Timberman drew admirers and detractors

John Campbell, an Australian-born former timber executive who, as president of the Pacific Lumber Co. in the 1990s, was at the fulcrum of a momentous battle between loggers and environmental activists, died last Sunday at his home in Fortuna, Calif. He was 67.

The cause was cancer, his son Matthew said.

Mr. Campbell was mayor of Fortuna, a Northern California town not far from Pacific Lumber's headquarters in Scotia, from 2006 until his death.

He worked for Pacific Lumber, also known as PALCO, for more than 30 years, beginning as a laborer in the rail yard in 1969. By 1985, he had risen to executive vice president in charge of forest products. In 1989, after the company was acquired in a hostile takeover by a Houston businessman, Charles Hurwitz, he became president. He was named chief executive in 1993.

By then, Mr. Campbell, an avid outdoorsman who hunted and fished (and who, his son said, introduced surfing to the Cornwall coast of England when he was a young man), was walking a tightrope between business and environmentalism.

Hurwitz's nearly $900 million takeover of PALCO was heavily leveraged. To pay back the accumulated debt, the company accelerated logging on its nearly 200,000 acres of timber, including stands of ancient California redwoods.

This unleashed the wrath of the environmental protectionists who came to be called, either proudly or disparagingly, tree-huggers, including the group Earth First. The group's protests became international news and included members' chaining themselves to trees and lying down in front of bulldozers and logging trucks.

One demonstrator, David Chain, was accidentally killed by a falling tree; another, Julia Hill, known as Butterfly, climbed a redwood (she named it Luna) and remained there for two years.

Finally, in 1999, after 10 years of negotiations, Hurwitz's holding company, Maxxam, which owned Pacific Lumber, sold 10,000 acres of old-growth redwood to the state and federal governments for $480 million in what was called the Headwaters agreement. (It included a tract of more than 3,000 acres known as the Headwaters Grove.) The sale also required Pacific to log under tighter environmental restrictions.

At the center of it all, Mr. Campbell drew admirers and detractors. He was praised by many for his business savvy and gentlemanly manner.

He was vilified by some within the company who viewed him as a traitor to corporate values that had existed for more than a century; he was seen as untrustworthy by some environmental adversaries who were suspicious of the company's vows to be a careful steward of the redwoods and the wildlife that logging endangered: the coho salmon and the marbled murrelet, a seabird that lays eggs only in the tallest treetops.

"He was utterly dismissive of environmental concerns," said Scott Greacen, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center, a Northern California group that has battled PALCO since the takeover. "But he was an effective symbol for the business community, and the fact that he was named mayor of Fortuna is a reflection of the esteem people had for him."

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a central figure in the Headwaters negotiations, said after Mr. Campbell's death: "I thought very highly of John Campbell. His stewardship of Pacific Lumber was a positive one, and he tried very hard to keep his commitments."

John Aloysius Campbell was born June 20, 1941, in Leura, New South Wales, outside Sydney, Australia, and he began his education in a one-room schoolhouse in the Burragorang Valley. His father was a photographer and a recreational sailor who served as an attaché for the U.S. Navy during World War II, helping U.S. ships negotiate the islands off the Great Barrier Reef.

Young John, an accomplished surfer who won a national life-saving competition, attended North Sydney Technical College.

He served in the Australian army, then left the country for the extended world travel that Australians call a walkabout.

He went to England, where he surfed off the coast of Cornwall, and New York, where he worked at the Australian consulate.

He intended to travel eventually to South America, but in 1966, during a brief stay in San Francisco, he met and married Cynthia Carpenter. Her father worked for Pacific Lumber, where Mr. Campbell took a job in 1969 loading lumber onto freight cars for $3.10 an hour.

The marriage ended in divorce. In addition to son Matthew, of Park City, Utah, Mr. Campbell is survived by his wife, Margaret, whom he married in 1991; another son, Michael, of San Francisco; and two grandchildren.

Mr. Campbell stepped down as president of PALCO in 2001. The company, still in debt, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2007.