Category Archives: Iconoclast

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. Continue reading →

I once attended a conference in Washington state and met some employees of the Washington Department of Natural Resources. Most western states owned and managed forests, but Washington owned more timber, and made far more money selling that timber, than any other state.

Knowing I was interested in old growth, one of the employees asked me, “Have you seen our giant western red-cedar on the Olympic Peninsula? It’s the largest western red-cedar in the world.” I told him I hadn’t seen it.

“It was part of a timber sale, but the company that bought the sale measured it and realized it was a world-record tree, so they left it standing. Another tree nearby was the world’s second-largest western red-cedar, but they cut it down.” Continue reading →

A lot of forest plans were issued in 1985, and I managed to review 20 of them. Considering holidays, that was almost one every two weeks. It made for a hectic schedule, but each new plan taught me something so that the quality of my reviews steadily improved.

A group of wilderness activists in Quincy, California asked me to review the Plumas Forest plan. The activists included Mike Yost, who taught forestry at Feather River Community College, his wife Sally, who is an amazing artist, and attorney Michael Jackson.

While I was reviewing documents in the forest supervisor’s office, some of the planners were meeting in another corner of the office. I could tell their discussion was getting heated, and finally one of them blurted out, “He’s going to write about us in his magazine, and we’re all going to be in trouble!” Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

Starting Forest Planning magazine was exciting, but after six years of 16-hour days on practically no pay, I was burnt out. Receiving the Neuberger Award was an indication that I was on the right track, but my actual accomplishments had been nearly nil.

The Forest Service had rejected the Oregon State Board of Forestry’s plan, but I had little to do with that. The state legislature had rejected my bill to reform the board and the governor had refused to appoint me to the board. The BLM had responded to my criticisms by building a brick wall around itself. The Forest Service was more open to discussion but hadn’t made any visible changes in response to my reviews of unit plans and timber management plans. On top of this, flunking the exam required to go on to get a Ph.D. in economics was dispiriting.

My friends James and Ellen, grateful for me getting the Forest Service to cancel the timber sale in their watershed because it was in a roadless area, offered to fix up one of their cabins for me to live in and recuperate. By this time, Miss Vickie, the woman I had met on the San Francisco Zephyr, and I were a couple, and she agreed to move down with me. Continue reading →

In late 1979, several events took place that would have profound consequences for the future of the national forests. First, in September OSPIRG published a massive, 144-page report on old-growth forests by Cameron La Follette. While environmentalists liked to talk about old-growth forests, what they meant were “big trees.” The Forest Service and timber industry argued that old-growth forests were “biological deserts” because the thick canopy of needles and leaves prevented any light from reaching the ground, and thus there was nothing for deer or other wildlife to eat.

Cameron’s report was the one of the first public efforts to challenge this notion, showing that several species of wildlife depended on old growth. It also noted that “most of the remaining old growth is in the already roaded portions of the National Forests which have been opened for timber harvest,” so wilderness protection of roadless areas would be insufficient to ensure the survival of such wildlife species. The report simultaneously opened the public’s eyes regarding old growth and created a new agenda for the environmental movement.

One sign of just how far Cameron was ahead of her time was an interview with Jerry Franklin, the forest ecologist who co-authored Natural Vegetation of Oregon and Washington, that she included in the report. “I personally don’t think old growth is an issue,” he said, because “there are already substantial acreages of old growth reserved.” Franklin would completely reverse course in less than two years. Continue reading →

In the late 1970s, I wrote comments on enough draft plans for people in the Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service to know who I was, but not enough to have a major impact on the plans. But I found or developed three tools that helped.

The first was described in a book titled The Economics of Natural Environments by John Krutilla, of Resources for the Future, and Anthony Fisher, an economist from the University of California at Berkeley. The book argued that, since development of a roadless area was irreversible, a special calculation was necessary to weigh the benefits and costs of such development. Their proposal was to assume that the recreation and other amenity values of undeveloped areas would increase forever because such areas would become increasingly scarce. Even if today’s amenity values didn’t outweigh today’s commodity values from development, they argued, the discounted sum of future amenity values might do so.

I applied Krutilla and Fisher’s method to Oregon roadless areas in a paper called An Economic View of RARE II. The paper showed that, while some areas had tremendous timber values that outweighed potential wilderness values, most were more valuable for amenities than commodities. Continue reading →

The West in the 1970s and 1980s was the site of increasingly strident conflicts over the national forests that became known as the Timber Wars. On one hand were the sawmills that depended on sales of federal timber, along with the loggers, truck drivers, mill workers, and others who depended on those sales for jobs. On the other hand were environmentalists seeking protection for wilderness, endangered species, fisheries, and other resources that weren’t so easily marketed.

Environmentalists appealed timber sales, went to court over endangered species, and lobbied Congress to pass wilderness legislation. Timber companies asked their employees to attend rallies and engaged in their own lobbying. Both sides rallied their supporters to comment on Forest Service and BLM land-use and timber management plans.

Eventually, the hostility got so bad that some of my friends were hung in effigy by timber industry supporters. I worked far enough in the background that I escaped that fate, but I still stuck my neck out on several occasions. Continue reading →

As a student at the University of Oregon, my main source of income was a federal program called work-study. The federal government paid 80 percent of the wages for part-time student employees, and non-profit organizations willing to pay the other 20 percent were eligible to hire students under the program. I received a call from Dave Brown, an assistant director of the Survival Center, an on-campus environmental group, asking me to work for them writing reviews of Forest Service plans.

The Survival Center was located in the latest, 1973 addition to U of O’s student union. I had office space, a desk, an IBM Selectric typewriter to write on, and a phone that was hooked into the state telephone network, allowing me to make unlimited calls to any city that had a state college or university. Although I rented a small room in a house in nearby Springfield for, as I recall, $55 a month, the Survival Center became my real home, and initially I only left because the building was closed to students after 11 pm. Later, they allowed students with a key to stay after 11 and I sometimes would work there until 2 or 3 in the morning.

I continued my cycling advocacy in a small way. Part of the cycling route between Eugene and Springfield was on a designated bike path that emptied onto a city street in Springfield. The city of Springfield had decided that it was too dangerous to let cyclists ride in the street and required that they use the sidewalk. The sidewalk wasn’t very wide and had something like 40 driveway cuts, each one requiring bicycles to go down a dip and then up a bump. Sometimes part of the sidewalk was blocked by signposts and it often had wet leaves, litter, and other obstacles. Continue reading →

Growing up in Portland, I was taught that the city had the cleanest water in the world because it came from a watershed on the Mount Hood National Forest that had been set aside exclusively for Portland’s use. The Bull Run Trespass Act of 1904 closed the 102-square-mile Bull Run Watershed, along with a 41-square-mile buffer around it, to all public entry, and only Forest Service officials and employees of the Portland water bureau were allowed to enter the area.

This belief was so well known that a medical doctor named Joseph Miller bought a piece of land on the edge of the buffer strip and built a home. There he and his wife lived for many years, content in the knowledge that behind their house was 143 square miles of pristine wilderness that, unlike most wilderness, wasn’t even open to public recreation.

I was in Corvallis studying forestry when this myth came tumbling down in the form of a landslide in 1971. Portlanders woke up one morning to find their “pristine” water to be muddy brown, and they were advised to boil it before drinking it (as if anyone would want to drink brown water). The Forest Service hastened to announce that the landslide that had polluted the city’s water wasn’t caused by one of the clearcuts in the watershed. What it didn’t say was that the landslide was caused by a road leading to one of those clearcuts. Continue reading →