8. Cascade Holistic Economic Consultants

In contrast with the BLM, the Forest Service was amazingly open and willing to work with the public. The BLM was sort of a made-up agency — a merger of something called the Grazing Service and the General Land Office. In contrast, the Forest Service had been founded by one charismatic man whose shadow continued to influence the agency for many decades after he left it.

Gifford Pinchot was raised in a wealthy family in Pennsylvania. Some of the family money came from logging forests in the Midwest, and perhaps out of a sense of guilt, Pinchot’s father encouraged him to study forestry. At the time, there were only a handful of professional foresters in the United States, so Pinchot went to France to study, then returned full of hopes and ambitions to prove that forest management — as opposed to simply cutting it and selling the land — could be made profitable.

In 1891, Congress authorized the president to set aside some of the vast federal lands in the West as forest reserves. These lands were managed by the Department of the Interior. Pinchot had gotten a job running the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Forestry, which was essentially an extension service encouraging farmers and other private land owners to manage forests rather than just convert them to other uses.

In 1905, Pinchot persuaded his friend, Theodore Roosevelt, to transfer the forest reserves to his Bureau of Forestry. Overnight, the reserves became national forests and the forestry bureau became the Forest Service. Pinchot considered forest management to be a crusade, and he inspired generations of foresters to follow this crusade.

After Roosevelt left office, Pinchot didn’t get along with Taft’s secretary of the interior, so Pinchot maneuvered himself to be fired by Taft. As a public martyr (who didn’t really need a job anyway), he fired up the masses, attracting 10,000 people to a conservation congress in St. Paul, Minnesota to promote the idea that the federal government should be the national leader in forest management and conservation in general.

Pinchot remained involved in national forest affairs until his death in 1946. Until 1979, every chief of the Forest Service had met Pinchot at some point or another. Among Pinchot’s ideas were that the forests belonged to the public, so the public should have a say in how they were managed.

After Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, which required the preparation of environmental impact statements for every major federal action significantly affecting the human environment, the Forest Service decided to carry out this idea by making its internal planning process as public as possible. It divided each national forest into planning units and wrote land-use plans for those units, seeking public opinion every step of the way. It also involved the public in the timber management plans written for each forest. Reviewing these plans became one of my major occupations for the next several years.

I had sent half-hearted letters to a couple of environmental groups to see if they would be interested in hiring a forester. The Sierra Club responded that they already had a forester: Gordon Robinson. Robinson had graduated in forestry at the University of California at Berkeley at a time when nearly all of the faculty there supported selection cutting. He started working for Southern Pacific, California’s largest landowner, managing 730,000 acres of timber lands using the selection system.

After leaving Southern Pacific, Robinson became a consultant to the Sierra Club, where he preached the virtues of selection cutting. He wasn’t as enthused about wilderness as other Sierra Club leaders; he just argued against clearcutting.

When presenting his ideas to the public, he basically stated that if a timber harvest left a site looking ugly, it was bad forestry, but if it left it looking pretty, it was good forestry. I considered that to be overly simplistic. What if a selection cut took all the valuable trees from a forest and left the worthless ones to regenerate? The result might look pretty but would not be economically sound. Due to my skepticism over whether clearcutting was really the main issue for forest management, I set a personal goal of replacing Robinson as the go-to forester for the environmental movement.

Since no environmental group had the budget to hire me — the Sierra Club paid Robinson as a half-time consultant, not an employee — I decided to become a consultant myself. Since my clients would all be non-profit groups, it made sense for my consulting firm to be non-profit.

I had only taken a single economics course in college and didn’t really understand economics at the time. But I sensed that it was a powerful tool and that the main problem was that it was focused on marketed resources. A broader or more holistic economic view would take non-market resources into account. So I named the company Cascade Holistic Economic Consultants and incorporated it in March, 1975.

As a logo for CHEC, I picked a chessboard with a game nearing completion. A Forest Service employee said that he and some others had tried to work the game and wondered what it meant.

“It’s a queen sacrifice,” I said. “White will win in three moves if it sacrifices the queen.”

“So that means you are willing to make the big play, right?” he asked. I said yes, but what it really meant was I was willing to sacrifice most of my potential earnings in order to accomplish my goals. In fact, that’s pretty much what happened, as I earned less than $150 a month for my first couple of years, less than $500 a month for the next ten, and never more than than $1,000 a month before 1993.

In my own mind, I saw myself as Paladin, from Have Gun Will Travel, who traveled the West to help people and used a chess piece as his logo. Later, I would jokingly use the phrase, “Have computer, will travel,” but as of 1975 all I could say was, “Have HP-65, will travel.”

My first client, other than Art & Paula, was a group of hikers who called themselves the Mount Hood Forest Study Group. They had been brought together by the Oregon Environmental Council and often met at the OEC office in southwest Portland. The group included university professors, engineers, writers, and other professionals whose common ground was that they loved hiking in the Mount Hood National Forest.

I soon learned that the environmental movement at that time was amazingly tolerant of differing views. For example, one of the members of the forest study group was a nuclear engineer who worked at a local nuclear power plant. The Oregon Environmental Council had another group of people, including one who worked as a logger, who were seeking to shut down the nuclear power plant. The nuclear engineer and logger were aware of each other’s existence and it never bothered them that both were working towards opposing goals as volunteers for the same organization.

Like other national forests, the Mount Hood was writing land-use plans for several planning units as well as a forest-wide timber management plan. Beyond commenting on these plans, I looked hard at what the Forest Service was doing on the ground.

