1. Memories

I first became an antiplanner in the 1980s, when the Forest Service, in response to a 1976 law, was writing long-range, comprehensive plans for every national forest in the country. As a forestry consultant who worked almost exclusively for environmental groups, I was hired to review many of those plans.

The Forest Service had an administrative process for appealing its decisions, and environmentalists appealed every single one of the more than 100 forest plans written by the agency. (There were 155 national forests, but some smaller ones were combined into one plan.) Environmentalists who hired me to review the plans won about half of their appeals or legal challenges. Groups that didn’t hire me lost every single appeal they brought.

One national forest halted all timber sales for more than a decade after my review. Others went back to the drawing boards and started over from scratch. “You always get nervous when you hear that Randal O’Toole is coming to your forest,” a forest planner admitted.

A comparison of the final plans with the plans that were successfully challenged revealed that, as a direct result of my work, millions of acres of forests that would have been cut at an economic loss to taxpayers were reserved from the chainsaw. Many of those acres ended up in wilderness areas. As an indirect result of my work, between 1990 and 2000 the Forest Service reduced the volume of timber it sold each year by 85 percent. I didn’t do this alone — the environmental groups that hired me did the hard work of providing local political and legal pressure on the agency — but much of this wouldn’t have happened without my work.

Most of my work consisted of reviewing computer models, the data that went into those models, and the results that came out of those models. For most people, these models were “black boxes” that mysteriously turned raw data into a plan. But because I could get inside the models, I could see what the Forest Service was doing, where it was lying to the model, where it was lying to the public, and where it was lying to itself.

This experience made me an antiplanner, a skeptic of all long-range or comprehensive government planning. Whether planning a forest, a city, a regional transportation network, or world climate, all planning is based on models, which are simplifications of reality. Not all models are in computers, but the computerization of modeling forced government agencies to publicly reveal their biases. It became clear to me that the main winners in government planning were the planning agencies themselves, which gained power, budgetary authority, and prestige from taking control of public and private resources.

Over the years, I’ve successfully helped stop timber sales, roads, light-rail lines, and onerous government regulations. This history makes for some interesting stories and, I hope, lessons that are worth passing on to others. Perhaps the most important lesson is question conventional wisdom. Being an iconoclast — staying a step apart from both allies and opponents — has helped me be effective in many unique ways.

I’ve been an iconoclast at least since I was a teenager. Sometimes it was merely symbolic, as when I refused to wear a tie for the photograph in my high school yearbook. Often it was more substantive, as when I questioned claims that the Forest Service made a profit, that years of fire suppression had led to dangerous fuel levels in the forests, that light rail generated economic development, or that high-density housing is affordable.

Many of these stories are coming from my memories alone. Recently, I was given a vivid example of how memories are not always accurate.

When I was 15 years old, my family, who lived in Portland, and my mother’s sister’s family, who lived in Bellevue, started a tradition of driving to Arizona for Christmas. My maternal grandparents had moved to Mesa, Arizona, so instead of sheltering inside away from cold rainstorms, we ended up celebrating Christmas by swimming, playing shuffleboard, and visiting desert scenery.

That first year, my cousins were excited about going to Disneyland on the way home after Christmas. But my parents solemnly informed my brothers and I that we wouldn’t be able to go that year and would have to wait to visit the fabled park until the next year.

So it was a great and pleasant surprise to open a present on Christmas offering an all-expense paid trip to Disneyland. While they played something of a trick on us by doing it this way, it made the visit extra special for me.

But not for my brothers, who are seven and nine years younger than me. When I brought this up once after both of our parents had passed away, they didn’t remember it like that at all. Instead, they both insist that we didn’t get to go to Disneyland that first year, and had to wait until the next year. For them, the wonderful prank my parents played on us backfired.

Since they were only 8 and 6 at the time, their memories are less reliable and I’m pretty sure I am right about this. Yet there have been other times when I’ve compared memories with other adults who lived through important events with me and found that what we remember is completely different.

Now, more than 50 years after that first visit to Mesa, I have quite a few memories. I’ll post these stories once a week; if you find them boring, you can skip them.

To support my memories as much as possible, I’ll base these stories on written documents. Since I’ve written roughly four million words in six books, hundreds of reports, numerous shorter articles, and a decade of blog posts, there should be a lot to write about.

The earliest years, roughly 1970 through 1980, have the least written support, but they taught me some of the most important lessons. I hope my memories are reliable, but if you remember anything differently from me, please let me know.

Next Thursday, May 9: The Day That Changed the World. Friday May 10 will have a special post about a 150th-anniversary.