In the late 1970s, I wrote comments on enough draft plans for people in the Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service to know who I was, but not enough to have a major impact on the plans. But I found or developed three tools that helped.
The first was described in a book titled The Economics of Natural Environments by John Krutilla, of Resources for the Future, and Anthony Fisher, an economist from the University of California at Berkeley. The book argued that, since development of a roadless area was irreversible, a special calculation was necessary to weigh the benefits and costs of such development. Their proposal was to assume that the recreation and other amenity values of undeveloped areas would increase forever because such areas would become increasingly scarce. Even if today’s amenity values didn’t outweigh today’s commodity values from development, they argued, the discounted sum of future amenity values might do so.
I applied Krutilla and Fisher’s method to Oregon roadless areas in a paper called An Economic View of RARE II. The paper showed that, while some areas had tremendous timber values that outweighed potential wilderness values, most were more valuable for amenities than commodities.
But what really struck me about the Krutilla & Fisher book was the same thing that attracted me to Mills’ model of an urban economy: here was a world view that had a consistent method of understanding how resources could be allocated. Somewhere I had picked up that “eco” in economics and ecology both came from the same Greek word for “house.” Ecology was “study of the house” and economics was “management of the house.”
This implied that ecologists could study the environment all they wanted but the results wouldn’t tell them how to manage it. Instead, it was the economists who set out to find the tools for determining how to manage the house, that is, how to allocate scarce resources such as wilderness. Ph.D. or not, I started calling myself an economist.
My affinity for economics led me to a group called the Western Forest Economists, which held an annual meeting near Mt. Hood in Oregon. I can’t remember what year I first attended, but it was probably in 1978. At that time, most attendees were university professors and students or Forest Service experiment station economists.
The second tool I used had to do with what land was economically suitable for timber management. The Forest Service held that any land that could produce 20 cubic feet of wood per acre per year was suitable, but a lot of this land couldn’t make money.
I wrote a report titled A New Reality: Timber Land Suitability in Oregon National Forests arguing that reforestation and other management costs were investments in the future, and the future value of timber needed to be discounted to the present and compared with those costs. If the costs were greater than the future benefits, then the land should be considered unsuitable. Economists call this calculation soil expectation value because it estimated the expected value of investments in bare soil.
The Forest Service responded that reforestation was a cost of cutting down the existing forest and it absolutely refused to even calculate soil expectation value, much less consider it a criterion for timber land suitability. The agency knew that a lot of land had valuable timber on it today even though investments in new timber would not be worthwhile. It relied on Congress to keep funding timber management in the future even though millions of acres would be losing money after the old growth was gone.
The third tool was more successful and involved the allowable cut effect. As I noted in chapter 5, this allowed the Forest Service to take credit for intensive management of future forests by increasing the cutting of old-growth forests today. When it came to roadless areas, however, the Forest Service argued that it needed those areas in its timber base to sustain existing levels of harvest.
It dawned on me that the allowable cut effect could also be used to save roadless areas. If the forest had enough old-growth timber that it could increase cutting with intensive management, then it might not need some or all of its roadless areas to maintain cutting: it just needed to apply enough intensive management. In effect, I was using the allowable cut effect argument against them.
I wrote this idea up in a paper that I gave to the Oregon Wilderness Coalition. OWC’s assistant director, Kurt Kutay, wrote summary, with a single footnote to my paper, and handed it out to the press. This became known as the Kutay Report. Nancy Duhnkrack, OWC’s wild river’s coordinator, asked me if I was upset with the fact that Kurt was getting all the credit for my idea, and I said no; what counted was that the idea got out.
As it turned out, the chief of the Forest Service, John McGuire, could read footnotes. Someone in the Forest Service called OWC and said that the chief wanted to meet with Kurt Kutay and I on his next visit to Oregon. I have an image in my mind that we met in a city park somewhere, but more likely it was at the Pacific Northwest Experiment Station in Portland.
At the meeting, the chief announced that he was ordering experiment station economists to study my idea in general. The study was to be known as the roadless area-intensive management tradeoff study. Somewhere along the way, it was shortened to roadless area tradeoff study or RATS, which led to some snickering within the timber industry. When it was published in late 1978, it concluded that I was right: when a forest had enough old growth, they could trade off intensive management for roadless area preservation. The study also found that not all forests had enough old growth to do so, but it later turned out to be a lot more forests than they originally estimated.
