By early 1976, I had become engaged in a war on three fronts — the BLM, Forest Service, and Oregon State Board of Forestry — and was losing all three. The problem was that I had only one tool at my disposal, policy analysis, and even if the reports I wrote were right, it wasn’t enough. I needed allies who could bring legal, political, public relations, and other tools to the table.
At a meeting of the Mount Hood Forest Study Group, I met a woman named Gail Kellogg who represented a group called the Oregon Wilderness Coalition. I gave her my card and suggested she call if she needed any forestry expertise.
“Oh, we have lots of experts,” she said dismissively, not even looking at my card or, for that matter, me. I was disappointed enough that this stuck in my memory but otherwise didn’t think much of it at the time as I had plenty of projects to keep me busy, albeit without producing much income.
Some time later, I received a phone call from a man who introduced himself as the director of the Oregon Wilderness Coalition, Jim Monteith. They were headquartered in Eugene, but he had heard about me and was in Portland and he and his associate, Kurt Kutay (pronounced koo-tie), wanted to visit with me.
They showed up at my northeast Portland apartment late in the evening with a pile of Forest Service plans and environmental impact statements. They talked about conflicts between salmon and timber cutting, wilderness and roads, and elk and cattle grazing. I was a bit overwhelmed at first, but later realized that at the beginning of any consultant-client relationship, there is a short time when the client knows more about the problem than the consultant, and the quality of the consultant is partly revealed by how fast that is turned around so that the consultant knows more than the client. Eventually, I would reduce the time to mere minutes.
Monteith didn’t have any money to pay me, so he probably saw me more as a partner than a consultant. But we had an immediate affinity: like me, Monteith and Kutay were recent college graduates who were working for almost no pay on issues that they considered vital, probably in part because of the 1970 Environmental Teach-In.
The Oregon Wilderness Coalition was a grassroots organization. Monteith and his staff — Kutay, a central Oregon resident named Tim Lillebo, and later Andy Kerr and others — traveled around the state nurturing local hikers, hunters, and others to work to protect potential wilderness areas. Under the 1964 Wilderness Act, a wilderness was a congressionally designated area of at least 5,000 acres that had no roads or other major evidence of human disturbance, and any unloaded piece of federal land that was over 5,000 acres had to be studied for its wilderness characteristics before it could be developed.
OWC staff and members carefully studied maps of national forests to find every parcel of 5,000 acres or more that had no roads. The organization then attempted to match up each roadless area with a local group dedicated to protecting that area. Some of the areas were huge, while others barely tipped 5,000 acres but still may have had unique attributes. The local groups would try to stop timber sales and road construction in the roadless areas and lobby members of Congress to formally designate them as wilderness.
The Sierra Club had encouraged the creation of state wilderness coalitions in many western states, partly because it knew there were many wilderness advocates, including hunters and horseback riders, who didn’t identify with the Sierra Club itself. The Oregon coalition was distinguished from most of the others by the scientific approach it took to the issues, which is why Monteith sought me out.
I learned more about the “lots of experts” the coalition had when I attended the organization’s annual conference in the summer of 1976. It was just the second such annual conference it had held, but it brought together well over a hundred people from all over the state, some of whom would end up as close friends.
What impressed me weren’t the wild-eyed romantics, though there were many of those, but the hardcore scientists who attended. I don’t know if Monteith planned this or if he simply had an affinity for scientists since he himself had a degree in biology from Stanford. In any case, the conference included a geologist named Fred Swanson, a forest ecologist named Glenn Juday, another ecologist named Paul Aleback, as well as wildlife biologists, soils scientists, and many other professionals and experts.
One of the reasons we were losing in 1976 is that all the science seemed to be against us. The main arguments environmentalists offered were emotional and aesthetic ones — old-growth forests were pretty; clearcuts were ugly — whereas the industry seemed to have all the facts on its side. Industry lobbying and publicity had spread those facts to everybody from politicians to editorial writers.
