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
