“Just because some senators were stupid doesn’t mean you have to be!” the forestry consultant yelled at the Forest Service official. “I hope when you consider multiple use you wait ’til the trees were gone first!”
For the Forest Service, “multiple use” — the idea that national forests were managed for many things and not just commodities — was almost as sacred as “sustained yield.” It was stunning to see this consultant, one of the biggest names in Northwest forestry, lose his cool in a public forum.
The story began in 1976 when OSPIRG asked me to work on the Oregon State Board of Forestry. The Oregon Department of Forestry had been created in 1911 to coordinate firefighting efforts and manage state-owned forest lands.
In 1971 — no doubt partly in response to the National Environmental Teach-In — the legislature passed the Oregon Forest Practices Act giving the department the authority to regulate private forest owners to protect wildlife, watersheds, and insure reforestation of cutover lands. The law created three regional Forest Practice Committees that would recommend regulations that would then be approved by the Board of Forestry.
That sounded fine, except that, by law, the Board of Forestry and the forest practice committees were dominated by timber industry representatives, thus creating a situation in which the industry was regulating itself. While two members of the sixteen member Board of Forestry represented “the public,” most of the rest represented the timber industry, counties whose revenues depended on timber cutting, and other industry interest groups. The dean of the OSU School of Forestry and regional forester in charge of Oregon and Washington national forests were de facto but non-voting members. Six of the nine members of each forest practices committee also, by law, represented timber land owners. When the board’s major duty was to oversee fire protection, it made sense for it to involve industry interests, but the Forest Practices Act created a huge conflict of interest.
I started attending every meeting of the board of forestry, usually hitchhiking to Salem. Once in a while I would get picked up by board chair (and dean of the OSU School of Forestry) Carl Stoltenberg or board member John Hampton, who owned Hampton Lumber Company. They were friendly to me, but other board members were actively hostile and acted like, if they saw me with my thumb sticking out, they’d rather run me over than pick me up.
It didn’t help that my hair was halfway to my waist. I think I grew my hair long because I wanted to let people know that people who looked different from them weren’t necessarily inferior. After a first meeting, people would often say to me that I was a lot more intelligent than they thought I would be when they first saw me. As the song says, I felt like I owed it to someone. It was probably a bad idea.
Anyway, I carefully reviewed Oregon’s forest practice rules and found that most of them were meaningless. The reforestation rules were the best, mandating that cutover areas be restocked with 100 to 150 seedlings per acre within a few years of the timber cut. But the rules for other environmental protections were full of weasel words such as “minimize” and “avoid.”
In response to my criticism, the Department of Forestry hired an Oregon State University professor, George Brown, to review the rules. His report admitted that there were some weasel words in the rules, but not as many as I claimed. However, his reasoning was questionable. For example, if a rule said, “Keep tractors in streams to a minimum,” he would have agreed that “minimum” was a weasel word. But the rule actually said, “Keep tractors in streams to an absolute minimum,” and he claimed “absolute” meant it was no longer a weaselly worded rule. Perhaps partly as a reward for his loyalty to the timber industry, Brown was made the dean of the Oregon State School of Forestry when Stoltenberg retired.
In January, 1976, John Beuter’s report, Timber for Oregon’s Tomorrow, was published by Oregon State University. The report showed that private timber landowners had cut nearly all of their old growth, and most of their second growth was not yet mature enough to harvest. The result would be a decline in Oregon harvest and jobs — unless the Forest Service and BLM were willing to “depart” from the non-declining flow policy and temporarily increase harvests until private forests matured.
The Board of Forestry clearly intended to use this report to pressure the Forest Service and BLM to give up on the non-declining flow policy. Not satisfied with the Beuter report, the board hired Mason, Bruce & Girard — the forestry consulting firm founded by David Mason, the original promoter of sustained yield management — to calculate exactly how much each national forest and BLM district would have to depart from non-declining flow. The company’s president, Carl Newport, attended the board meetings and acted like an industry lobbyist himself. I could tell that Forest Service regional forester Ted Schlapfer was not enthused about this, but he didn’t legally have a vote and didn’t speak too loudly against it.
Of course, I didn’t hesitate to speak against it. If the Forest Service departed from non-declining flow, I said, what guarantee would there be that private landowners would increase cutting when the national forests began to run out of timber? Would those landowners accept regulation of their harvests by the Forest Service?
I was the only environmentalist to attend most of these meetings, and there was virtually no press coverage. In addition to the board members, most of whom represented the industry, participants in the board meetings were mostly lobbyists from such groups as Associated Oregon Industries and people like Newport. After I asked the above questions, a young, somewhat naïve lobbyist seemed very distressed by my comments.
