The West in the 1970s and 1980s was the site of increasingly strident conflicts over the national forests that became known as the Timber Wars. On one hand were the sawmills that depended on sales of federal timber, along with the loggers, truck drivers, mill workers, and others who depended on those sales for jobs. On the other hand were environmentalists seeking protection for wilderness, endangered species, fisheries, and other resources that weren’t so easily marketed.
Environmentalists appealed timber sales, went to court over endangered species, and lobbied Congress to pass wilderness legislation. Timber companies asked their employees to attend rallies and engaged in their own lobbying. Both sides rallied their supporters to comment on Forest Service and BLM land-use and timber management plans.
Eventually, the hostility got so bad that some of my friends were hung in effigy by timber industry supporters. I worked far enough in the background that I escaped that fate, but I still stuck my neck out on several occasions.
I think it was in the summer of 1978 that Oregon Representative Jim Weaver, who chaired the forestry subcommittee of the House Agricultural Committee, held wilderness hearings in Eugene. Although the part of Oregon he represented saw more timber cut each year than any other congressional district, he was an ardent wilderness advocate. To gain headlines for its cause, timber industry leaders held their own alternative hearing elsewhere in Eugene. They invited former Missouri Congressman James Symington to hear testimony at their hearing.
The day before the hearings, the Eugene Register-Guard reported that Symington had invited anyone to testify at the hearings. Knowing that my testimony at the Weaver hearing was scheduled in the afternoon, I went to the Symington hearing and signed up in the morning. While waiting for my turn, one of the loggers testified that it was unfair that they had to work to earn a living while the wilderness people could work full time for their cause. (Of course, the timber industry had plenty of well-paid, full-time lobbyists.)
“You’re right,” said Symington. “All they have to do is send out a letter that says, ‘Save French Pete,’ and they get a million dollars! And the people giving them the money don’t know whether French Pete is a pizza parlor or a fish!” I made a note to tell Jim Monteith about that fundraising strategy.
When it was my turn to testify, I pretty much gave the same testimony that I would give at the Weaver hearing. Symington’s response was that “You showed poor judgment in coming here today.” But he had invited anyone to testify!
By the fall of 1978, I had worked for four years on the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Oregon Department of Forestry. I had written several papers — mostly self-published by CHEC — and spoken at many conferences. I hadn’t actually won a lot of battles, but I had made enough of a name for myself that John Platt, the director of the Oregon Environmental Council, invited me to attend OEC’s annual banquet in October. Always happy to get a free meal, I gladly accepted.
The day before the banquet, I received a phone call from one of OEC’s staff members confirming I would attend. I said I would. “Good, because it would be horrible if you weren’t there.”
“I’ve never been to an OEC banquet before,” I observed. “Why would it be horrible if I missed this one?” “Because you’ve never won the Neuberger Award before!” she said.
Richard L. Neuberger was a U.S. senator from Oregon in the 1950s who is credited with saving Hells Canyon from being dammed and flooded. The truth is that he saved it from being dammed by private utilities but allowed it to be dammed by public agencies. But he is nevertheless regarded as an early environmentalist, so OEC named its highest award after him. Previous recipients had been Oregon Congressman Jim Weaver and the Eugene Register-Guard newspaper for its environmentally friendly editorial policies.
The evening of the banquet, I drove my old Ford van to Portland listening to Andy Kerr and Cameron La Follette, who were obviously in on the secret, talk about the history of Senator Neuberger’s political career. At the dinner, I learned that I was sharing the award with Lloyd Marbet, who was well known as Oregon’s leading opponent of nuclear power. I was proud to be considered with him, and the only thing that rankled was that the award was “for service to Oregon as an environmental volunteer.” The only reason I was a volunteer was that I hadn’t yet figured out how to get people to pay me!
On accepting the award, I gave a quick speech that I thought was very profound at the time, suggesting that environmentalists should show no hostility towards loggers and others who opposed them “because we are doing it for them” and their children. Today it feels condescending. The first person to shake my hand as I walked back to my seat was Ron Buel, Neil Goldschmidt’s former chief of staff who had recently gone into the newspaper business.
