Tom Barlow, who coined the term “below-cost timber sales,” left the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1982 to move to Kentucky where he, improbably, managed to get himself elected to Congress for one term. Soon after that, his associate Gloria Helfand, who gathered most of the data for NRDC’s forest-by-forest analysis of timber profitability, ran off to Berkeley to get her Ph.D. in economics and now teaches at the University of Michigan.
That left the Wilderness Society, which had a couple of economists, and me to do the heavy lifting on money-losing timber sales. While NRDC was the first to look at timber profitability on a forest-by-forest basis, I was the first to look at it on a timber sale-by-timber sale basis in my analysis of 10,000 Forest Service timber sales sold in 1983.
In addition to reporting on the issue in Forest Planning/Watch magazine, I wrote many reports on timber sale economics. In 1980, Subsidizing the Timber Industry described how the Forest Service lost money on timber sales. The Citizens’ Guide to Forestry and Economics in 1986 looked at the overall picture of the inefficiencies of national forest management. In 1991, Growing Timber Deficits performed a detailed analysis of the Forest Service’s 1990 timber sale program. The Citizens’ Guide to the Forest Service Budget in 1992 went step-by-step through the timber sale process to show how the Forest Service increased its budget by losing money on timber. Continue reading
