Category Archives: Iconoclast

By early 1976, I had become engaged in a war on three fronts — the BLM, Forest Service, and Oregon State Board of Forestry — and was losing all three. The problem was that I had only one tool at my disposal, policy analysis, and even if the reports I wrote were right, it wasn’t enough. I needed allies who could bring legal, political, public relations, and other tools to the table.

At a meeting of the Mount Hood Forest Study Group, I met a woman named Gail Kellogg who represented a group called the Oregon Wilderness Coalition. I gave her my card and suggested she call if she needed any forestry expertise.

“Oh, we have lots of experts,” she said dismissively, not even looking at my card or, for that matter, me. I was disappointed enough that this stuck in my memory but otherwise didn’t think much of it at the time as I had plenty of projects to keep me busy, albeit without producing much income. Continue reading →

“Just because some senators were stupid doesn’t mean you have to be!” the forestry consultant yelled at the Forest Service official. “I hope when you consider multiple use you wait ’til the trees were gone first!”

For the Forest Service, “multiple use” — the idea that national forests were managed for many things and not just commodities — was almost as sacred as “sustained yield.” It was stunning to see this consultant, one of the biggest names in Northwest forestry, lose his cool in a public forum.

The story began in 1976 when OSPIRG asked me to work on the Oregon State Board of Forestry. The Oregon Department of Forestry had been created in 1911 to coordinate firefighting efforts and manage state-owned forest lands. Continue reading →

In contrast with the BLM, the Forest Service was amazingly open and willing to work with the public. The BLM was sort of a made-up agency — a merger of something called the Grazing Service and the General Land Office. In contrast, the Forest Service had been founded by one charismatic man whose shadow continued to influence the agency for many decades after he left it.

Gifford Pinchot was raised in a wealthy family in Pennsylvania. Some of the family money came from logging forests in the Midwest, and perhaps out of a sense of guilt, Pinchot’s father encouraged him to study forestry. At the time, there were only a handful of professional foresters in the United States, so Pinchot went to France to study, then returned full of hopes and ambitions to prove that forest management — as opposed to simply cutting it and selling the land — could be made profitable.

In 1891, Congress authorized the president to set aside some of the vast federal lands in the West as forest reserves. These lands were managed by the Department of the Interior. Pinchot had gotten a job running the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Forestry, which was essentially an extension service encouraging farmers and other private land owners to manage forests rather than just convert them to other uses. Continue reading →

Art Downing and Paula Ajay were San Francisco hippies who, with some friends, decided to form a commune and move back to the land. They bought some cutover timber land in southern Oregon, only to discover that being bordered by the BLM meant that they could expect clearcutting and herbicide spraying in their proverbial backyard.

Downing and Ajay contacted OSPIRG for help and OSPIRG sent them to me. By the time I met them, they and a man named Harold Washington were the only members left of the commune, and Washington soon went back to California as well.

Downing and Ajay introduced me to the clearcutting issue. Deciding whether to use clearcutting or some other cutting method was another subject that wasn’t taught to undergraduates at the Oregon State University School of Forestry, but I knew clearcutting was controversial. I was skeptical of the controversy, which I felt was based mainly on aesthetic grounds, and I believed that whether a particular forest should be cut at all was a more important question than how it should be cut. Continue reading →

While studying the BLM, I learned some valuable lessons about Oregon forests. Private timber companies that owned a large portion of Oregon’s forests practiced sustained yield but not non-declining even flow. Many of them were running out of old-growth timber and were counting on national forests and BLM lands to keep their mills running while waiting for their second-growth forests to grow back. But mills that didn’t own their own lands were already buying most of the federal timber on the market, and they feared being pushed out of business when the big timber land owners started competing against them.

The Forest Service and BLM had dramatically increased their allowable cut levels between 1950 and 1973. At first, this was possible simply because they had so much timber available, but in the last few years before 1973 they were increasingly relying on tricks like the allowable cut effect and genetic improvement. The agencies were clearly at their limit and couldn’t increase their allowable cut levels further without violating the non-declining even flow rule.

The timber industry had what it thought was an elegant solution to this problem: when the Forest Service and BLM calculated their allowable cuts, they should take nearby private lands into consideration. If those lands were growing second-growth timber, under the allowable cut effect the federal land managers could increase their allowable cuts. This would appear to satisfy the political need to protect local community stability. Continue reading →

One of the requirements for graduating from the Oregon State School of Forestry was that students had to spend at least one summer working for a forestry company or agency. On application, the school agreed that work studying forest policy for OSPIRG would qualify. Since my 1972 internship earned so much publicity, OSPIRG was happy to hire me again for the summer of 1973 and to put me to work on a forestry project.

