Monthly Archives: July 2019

The West in the 1970s and 1980s was the site of increasingly strident conflicts over the national forests that became known as the Timber Wars. On one hand were the sawmills that depended on sales of federal timber, along with the loggers, truck drivers, mill workers, and others who depended on those sales for jobs. On the other hand were environmentalists seeking protection for wilderness, endangered species, fisheries, and other resources that weren’t so easily marketed.

Environmentalists appealed timber sales, went to court over endangered species, and lobbied Congress to pass wilderness legislation. Timber companies asked their employees to attend rallies and engaged in their own lobbying. Both sides rallied their supporters to comment on Forest Service and BLM land-use and timber management plans.

Eventually, the hostility got so bad that some of my friends were hung in effigy by timber industry supporters. I worked far enough in the background that I escaped that fate, but I still stuck my neck out on several occasions. Continue reading →

As a student at the University of Oregon, my main source of income was a federal program called work-study. The federal government paid 80 percent of the wages for part-time student employees, and non-profit organizations willing to pay the other 20 percent were eligible to hire students under the program. I received a call from Dave Brown, an assistant director of the Survival Center, an on-campus environmental group, asking me to work for them writing reviews of Forest Service plans.

The Survival Center was located in the latest, 1973 addition to U of O’s student union. I had office space, a desk, an IBM Selectric typewriter to write on, and a phone that was hooked into the state telephone network, allowing me to make unlimited calls to any city that had a state college or university. Although I rented a small room in a house in nearby Springfield for, as I recall, $55 a month, the Survival Center became my real home, and initially I only left because the building was closed to students after 11 pm. Later, they allowed students with a key to stay after 11 and I sometimes would work there until 2 or 3 in the morning.

I continued my cycling advocacy in a small way. Part of the cycling route between Eugene and Springfield was on a designated bike path that emptied onto a city street in Springfield. The city of Springfield had decided that it was too dangerous to let cyclists ride in the street and required that they use the sidewalk. The sidewalk wasn’t very wide and had something like 40 driveway cuts, each one requiring bicycles to go down a dip and then up a bump. Sometimes part of the sidewalk was blocked by signposts and it often had wet leaves, litter, and other obstacles. Continue reading →

Growing up in Portland, I was taught that the city had the cleanest water in the world because it came from a watershed on the Mount Hood National Forest that had been set aside exclusively for Portland’s use. The Bull Run Trespass Act of 1904 closed the 102-square-mile Bull Run Watershed, along with a 41-square-mile buffer around it, to all public entry, and only Forest Service officials and employees of the Portland water bureau were allowed to enter the area.

This belief was so well known that a medical doctor named Joseph Miller bought a piece of land on the edge of the buffer strip and built a home. There he and his wife lived for many years, content in the knowledge that behind their house was 143 square miles of pristine wilderness that, unlike most wilderness, wasn’t even open to public recreation.

I was in Corvallis studying forestry when this myth came tumbling down in the form of a landslide in 1971. Portlanders woke up one morning to find their “pristine” water to be muddy brown, and they were advised to boil it before drinking it (as if anyone would want to drink brown water). The Forest Service hastened to announce that the landslide that had polluted the city’s water wasn’t caused by one of the clearcuts in the watershed. What it didn’t say was that the landslide was caused by a road leading to one of those clearcuts. Continue reading →