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
