Growing up in Portland, I was taught that the city had the cleanest water in the world because it came from a watershed on the Mount Hood National Forest that had been set aside exclusively for Portland’s use. The Bull Run Trespass Act of 1904 closed the 102-square-mile Bull Run Watershed, along with a 41-square-mile buffer around it, to all public entry, and only Forest Service officials and employees of the Portland water bureau were allowed to enter the area.
This belief was so well known that a medical doctor named Joseph Miller bought a piece of land on the edge of the buffer strip and built a home. There he and his wife lived for many years, content in the knowledge that behind their house was 143 square miles of pristine wilderness that, unlike most wilderness, wasn’t even open to public recreation.
I was in Corvallis studying forestry when this myth came tumbling down in the form of a landslide in 1971. Portlanders woke up one morning to find their “pristine” water to be muddy brown, and they were advised to boil it before drinking it (as if anyone would want to drink brown water). The Forest Service hastened to announce that the landslide that had polluted the city’s water wasn’t caused by one of the clearcuts in the watershed. What it didn’t say was that the landslide was caused by a road leading to one of those clearcuts.
Wait a minute, I wondered, as did Dr. Miller and many others: If only Forest Service and water bureau employees can enter the watershed, how can there be roads and clearcuts there?
It turned out that, back in 1958, the Forest Service had persuaded the water bureau that it needed to cut the trees in the watershed to save them from a forest fire that potentially could do more damage to the city’s water supply. I suspect this was bullshit, as fires on the wet west slope of the northern Oregon Cascades were actually very rare. Certainly, the likelihood of damage from a road-caused landslide was much greater than that of fire.
Miller hired an attorney named Charlie Merten and together they sought as many experts as they could to challenge Forest Service policies. Among others, they found me. Looking back, I don’t think I had any real expertise to offer them: I was spending most of my time looking at timber policies, not on-the-ground timber management.
“Dr. Miller is a true Jeffersonian Democrat,” Merten told me with admiration. “He wants the public to be aware of all of the facts.”
I remember testifying in Judge Burns’ courtroom, but I don’t remember what I said. It was really an open-and-shut case anyway: the law was absolutely clear about not allowing anyone but Forest Service and water bureau employees into the watershed, and neither loggers nor road builders qualified. But Merten and Miller were probably aware that, once they won their court case, they would then have to defend it in Congress.
If so, they were right: Burns shut down the logging operations in 1977, and Portland Representative Robert Duncan and Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield immediately got Congress to repeal the Bull Run Trespass Act. The replacement law put the burden of proof on those who objected to logging to show that it would harm Portland’s water quality. Miller continued to fight on until 1996, when another landslide polluted Portland’s water, and the Forest Service eventually set aside most of the watershed for spotted owl habitat.
My work with Loren Hughes, whose wife Betty had gasped when she had seen my “holster” at the Oregon Wilderness Coalition conference, had a longer-lasting impact. Loren and Betty owned a jewelry store in La Grande, Oregon and about 15 acres of land outside of town where they raised a few cattle, horses, and five sons. A dedicated hunter and wilderness advocate, Loren invited me and various members of OWC’s staff to join him on horse packing trips into various wilderness and roadless areas in Northeastern Oregon.
One memorable trip took us deep into Hells Canyon. Somewhere I have a photo of me with my blue Stetson covering hair that went nearly to my waist on a horse next to a giant ponderosa pine tree that was nearly as big in diameter as the horse was long.
One of the members of our party was Jim Carlson, a Salem wilderness advocate who turned out to be a real mountain man. He could walk faster than any horse, up or down hill, and soon he was well ahead of us.
One day I decided to walk as well and took a different route from the main party. While their trail followed a ridge top, mine followed a creek below. My trail had not been maintained, and the delays from climbing over logs resulted in me spending a slightly chilly night alone. The next morning, embarrassed but none the worse for wear, I met the rest of the group at the top of the trail.
In between horse pack trips, Loren filed so many timber sale appeals that he became known in La Grande as “15-cent stamp Loren” Timber supporters claimed it was unfair that he could stop a sale for just 15 cents, which was then the price of first-class postage. Of course, appeals were a lot of work, and in most cases all they did was to delay the sales. In some cases, however, delay proved to be enough as eventually the disputed forests were designated wilderness or set aside for wildlife or other purposes.
