Exaggerated yield tables. Misclassification of unsuitable timber lands. Below-cost sales. Overestimated timber prices. Fallacious FORPLAN models. Perverse incentives. Conflicts between timber and other resources, especially those dependent on old growth. All of these issues indicated that the Forest Service was selling far more timber than it could sustain.
Associates such as Cameron La Follette and Andy Stahl were focusing on the old-growth question, while Tom Barlow had identified the below-cost sales problem. Since Barlow left NRDC, however, I had been leading the charge on all of these issues other than old growth, and in fact on most of them I was the sole person in the environmental movement doing the research showing that the Forest Service was off course.
The Forest Service was clearly very different than it had been some forty years before. While clearcutting was the dominant timber prescription in the 1980s, in the late 1940s the Forest Service bragged that it almost exclusively practiced selection cutting. The Forest Service had a large photo file for media purposes with photographs going back many decades — a few taken by the agency’s founder, Gifford Pinchot, himself — and some of them compared “bad forest practices” on private land, namely clearcutting, with “good forest practices” on national forests, namely selection cutting. Continue reading
