6. Timber for Oregon’s Tomorrow

While studying the BLM, I learned some valuable lessons about Oregon forests. Private timber companies that owned a large portion of Oregon’s forests practiced sustained yield but not non-declining even flow. Many of them were running out of old-growth timber and were counting on national forests and BLM lands to keep their mills running while waiting for their second-growth forests to grow back. But mills that didn’t own their own lands were already buying most of the federal timber on the market, and they feared being pushed out of business when the big timber land owners started competing against them.

The Forest Service and BLM had dramatically increased their allowable cut levels between 1950 and 1973. At first, this was possible simply because they had so much timber available, but in the last few years before 1973 they were increasingly relying on tricks like the allowable cut effect and genetic improvement. The agencies were clearly at their limit and couldn’t increase their allowable cut levels further without violating the non-declining even flow rule.

The timber industry had what it thought was an elegant solution to this problem: when the Forest Service and BLM calculated their allowable cuts, they should take nearby private lands into consideration. If those lands were growing second-growth timber, under the allowable cut effect the federal land managers could increase their allowable cuts. This would appear to satisfy the political need to protect local community stability.

There were two catches. Obviously, environmentalists who were concerned about wildlife, watershed, and recreation wouldn’t be happy with the increased timber cutting, but most of them weren’t even aware it was being discussed. Less obviously, the mills that depended on public timber had no assurance that private landowners would sell them timber when public supplies ran low.

When I returned to the Oregon State School of Forestry in my senior year, after spending my junior year studying geology at Portland State, I wrote a paper about this conundrum and concluded that I expected to be working on it well after I graduated. I asked my advisor, forest ecologist William Ferrell, to review it and he was impressed enough to circulate it among other members of the faculty.

One of the faculty members, John Beuter, had been hired by the Oregon State Board of Forestry — which was chaired by forestry school dean Carl Stoltenberg — to study this question as well. He gathered timber inventory data from public agencies and private landowners and ran computer models predicting future cutting levels if the federal agencies stuck with non-declining flow or were willing to take private lands into account when setting their cutting levels. He was assisted by two graduate students, Norm Johnson and Lynn Scheurman. Their report, when it came out, would be called Timber for Oregon’s Tomorrow.

Long before that happened, I was talking with someone at the forestry school and mentioned the paper I wrote. “Oh, you’re the one who wrote that,” he said. He informed me that he was working on John Beuter’s project, and “we’re going to rub you out.” I’m pretty sure it was Norm Johnson; he denies it, but a mutual friend says, “That sounds like Norm. He was pretty arrogant in those days.” Johnson’s specialty was writing computer programs for timber harvest scheduling, and he and I would cross paths many times in the next couple of decades.

Computer science happened to be one of the many courses I took at OSU that were outside my major. In those days, students programmed computers by typing the program in the language of their choice — usually Basic or Fortran — on a teletype machine, which “printed” the program on a spool of punched tape. This tape was given to a desk behind which the wizards who maintained a mainframe computer ran the programs. After several hours wait, they would present the programmer with a computer printout usually saying that the program had failed in some way or another. This process was not only agonizingly slow, it required the students themselves to pay for time on the computer.

I discovered that I loved to program computers, and wrote many frivolous programs such as a way to identify the best combination of front chainwheels and rear sprockets for an idea 10-speed bicycle. But I also realized I couldn’t afford to pay for all the computer time I wanted, so after acing the course in beginning programming, I stopped working with computers.

The forestry school didn’t have computers, but it did have desktop calculators with enough memory that they could do things like calculate standard errors and standard deviations. One of the professors proudly showed off his new toy, a pocket calculator, which he said the desktop calculator company gave to the school when it bought so many calculators. Since we had been using slide rules for most of our calculations, especially in forest engineering and inventory, the idea of a pocket calculator was interesting, but at the time the cost of a four-function calculator was more than a hundred dollars.

Near the end of the school year, I was intrigued to learn about a new calculator introduced by Hewlett-Packard: the HP-65, the first programmable pocket calculator. Even today, many people of my generation get misty eyed when they remember this machine. It had room in its memory for 100 instructions, and it had a card reader and writer so users could store and share programs.

Even with a student discount at the OSU bookstore, it cost around $715, about $3,700 in today’s money and almost as much as OSPIRG paid for a summer internship. Someone told me, “I hear if you drop it, they’ll pay you $5 for the parts.” I mentioned this to the bookstore salesman and he took a calculator and threw it on the floor. It worked fine.

It was a hard decision, but I bought one and never regretted it. Personally, it satisfied my urge to program computers for a long time. As a student, I was able to use it in my courses, and still remember disturbing a quiet final exam by running the card reader while other students were struggling with their slide rulers. “Are the aliens landing?” one student asked. After graduating, it became an indispensable tool for much of my work for almost a decade.

In my final term at Oregon State, the Weyerhaueser Company offered a special course to let students know what it was like to run a large forest products company. Company president George Weyerhauser himself flew down for several of the classes, and senior vice president Charles Bingham (who happened to be George’s roommate in college) came to most of them. Although intended for graduate students, I applied to join and was accepted.

Weyerhaeuser was the largest and had the reputation for being the most environmentally sensitive timber company in the nation. Some people cynically said that they gained that reputation mainly because they were careful to leave a screen of trees between highways and their cutting units so that people wouldn’t be disturbed by the ugly clearcuts.

The truth was that Weyerhaeuser purchased much of its Pacific Northwest land for $6 an acre in 1900 in one of the largest land sales in American history. Frederick Weyerhaeuser happened to live next door to James J. Hill in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Hill controlled the Northern Pacific Railway and its 44-million acre land grant. There turned out to be so much timber on the land that it didn’t take much cutting to pay for the purchase, so the company was able to cut its land slowly and carefully. This was a sharp contrast to companies such as Georgia-Pacific, which paid high prices for large blocks of land after World War II and had to cut them over quickly to pay for them.

Weyerhaueser executives probably didn’t expect the class to turn into debates over forest policy. Although I participated, the debates were led by one of the graduate students who was skeptical of just about everything the company did: cutting rates, cutting methods, rotation ages, its genetic improvement program, and so forth.

Although George Weyerhaeuser’s name was on the company, the Weyerhaeuser family was only a minority owner. George got the job as president by advocating that the company invest in what he called “high-yield forestry.” Essentially, he used the allowable cut effect in the same way as the Forest Service, promoting spending on thinnings and other intensive management practices by saying it would allow faster cutting of the company’s old-growth timber. It must have worked because Weyerhaeuser is still the largest and one of the most profitable timber landowners in the United States, but the parallels between what the company was doing and what the BLM and Forest Service were doing invited criticism.

I succeeded in graduating in four years, with two degrees no less. The question became what to do next. I didn’t want to work for the Forest Service, BLM, Weyerhaeuser, or any other timber company. No environmental groups could afford to hire me full time. In the short run, the answer was once again OSPIRG, which hired me for another summer internship.