At the opposite corner of the state in southwest Oregon, Art and Paula introduced me to several new clients, including James Wahlstrom and Ellen Switzer. Like Art and Paula, James and Ellen had moved “back to the land” from the San Francisco Bay Area, buying a 120-acre parcel that had originally been homesteaded by someone named Jack Shade. At one time, the Old Shade Place had been used as a dude ranch, and it had several guest cabins as well as the main house where Ellen and James raised five children.
Located on the Illinois River, a state scenic waterway, a few miles upstream from the Kalmiopsis Wilderness, the Old Shade Place was completely surrounded by the Siskiyou National Forest. Off the grid, they got their drinking water as well as water to turn a pelton wheel for electricity. So they were disturbed when the Forest Service announced it wanted to sell a timber sale in the watershed above them.
James and I walked through the proposed timber sale area and, it being an arid forest, I probably did my usual stand density index analysis. I also reviewed the Siskiyou timber management plan and other plans coming out of the Siskiyou Forest.
In 1977, I went to the Oregon legislature to lobby for reform of the Oregon State Board of Forestry. Under a bill I wrote, the sixteen-member board would be replaced by seven members, no more than three of whom could have any affiliation with the timber industry. The nine-member forest practice committees could have no more than three members affiliated with the timber industry.
Since I was still living car-free in Portland, I got to Salem by bicycling about 56 miles each Monday morning. Jim Carlson was kind enough to let me stay at his house during the week, then Friday evening I bicycled back to Portland. I received some publicity for this, but it wasn’t enough to get the bill passed.
The timber industry naturally lobbied furiously against the reform. The chair of the senate agriculture committee, which reviewed the bill, was a coastal resident named Charles Hanlon, and he basically blocked the bill from any consideration.
Meanwhile, one of the many forest plans I had reviewed was the Mount Hood National Forest timber management plan. This may have been the first plan I reviewed where I spent less time reading the plan itself than reviewing the background documents that went into the plan. Forest supervisor Dale Robertson was one of several supervisors who told me, “Our files are open to you.” That didn’t mean I could go in and plunder them at will, but I could ask for any and all background documents and review them in the office without requiring a Freedom of Information Act request or being stalled by arguments that the documents were “predecisional” and thus closed to the public.
On the Mt. Hood, I found documents written by forest planners saying that, due to rocks, landslides, roads, soil compaction from previous logging, and other factors, much of the land that had been included in the timber base was not really capable of growing timber. To account for this, they recommended reducing the land based in the Forest Service’s computer models by 30 percent. A handwritten note on the document, signed by the regional timber staff officer, approved a 15 percent reduction.
This was a smoking gun that seemed to say, “The Forest Service’s own data says 30 percent but for political reasons the agency used just 15 percent.” Politics weren’t supposed to overrule science, so this became one of the main points when the Mount Hood Forest Study Group appealed the 1977 timber management plan to the chief of the Forest Service.
In addition to the documents we submitted, the chief’s office agreed to listen to our case at a hearing in Washington in July, 1977. Someone had to go to give that presentation, and at a meeting at the Oregon Environmental Council office in Portland, Todd True, a member of the study group who was also active in the Oregon Wilderness Coalition, announced that this person would be me. They didn’t have a big budget for my expenses, he said, but they could give me $250.
In 1977, before airline deregulation, $250 probably couldn’t have purchased a round-trip airline ticket from Portland to Washington. I didn’t even consider flying, however. Instead, I found out that Amtrak had a 14-day rail pass for $159. The pass allowed unlimited travel on any Amtrak train in that 14 days.
I decided my goal was to ride Amtrak the maximum number of miles possible. Instead of taking a train straight to DC, I first went north to Tacoma, where I caught the Coast Starlight south to Los Angeles. From there I took the Sunset Limited to New Orleans, where I visited the French Quarter and enjoyed the Preservation Hall Jazz Band before catching an early morning Southern Crescent to Washington. That wasn’t enough, however, so I took a round-trip from Washington to Boston.
Instead of staying at a hotel, I caught one of Amtrak’s Florida trains every evening at about 8 pm. I would enjoy the ride until about midnight, then get off and catch the train back to Washington. This allowed me to sleep from about 1 am to 7 am as the trains arrived in DC at about 8.
