In 1981, the Oregon Wilderness Coalition held a fair and fundraising auction at the Lane County Fairgrounds. I passed out brochures encouraging people to take Amtrak on their next wilderness adventure and bought a river trip for two on Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River. Unfortunately, someone also stole my Raleigh International bicycle, a Campagnolo-equipped classic from the early 1970s.
At about the same time, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (SCLDF) asked me to testify in a court case about Alaska state forests. This wasn’t really my first paying client, but I think they paid me more than I had been paid before. At least, the fee they paid was enough to replace my Raleigh with a nice up-to-date Trek with Dura-Ace components.
SCLDF had already hired Gordon Robinson to review the state’s timber management plan, and all they really wanted me to do was corroborate his analysis. Gordon and I flew up to Juneau together — it was my first time up in an airplane — and watched the mountains of Southeast Alaska from the window. Later, SCLDF chartered a small plane and flew us over state lands and, incidentally, glaciers, mountains, and fjords. It was all very pretty, but had nothing to do with my testimony.
I was impressed to discover that Gordon’s analysis was brilliant. He had found that the state Division of Forestry had used numerous tricks to increase timber sales and that the state was likely to have a “falldown” in timber sales in a few decades.
My original contribution was an analysis of stand density index. The inventory records were in Anchorage, so SCLDF flew me up there and, while there, I took the Alaska Railroad to Denali and went on a tour to see Mt. McKinley, grizzly bears, and other wildlife. Back in Juneau, I also took a ferry to Skagway so I could ride the White Pass & Yukon Railroad to White Horse.
Regardless of what Gordon said about allowable cut calculations or what I said about yield tables, SCLDF’s case really turned on the definition of “sustained yield.” Just as Congress required the Forest Service and BLM to practice sustained yield, the Alaska legislature had required the Division of Forestry to do the same. But where the Forest Service and BLM both decided that sustained yield meant nondeclining flow, the state wasn’t willing to go that far.
After I testified, the judge asked me what nondeclining flow meant for an agency that would have to reduce timber sales in the future. I said it would have to reduce them now to meet the nondeclining flow rule. He clearly believed that, if a reduction was needed, it would be better to do it in the future than now, so he sided with the agency.
Back in Oregon, the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest regional forester, Richard Worthington — who had compared old growth with rotten apples — retired and was replaced with a man named Jeff Sirmon in 1982. He invited Jim Monteith and other Oregon Wilderness Coalition staff and I to meet with him and his planning staff.
I decided to make the economics of timber land suitability to be a focal point for discussion. As I’ve previously noted, my argument was that the Forest Service should at least calculate the expected net returns from investments in reforestation, a calculation known as soil expectation value. Once the calculations were made, of course, I would argue that timber should not be cut from land that had a negative soil expectation value.
Everyone in the room was very conciliatory while Sirmon was there. Sirmon, who had been raised in the South, still had a thick accent, and after I made my pitch I was confused when he said to his chief planner, “We better get some sols people in here.” I couldn’t figure out what he meant until the planner said, “I don’t think this is an issue for soils scientists.” It turned out everything I said had gone over Sirmon’s head as he didn’t understand the economic concept of soil expectation value, but he made it clear he wanted to work with us.
As soon as he left the room, however, it was like we hit a brick wall. All of the planners, including the regional economist, made it absolutely clear that there was no way the Forest Service would ever embarrass itself by calculating soil expectation value, effectively admitting that most of its spending on reforestation was a waste of money.
A few days after the meeting, Jeff Sirmon called Jim Monteith. At first, Jim thought that Simon might be calling to apologize for the way the meeting turned out. But no, he was calling to complain that Oregon Wilderness Coalition’s use of Smokey the Bear violated the Smokey Bear Act, which protected the symbol from commercial use. OWC had put a picture of the bear in its magazine with the phrase, “When was the last time Smokey lied to you?” Of course, this was a non-commercial use that wasn’t forbidden by the act.
A few weeks later, we heard that the regional planner had been replaced. We wondered if it was because of his attitude at that meeting. As I describe below, I eventually learned that that wasn’t true either.
Meanwhile, a new movement was growing called the Sagebrush Rebellion. Consisting mainly of ranchers who grazed their cattle and sheep on federal lands, it also included some timber industry factions that depended on public land timber. Supporters said their goal was to turn federal lands over to the states, who would be better managers, but to environmentalists “better managers” translated to “have less scruples over such policies as nondeclining flow.”
At the 1983 Western Forest Economists meeting in May, a couple of economists from Montana State University offered a different proposal: John Baden and Richard Stroup suggested that Congress sell or privatize the national forest and use the revenue to fund social security. I asked them for a copy of their presentation, but they failed to mail me one.
