Monthly Archives: May 2019

One of the requirements for graduating from the Oregon State School of Forestry was that students had to spend at least one summer working for a forestry company or agency. On application, the school agreed that work studying forest policy for OSPIRG would qualify. Since my 1972 internship earned so much publicity, OSPIRG was happy to hire me again for the summer of 1973 and to put me to work on a forestry project.

I wanted to study the Forest Service but OSPIRG asked me to study the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) instead. While I was still in school in Corvallis, OSPIRG’s main office in Portland had been visited by a strange man named Robert Bradley Jones who was concerned about BLM lands in western Oregon. He had written a book called One by One which told the sordid story of how Congress had given every other square mile of land between Portland and the California border (as well as between Roseburg and Coos Bay) as grants to the Oregon & California Railroad and wagon road builders and then took them back when the railroad failed to comply with the terms of the grant. Known as the O&C lands, these revested land grants represented less than 1 percent of the area managed by the BLM but produced something like 90 percent of its timber.

In 1937, Congress had written a law directing the Secretary of the Interior to manage the O&C lands for timber on a sustained yield basis, probably the first time Congress had used the term “sustained yield” in a law. The law also directed the secretary to give 75 percent of the revenues to the counties in lieu of the property taxes the counties would have collected had the lands been private. Most of the counties had agreed to give a third of their share of the funds to the BLM to pay for roads, reforestation, and other costs of accessing and managing the timber. They reasoned that, if the BLM didn’t have any money, it couldn’t sell much timber, so 50 percent of a lot of sales would be better for the counties than 75 percent of not much. Continue reading →

In my freshman year at Oregon State, Ralph Nader came to Oregon and urged university students to fund a public interest research group that would hire experts to advocate for consumer and environmental goals. I circulated petitions and the student body governments of Oregon State, the University of Oregon, and most other major schools in the state agreed to contribute an average of a dollar a quarter per student to the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group.

In my sophomore year, OSPIRG announced that it would hire 16 student interns to work for the summer at $750 each. I applied but was told — probably because of my mediocre grades — that I didn’t make the cut. However, they did have $250 left over, and if I would work for that amount, they’d be happy to give me a project.

The previous summer I had worked as a parking lot attendant, and anything was better than doing that again. So I happily took the job and bicycled from my northeast Portland apartment to OSPIRG’s downtown offices in the Governor Building on 2nd and Stark. Downtown Portland was then a sleepy place that was practically dead after 6 pm. The Governor Building was a ramshackle office building surrounded by parking lots left behind after other buildings had been torn down. As I recall, OSPIRG was on the fourth floor, and I usually ran up the stairs two at a time rather than take an elevator. Continue reading →

When I was debating whether to go to forestry school, my parents and I attended a sort of a career day at my high school where representatives from various colleges presented their programs. The Oregon State School of Forestry showed a movie about their curriculum that included a lot of pictures of trees being cut down.

“It looks like they’re more about cutting trees than saving them,” my father whispered to me. As economist John Baden told me many years later, Oregon State’s forestry school was “the Vatican of sawlog forestry.” I could see that in 1970, but decided that, in order to save the forests, I needed to learn the language and tools of forestry.

Also influencing my decision was the fact that Oregon State was affordable. In-state tuition for my first year was a little more than $400. Tuition, books, room, and board for all four of my undergraduate years was about $5,000. Continue reading →