I have absolutely no recollection of the hearing. We must have lost the appeal or I’d remember it better. Yet I still remember every day of the train trip, especially an impromptu show by someone who owned an Atlanta magic shop on the train between New Orleans and Washington.
I was less fond of the overnight Boston-to-Washington Night Owl, which had a rude train crew, one totally booked sleeping car, short-distance coaches with minimal leg room and lights on all night for overnight passengers, and a darkened long-distance coach with more legroom that was set aside for passengers between Philadelphia and DC. I insisted on staying in the long-distance coach, and resolved to eventually find out what was wrong with Amtrak that it could allow such uncomfortable conditions.
Before working on Amtrak, I also worked on other transportation issues, specifically, cycling advocacy. Ever since taking a course in cycling as one of my physical education requirements at OSU, cycling was in my blood. I didn’t even get a driver’s license until I graduated from college, and didn’t get my first car for several years after that.
In the summer of 1974, I and my then significant other borrowed a car from my parents and drove to Spokane to attend Expo ’74. From there, she drove home and I bicycled to Edmonton, Alberta. The next summer, my brother and I bicycled from Portland to Banff. I could fix a flat tire in less than 10 minutes, and once when my brother’s freewheel sprockets broke near Pullman, Washington, I went into a bike shop, borrowed their tools, and replaced the sprockets before anyone had a chance to object.
With other Portland cyclists, I helped form a bicycle cooperative that fixed people’s bikes at the Saturday Market. After packing up our booth, we would go on long bike rides together, once as far as Astoria. That coop later evolved into a non-profit bike shop called the Bicycle Repair Collective that remained in business until 2013.
I also attended meetings of Portland’s bicycle advisory committee where I argued strongly for safer bike routes across Portland’s many bridges. Portland had eleven crossings of the Willamette River, six of which funneled traffic from east side streets into the downtown area. Cycling across these bridges was a nerve-wracking experience, yet most had wide sidewalks that could be used by cyclists with proper placement of some on- and off-ramps at either end of the bridges. I suggested locations for such ramps and officials of the city transportation department patiently explained that it would be too dangerous to allow bicycles to shoot off the sidewalk into moving auto traffic. Yet a few years later, the city put ramps at almost all of the locations I had recommended.
In the three years that I lived in Portland after graduating from OSU, I had undertaken a number of projects. Though I called myself a consultant and I thought of the people I worked as my clients, I never sent out a single invoice and never got paid by any of them, other than OSPIRG for my post-graduation internship.
During one visit to the Hughes residence, I met Jim Merzenich, or Merz, who worked for the Nature Conservancy. He drove around in a Volkswagen Thing and said he had a “trap line” of friends whose hospitality he enjoyed around the state of Oregon. I realized I had my own trap line, but lacking any actual income, I couldn’t afford to rent an apartment, own a car, or do other things that people with “real jobs” took for granted.
To help people like Loren understand the work I was doing, I issued CHEC’s second citizen’s guide, The Citizen’s Guide to Forestry and Economics, in August 1977. The basic premise — which I might argue with today — was that “it should be possible to objectively determine an allocation of public forest resources that will provide the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time.” In other words, it supported a “rational planning process” that was heavily oriented around economics.
The paper covered basic concepts such as benefit-cost, discount rates, and externalities and showed how these concepts could be built into a planning model that would optimize the use of public forests. This included both land allocation to wilderness, timber, and other uses as well as the determination of the allowable cut. Looking at it today, I am amazed at, on one hand, how sophisticated it was and, on the other, how much it was probably over the heads of my intended audience.
Reports like this still weren’t clearly winning any battles, but I had developed enough notoriety that a professor of urban planning at the University of Oregon asked me to speak to his class. After I did so, he suggested I join the department. At first I thought he was asking me to teach, which made no sense as I had no urban planning credentials, but then I realized that he was asking me to apply to be a student in the department. When I pointed out that I was interested in rural planning, not urban planning, he noted that his department was called “urban and regional planning,” saying that the regional part covered rural areas (which turned out not to be true). I wondered if he regularly invited people to speak as a way of recruiting students.
Still, when I looked into it, it seemed like a good idea if only for financial reasons. Various student aid programs would cover many of my expenses and significantly increase my income from what it had been. So, in September 1977, I moved to Eugene.
