Category Archives: Iconoclast

Membership in PRPA inspired me to go to a rail restoration conference at the California Railroad Museum and to become active with rail history groups all over the country. One person I met, Benn Coifman, was a student in transportation engineering at UC Berkeley. On the side, he had designed a variety of railroad fonts, including both lettersets such as the unique font used by the Great Northern’s streamlined Empire Builder as well as graphics of such objects as locomotives and railcars. He soon added an SP&S 700 to one of his graphic fonts.

I even inquired about getting a master’s degree in the history of technology at a major university, thinking I could become a museum curator of some type. After visiting the school, however, I decided I was no longer willing to put up with all the red tape involved with being a student that I had accepted as a necessity two decades before.

After the 700’s triumphant return from the Washington Central, the Sacramento Railroad Museum invited PRPA to join them for a railfair they were planning for 1991. One way to help pay for such a trip would be to sell space on passenger cars. The 4449 had a fleet of ex-Southern Pacific cars that it used for such trips. Except for our crew car, we didn’t have any passenger cars, but the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the National Railroad Historical Society did, so we met with them to plan the trip. Continue reading →

The year 1995 represented a significant transition in my career. Before 1995, nearly all of my work was studying forest planning and forest policy for environmental groups. After 1995, nearly all of my work was studying urban growth and transportation planning and policy for free-market groups. Before describing that transition, it is worth taking an interlude to look at what was almost my third career: railroad history.

I’ve loved passenger trains ever since my first ride on one, from Grand Forks, North Dakota to Portland, when I was five years old. I grew up with Diesel-powered streamlined trains, and can’t remember ever seeing a steam locomotive in operation except in places like the Portland Zoo and Disneyland. Compared to a real, full-sized steam locomotive, these were toys, so I ignored them and maintained a fondness for streamliners.

One such streamliner was the Rio Grande Zephyr, a remnant of the Chicago-Oakland California Zephyr. The Rio Grande Railroad had elected to not join Amtrak in 1971 and so continued to run its Zephyr between Denver and Salt Lake City over what is probably the most scenic rail route in America. By 1983, however, Amtrak talked the Rio Grande into letting it run Amtrak trains on its route rather than the far-less scenic route it had been using. Vickie and I were on the last run of the Rio Grande Zephyr, and I wrote about it in Passenger Train Journal. After returning from that trip, I became much more interested in rail history. Continue reading →

The last monthly issue of Forest Watch magazine was August, 1993. The first issue of Different Drummer was winter, 1994. Although less frequent than Forest Watch, each issue was 64 pages long compared with 28 for a typical Forest Watch. Each issue focused on one topic: the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Endangered Species Act, state land and resource agencies, and so forth.

Different Drummer eventually published 13 issues. I was the sole writer of about six of them, and the main writer for several more. One person who helped write a couple of issues was Karl Hess IV, who had a Ph.D. in range ecology and whose father, Karl Hess III, was a well-known libertarian. While I was an environmentalist who had become libertarian, Karl was a libertarian who had become an environmentalist, so we fit well together.

In line with the Different Drummer idea, I changed the name of Cascade Holistic Economic Consultants, which had always been awkward, to the Thoreau Institute. Henry David Thoreau is sometimes considered the first environmentalist, but he was also deeply suspicious of big government. I felt this represented the focus of my work: finding ways to improve the environment without big government. Continue reading →

Forest Planning/Watch had many excellent editors over the years, and I can’t really rank them. But a case could be made that the best editors were people who were writers themselves. One of those was Jeff St. Clair, who had led the group that brought me to Indiana to review the Hoosier Forest plan (his group was called Forest Watch, after which we named the magazine) and then decided to move to Oregon City at about the same time I was moving from Eugene to Oak Grove. He took over as editor in August, 1990.

Soon after that, the CHEC staff was joined by Karen Knudsen, a Colorado native who said she had climbed all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks by the time she was 21, a claim I found fully believable after trying to keep up with her cycling in the mountains of Utah. She had a degree in economics from Colorado College, which forever endeared me to that school as I have always felt she was the smartest person I’ve ever had the privilege of working with.

I could tell her to work on a particular topic and soon she would have a full report. She wrote reports on such topics as the Knutson-Vandenberg Act. I cried a little when she told me she was moving to Montana because its snow was better for skiing than Oregon’s. After she moved there, I received a phone call from the Clark Fork Coalition asking for a job reference. I told them if they didn’t hire her they should shoot themselves. She now is the group’s executive director. Continue reading →

In 1975, I set out to replace Gordon Robinson’s “if it’s pretty, it’s good; if it’s ugly, it’s bad” mantra with a more scientific approach to environmental issues such as wilderness, timber cutting, and public land management in general. I was fortunate to work with James Monteith, whose background in biology gave him a similar approach, as well as other experts and specialists.

By 1990, it was clear that we had changed the environmental movement from one based on emotion to one based on science and technology. It was also becoming clear just how successful we were, as national forest timber sales were declining and people inside the Forest Service, from top to bottom, were trying to reform the agency from the inside. We had no idea that, by 2001, timber sales would fall by 85 percent, but we could still feel good about our work.

Unfortunately, two events would undo the revolution that had taken place within the environmental movement: the fall of the Soviet Union and the election of Bill Clinton to the White House. When the Soviet Union fell, it appeared to be a victory of free markets over government planning. “Socialism” was considered a tainted idea, just like communism and fascism. Polls showed that the vast majority of Americans agreed with the statement that “government messes everything up.” Continue reading →

Exaggerated yield tables. Misclassification of unsuitable timber lands. Below-cost sales. Overestimated timber prices. Fallacious FORPLAN models. Perverse incentives. Conflicts between timber and other resources, especially those dependent on old growth. All of these issues indicated that the Forest Service was selling far more timber than it could sustain.