As a result, everyone knew that Oregon depended on the timber industry for 40 percent of its jobs. Everyone knew that the Forest Service made a profit and that profit came from timber sales. Everyone knew that old-growth forests were biological deserts filled with dead, dying, and decrepit trees. Everyone knew that clearcutting was the only way to reforest Douglas-fir. Everyone knew that deer, elk, and other wildlife thrived in a managed forest that mimicked natural wildfires with frequent clearcuts.
In less than a decade, all of these “facts” would be proven wrong. At that point, the environmentalists had all the facts and science on their side while all the industry had was the emotional one of the need to protect jobs no matter how much harm it did to the environment. This turnaround happened within the Forest Service itself, starting with the experiment station and spreading to the national forests. But I am convinced that the real origin can be traced to that 1976 meeting of scientists and professionals who were willing to question conventional wisdom and in turn to the efforts of James Monteith and his staff to cultivate those experts.
I have to cringe a little bit when I think of myself at the conference. Not only did I have long hair, I wore blue Stetson hat and a floor-length blue cape with a faux-fur-lined hood — not exactly an ensemble that went together. I introduced myself by my initials, ROT: “I’m ROT and I work on wood.”
During one large group discussion, someone brought up the need to fight clearcutting. I stood up, raised my foot up on a bench, and threw back my cape, exposing my holster. My soon-to-be friend Betty Hughes gasped and whispered to her husband, Loren, “He’s got a gun!” But it wasn’t a gun, only my trusty HP-65.
I then proceeded to announce, “I’m a forester” — which was actually more threatening to some of the people there than if I had a gun — and gave my standard lecture about how the cutting method was less of an issue than whether the forest should be cut at all. No matter what the cutting method, I noted, eventually all old-growth trees would be replaced with second-growth and roadless areas would be completely roaded, destroying any wilderness qualities forever.
They say that first impressions count, but I was willing to give up that first impression because I knew I could make it up with the second impression, the one that would come when I started speaking rationally and with the facts behind me. In retrospect, I wonder how many friends and allies I didn’t make because they never made it to the second impression. Eventually, I ended up cutting my hair and my clothing is more conventional, though I still won’t wear a modern tie. I guess I’ve decided I can be iconoclastic in ways other than my personal appearance.
In addition to the scientists, this conference introduced me to people throughout the state. Soon I was working in northeastern Oregon, the Oregon Coast Range, the Siskiyou National Forest of southwest Oregon, and many other places. My work included challenging individual timber sales, helping people oppose herbicide spraying on adjacent lands, commenting on Forest Service land-use plans, and being an expert witness in a variety of court cases.
To help potential clients and other members of the public deal with these issues, I wrote CHEC’s second publication, a 32-page paper called The Citizen’s Guide to Forestry and the Environment. The basic premise of the booklet was that “forestry is too important to be left to foresters,” so the public should get involved in Forest Service and BLM planning.
The paper covered the National Environmental Policy Act, timber harvest systems such as clearcutting and shelterwood cutting, forest practices such as herbicide spraying and thinnings, and the impacts of these practices on water, soils, fish, wildlife, and recreation. It also included a basic introduction to forest policies such as allowable cut, even flow, plus a discussion of old growth, wilderness, and the Forest Service planning process.
This was first published in June of 1976 and revised and reissued at least two more times. Over the next few years, I printed up thousands of copies of this paper, selling them for the nominal price of $1. This was only the first of a long series of citizen’s guides that I would write over the next decade or so.
The back of the third edition lists six CHEC staff members: staff forester Randal O’Toole, staff geologist Michael James; staff ecologist Marya Nowakowski; staff economist Michael Martin; staff educator Todd True; and rivers specialist Nancy Duhnkrack. This was mostly a figment of my imagination: none of these people were ever paid (except, eventually, me), and I suspect some of them never really thought of themselves as working for CHEC. At least some of them wanted to work for CHEC, but fundraising was another talent I never really learned.
Since CHEC was non-profit and eventually gained tax-deductible status from the Internal Revenue Service, it was theoretically eligible for grants and donations. I purchased a book that was supposed to help with fundraising called The Seven Laws of Money. The first law was something like, “If you are doing the right thing, the money will come.” I never read beyond that; I just did what I thought was the right thing. Eventually, the money did come, but it was a long time before it was more than a trickle.
