Monthly Archives: September 2019

Soon after Reforming the Forest Service was published, we began to see signs of dissension within the Forest Service. They were subtle at first: a memo here, a policy decision there. They became more overt when an on-the-ground timber sale planner in Oregon started a group called Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. Then they became a flood bursting through a dam as all of the forest supervisors in the West joined a movement against decisions being made by the Washington DC office of the agency. The results figuratively turned the agency upside down.

The story actually goes back to 1979, when Max Peterson replaced John McGuire as chief of the Forest Service. Unlike all of his predecessors, Peterson was a road engineer, and he was probably picked precisely because he wasn’t a forester as the agency had been under fire for its timber dominance. But from an environmental view, road engineers were even more suspect since it was feared that his agenda would focus on developing the roadless areas.

But with Ronald Reagan’s appointment of John Crowell as deputy secretary of Agriculture, Peterson ended up spending most of this tenure defending the forests against increased timber cutting. Crowell made it clear that he believed the national forests should be selling 20 billion board feet of timber a year, not the 10 or 11 billion they had been selling. Allowable sale levels could only be increased through forest planning, and under Crowell the Department of Agriculture issued new planning rules that emphasized timber sales. Continue reading →

Sometime in 1986, an editor from Island Press called me to see if I would write a book for them. A non-profit book publisher, Island Press was created in 1984 to focus on environmental issues. It relied on grants and donations to fund about half of its operation so it could publish books that might not have a huge audience. Drummond Pike, the Shalan Foundation director who helped us start Forest Planning magazine, was one of its early supporters and referred them to me.

I agreed to write a book, but book writing turned out to be hard. I had written enough 5,000- to 10,000-word reports that I could imagine a report outline in my head and just start writing. But most books are around 100,000 words, and it was hard to conceive of something that big all at once. Even now, six books later (plus three or four that were never published), I have to worry that I’ll repeat something in chapter 9 that I already wrote in chapter 4.

In the fall of 1986, writer Bill McKibben asked if I could give him a tour of old-growth forests in southwestern Oregon, which had been made famous by Earth First! blockades of road construction. I gave him my pitch about the incentives created by the Knutson-Vandenberg Act, which — based on what he has written since then — made absolutely no impression on him at all. Continue reading →

CHEC’s work had attracted enough attention that the Colorado and Arizona departments of natural resources each hired us to help them understand some of the plans in their states. While I was between reviewing two forest plans in western Colorado, I spent the weekend visiting the Gunnison National Monument and other scenic areas.

While I was driving around, I listened to the radio as underdog Los Angeles Raiders, led by quarterback Jim Plunkett (who Jim Monteith said was his roommate at Stanford), were beating the Washington Redskins in the SuperBowl. The game sounded so interesting that I went back to my motel to watch the last half, which meant I got to see the Apple 1984 commercial. The Macintosh looked interesting, but without a hard drive and a decent printer it wasn’t much use to us.

A year later, Apple began making its LaserWriter printer, the first affordable laser printer. As soon as I saw it and the range of fonts Apple was offering, I thought “calligraphy.” When in high school, I had met Reed College art professor Lloyd Reynolds, one of the most famous calligraphers in the world, and took a class in calligraphy taught by one of his students. I didn’t know it, but Steve Jobs had also learned calligraphy from Reynolds, and the experience had helped inspire his work on the Macintosh and LaserWriter. Continue reading →

I once attended a conference in Washington state and met some employees of the Washington Department of Natural Resources. Most western states owned and managed forests, but Washington owned more timber, and made far more money selling that timber, than any other state.

Knowing I was interested in old growth, one of the employees asked me, “Have you seen our giant western red-cedar on the Olympic Peninsula? It’s the largest western red-cedar in the world.” I told him I hadn’t seen it.

“It was part of a timber sale, but the company that bought the sale measured it and realized it was a world-record tree, so they left it standing. Another tree nearby was the world’s second-largest western red-cedar, but they cut it down.” Continue reading →