5. OSPIRG Intern Part 2

One of the requirements for graduating from the Oregon State School of Forestry was that students had to spend at least one summer working for a forestry company or agency. On application, the school agreed that work studying forest policy for OSPIRG would qualify. Since my 1972 internship earned so much publicity, OSPIRG was happy to hire me again for the summer of 1973 and to put me to work on a forestry project.

I wanted to study the Forest Service but OSPIRG asked me to study the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) instead. While I was still in school in Corvallis, OSPIRG’s main office in Portland had been visited by a strange man named Robert Bradley Jones who was concerned about BLM lands in western Oregon. He had written a book called One by One which told the sordid story of how Congress had given every other square mile of land between Portland and the California border (as well as between Roseburg and Coos Bay) as grants to the Oregon & California Railroad and wagon road builders and then took them back when the railroad failed to comply with the terms of the grant. Known as the O&C lands, these revested land grants represented less than 1 percent of the area managed by the BLM but produced something like 90 percent of its timber.

In 1937, Congress had written a law directing the Secretary of the Interior to manage the O&C lands for timber on a sustained yield basis, probably the first time Congress had used the term “sustained yield” in a law. The law also directed the secretary to give 75 percent of the revenues to the counties in lieu of the property taxes the counties would have collected had the lands been private. Most of the counties had agreed to give a third of their share of the funds to the BLM to pay for roads, reforestation, and other costs of accessing and managing the timber. They reasoned that, if the BLM didn’t have any money, it couldn’t sell much timber, so 50 percent of a lot of sales would be better for the counties than 75 percent of not much.

Clackamas County, however, didn’t like that arrangement. Robert Bradley Jones had been a Clackamas County commissioner, and he convinced his co-commissioners to sue the BLM asking for the full 75 percent. One by One was the story of this lawsuit, which was initially successful but which lost in the long run.

If Jones thought he would get any sympathy from OSPIRG, he was wrong. Indeed, 50 percent of revenues is a lot more than private landowners pay in property taxes, so if anything the counties should have been given far less, and certainly not 75 percent. Even the 25 percent paid to counties by the Forest Service was way too much.

Jones’ book, however, started me on an in-depth study of timber harvest scheduling, an important topic for public land managers that is barely mentioned in any undergraduate course at Oregon State. As such, my internship met OSU’s goal in requiring students to take a summer forestry job, as it paved the way for my future work in forest policy, though some at OSU probably didn’t approve of the political slant I took at OSPIRG.

As the Forest Service’s land branch is divided into national forests, the Forest Service’s research branch is divided into experiment stations. The Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station had its headquarters in Portland across the river from OSPIRG’s office. The station’s library made hundreds of research papers and technical reports available for free, and I ended up spending a lot of time browsing the library, learning basic concepts, and catching up on the latest issues in timber management planning. The most important concepts were:

• Allowable cut — The maximum amount of timber a public agency decided it could sell each year while providing basic protections for recreation, wildlife, water, and other resources. (Technically this should be called allowable sale, but allowable cut had such a nice ring to it that most foresters used that term.)
• Rotation — The age of trees when they are mature and ready to be cut. To maximize the allowable cut, the rotation should be set at the age when the average annual growth rate reaches a peak, which foresters call the “culmination of mean annual increment.” In the Pacific Northwest, that was usually around 100 years. Rotations that maximize economic returns on investments are usually much shorter — around 40 years in the Northwest — because the discount rate punishes longer investment periods.
• Sustained yield — The idea that land should be managed to always provide a future crop of timber. At minimum, this means cutting in such a way that the forest reforests itself or seeding or planting trees to make sure the commercially valuable species continue to grow on the site. According to many in the timber industry, it did not necessarily mean that there would be timber to cut in every single year: a landowner might cut all of the timber from land in 20 years and, on a 40-year rotation, have little to cut for the next 20 years. But they would still be following sustained-yield principles so long as the timber would be there at the end of the 40 years.
• Even flow — A special kind of sustained yield in which the same amount of timber is cut or sold each year. Thus, on a 40-year rotation, only about 2.5 percent of the land could be cut each year, while on a 100-year rotation, only about 1 percent could be cut each year.
• Non-declining even flow — A refinement of the even-flow policy that would allow timber sales to increase over time but never decrease.

These concepts became critically important in 1969 when the experiment station published a report called the Douglas-Fir Supply Study. Douglas-fir is one of the fastest-growing trees in the world and though it is native only to western North America, it has been transplanted to many forests in Europe and Australia. It is a valuable structural timber for home and other building construction. Douglas-fir could grow to be at least a thousand years old, and old-growth Douglas-fir trees were, at one time, second only to the redwoods as the largest in the world. By 1970, private landowners had cut the biggest Douglas-fir trees in the Northwest, but the Forest Service and BLM still had millions of acres of forests that were at least 300 years old in the Pacific Northwest.

The Douglas-fir Supply Study was the first application of computer models to timber harvest planning. Both agencies had always claimed to practice sustained yield which, as they defined it, meant they would never cut more today than they could cut in the future (i.e., non-declining flow). So they were stunned when the Douglas-fir Supply Study revealed that they were cutting considerably more than they could cut in the future.

