SEATTLE -- Ty Abernathy tips his head back and judges where this big tree will fall as he starts cutting it with a chain saw. This is a hand faller's work, all eyeballing and experience to land a more than 100-foot-tall Douglas fir without breaking it -- or getting killed.

Abernathy pauses to pound a wedge into the cut with a sledgehammer. Open it wider, then cut again, deeper, the saw screaming through the trunk until he feels the tree start to let go. He kills the saw's motor and jumps back. Stands to watch, as with a crack and shudder, the big fir begins to fall. Slowly, it cuts its last arc through the sky where it has persisted through some 100 winters. It tips, totters, picks up momentum.

Its thundering crash shakes the forest floor.

For more than a century, this has been a way of doing business in Washington, cutting forests owned by the state and today managed by the Department of Natural Resources. But in an era of climate warming -- and growing climate activism -- there is a new war in the woods.

This fight is not over old growth, the trees sprouted before 1850 and never cut since settlers came here. Those ancient monarchs are already protected by state and federal policy spurred by the Timber Wars of the 1980s and '90s that led to protection of more than 6 million acres of old growth (older than 200 years) on federal land in three states within the range of the northern spotted owl.