Though supposedly taking a full load of economics courses, I decided to pursue my investigation of Amtrak in November by buying a 30-day Amtrak rail pass and a 22-day rail pass for VIA, Canada’s newly created version of Amtrak. The passes overlapped a little bit, but I ended up on a train for 49 days straight, riding every Amtrak route but one and every VIA route west of Moncton, New Brunswick. My journey started on the day after Thanksgiving, 1978, and ended around January 11, 1979, which means I would have missed several weeks of school. I can’t remember how I managed that when I was supposed to be studying for a Ph.D.
After the trip, I approached Ron Buel, who had mentored me on my first OSPIRG study and had since founded Portland’s Willamette Week newspaper, to see if he would be interested in publishing my review of Amtrak. He was and he offered to pay me “my rate” per word. I didn’t have a rate, so he offered three cents a word, which I assumed was a first-time author rate.
I had never been paid by the word before, and while I didn’t deliberately set out to pad the article to increase my payment, I didn’t skimp either. I ended up writing about 24,000 words, which Willamette Week broke into two parts to be published in successive issues. Willamette Week was a full-sized newspaper in those days, not the Pulitzer-prize-winning tabloid it later became, and my article pretty much filled four whole pages of the paper.
The article was pertinent because, in one of Jimmy Carter’s benighted efforts to rescue the economy, the Department of Transportation proposed to cut six long-distance Amtrak routes. Since most of Amtrak’s costs are fixed, I realized that cutting a few trains wouldn’t save much money and would only make the remaining trains appear to lose even more money. So what started out as a critique of Amtrak became a justification for saving those Amtrak routes. I used the usual arguments about how roads are subsidized so therefore trains should be too, arguments I no longer believe. But I still believe that cutting those six trains didn’t save taxpayers any money, and you can’t find much evidence that it did from looking at Amtrak’s budget.
While I was furiously typing the final copy of the article, I had holed up in an office where I didn’t think anyone could find me. Yet when the phone rang, I answered it and heard a woman’s voice.
“Hi, I met you once and want to help save Amtrak,” she said. Write your congressman, I said. “I did, but I want to do more.”
“Did I meet you on a train?” I asked. Yes. “Was it the San Francisco Zephyr?” Yes again. “Can you type?” Yes. So a woman I had met on my 49-day train trip came down and typed one-third of the final copy for my Willamette Week article. Her name was Vickie Crowley, and she accompanied me to several events where I gave slide shows encouraging people to write their congressional representatives to save those Amtrak trains.
Another indication that I didn’t take graduate school seriously was that I spent some of the first half of 1979 again lobbying the Oregon legislature to reform the board of forestry. As it happened, the biggest obstacle in 1977, Senator Charles Hanlon, had turned into the biggest supporter of reform. I don’t know how it happened, but sometime between biennial legislative sessions Hanlon had gotten upset with the existing board and wanted to change it.
Unfortunately, in 1978 a Republican beat the Democratic incumbent for the governor’s office. The Democratic leadership in the legislature didn’t want to give a Republican the opportunity to pick all seven members of the reformed board so they decided to kill the bill despite Hanlon’s support. Hanlon was originally elected as an independent, and though nominally a Democrat by 1979, he wasn’t considered loyal enough for the party to be loyal to him.
I realized I didn’t have the knack for lobbying and never returned to the legislature after that. I should have tried to learn how to lobby from my friend, Cameron La Follette, who took to it naturally. She had discovered that some of the oldest trees in Oregon were on private land in the Cascade mountains above Albany. The Bureau of Land Management had made a half-hearted attempt to save the trees through a land exchange, but it fell through. So Cameron lobbied the legislature to exchange state land for the trees. While lobbying, Cameron would do things like go to the opening of the Oregon Shakespearean Festival in Ashland, which was also attended by many legislators. I thought that was a waste of time, but she was making valuable contacts.
If I had made similar contacts, I might have done better when I tried to get the governor to appoint me to one of the two “public” spots on the board of forestry. Everyone agreed it was never going to happen so long as the governor was a conservative Republican, but I was still disappointed when he turned me down. As it turned out, as soon as a Democrat retook the governor’s office in 1987, the legislature replaced the board with one that was structured almost exactly the way I had first proposed in 1977.
