As a student at the University of Oregon, my main source of income was a federal program called work-study. The federal government paid 80 percent of the wages for part-time student employees, and non-profit organizations willing to pay the other 20 percent were eligible to hire students under the program. I received a call from Dave Brown, an assistant director of the Survival Center, an on-campus environmental group, asking me to work for them writing reviews of Forest Service plans.
The Survival Center was located in the latest, 1973 addition to U of O’s student union. I had office space, a desk, an IBM Selectric typewriter to write on, and a phone that was hooked into the state telephone network, allowing me to make unlimited calls to any city that had a state college or university. Although I rented a small room in a house in nearby Springfield for, as I recall, $55 a month, the Survival Center became my real home, and initially I only left because the building was closed to students after 11 pm. Later, they allowed students with a key to stay after 11 and I sometimes would work there until 2 or 3 in the morning.
I continued my cycling advocacy in a small way. Part of the cycling route between Eugene and Springfield was on a designated bike path that emptied onto a city street in Springfield. The city of Springfield had decided that it was too dangerous to let cyclists ride in the street and required that they use the sidewalk. The sidewalk wasn’t very wide and had something like 40 driveway cuts, each one requiring bicycles to go down a dip and then up a bump. Sometimes part of the sidewalk was blocked by signposts and it often had wet leaves, litter, and other obstacles.
I discovered that the state legislature had passed a law allowing cities to designate sidewalks as mandatory bike routes only if they could prove the sidewalks were safer than the street. I wrote a short report showing that the sidewalk in this case was more dangerous than the street. A Springfield transportation planner chortled that I was practicing law without a license because they had passed their ordinance before the state had passed the law and therefore the ordinance was grandfathered in.
Shortly after that, a police car stopped me for cycling in the street. The patrolman obviously recognized my name and said, “I don’t want a big fuss, but please tell your friends not to cycle in the street.”
A few days later, a U of O student came to me and said she had been ticketed for cycling in the street. I gave her my report and the citation to the state law. She brought them to the judge, who promptly threw out the city ordinance. It was nice to get a small victory now and then.
In retrospect, I don’t think I ever took graduate school itself seriously. The Urban Planning Department scheduled all of its courses on Mondays through Thursdays, probably so that the professors could have three-day weekends. But they also expected the students to study on Fridays.
Instead, every Thursday after my last class, I would hop on a Greyhound bus to Baker, Oregon. Arriving at about 5 am, I would lay out a sleeping back on a grassy area behind the parking lot of the Wallowa-Whitman forest supervisor’s office to catch a couple of hours of sleep. At around 8 o’clock or so, when I noticed someone unlocking the office doors, I would get up, wash up in a Forest Service restroom, and then take my trusty HP-65 to the timber planning office. When I told Jim Monteith — himself a well-known insomniac — about this schedule, he said, “What power! We can’t lose when you’re doing something like that.”
In 1968, the Forest Service had inventoried the Wallowa-Whitman national forests using a systematic sampling method. They effectively drew a grid over the forest with horizontal and vertical lines 1.7 miles apart. The intersections of these lines became the sample plots for forest measurements. Field crews would record the species and sizes of all the trees at each plot. All of the data was entered into a computer (probably on punch cards) and printed out on 11″x17″ continuous feed computer paper.
Since eastern Oregon, like southwestern Oregon, was an arid environment, I was suspicious that Forest Service yield tables had failed to account for stand density index. The standard yield tables for ponderosa pine had a stand density index of 370, that is, there would be 370 trees per acre when the average tree was 10 inches in diameter. The person who made the yield tables deliberately excluded all sites that had a stand density index of less than 250. Yet, due to moisture limitations, some sites might not be capable of growing to a full 370 SDI.
I focused on the parts of the Wallowa-Whitman that were covered in recent plans, the Wallowa Valley plan and the Burnt Powder plan. The Forest Service’s inventory had nearly 400 plots in these planning units, of which 159 were recorded as being uncut. I entered the data for all of the trees from each of these plots into my HP-65 and was able to calculate that the average stand density index of ponderosa pine stands was only 61 percent of the 370 that was considered “normal.” Other species of timber were 84 percent of normal, but the planning units as a whole averaged just 75 percent of normal.
In short, the Forest Service’s own data revealed that the Forest Service yield tables were probably overestimating timber land productivity by 33 percent (since 100 is 33 percent more than 75). However, there was a problem: just because the plots I reviewed in the office were marked as “uncut” didn’t mean they were undisturbed. A recent fire, landslide, or other natural event might have temporarily reduced the stand density index.
To make sure these plots were truly undisturbed, I then spend the rest of the weekend locating and measuring plots. In this I was helped by various local wilderness advocates who I had met at the OWC conference or through Loren Hughes. Some weekends, we had enough people for two crews. I would give them aerial photos of each plot provided by the Forest Service, and we would drive and hike out to find each one to see if there had been any disturbance that might account for a low SDI.
We found that a few of the plots had been disturbed by fires more than 50 years before, but they would have fully recovered since then. Three plots had been disturbed by fire in the past 50 years but appeared to be well stocked. One plot seemed to have low stocking due to livestock grazing and a couple of plots had been disturbed by snow avalanches. In a 1979 report, I concluded that, while the Forest Service’s yield tables might not be quite 33 percent too high, they were still too high.
Back in Eugene, I realized that different professional schools, such as forestry, economics, geography, and planning, taught their students basic tools but also instilled in them a particular world view. The forestry world view was that timber was a scarce resource and the human population was growing so forestry professionals were needed to make sure society always had wood available. “From the cradle to the grave, we are always surrounded by wood,” said one early forester.