I wanted to study the Forest Service but OSPIRG asked me to study the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) instead. While I was still in school in Corvallis, OSPIRG’s main office in Portland had been visited by a strange man named Robert Bradley Jones who was concerned about BLM lands in western Oregon. He had written a book called One by One which told the sordid story of how Congress had given every other square mile of land between Portland and the California border (as well as between Roseburg and Coos Bay) as grants to the Oregon & California Railroad and wagon road builders and then took them back when the railroad failed to comply with the terms of the grant. Known as the O&C lands, these revested land grants represented less than 1 percent of the area managed by the BLM but produced something like 90 percent of its timber.

In 1937, Congress had written a law directing the Secretary of the Interior to manage the O&C lands for timber on a sustained yield basis, probably the first time Congress had used the term “sustained yield” in a law. The law also directed the secretary to give 75 percent of the revenues to the counties in lieu of the property taxes the counties would have collected had the lands been private. Most of the counties had agreed to give a third of their share of the funds to the BLM to pay for roads, reforestation, and other costs of accessing and managing the timber. They reasoned that, if the BLM didn’t have any money, it couldn’t sell much timber, so 50 percent of a lot of sales would be better for the counties than 75 percent of not much. Continue reading →

In my freshman year at Oregon State, Ralph Nader came to Oregon and urged university students to fund a public interest research group that would hire experts to advocate for consumer and environmental goals. I circulated petitions and the student body governments of Oregon State, the University of Oregon, and most other major schools in the state agreed to contribute an average of a dollar a quarter per student to the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group.

In my sophomore year, OSPIRG announced that it would hire 16 student interns to work for the summer at $750 each. I applied but was told — probably because of my mediocre grades — that I didn’t make the cut. However, they did have $250 left over, and if I would work for that amount, they’d be happy to give me a project.

The previous summer I had worked as a parking lot attendant, and anything was better than doing that again. So I happily took the job and bicycled from my northeast Portland apartment to OSPIRG’s downtown offices in the Governor Building on 2nd and Stark. Downtown Portland was then a sleepy place that was practically dead after 6 pm. The Governor Building was a ramshackle office building surrounded by parking lots left behind after other buildings had been torn down. As I recall, OSPIRG was on the fourth floor, and I usually ran up the stairs two at a time rather than take an elevator. Continue reading →

When I was debating whether to go to forestry school, my parents and I attended a sort of a career day at my high school where representatives from various colleges presented their programs. The Oregon State School of Forestry showed a movie about their curriculum that included a lot of pictures of trees being cut down.

“It looks like they’re more about cutting trees than saving them,” my father whispered to me. As economist John Baden told me many years later, Oregon State’s forestry school was “the Vatican of sawlog forestry.” I could see that in 1970, but decided that, in order to save the forests, I needed to learn the language and tools of forestry.

Also influencing my decision was the fact that Oregon State was affordable. In-state tuition for my first year was a little more than $400. Tuition, books, room, and board for all four of my undergraduate years was about $5,000. Continue reading →

If asked, many baby boomers would probably say that the most important day in history during their lifetimes was November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. That event transformed America in many ways, bringing the happy-go-lucky 50s to a dark close, perhaps paving the way for the Viet Nam War, but also bringing in a president who, unlike Kennedy, was able to persuade Congress to pass several vital civil rights laws.

For me, however, the most important day was another 22: April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day or, as it was called then, the National Environmental Teach-In. This day transformed America from one that was divided on environmental issues to one in which everyone, from teachers and politicians to oil and timber companies, were expected to pledge allegiance to environmental protection first before taking any other position on the issues. The results include recycling, locavores, and a consensus of thousands of scientists who aren’t climatologists on global climate change even though scientists had previously been conditioned to not express strong opinions on issues outside their areas of expertise.

As well as affecting our country in general, the teach-in had a huge effect on my life. I wanted to be an architect, and I spent the long drives my family took to Arizona each Christmas reading books on modern architects: Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, Le Corbusier, and most importantly Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Taliesin West I visited on one of our Arizona trips. Continue reading →

I first became an antiplanner in the 1980s, when the Forest Service, in response to a 1976 law, was writing long-range, comprehensive plans for every national forest in the country. As a forestry consultant who worked almost exclusively for environmental groups, I was hired to review many of those plans.

The Forest Service had an administrative process for appealing its decisions, and environmentalists appealed every single one of the more than 100 forest plans written by the agency. (There were 155 national forests, but some smaller ones were combined into one plan.) Environmentalists who hired me to review the plans won about half of their appeals or legal challenges. Groups that didn’t hire me lost every single appeal they brought.

One national forest halted all timber sales for more than a decade after my review. Others went back to the drawing boards and started over from scratch. “You always get nervous when you hear that Randal O’Toole is coming to your forest,” a forest planner admitted. Continue reading →