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