The problem was that a 300-year-old old-growth forest would have a lot more volume of wood — sometimes twice as much — than could be grown in a 100-year rotation. As a result, wrote experiment station economist Don Flora (who patiently answered my many questions about the issue), “there was bound to be a drop in harvesting as the second rotation got underway.” While it seems obvious in retrospect, no one in the Forest Service realized it because, before computers, their “calculations never went beyond the first rotation.”

Though timber managers were fond of calling old growth “dead, dying, and decrepit,” the trees were huge, those still alive were growing fairly fast, and their wood was prized by builders for their structural strength. Second-growth Douglas-fir trees might grow an inch in diameter every two or three years, but lumber cut from such trees was liable to split when someone pounded a nail into it.

The “fall down” predicted by the Douglas-fir Supply Study violated everything the Forest Service claimed to stand for, including the economic stability of communities dependent on national forest timber sales. In response to the study, the chief of the Forest Service issued an “emergency directive” requiring that all future timber harvest plans comply with a strict, non-declining even flow policy.

The timber industry argued that this policy would cause a fall down in timber sales now, instead of some point in the future, and that was a more immediate threat to local communities than one that might be phased in over several years. But the Forest Service would not be budged, and the BLM ended up adopting a similar policy.

I soon realized that the Forest Service had a hidden agenda when it adopted strict, non-declining even flow as a policy. The Douglas-fir Supply Study had shown that one way of mitigating the fall down was to make second-growth grow faster. Spending more money on reforestation, commercial thinnings that removed some trees for wood processing while leaving the rest to grow faster, and precommercial thinnings that cut some trees in overstocked stands, leaving the rest to grow faster, would allow for faster overall growth and reduce the size of the fall down.

Many of these practices really didn’t pay for themselves, especially when considered over a 100-year rotation. At a 7 percent interest rate, spending $100 an acre precommercially thinning at age 10 and then waiting 90 years for a result would require $44,000 of additional payoff per acre vs. not doing the thinning. Even at a 4 percent discount rate, the added payoff would have to be more than $3,400 an acre. On such a long rotation, only the most productive timber lands could return 4 percent and none could return 7 percent.

However, if thinning now would allow a forest to cut more old growth now, the payoff would be immediate and huge. If thinnings made the remaining trees grow just 10 percent faster, forest could cut 10 percent more old growth now, whose value more than repaid the cost of thinnings. This became known as the allowable cut effect.

At least one economist, Dennis Teeguarden of the University of California, Berkeley, protested that the allowable cut effect was a sham. Since it was just an artifact of the non-declining flow policy — which economists didn’t like anyway — even greater economic returns could be gained by simply discarding that policy without wasting money on intensive management practices that would never pay off.

Such arguments went over the heads of members of Congress, who bought into the Forest Service’s policy of maximizing allowable cuts (which meant longer rotations than made economic sense) to provide the maximum wood for local mills and the homebuilding industry, as well as the non-declining flow policy to minimize disruption of local communities. If giving the Forest Service and BLM more money to pay for intensive management meant minimizing the fall down that would result from applying that policy today, then Congress was happy to do so. The result was a bigger budget for the Forest Service and, once the policies were implemented on the ground, more old growth cutting for local sawmills.

The BLM adopted the allowable cut effect with a vengeance. Unlike the Forest Service, which depended on annual appropriations for roads and timber sales, the BLM received 25 percent of whatever timber revenues it generated, effectively rewarding it for selling more timber.

In addition to precommercial and commercial thinnings, the BLM claimed that spraying herbicides to eliminate competition from hardwoods would increase Douglas-fir growth by 5 to 10 percent, thus allowing for a 5- to 10-percent increase in old-growth sales. This generated huge controversies because BLM lands (being made up of old land grants that consisted of every other section of land) were more likely to border private lands than national forests. When the BLM used helicopters and planes to saturate its young forests with herbicides, often twice in a few years, some of that spray drifted onto private lands, and some of those lands were occupied by young people who were part of the back-to-the-land movement. They protested this very strongly.

Another BLM policy that got less public notice was to “genetically improve” the trees it was planting in the forests. Forest geneticists had discovered that Douglas-fir and other trees had adapted themselves to specific sites. The growing season at 900 feet in elevation, for example, would be different from the season at 1,100 feet. A forest geneticist named Helge Irgens-Moller showed that planting seeds at 1,100 feet that came from trees growing at 900 feet would result in suboptimal growth. He and other geneticists urged land managers to collect seeds from every elevation and growing condition and make sure to plant seedlings in the right place.

In 1971, the BLM designed a seed selection program and submitted it for review to Irgens-Moller and other geneticists at Oregon State University. All of them gave the program their seal of approval. The BLM then decided that this program would make trees grow 11 percent faster, allow it to increase the allowable cut.

When the geneticists found out, they protested loudly, noting that the 11 percent number was never mentioned in the seed selection program they had approved. Not adopting the BLM’s genetic program would result in trees growing slower than the standard yield tables, they said, but adopting it wouldn’t make them grow faster; they would only grow as fast as the yield tables predicted. Irgens-Moller in particular said that the BLM’s policy was “absolutely unreasonable if not irresponsible.”

My OSPIRG report on the BLM didn’t come out until 1975 and it recommended only modest changes in the BLM’s program (including elimination of the assumption that genetic improvement would increase growth by 11 percent). But the work I did paved the way for more studies of the BLM, Forest Service, and the timber economy in Oregon as a whole.