The Antiplanner’s friend, Andy Stahl–who frequently comments on this blog–recently appealed a timber sale on the Bighorn National Forest. That takes me back to the 1970s and 1980s, when Andy and I appealed timber sales, forest plans, and other national forest and BLM projects almost on a weekly basis. Sometime around 1980, I held the distinction of having appealed more BLM timber sales than anyone, but Andy soon eclipsed me.
Recent aerial photo of timber cut from the Bighorn National Forest in about 1985.
During the 1980s, the Forest Service sold nearly 11 billion board feet of timber each year, but in the 1990s this rapidly declined, partly due to Andy’s activities protecting the spotted owl and–I’d like to think–partly due to Forest Service employees reading my book, Reforming the Forest Service, and deciding they didn’t want to be that kind of an agency any more. (As I describe in this article, this is greatly oversimplified and a lot of other factors were involved, some of them quite surprising).