Shortly before the meeting, a President Carter besieged by inflation had announced that he was directing the Forest Service to consider increasing national forest timber sales in order to reduce timber prices. This was another ill-conceived policy since increasing the supply of one resource wouldn’t do anything to fight inflation, but I asked Chief McGuire what he thought of it. “President Carter asked us to study it,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “We’ll study it.”
What about the Oregon State Board of Forestry’s plan for the Forest Service to depart from non declining flow to make up for temporary declines in private timber harvests? I asked. “What guarantee would there be that the timber industry will increase its cutting when we run out?” he countered, asking the same question I asked the board.
McGuire was politically astute enough to became chief, but he was also a scientist who had previously been the director of the Pacific Southwest Forest & Range Experiment Station in California. As it turned out, he was also the last chief of the Forest Service to have been introduced to Gifford Pinchot before Pinchot’s death in 1946. While I continued to pressure the agency in every way I could, this meeting gave me an optimistic view of the Forest Service.
Whether I was jealous of the attention Kurt received from the Kutay report soon became a non-issue. Kurt’s girlfriend, who may have been tired of supporting his work, persuaded him that now that he had made a name for himself with the Kutay report, he should go back to graduate school and get a “real job.” He went to the school of natural resources at the University of Michigan, and was rarely seen again in Oregon. He and his wife — who isn’t the girlfriend who persuaded him to quit OWC — now run an ecotourism business out of Seattle. I’m not sure he needed a graduate degree in natural resources to run that business, but I am sure he is a lot happier than if he were a professor or something like that.
Kurt’s place at OWC was effectively taken over by Andy Kerr, a wilderness activist who had grown up in Creswell, a few miles south of Eugene. Like Tim Lillebo, OWC’s eastern Oregon representative, Andy had a blue-collar background: his father was a homebuilder and Tim’s was a truck driver, and both sometimes did work for their fathers when they needed money. That must have been quite often, as OWC generously paid its director, Jim Monteith, $200 a month, and Jim in turn paid half of that, or $50 a month each, to Andy and Tim. We were all “voluntary poor,” but since we were poor together, no one really minded.
In 1978, the Northwest Environmental Defense Center held a national conference in Portland on Congress’ 1976 National Forest Management Act. I was excited to see that John Krutilla was one of the speakers. The NEDC also invited Jim, Andy, and I to speak, though we didn’t have as glorified roles as Krutilla and the other principle speakers. However, they paid our expenses, which was a new thing for us.
I took advantage of this by riding Amtrak from Eugene to Portland. The conference was at the Benson Hotel, Portland’s finest, but I was surprised that the hotel dining room had already closed by the time I arrived. So we ate appetizers provided by the hotel bar and billed them to our rooms. It almost like taking a holiday.
At the conference, in addition to Krutilla, I met two other people who became important to this story. The first was Tom Barlow of the Natural Resources Defense Council. NRDC was supposed to pair attorneys with resource experts so that they could bring environmental cases to court. Barlow, whose history was in banking, was considered a financial expert.
The Forest Service liked to brag that it was the only agency of the federal government that made a profit. Certainly, selling valuable old-growth Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine trees in Oregon and Washington made a profit, so it never occurred to me to question this claim. Having more of a national perspective, Barlow asked for the budgets and revenues from each of the Forest Service’s nine regions. He identified those line items associated with timber — sale preparation, harvest administration, road construction, reforestation, and so on — and compared them with the timber receipts from each region.
His report, which of course became known as the Barlow report, showed that most Forest Service regions lost money on their timber programs, a phenomenon he called “below-cost timber sales.” In fact, the only regions that regularly earned a profit were the Pacific Northwest and California regions. In 1980, he and some associates at NRDC published a report that broke the data down to the individual national forests, showing that even some forests in California lost money.
After one of the sessions at the conference, someone tapped me on the shoulder and introduced himself as a forestry student from OSU. “People keep telling me to watch out or I’ll become like you,” he said, so he wanted to find out what I was like. His name was Andy Stahl.
I didn’t realize it, but we now had the nucleus of the group that was reforming Oregon’s environmental movement and would eventually reform the Forest Service: Jim Monteith, Andy Kerr, Tim Lillebo, Nancy Duhnkrack, Cameron La Follette, Todd True, Andy Stahl, and me. Together, we were replacing Gordon Robinson’s “if it’s pretty, it’s good; if it’s ugly, it’s bad” rhetoric with a more scientific view of the issues.
As a result, within a very short time we would overturn the dominant paradigm that held that the science was all on the timber industry’s side. Soon after that, we would discredit the Forest Service’s claim of being unbiased experts scientifically managing the national forests for the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time. The result was a revolution both inside and outside the agency that has few parallels in history.
