Category Archives: Iconoclast

Sales of the Vanishing Automobile went really well. Although my publicity was limited to a web site and speaking engagements, it sold faster than my previous book, Reforming the Forest Service.

This made me realize that there was a lot of grassroots opposition to urban planning fads such as smart growth and light rail. To promote that opposition, I decided to bring experts and activists together in a national conference.

Previous conferences that I had held, such as the 1984 Mission Symposium, had been backed up by a staff of at least four or five other people. But I organized this conference, which I called Preserving the American Dream, by myself. Continue reading →

While I was in transition from working primarily on public lands issues to working primarily on urban issues, the Forest Service was in transition from focusing primarily on timber to focusing on something else, but it wasn’t quite sure what. Chief Thomas suggested that it should focus on ecosystem management, but ecosystem management doesn’t pay the bills, especially since no one was quite sure what it meant.

My reform proposals called for the federal land agencies to be allowed to charge market prices for all resources and be funded exclusively out of a fixed share of those revenues. I suspected that, on most national forests, this would lead to recreation becoming the most important use, though there would still be room for timber and other uses. The main obstacle to this was that Congress didn’t allow the agencies to charge for most recreation.

That began to change in 1996 when Congress created the Recreation Fee Demonstration program, allowing each of the four main public land agencies (Forest Service, Park Service, BLM, and Fish & Wildlife Service) to begin up to 100 experiments with recreation fees each and letting the agencies keep the revenues. The Park Service approached this with a complete lack of innovation, instead merely increasing entrance fees on 100 parks that were already charging fees and keeping the increased income (the fees that were previously being collected went into the Land & Water Conservation Fund). Continue reading →

I first met Randy Simmons when we were both graduate students at the University of Oregon. He was seeking a Ph.D. in political science, but like me when I was in urban planning, he decided to get a different view of things by taking a course in urban economics. I was in my first term as a student in economics and they assigned me to be a teaching assistant in the course he was taking.

I had already taken urban economics, but the course I took was for graduate students and the course he was taken was for undergraduates and included a lot more basic economics while the graduate course focused on modeling. As a result, I was a terrible T.A. because I didn’t yet know much about basic economic concepts such as elasticity. Yet Randy and I got along because we were both interested in environmental issues.

By 2000, Randy was the chair of the Utah State University political science department. He had studied and written about public lands, endangered species, and wilderness (and since then has written much more). But he really thinks more like an economist than a political scientist, and today he is in Utah State’s economics department. Continue reading →

Between the end of fall semester at Yale and the beginning of spring semester at UC Berkeley, we had time to drive across the United States, spend a few days at our Oak Grove home that was still for sale, find housing in the Bay Area, take a trip to the Oregon Coast, and move the things we needed from Oregon to our temporary home in Walnut Creek. I had looked for housing in Berkeley and quickly decided that housing on the other side of the Berkeley Hills in Contra Costa County was more affordable. I lucked out in finding a serviceable home that was scheduled to be torn down and replaced with apartments, so the owners rented it for a reasonable price.

This meant that, for the first time since high school, I commuted by transit instead of by bicycle or foot. From the house in Walnut Creek, I walked a short distance to the BART station and took the train to Berkeley. With a change of trains, I could get off within two blocks of my office. If I took my bicycle, which was allowed during non-rush-hours, I could avoid the change of trains and cycle about two miles to the office.

On the walk to the BART station I passed through a neighborhood of pre-war homes that realtors would describe as cute or cozy. Most were about 1,000 to 1,600 square feet on small, irregularly shaped lots. A few for-sale signs indicated asking prices of around $400,000, which seemed astounding for someone used to Oregon’s prices. However, I learned, that was only the starting price, as the homes sold rapidly after bidding wars that could easily add $100,000 to the price. This was the result of the urban-growth boundaries in Contra Costa and all other Bay Area counties (except San Francisco, which was entirely urbanized). Continue reading →

In the spring of 1998 I received a phone call from someone at the Yale School of Forestry. The school was offering fellowships to people who had worked in the conservation movement. The fellowships–lasting one semester per year alternating with a fellowship to someone from the timber industry–were given out on a competitive basis, but my caller informed me that if I applied he guaranteed I would get it.

That was very flattering, though it turned out he had previously made the same offer to my friend Andy Stahl, who had garnered more headlines than I had during the spotted owl wars. Andy couldn’t do it, but he suggested my name. I applied, was accepted, and made plans to spend fall semester, 1998, in New Haven.

As part of the fellowship, I was encouraged, but not required, to offer a course relating my experiences to students. There were also funds to bring in several guest speakers. The school would provide me with an office, an apartment, and an intern. In addition, they would pay me more for four months than I had ever previously earned in two years. According to my friends, it wasn’t more than I was worth, but I was still living in voluntary poverty as a part of being an environmental activist, even though I was no longer really accepted in the environmental community. Continue reading →

In 1998, my friend Karl Hess invited several people to take a tour of southern Africa to see how wildlife was managed in other parts of the world. Among the people who joined the tour were National Wildlife Federation attorney Tom France (who was also part of the Forest Options Group); Earth First! Co-founder Dave Foreman; economist Bob Nelson, who had worked as a policy analyst in the Department of the Interior and later as a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland; and Brent Haglund, director of the Sand County Foundation, which manages Aldo Leopold’s land in Wisconsin and teaches corporate executives how they can improve their bottom lines by being more sensitive to the environment.

