20. You’re Especially Proud of That?

CHEC’s work had attracted enough attention that the Colorado and Arizona departments of natural resources each hired us to help them understand some of the plans in their states. While I was between reviewing two forest plans in western Colorado, I spent the weekend visiting the Gunnison National Monument and other scenic areas.

While I was driving around, I listened to the radio as underdog Los Angeles Raiders, led by quarterback Jim Plunkett (who Jim Monteith said was his roommate at Stanford), were beating the Washington Redskins in the SuperBowl. The game sounded so interesting that I went back to my motel to watch the last half, which meant I got to see the Apple 1984 commercial. The Macintosh looked interesting, but without a hard drive and a decent printer it wasn’t much use to us.

A year later, Apple began making its LaserWriter printer, the first affordable laser printer. As soon as I saw it and the range of fonts Apple was offering, I thought “calligraphy.” When in high school, I had met Reed College art professor Lloyd Reynolds, one of the most famous calligraphers in the world, and took a class in calligraphy taught by one of his students. I didn’t know it, but Steve Jobs had also learned calligraphy from Reynolds, and the experience had helped inspire his work on the Macintosh and LaserWriter.

Apple repackaged its failed Lisa computer as the Macintosh XL, with a 10-megabyte hard drive. We bought one with a LaserWriter, and also bought the first edition of PageMaker layout software, putting Forest Planning at the forefront of the desktop publishing revolution.

I let everyone I knew play with the new Mac. It turned out my brother Dave, who received a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, had the most affinity for it, rapidly turning out drawings and illustrations we could use. With Dave’s help, we started producing Forest Planning on the Mac.

I remember going to a Mac users group meeting, and people from the local Apple store proudly showed off their four-page newsletter. I dumbfounded them by handing out The Citizens Guide to Forest Planning, a 40-page special issue of Forest Planning that was entirely designed and laid out on the Mac. The new computers not only improved the appearance of the magazine, all of our reports and forest plan reviews took on a more professional, typeset look with cover photos and, where appropriate, graphs that didn’t look like they were printed on a daisywheel printer.

A few months later, we moved our office from the former elementary school into the top floor of a former home — three bedrooms and a bath — in what was now an industrial area. After getting everything moved and unpacked, we arrived the next morning to find someone had broken in and stolen our computers, terminals, and printers.

Fortunately, they were insured, and I decided to replace the Altos with the latest Macintoshes, which now came with a megabyte of RAM each and optional hard drives. We had at least two desks in every room, and every desk had a Mac on it, and they were all tied together in a network so we could send each other files and send files to the printer. I continued to write software, mostly in C and Pascal, but a new program that Microsoft wrote exclusively for the Mac, called Excel, eliminated the need for me to do much more programming.

We missed a few months of Forest Planning magazine while we were regrouping, and one day I asked people if we should change the name of the magazine. I happened to be wearing a t-shirt that Jeff St. Clair had given me, so Vickie immediately responded, “How about Forest Watch?” I thought that was a great idea. She thought I had deliberately worn the t-shirt to promote the name, but it was just an accident.

My work on the incentives created by the Knutson-Vandenberg Act attracted the attention of John Baden, whose group, the Political Economy Research Center, held annual conferences for journalists and congressional staffers to teach them about the economics of environmental problems. Baden invited me to lecture at many of these conferences.

The congressional staffers conferences were the most fun because they were held in December at Lone Mountain Ranch, a dude ranch in the summer but a cross-country ski resort in the winter. Snow in Montana is much better for skiing than in the western Cascades, so I was able to hone up on my ski skills. Later, when I was reviewing some Montana forest plans, ranch owner Bob Schaap generously allowed me to stay at the ranch while I was writing up my results.

The journalists conferences were held in the summer and I wasn’t much into horseback riding. But I did meet a U.S. News and World Reports writer named Steve Budiansky who said he would like to join me sometime when I was doing a forest plan review.

I arranged to meet him in Cody, Wyoming, from which we would visit several forests around Yellowstone Park. I asked the forests to show me their Timber Sale Reports, which showed how much money went to fund reforestation and other activities and how little made it to the U.S. Treasury. However, he wasn’t persuaded that this showed that the Forest Service was deliberately designing sales to enhance its budget.