Next fall, I heard that the University of Oregon economics department had invited Baden to come to Eugene to present his proposal. When Baden tells the story today, I showed up to heckle him, but really I just wanted a copy of his paper so I could publish it in Forest Planning.
Perhaps to ward off heckling, he started his presentation saying, “Is Randal O’Toole here? Because he is really the nation’s number one expert on Forest Service economics.” I was pleased see the professors who flunked me out of the Ph.D. program shift uncomfortably. Afterwards, I got a copy of his paper and went to my office.
One of the things I learned in publishing Forest Planning was that I was not only a prolific writer, I was a good editor of other people’s writings and could cut a technical paper in half while at the same time making it more accessible to the lay reader. I quickly typed Baden’s paper into the computer, editing as I went, then printed it out. A phone call to the economics department indicated that Baden was having lunch at one of my favorite Eugene restaurants, so I cycled over and presented him with the print out.
He read through it while I stood nervously looking over his shoulder. When he got close to the end, he said, “This is good. Do you want a job?” I said yes but I knew he was only kidding. To the shock of many readers, we published the paper in Forest Planning along with an editorial I wrote noting that there was a lot of logic to what Baden was saying and environmentalists needed to come up with an equally valid proposal for fixing national forest problems or they would lose in the long run.
The problem was that the Forest Service had been created to be run by “scientific experts” who would automatically place the public good over any specific private good. Yet the agency seemed to be in the pockets of the timber industry, even though Barlow’s report had shown that most national forests were losing money on timber.
Barlow’s original report looked at timber revenues and costs for each of the nine Forest Service regions. His 1980 report looked at revenues and costs for each of the 100 or so national forests. I decided to take the next step and look at timber profitability on a sale-by-sale basis.
The Forest Service had a two-page form reporting data for each timber sale known as the Timber Sale Report, form 2400-17. For each species of tree in the sale, the report indicated how much the Forest Service thought it was worth per thousand board feet. Rather than worry about costs to taxpayers, Forest Service appraisals focused on how low the timber price would have to be to allow the purchasers to earn a profit. That was the minimum bid price. The sales were sold at auction, which often drove prices much higher than the minimum, and this too was on the report.
The Timber Sale Report also indicated where some of the revenues would go. In 1930 Congress had authorized the Forest Service to keep some of the receipts to reforest the land. Other laws allowed it to use some of the funds for brush control (meaning prescribed burning), herbicide spraying, and road maintenance. In 1976, Congress expanded the 1930 law to allow the Forest Service to keep receipts for precommercial thinnings as well as recreation, wildlife, and watershed improvements.
Finally, if the purchasers were required to build roads to access the timber, the Forest Service’s estimate of the road costs were credited against the price the purchaser had to pay. A Forest Service rule required that at least 50 cents per thousand board feet be returned to the Treasury, but only if there was money left over after all of these deductions would the Treasury get any more.
I asked each of the Forest Service regions for Timber Sale Reports for all of the sales sold in 1983, excluding such small sales as Christmas trees and firewood sales. At the time, the agency sold about 10,000 sales a year, so we ended up getting about 20 reams of paper. I created a database for these sales and hired some students to work part time entering the data.
Trees such as Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine were very valuable, while others such as white fir and lodgepole pine were nearly worthless. Sometimes they would be in the same sale, and while ponderosa and white fir often grew in the same stands, lodgepole usually grew in pure stands. This meant that, in sale with both ponderosa and lodgepole, the Forest Service would sell the ponderosa for less than it was really worth in order to cross-subsidize the removal of the lodgepole. I even found a Forest Service memo noting that timber purchasers sometimes called the worthless stands “punishment units” since they had to cut those trees at a loss in exchange for the extra profits they made from the valuable timber.
I knew that most national forests in Oregon and Washington made money, so I was surprised to find that, once cross-subsidies were taken into account, Northwest forests lost more money on more timber than any other region of the country. California was second. The Forest Service was clearly selling timber way beyond the level that made economic sense.
All of our work was done in a two-room office in a former Eugene elementary school. The rooms were much smaller than a school room and were probably once the nurse’s office or principle’s office for the school.
One day, we were visited by the Forest Service’s new regional planner, Al Lampe, in the company of a former forest supervisor named Bob Chadwick who had become something of a conflict resolution mediator. “So this is where it all happens,” exclaimed Bob about our tiny offices, “this” being, of course, our incessant attacks on the Forest Service.
I remembered Al Lampe from when he was a timber planner in the regional office. He would scowl over me whenever I came in to look at inventory data and other records. Later, he spent some time working for the Forest Service in Colorado. I noticed he wasn’t scowling anymore. In fact, he was downright cheerful, and I asked why.
