3. The Vatican of Sawlog Forestry

When I was debating whether to go to forestry school, my parents and I attended a sort of a career day at my high school where representatives from various colleges presented their programs. The Oregon State School of Forestry showed a movie about their curriculum that included a lot of pictures of trees being cut down.

“It looks like they’re more about cutting trees than saving them,” my father whispered to me. As economist John Baden told me many years later, Oregon State’s forestry school was “the Vatican of sawlog forestry.” I could see that in 1970, but decided that, in order to save the forests, I needed to learn the language and tools of forestry.

Also influencing my decision was the fact that Oregon State was affordable. In-state tuition for my first year was a little more than $400. Tuition, books, room, and board for all four of my undergraduate years was about $5,000.

When I arrived in Corvallis in the fall of 1970, I learned that forestry and engineering were the most difficult degrees to earn in Oregon. Where most schools at the University of Oregon required 186 credit hours to graduate (an average of 15.5 per quarter), and most at Oregon State required 192 (16 per quarter), forestry and engineering each required 204 (17 per quarter). Many of the required classes in the first couple of years seemed to be killer courses, designed to weed out people who weren’t really serious.

At an introductory meeting, my advisory professor observed that, of each incoming class in the forestry school, a large number would drop out, many more would change majors, and many of the rest would end up taking longer than four years to graduate. An average of only 4 percent, he concluded, ended up graduating in four years. Glancing at my SAT scores, he said, “You’re one of the 4 percent.” I vowed to make his prediction come true.

As it turned out, credit hours weren’t a problem. I was so eager to learn that I insisted on taking 21 to 22 credit hours each quarter, taking classes in many of the sciences even if they weren’t required for my major. I took well to zoology, botany, mammalogy, and geology. I didn’t do so well in chemistry (even though my dad was a chemist) or calculus, the latter because the classes were taught by foreign students whose accents I couldn’t penetrate. I long resented OSU for that but later learned that the same thing happened in Ivy League schools.

In addition to a couple of years of German, I also took courses in poetry and music theory, even though I didn’t play an instrument, and dabbled in song writing and orchestral composition. But I realized I couldn’t do that and save the forests, so I dropped them after a year or so. With this course load, my grades weren’t great, but I reasoned that my grades would be less important to my future career than my ability to analyze and present information.

At some point, I realized I was racking up enough credits to earn two degrees. I looked at the various sciences and most of them required a year of organic chemistry. Since chemistry wasn’t my favorite subject, I wasn’t interested in that. The one exception to the organic chemistry rule was geology. Geology also seemed to go well with forestry because trees, of course, grew out of the earth and, more important, geologic instability might be one reason why some trees shouldn’t be cut. So I ended up getting a degree in geology even though I’ve never really practiced it.

The dean of the forestry school, Carl Stoltenberg, took his duties seriously enough to teach the introduction to forestry course my first term, something none of his successors did. He was a handsome, white-haired man who invited a handful of his students to dinner every few nights over the course of the quarter. I enjoyed discussions with him and remember being dismayed when some of my fellow students told me that many of the professors didn’t like me because of my environmental leanings. Carl and I would be political adversaries in the future, but he never let that affect his friendly attitude towards me.

For personal reasons, I spent my junior year at Portland State University, cramming in as many geology courses as I could. I learned environmental geology from Leonard Palmer and vulcanology from Paul Hammond, both of whom gained their fifteen minutes of fame when Mt. St. Helens erupted a few years later.

The head of the department, John Allen, had personally made geologic maps of Coos County, so we spent a rainy fall week at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology in Charleston. Miles of ocean front from Charleston to the south were protected in state and county parks where impressive formations of sandstone, conglomerates, and mudstones were exposed to view, some of which were heavily laden with fossils. Everyone was awed by the waves crashing on the rocks at Shore Acres State Park, and this became one of my favorite places in the world.

My senior year I was back at Oregon State, taking a full load of forestry courses in order to graduate in four years. Most of the forestry courses I took in my three years there were basic, covering such topics as dendrology (tree identification); forest engineering (mainly making topographic maps); mensuration (measuring trees). In fact, only one or two of the courses addressed issues that would be important for my career: when do you cut trees, where do you cut them, how do you cut them, and how do you reforest them? These turned out to be issues covered only in graduate courses, but I ended up learning about those issues in my summer jobs.