So I asked for the environmental assessments the forests had written for several sales chosen at random. Immediately we found statements written by wildlife biologists, recreation managers, and other non-timber experts saying that they supported such-and-such a sale because they could use the timber revenues the sale would produce to fund their programs. That convinced him and he wrote a very nice article about my work in U.S. News.

That wasn’t the only publicity we received. One day a writer from Colorado called and asked if she could visit our offices for an article she was writing for Audubon magazine. Audubon didn’t buy it, but another magazine called Harrowsmith did.

For the article, the writer interviewed Buddy Smith, the regional economist who read my review of the Santa Fe and persuaded the regional forester to scrap that plan. “Randal O’Toole has had more influence on forest planning than all of the environmental groups combined,” he told the writer. That was certainly true in New Mexico: I reviewed plans for every national forest in the state and, as a result of my reviews, the forests reduced their suitable timber bases by 2.5 million acres

In 1986, I reviewed a dozen plans, about one per month. One of the first was for the Sequoia National Forest. Although the biggest and best-known giant sequoia trees are in Sequoia and Yosemite national parks, the Sequoia National Forest has more giant sequoia stands and trees than the parks.

Giant sequoias live up to their name: a single tree can weigh tens of thousands of tons. Yet they have a very shallow root system that leaves them vulnerable to windfall if as little as 10 percent of their roots are severed or killed.

While I was in the Sequoia Forest supervisor’s office, the supervisor himself came to visit me. “Are you going to look at our forest while you are here?” he asked. I said yes, I planned to drive into the forest after the office closed at 5 pm.

“Let me draw you a map to a place of which we are especially proud,” he offered. That afternoon, Vickie and I followed his directions. At the end of the road, we found a large clearcut with three giant sequoias looking forlorn in the middle. Tractors had run over their roots, and we also found another giant sequoia whose roots had been truncated by the road constructed to reach this clearcut.

Why were they proud of this? The answer had to do with another facet of sequoia biology. Relics from a bygone age, they can live for thousands of years, but don’t seem to be regenerating themselves. Yet the Park Service discovered that prescribed burning underneath sequoia groves led to the germination of thousands of seedlings per acre. This helped boost the legitimacy of prescribed burning.

The Forest Service wanted to replicate the Park Service’s results, but Congress at the time gave the Forest Service very little money for prescribed burning. However, Congress did allow the Forest Service to spend timber sale revenues on prescribed fires — but only in the areas that had been cut. Thus, the Forest Service reasoned that, in order to do the prescribed fire that would save the giant sequoias, they first had to do a clearcut that would probably destroy them.

People like the Sequoia Forest supervisor were well educated and clearly loved the land they were managing. Every forest supervisor I had ever met bragged that his or her forest was unique. So why did smart people put in charge of unique resources always come up with the same prescription: clearcutting? The answer, of course, was the incentives created by the K-V Act and other laws allowing the Forest Service to keep an unlimited share of timber receipts.

A few months later, I was in Montana reviewing the Beaverhead Forest plan for Jim Welch, a local rancher. Welch had been raised on a ranch in New Mexico, moved to Los Angeles where he made a lot of money building homes, then bought himself a ranch in Montana’s Big Hole.

The Beaverhead lost money on most of the timber it sold. Yet the FORPLAN model eagerly prescribed clearcutting on all available land. The reason was simple: planners told FORPLAN that timber was worth a lot more than it really was.

Forest Service timber contracts were very generous to winning bidders. If timber prices went down after they won a contract but before they cut the trees, the prices they paid would be reduced. But if prices went up, the prices they paid would not be increased. This led to a huge bidding war in the late 1970s as bidders bet that prices would go up and they would get to pay for timber at the old prices.

Meanwhile, the Forest Service had asked its economists to predict timber prices over the next 50 years. They projected that prices would increase rather rapidly. FORPLAN’s outputs were on a decade-by-decade basis, so Beaverhead Forest planners reasoned that the prices in the first decade of the plan would be the prices at the end of the 1970s plus planners’ predictions of increases for five or more years.