He told me he felt like the Colorado job was a dead-end, so he applied for a job in the Washington office. When he didn’t get it, he asked Rex Hartgraves, who he said was the number 3 man in the Forest Service, why not.
“Al, you need to figure out where you want to spend the rest of your career,” advised Rex. As Chadwick once told me, “there comes a time in the career of every Forest Service employee when they realize they are not going to get to be chief, and that is very freeing for them.” This apparently was that moment for Lampe.
After talking it over with his wife, Al decided he wanted to live in Government Camp on Mt. Hood. They bought a house there and his wife got a job teaching school near there. Then he stunned Hartgraves by telling him he was resigning to move back to Oregon.
Shortly after that, while he was still working for the Forest Service, he was at a conference in Portland when he got a call from Hartgraves telling him he should go to the regional office to see about his new job. Even though he hadn’t applied for a job, Hartgraves cared enough about him to kick the regional planner upstairs and give Lampe the job.
Al told me another interesting story. When he arrived in Portland, he looked at the planning office and realized that only nine of the seventeen people on his staff were actually doing anything. The other eight just pushed paper around. He thought about cutting those eight, but he realized that his pay grade required that he have more than nine people working under him. So he let them push paper.
I had heard that the Forest Service once held a conference called a Mission Symposium to allow its top officials to talk about the agency’s goals. I decided to hold a Mission Symposium so the public could also debate those goals. With the help of Bob Chadwick, we got the Forest Service’s support for such a conference. I wanted to hold it in San Francisco and negotiated a really good rate — $55 a night — at the Palace Hotel. I had a sentimental reason for holding it there as I thought, at the time, that Paladin of Have Gun Will Travel lived at the Palace Hotel, but it turned out it was called the Hotel Carlton.
In any case, the chief of the Forest Service, who by now was an engineer named Max Peterson, gave the keynote speech and then spent the evening patiently withstanding questioning from the many environmentalists who attended. Other speakers included Congressman Jim Weaver, Jeff Sirmon, John Baden, Sally Fairfax of the University of California at Berkeley, future deputy assistant secretary of agriculture Jim Lyons, and at least a half dozen others.
Years later, Fairfax told me she came away from the conference frustrated that environmentalists criticized the Forest Service yet had no alternative models to offer. This started her on years of productive work looking at conservation trusts, state trusts, and other models of land management.
After the conference, we held a strategy meeting for the environmental leaders who attended. Forest plans were just beginning to emerge, and Kaid Benfield of the Natural Resources Defense Council said that NRDC planned to review and appeal two or three plans in Colorado. The Wilderness Society proudly announced that it had received a $1 million grant that it planned to use reviewing ten different forest plans.
When it was my turn, everyone gasped when I said that I expected CHEC would review 40 or 50 plans. That turned out to be an underestimate. With the help of Dieter Mahlein, I reviewed plans for 55 national forests, a little more than half the total. Since I reviewed both the draft and final plans for a few forests the total number of reviews is at least 60 — and this count may have missed one or two.
These reviews covered forests in 20 states and distributed across every Forest Service region. I reviewed plans for every forest in Arizona and New Mexico, almost every forest in Colorado and Montana, and a majority of forests in California and Oregon, plus forests in every other western state except Nevada. Outside of the western states, I reviewed plans in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin. Beyond forest plan reviews, I also scrutinized the Tongass Forest in Alaska and four more forests in Idaho. By 1990, I probably had a better understanding of the Forest Service and National Forest System than all but a handful of Forest Service employees, most of whom only worked in two or three of the agency’s nine regions over the course of their careers.
That was all in the future. In 1985, a few weeks after the Mission Symposium, when I received a call from a client in California who had asked me to review the Shasta-Trinity forest plan. The Wilderness Society had picked the Shasta-Trinity to be one of its forests, he said, so they wouldn’t need me to do it. I was plenty busy so I didn’t mind being “unhired.”
A few months later, he called me back. Having read the Wilderness Society’s review of another forest plan along with my reviews of various plans, he decided to hire me back.
The Wilderness Society offered to pay me to review a forest plan provided I would teach its economist how I did it. I was a bit annoyed that I was supposed to teach someone to effectively be my competitor, but I agreed. The first thing, I said, is that you have to visit the national forest office that wrote the plan. But it turned out the Wilderness Society’s million-dollar forest planning budget didn’t include any money for its expert to travel to the national forests. While my reviews focused on the background documents, the Wilderness Society limited its reviews to what was published in the plans and environmental impact statements.
While I have all 60 reviews in a very fat three-ring binder, a few, in addition to the three I mentioned in the previous chapter, really stick out in my mind. I’ll describe them in the next chapter.