When I entered urban planning school, I knew it would teach a world view, but I didn’t want to be limited to that view. So, although the planning school required a full load of classes, I decided to also take a course in urban economics. This was taught by Ed Whitelaw, a young charismatic professor who, in addition to teaching, had started his own consulting firm, ECONorthwest.
For the class, he used a book by Edwin Mills called Studies in the Structure of an Urban Economy. Though just 151 pages long, this book was densely packed with ideas centered around the construction of a model of an urban area. Successive chapters of the book tested the model against reality, added complexities to improve the model where necessary, and tested it again.
Eventually, the model produced realistic enough results that we could ask questions such as, “what happens when you draw an urban-growth boundary around a city?” This was before any Oregon city had drawn an urban-growth boundary. One of the answers was that you get more congestion because, even though a denser city might lead a few people to walk or take transit more, most people would continue to drive and more driving in a smaller area means more congestion.
This presented a sharp contrast to my urban planning courses. Rather than any analysis, urban planning as taught at the U of O seemed to be more about using ones intuition to navigate laws and regulations with a goal of making cities better, though “better” was somewhat undefined.
I became concerned about the quality of teaching when one of the classes had a session on wilderness. Though the professor was married to a Forest Service planner, she didn’t seem to know what the 1964 Wilderness Act said about wilderness.
“Is grazing allowed in wilderness?” one of the students asked, to which she answered “no.”
“Yes, grazing is allowed,” I interjected, “but you can’t use motorized vehicles to herd the livestock. You have to use horses.”
“Is mining allowed in wilderness?” another student asked, to which she again answered “no.”
“Not only is mining allowed, until 1984 [which was still seven years away], anyone can prospect for minerals in a wilderness,” I responded. “If they find any, they can stake a claim and continue to mine there forever.”
“Is firefighting equipment allowed in wilderness?” someone asked, and again she answered “no.”
“Motorized equipment is allowed in wilderness areas in an emergency,” I countered, “such as fighting a fire or saving someone’s life.”
My concerns came to a head one day when the students were asked, “Would drawing an urban-growth boundary around a city increase or reduce congestion?” All of the students agreed that an urban-growth boundary would lead to a denser city which would reduce congestion because people would be more likely to ride transit, walk, or bicycle.
I pointed out that actual data showed that urban-growth boundaries increased congestion, but couldn’t persuade a single student. For some reason, this class required three different professors, but none of them supported me. None of them said, “let’s look up the data and find out.” None of them said, “let’s build a model of the city and see how it works.” Instead, one of the professors finally said, “Everyone is entitled to their opinion,” and the subject was dropped.
Robert Kennedy once said, “Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?” This to me illustrated the difference between the economic and planning world views. Economists sought to figure out how the world works, and once knowing that, might offer suggestions to make it better. Planners (with Kennedy’s approval) imagined what they thought was an ideal world, and then tried to force cities and people into their idea. (Ironically, Kennedy’s quote is based on a line from a play by George Bernard Shaw which the serpent uses in trying to lure Eve out of the Garden of Eden.)
That was the day I decided I preferred the economic world view over the urban planning world view. I don’t think I took a single urban planning course after that quarter, instead getting independent study credits with both planning and economics professors.
At some point, probably fall quarter 1978, my affiliation switched from the Survival Center back to OSPIRG. I remember hiking in the Columbia Gorge and suddenly getting the feeling that OSPIRG wasn’t living up to its full potential. I knew OSPIRG was holding a student conference on the Oregon Coast that weekend, so I somehow made my way there. I got elected to the board of directors and eventually became chair of the board.
During that or a subsequent OSPIRG conference, I remember meeting a student from Reed College who said to me, “I’ve always hypothesized that someone like you existed, but I’ve never met one before.” As an iconoclast, I took that as a compliment, but I’m not sure it was intended that way.
Her name was Cameron La Follette, and she was related to the famous La Follette family of Wisconsin. She ended up making important contributions to this story.
As an OSPIRG activist, I saw myself as more of a staff member than a student, and I wanted to visit the various campuses that participated in OSPIRG. So I decided it was time to get my first car. Specifically, I wanted a van so I could sleep in the back of it, something that has been a requirement for just about every car I’ve bought since then. I found a beat-up 1964 Ford van and bought it for about $500.
Since I more-or-less lived at the student union, I decided I no longer needed my $55 a month room in Springfield. Instead, I parked the van just off campus and slept in it, usually arriving well after midnight and returning to the office before 8 am. Although I never thought of myself that way, today we would say I was homeless. This continued for long enough that I probably wasn’t counted in the 1980 census.
I applied and was accepted as a graduate student in economics, but I didn’t take that very seriously either. In the 1978-1979 school year I took a series of core courses for Ph.D. candidates. None of the professors were as interesting as Ed Whitelaw and none of the books were as interesting as Mills’ urban economics book. Although the economics department gave me an office to use, I only visited it once or twice and spent most of the rest of my time in the student union working on forestry issues.
The other Ph.D. students told me their goal was to become university professors. Inwardly, I recoiled in horror: Giving occasional lectures to students was fine; teaching the same courses over and over again sounded achingly dull. My goal, of course, was to do what I called activist research, which meant doing the analysis to find the right answer to environmental problems and following up that analysis with public education to change government policies. As I’ll describe in the next few chapters, while I was supposed to be studying economics, I was in fact lobbying in the state legislature, reviewing transportation issues, and participating in forest planning.
I certainly wasn’t giving graduate school my full attention. At the end of the school year, Ph.D. candidates were given a test; those that passed would go on to write a thesis. I flunked. I was disappointed because I had never really failed at anything scholastic before. I hung around the University of Oregon for another year or so, saying I was considering getting a master’s degree in economics, but as it turned out, getting or not getting a graduate degree really didn’t matter for my career.