However, by the time the plan was being written, everyone knew this wasn’t true. Due to the crash in the housing market, prices were much lower than they had been in the 1970s. Even the prices in the late 1970s weren’t valid because they were due to buyers’ insane bidding wars that assumed prices would never fall again.

Thus, the prices in the Beaverhead FORPLAN model — and in fact the FORPLAN models used throughout the Northern Region, which included Montana and northern Idaho — were much higher in the first decade than anyone had ever paid, or in all likelihood ever would pay, for Beaverhead timber — and prices in the model continued to grow for the next four decades. This in fact created a problem for planners because FORPLAN wanted to put all available land in the timber base but didn’t want to cut any of it until prices flattened out after the fifth decade. They solved this problem with a constraint more or less ordering FORPLAN to cut trees in the first decade anyway.

While planners assumed timber prices were increasing, they assumed the values of all other resources would remain flat. They also assumed that timber-sale costs would increase, but at a much lower rate than the price increase, so timber would become increasingly profitable.

Later, I found a memo from Pacific Northwest region economists to the Washington office arguing that the assumption that timber prices would increase while other values remained constant was biased, but the Washington office just replied that Congress expected the Forest Service to use the best available data, and it had no data on increases in the values of other resource. Of course, the reason it had predictions of timber price increases but no predictions for other resources was because it had asked its own economists for the timber predictions but not other resource predictions.

This was especially ironic considering that a Forest Service economist (who later became Pacific Northwest regional forester) had challenged the Krutilla model because it assumed that wilderness values would increase while other values did not. But Krutilla’s argument was that the decision to develop a wilderness area was irreversible, so it deserved some extra consideration. The decision not to cut timber from an area because doing so was losing money was hardly irreversible: provided Congress didn’t designate the area as wilderness, the Forest Service could decide to cut it if and when doing so ever became profitable.

Jim Welch gave a copy of my review of the Beaverhead plan to Montana Senator Jim Melcher. “That’s the most devastating report I’ve ever read,” Melcher told Welch. Obviously, he hadn’t read my review of the Hoosier Forest plan, plus he may have been trying to butter up a potential campaign donor. But I appreciated the compliment when Welch passed it along to me.

By 1988, I had reviewed more FORPLAN models than anyone else. Several timber industry consulting firms had learned about FORPLAN, and Mason Bruce & Girard even went to the trouble of porting FORPLAN from the Forest Service’s Univac computer to an IBM mainframe computer. But due to the recession, the industry rarely had any money to hire consultants.

Still accepting that forest planning was possible even if I believed the Forest Service was doing it wrong, I wrote a paper whose long-winded title was The Suitable Timber Base, Well-Behaved FORPLAN Models, and Win-Win Situations in National Forest Planning. The basic point of the paper was that, if FORPLAN were used correctly, it would have revealed that roadless areas could be preserved on many forests without significantly reducing timber sales.

The Forest Service instead built its preconceived notions into forest plan alternatives, with a wilderness alternative that cut very little timber and a timber alternative that withheld very little land from cutting. In doing so, it exaggerated the trade-offs between timber and the environment.

In many cases, such as on the Beaverhead, the problem was the projections of future timber prices. Because the prices in the fifth decade were impossibly high, FORPLAN would allocate all available lands to timber after that time. Yet only a portion of those lands were needed to meet the proposed first decade sale levels.

The National Forest Management Act required the Forest Service to establish a suitable timber base that was “cost effective” in meeting timber goals. I had long quarreled with the cost-effectiveness rule, because if the goals were too high, land would be considered cost effective even if cutting timber on it lost money.

However, the plans written with FORPLAN and projected price increases didn’t even satisfy the cost-effectiveness rule. I estimated that 30 percent of the land that FORPLAN was allocating to timber wasn’t really needed to meet those proposed sale levels.

That’s a breathtaking number of acres that could have been managed for other uses, thus greatly reducing controversies over the national forests. But the Forest Service, it sometimes seemed, thrived with the controversies, as putting timber at one extreme and environmentalists at the other made it appear that anything the agency did in the middle was reasonable. To really reform national forest management, it would be necessary to demolish the myth of agency impartiality.