“The Forest Service has an obligation to protect community stability, so it should take private lands into account when it sets its allowable cut,” she said. “But private landowners have no such obligation, so they shouldn’t have to be regulated.” In fact, the Forest Service isn’t legally obligated to protect community stability; that’s just something it made up to justify its annual appropriations for timber sales. But, given the make-up of the board, I was surprised that she feared there was a real possibility that the board would take my idea seriously.
About this time clearcutting had become a national issue. An environmental group in West Virginia had sued the Forest Service for clearcutting on the Monongahela National Forest, and in August 1975 the Fourth Circuit Court agreed that clearcutting violated an 1897 law. That law authorized the Forest Service to sell only “dead, physiologically mature, and large growth” trees that had been “individually marked” for cutting, thus apparently endorsing selection cutting. Since some trees in an area to be clearcut would be less than “physiologically mature” or “large growth,” clearcutting was not possible under the law.
The timber industry went ballistic, claiming that this “archaic law” had to be repealed or it would have terrible repercussions on the national economy. Clearcutting was not only more efficient than other methods of cutting, the industry claimed, it was absolutely required in order to reforest species like Douglas-fir, which required lots of sunlight to regenerate. Douglas-fir, it was said, had evolved to grow up after forest fires, and clearcutting merely imitated such fires.
In response, I wrote a paper co-published by OSPIRG and CHEC titled Oregon and the Monongahela Decision. I pointed to an Oregon State University paper by Jerry Franklin (the co-author of Natural Vegetation of Oregon and Washington) and Crown Zellerbach forester Dean DeBell. “Biologically,” they wrote, “no types or species appear to require large clearcuts for successful regeneration” (they defined “large” as 10 acres or more.)
In response to the fire argument, I referred to The Practice of Silviculture, a standard textbook used in many forestry schools. Author David Smith observed that if “silviculture were a perfect imitation of natural processes leading to the ecological optimum for each species and site, a number of variants of the shelterwood system rather than clearcutting would be the most common kind of silvicultural management.” For these and other reasons, my report showed, the timber industry hysteria over the Monongahela decision was misplaced.
In response to the Monongahela decision, Congress considered three options. The timber industry proposal, to simply repeal the 1897 law, was dead on arrival. The environmental proposal, introduced by West Virginia Senator Jennings Randolph, was to allow some clearcutting but under strict, legal conditions. This had more support. But it was the third proposal, introduced by Hubert Humphrey but actually written by friends of the Forest Service, that would carry the day. This bill would solve clearcutting and other forest controversies through land-use planning. This gave Congress plausible deniability, since the regulations and on-the-ground decisions were made by the Forest Service, while creating an appearance of regulation.
The Board of Forestry watched this process closely because, beyond clearcutting, the industry wanted the new law to legalize or even mandate departures from non-declining flow. The final wording of the law read, “in order to meet overall multiple-use objectives, the Secretary may establish an allowable sale quantity for any decade which departs from the projected long-term average sale quantity that would otherwise be established.” When Humphrey introduced the bill that had passed out of committee to the floor of the Senate, Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield engaged him in a colloquy over whether this wording would allow departures to make up for private landowner shortfalls. Humphrey, who probably didn’t really understand what was at stake, answered in vague terms.
The Board of Forestry met the day after the Senate approved the National Forest Management Act and sent it to the president for his signature. At the meeting, Carl Newport proudly told the story of the colloquy between Hatfield and Humphrey and how it would mean that the board’s plans for departures could be implemented.
Ted Schlapfer, however, had some bad news for the board. He had received a directive from the Forest Service’s Washington office that morning saying that the agency would strictly interpret the law to allow departures only for “multiple-use purposes,” not for community stability. He strongly implied that the agency couldn’t imagine any multiple-use purpose that would demand a departure from non-declining flow.
The board was naturally upset about this, but no one was more agitated than Carl Newport. “Just because some senators were stupid doesn’t mean you have to be!” he shouted. “I hope when you consider multiple use, you wait ’til the trees are gone first.”
While what I considered to be the good guys had won this round, I suspected it was only because the Forest Service wanted to hold the allowable cut hostage to get more funds from Congress for intensive management. In fact, the National Forest Management Act specifically allowed the Forest Service to use an unlimited share of timber sale revenues for thinnings and other intensive management.
The law also created what the chief of the Forest Service admitted was the “largest central planning process in the free world.” This came naturally to Humphrey, a long-time supporter of the New Deal and other government planning processes.
Meanwhile, the Board of Forestry still had control over regulation of forest practices on private lands. I resolved to try to fix that in the 1977 legislature. In the meantime, I continued to work on Mt. Hood forest planning.
Very much enjoying this series, Antiplanner.