Associates such as Cameron La Follette and Andy Stahl were focusing on the old-growth question, while Tom Barlow had identified the below-cost sales problem. Since Barlow left NRDC, however, I had been leading the charge on all of these issues other than old growth, and in fact on most of them I was the sole person in the environmental movement doing the research showing that the Forest Service was off course.

The Forest Service was clearly very different than it had been some forty years before. While clearcutting was the dominant timber prescription in the 1980s, in the late 1940s the Forest Service bragged that it almost exclusively practiced selection cutting. The Forest Service had a large photo file for media purposes with photographs going back many decades — a few taken by the agency’s founder, Gifford Pinchot, himself — and some of them compared “bad forest practices” on private land, namely clearcutting, with “good forest practices” on national forests, namely selection cutting. Continue reading →

Tom Barlow, who coined the term “below-cost timber sales,” left the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1982 to move to Kentucky where he, improbably, managed to get himself elected to Congress for one term. Soon after that, his associate Gloria Helfand, who gathered most of the data for NRDC’s forest-by-forest analysis of timber profitability, ran off to Berkeley to get her Ph.D. in economics and now teaches at the University of Michigan.

That left the Wilderness Society, which had a couple of economists, and me to do the heavy lifting on money-losing timber sales. While NRDC was the first to look at timber profitability on a forest-by-forest basis, I was the first to look at it on a timber sale-by-timber sale basis in my analysis of 10,000 Forest Service timber sales sold in 1983.

In addition to reporting on the issue in Forest Planning/Watch magazine, I wrote many reports on timber sale economics. In 1980, Subsidizing the Timber Industry described how the Forest Service lost money on timber sales. The Citizens’ Guide to Forestry and Economics in 1986 looked at the overall picture of the inefficiencies of national forest management. In 1991, Growing Timber Deficits performed a detailed analysis of the Forest Service’s 1990 timber sale program. The Citizens’ Guide to the Forest Service Budget in 1992 went step-by-step through the timber sale process to show how the Forest Service increased its budget by losing money on timber. Continue reading →

By the late 1980s, forest planning was far from complete. As of 1987, eight years after the Forest Service published its final planning rules, more than half the plans were still unfinished. Still, the process was winding down, as reflected by the number of forest plan reviews I did each year. As near as I can tell, I had reviewed some 20 plans in 1985, but only eight each in 1986 and 1987, seven in 1988, and one a year for the next couple of years after that.

After considering appeals and do-overs resulting from those appeals, the planning process was taking a lot longer than originally projected. The plans were also a lot more expensive. Though Chief McGuire had guessed in 1976 that each plan would cost about a million dollars, Northern Arizona University forestry professor Richard Behan estimated that the actual cost was well over $10 million per plan.

One of the plans I reviewed in 1987 was for Ohio’s Wayne National Forest. Since the Wayne and the Hoosier were both only about a hundred thousand acres each, compared to western forests that were typically close to a million acres, both the Indiana and Ohio forests were managed out of the same supervisor’s office in Bedford, Indiana.

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Soon after Reforming the Forest Service was published, we began to see signs of dissension within the Forest Service. They were subtle at first: a memo here, a policy decision there. They became more overt when an on-the-ground timber sale planner in Oregon started a group called Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. Then they became a flood bursting through a dam as all of the forest supervisors in the West joined a movement against decisions being made by the Washington DC office of the agency. The results figuratively turned the agency upside down.

The story actually goes back to 1979, when Max Peterson replaced John McGuire as chief of the Forest Service. Unlike all of his predecessors, Peterson was a road engineer, and he was probably picked precisely because he wasn’t a forester as the agency had been under fire for its timber dominance. But from an environmental view, road engineers were even more suspect since it was feared that his agenda would focus on developing the roadless areas.

But with Ronald Reagan’s appointment of John Crowell as deputy secretary of Agriculture, Peterson ended up spending most of this tenure defending the forests against increased timber cutting. Crowell made it clear that he believed the national forests should be selling 20 billion board feet of timber a year, not the 10 or 11 billion they had been selling. Allowable sale levels could only be increased through forest planning, and under Crowell the Department of Agriculture issued new planning rules that emphasized timber sales. Continue reading →

Sometime in 1986, an editor from Island Press called me to see if I would write a book for them. A non-profit book publisher, Island Press was created in 1984 to focus on environmental issues. It relied on grants and donations to fund about half of its operation so it could publish books that might not have a huge audience. Drummond Pike, the Shalan Foundation director who helped us start Forest Planning magazine, was one of its early supporters and referred them to me.

I agreed to write a book, but book writing turned out to be hard. I had written enough 5,000- to 10,000-word reports that I could imagine a report outline in my head and just start writing. But most books are around 100,000 words, and it was hard to conceive of something that big all at once. Even now, six books later (plus three or four that were never published), I have to worry that I’ll repeat something in chapter 9 that I already wrote in chapter 4.

In the fall of 1986, writer Bill McKibben asked if I could give him a tour of old-growth forests in southwestern Oregon, which had been made famous by Earth First! blockades of road construction. I gave him my pitch about the incentives created by the Knutson-Vandenberg Act, which — based on what he has written since then — made absolutely no impression on him at all. Continue reading →