One of the most-prized publications I had collected from the Pacific Northwest Experiment Station was a beautiful book called Natural Vegetation of Oregon and Washington, written by forest ecologist Jerry Franklin and soils scientist Ted Dyrness. Although I have to admit that I skipped the forest ecology class at Oregon State, this book gave me an education in ecology that was probably almost as good as I could have received in that class.

The most important concept in the book was natural succession: after a fire or other disturbance, an area is pioneered by one plant community, which is eventually replaced by another, which prepares the ground for another, and so on until finally a plant community occupies the site that can remain stable until the next disturbance. The last community is called the climax community, and Franklin and Dyrness’ book divided northwest forests into the climax communities that they would eventually reach. (Many years later, I learned that the first person to understand and write about the process of forest succession was Henry David Thoreau.)

In much of northwest Oregon, forests were dominated by Douglas-fir, but Douglas-fir wasn’t the climax forest. After a fire, which often volatilizes the nitrogen out of the soil, the first trees to grow in would be alder, which like legumes formed a symbiotic relationship with microbes that return nitrogen back into the soil. This creates the conditions enabling taller Douglas-fir trees to replace the alders. The Douglas-fir, in turn, are unable to successfully regenerate in the full shade of a fully stocked forest, so if the forest remains undisturbed they would eventually be replaced by western hemlock, which can regenerate in the shade. That would take a long time, however, since Douglas-fir trees could live close to a thousand years. As a result, they were the dominant tree in most native forests because it was more likely that fire would replace the forest before hemlock took over.

In the Mount Hood National Forest, Douglas-fir/western hemlock forests dominated up to about 3,000 feet in elevation. Above that, colder temperatures and heavy snowfalls allowed other species, such as true firs, pines, and other species to have a role, with Pacific silver fir being the climax. Above 5,000 feet, mountain hemlock and subalpine fir became dominant.

The Forest Service justified clearcutting in western Oregon by claiming that Douglas-fir couldn’t regenerate in full shade. But this justification didn’t apply to the higher elevation forests. People in the forest study group suggested to me that the Forest Service was having problems reforesting clearcuts in these upper elevations.

The Oregon Environmental Council gave me a small grant, probably about $500, to find out if that was true. I obtained maps from the Clackamas Ranger District of the Mount Hood Forest that showed clearcut boundaries and the dates that they were cut. Since I still didn’t have a car, I relied on other study group members to provide transportation and to act as my assistants in counting seedlings. In the fall of 1975, we spent many days finding and tromping through 77 clearcuts that were above 3,000 feet to count seedlings.

The Forest Service’s goal was to have 300 trees per acre. One-three-hundredths of an acre was a circle of about seven feet in radius. We would walk a straight line through the clearcut and stop every ten or twenty paces and then see whether there was a seedling within seven feet of where we stopped. If the Forest Service had met its goal, every plot we measured would have at least one seedling. If some plots had more than one seedling, the extras were ignored because a mature forest would only have room for one tree in that space.

Based on these measurements, my May 1976 report found that a third of the clearcuts we measured had fewer than 100 well-spaced seedlings per acre and another quarter had only 100 to 200 seedlings per acre. Only about 23 percent were fully stocked with 300 seedlings per acre and another 19 percent had barely adequate stocking of 200 to 300 seedlings per acre.

This was CHEC’s first research paper and its design became a model for many reports in the future. I was a two-finger typist in college, and OSPIRG had its own typists to type up intern reports. But I realized I wouldn’t be able to afford to hire a typist, so I taught myself to type — another skill not taught by the OSU School of Forestry! OSPIRG reports were printed double-spaced on 8-1/2″x11″ paper, but I thought that was a waste of paper. So I typed my paper single spaced, and to save even more paper, I reduced it down so that each page fit within a 7″x8-1/2″ space. I then photocopied these on 8-1/2″x14″ paper that would be folded in half and center stapled to form a little booklet.

(By the way, I’m not knocking the School of Forestry when I write about all the things I had to learn outside of OSU. The school provided the basic knowledge needed for students to go on into specialties. The specialty I entered, forest planning and timber policy, required skills that other specialties wouldn’t require, and those specialties required skills that I didn’t need, so it made sense that I would learn a lot of things not taught to undergraduates.)

Rather than circling the wagons, as the BLM had done, the Forest Service responded to my report in a positive way. The Mount Hood Forest supervisor was Dale Robertson, and he asked the forest silviculturist, David Ellen, to review the clearcuts in my report to see if the problem I identified was real. Robertson and Ellen personally went with me on a tour of the Clackamas Ranger District. Ellen convinced Robertson that the problems weren’t as serious as stated in my report, but I was happy that they were willing to listen to me.

I had heard this from other environmentalists. Robertson’s previous job was supervisor of the Siuslaw National Forest in the Oregon Coast Range. Landslides were a serious problem on the steep slopes of that forest, and I was told that Robertson was always careful to listen to complaints from the public about the loss of fish habitat. Did the policies change? I asked. No, but they were happy that he listened to them.

Robertson later became chief of the Forest Service and it was clear that his ability to sooth public concerns was an important reason for that. Of course, the problems remained.

Personally, after meeting with Robertson and Ellen, I had to ask myself: was my study wrong or was Ellen just covering up? Had I somehow biased my results, perhaps by making transects through the clearcuts that were easy to walk through (and maybe less likely to be stocked) rather than areas of thicker vegetation where there might have been more seedlings? Either way — cover up or biased data collection — the lesson I learned was that it didn’t pay to attempt to gather my own data for challenging forest agencies. Instead, I suspected I would be much more effective using the agencies’ own data against them.