worthless by the collapse of the lumber and plywood markets. Along with Senators Hatfield and Howard Metzenbaum, AuCoin helped write the Federal Timber Contract Payment Modification Act of 1984. After requiring timber companies to pay a penalty to the U.S. Treasury, the bill released the firms from their contracts and allowed them to return approximately 9.5 billion board feet of standing timber to the government, much of it commercially pre-thinned. Environment AuCoin's environmental record earned him the endorsement of major environmental organizations in each of his House elections. In addition to blocking offshore oil exploration, AuCoin prevented mining in the center of Oregon's Three Sisters Wilderness area by buying out a mining claim in the area's geologically significant Rock Mesa and served on the committee that helped write the 200-mile offshore economic zone, which would become known as the Magnuson Act. Although the Port of Portland shipyards, a major Oregon employer, stood to benefit from oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, AuCoin opposed the plan on environmental grounds. He also helped preserve Cascade Head on the Oregon Coast, supported the Columbia Gorge Scenic Protection Act, helped stop the construction of Salt Caves Dam on the last free-flowing stretch of the Klamath River, co-authored the 1988 bill quadrupling the designation of National Wild and Scenic Rivers in Oregon, and fought the construction of a plant at the Umatilla Chemical Depot to incinerate excess chemical weapons. His work on the 1984 Oregon Wilderness Act, which doubled wilderness acreage in Oregon's federal forests, earned him a Distinguished Service award from the Sierra Club. Timber harvest controversies Soon after the decades-long effort to expand wilderness was resolved, annual timber harvests on Forest Service lands in Oregon and Washington had increased to reach a crisis point in the late 1980s. Critics charged that AuCoin, along with other Northwest members of Congress, were forcing unsustainable logging levels, noting Congress's proposed annual timber harvests of more than 4 billion board feet per year—well above historical averages of 2.6 to 3 billion board feet (bbf) for the region. However, Randal O'Toole, a self-described libertarian and environmental economist, observed that the harvest numbers cited by critics included timber that had been sold, often commercially pre-thinned, returned to the government through the Timber Contract Relief Act, and therefore were inaccurately inflated. Excluding the "buy-back" volume net harvests of new "green" timber were lower than average: 2.6 billion board