We were also joined on various parts of the tour by a Peace Corps volunteer named Stephanie Jayne. Unusual for Peace Corps volunteers, she had taken the trouble to learn the local languages and insisted on living with the villagers she was helping, rather than in quarters maintained by the Peace Corps. Apparently, she had invited Karl to help with some institutional issues, which was how he got involved in the region.

I had already been exposed to the political institutions of a few other countries during my years studying forest planning. In the early 1980s, some environmentalists in British Columbia invited me to Victoria to study the B.C. Ministry of Forests. In the late 1980s, a member of the Tasmanian parliament, Bob Brown, invited me to Australia to study the Tasmanian forest ministry. Continue reading →

In the mid-1990s, that portion of the timber industry that depended on federal timber sales was on the ropes. National forest timber sales had declined from 11 billion board feet in 1989 to less than 3 billion in 1995. Mills that had bought most of their timber from the national forests for the previous five decades were hard pressed to find alternate sources of wood.

So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that timber industry representatives were eager to talk with environmentalists about finding common ground for reforming the Forest Service. Nor was it surprising that environmentalists were reluctant to talk; after all, they were winning, so any talks that might lead to a compromise seemed to be unnecessary.

But I wasn’t a typical environmentalist, and as the term was defined by the “progressives” in 1995, maybe I wasn’t an environmentalist at all. I was less interested in “total victory” than I was in getting the answer right. How much was the right amount of timber to be cut from federal lands? What was the right amount of wilderness? What was the proper balance between clearcutting vs. selection cutting given their differing impacts on wildlife, watershed, and other resources? Continue reading →

After winning the battle of Oak Grove, I wanted to help other neighborhoods in the Portland area that were facing similar densification plans. One of the first things I did was call a meeting of people who were fighting densification in their own neighborhoods. Quite a large number of people showed up, and the group decided to call itself Ortem, which was Metro spelled backwards. Ortem never became very powerful but it did help people throughout the region network together and get access to resources and expertise.

About this time, two students from the Maxwell School of Public Affairs at Syracuse University came to Portland to work for me as interns. I hadn’t looked closely at Portland’s light-rail system, so I asked them to study it. Their first response was, “We love light rail!” I told them to look at it with an open mind.

They came back a week or so later and announced, “It’s awful!” They had interviewed some critics who convinced them that it was a huge waste of money. It cost far more than buses and most of the people riding it were former bus riders. In fact, the share of Portland-area residents taking transit to work dramatically dropped after Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, built light rail because it had to cut bus service and raise bus fares to help pay for rail cost overruns. Continue reading →

“People Come and Go. I Plan for the Land.”

Our initial efforts to save Oak Grove from densification were pretty naïve. First, we thought we could persuade the Clackamas County planners that densification was a bad idea. We invited the lead planner to walk the neighborhood with some of us, a walk that ended with a visit in Jeanne Johnson’s home.

Johnson, a schoolteacher, lived with her husband in a beautiful, 1908 craftsman-style home. After walking around the area on a sunny spring day, the planner exclaimed to Johnson, “What a lovely neighborhood. The only other time I’ve ever walked around here was last fall. It was raining, the edges of the streets were muddy, and I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to live here.” She was from the government and she was here to help us Neotraditionalize our neighborhood.

Johnson’s neighbors, some of whom had lived their entire lives in Oak Grove, then tried to explain why they didn’t like the plan. Some feared higher densities would bring back the crime that once infested the area. Others worried about congestion. After listening, the planner–who had spent no more than a few hours in the area–looked at the Johnsons’ 87-year-old river-rock fireplace and replied, “People come and go, but the land remains. I plan for the land.” In other words, our concerns didn’t matter; she knew what was best. Continue reading →

In 1989, when Vickie and I decided to move from Eugene to Portland so I could work on the SP&S 700, home prices in Portland were starting to rise following the recession of the 1980s. We soon realized that we couldn’t afford a home in Portland, but we did find a nice house in a Portland suburb called Oak Grove. Having grown up in Portland, I was aware that Oak Grove was located a few miles south of the city on the east side of the Willamette River, but I didn’t know much about it.

I soon learned that Oak Grove is an unincorporated area that had exclusively been farmland until 1892, when the world’s first electric interurban railroad connected the 20-mile distance between Portland and Oregon City, Oregon’s oldest incorporated city. Wealthy Portlanders soon realized that they could “get away from it all” by building homes along the rail line and commuting.

By 1930, parts of Oak Grove nearest the trolley line had been subdivided into standard 50×100 lots centered around a small retail area. But much of the community was a “railroad suburb,” with large houses on parcels of an acre or more, interspersed with farms and dairies. Over succeeding generations, the large parcels and farms were broken up and sold off. Today, the community has a wide variety of lot sizes and home styles. Continue reading →