Meanwhile, I was heavily involved with Forest Service planning. The 1964 Wilderness Act declared that any undeveloped area of 5,000 acres or more on federal land was eligible to become wilderness, and directed the Forest Service and other federal land agencies to evaluate such areas for their wilderness characteristics before developing them. In 1972, before I was involved, the Forest Service tried to do a single massive study of every 5,000-acre roadless area it could find, calling it the Roadless Area Review and Evaluation or RARE. When the Sierra Club challenged this study in court, the courts decided that such a national study wasn’t adequate to meet the requirements of the Wilderness Act.
That’s what led the Forest Service to the land-use process I was involved in during the 1970s. The agency divided national forests into planning units that ranged in size from a few tens of thousands of acres to hundreds of thousands of acres. Planners on each forest would write environmental impact statements for each unit, weighing wilderness vs. timber and other alternatives for the roadless areas in the units.
At the same time, the Forest Service was writing timber management plans for each forest. This led to a conundrum: since the unit plans determined how much land would be managed for timber, how could the planners decide how much timber could be cut before the unit plans were all written? The agency didn’t have a good answer for that, but I suspect they were writing the timber plans simultaneously with the unit plans because they feared that otherwise some environmental group would successfully challenge their timber programs under the National Environmental Policy Act, which required environmental impact statements for every “major federal action significantly affecting the human environment.”
Planning units seemed to increase in size over time as the Forest Service no doubt realized it couldn’t spend hundreds of hours of planners’ time on each 65,000-acre watershed. The bigger they were, however, the harder it was for planners to carefully assess wilderness and other values on each portion of the planning unit.
The size issue reached a critical point when the Forest Service wrote a single land-use plan for the entire Willamette National Forest. At nearly 1.7 million acres, the Willamette was the largest national forest in Oregon, and while there were a few larger in other states, no other forest cut anywhere near as much timber as the Willamette. Its allowable cut of 640 million board feet a year was almost twice as much as was cut from any other forest.
Debates over roadless areas in the Willamette had been heated for many years. The focal point was French Pete, a watershed filled with old-growth Douglas-fir west of the Three Sisters Wilderness area. Thus, the Willamette land-use plan attracted a lot of attention.
As disturbing as the Willamette plan was, I was equally appalled by a plan produced by the Okanogan National Forest in north central Washington. Called the Twisp-Winthrop-Conconully plan, it covered three-fourths of that national forest, and nearly all of it was roadless. Moreover, being located far from a major city, it didn’t seem to have the defenders that the Willamette had.
I had never been to the Okanogan Forest, but Dave Corkran, who was in the Mt. Hood Forest Study Group, had hiked there once. So, on his behalf, I appealed the plan to the regional forester. In the Forest Service, the unit plans were written by the supervisor, so appeals went to the regional forester, and those dissatisfied with his or her decision could appeal to the chief’s office in Washington.
The Carter administration had appointed an environmentalist named Rupert Cutler to oversee the Forest Service and for some reason he decided that the Forest Service should try another national roadless area review and evaluation. This became known as RARE II. The first step in the process was to identify undeveloped areas of 5,000 acres or more on the national forests, so local wilderness advocates all over the country scrambled to find such areas.
I looked at a map of the Siskiyou National Forest and realized that the unloaded area in James’ and Ellen’s watershed where the Forest Service wanted to sell a timber sale was more than 5,000 acres in size. I earned their long-term gratitude by nominating it for evaluation in RARE II, which delayed the sale for, as it turned out, ever.
Meanwhile, I wanted to add the Okanogan roadless areas to the RARE II process, but the Sierra Club objected, saying that only areas that hadn’t been covered by a unit plan could be added. I lost the appeal at the regional level, but Todd True — who aspired to be an environmental lawyer — agreed to write the appeal to the chief. Thanks to his hard work, we won that appeal.
After winning the appeal, I realized that we no longer wanted those roadless areas included in RARE II, because if they were the Forest Service could begin logging them as soon as RARE II was done while otherwise it would have to wait until it revised the Okanogan plan. Of course, the Sierra Club disagreed and immediately nominated them for RARE II. As it turned out, the courts decided that RARE II was as inadequate as RARE I, so the Forest Service went back to land-use planning at a forest level.
Todd did go to law school, and after graduating in 1981, he went to work for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, now known as Earth Justice where he has had an illustrious career defending endangered species, clean water, forests, and other Northwest natural resources. While he was going to law school, I was working on Forest Service planning.
