Monthly Archives: June 2019

“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 →