In late 1979, several events took place that would have profound consequences for the future of the national forests. First, in September OSPIRG published a massive, 144-page report on old-growth forests by Cameron La Follette. While environmentalists liked to talk about old-growth forests, what they meant were “big trees.” The Forest Service and timber industry argued that old-growth forests were “biological deserts” because the thick canopy of needles and leaves prevented any light from reaching the ground, and thus there was nothing for deer or other wildlife to eat.
Cameron’s report was the one of the first public efforts to challenge this notion, showing that several species of wildlife depended on old growth. It also noted that “most of the remaining old growth is in the already roaded portions of the National Forests which have been opened for timber harvest,” so wilderness protection of roadless areas would be insufficient to ensure the survival of such wildlife species. The report simultaneously opened the public’s eyes regarding old growth and created a new agenda for the environmental movement.
One sign of just how far Cameron was ahead of her time was an interview with Jerry Franklin, the forest ecologist who co-authored Natural Vegetation of Oregon and Washington, that she included in the report. “I personally don’t think old growth is an issue,” he said, because “there are already substantial acreages of old growth reserved.” Franklin would completely reverse course in less than two years.
Also in September, CHEC published a companion report, also by La Follette, analyzing efforts to protect the spotted owl. Research by an Oregon State University graduate student named Eric Forsman revealed that, far from being biological deserts, old-growth Douglas-fir forests were critical habitat for this large bird. Forsman’s published research found that the mating pairs of spotted owls that he studied needed at least 300 acres of old growth per pair, so the Forest Service-BLM plan called for reserving something like 1,000 old-growth patches that were 300 acres in size.
However, someone — I can’t remember if it was Cameron — thought to ask Forsman how many acres each of the pairs that he studied needed. It turned out that only one pair was able to survive on 300 acres, while another pair needed 2,000 acres and the rest used about 1,000 acres each. The interagency management plan would save only 30 percent of the acres needed to protect the owl.
The second major event was the Forest Service’s publication of regulations for how it would implement the National Forest Management Act, which sought to resolve resource controversies through a forest planning process. The rules required that each forest write a forest-wide land-use and timber management plan whose goal was to maximize the economic value of the forest. Every national forest quickly added an economist to its forest planning team, leading to a huge influx in Forest Service economists at the Western Forest Economist meetings.
Experiment station economist Kent Connaughten invited me to speak at the 1980 Western Forest Economists meeting about Krutilla & Fisher’s method. I felt honored to do so, but then he offered his response. Krutilla & Fisher’s model assuming that amenity values would grow forever “was a turkey,” he said, because we just can’t know the future that well. I felt a little bit set up, but realized there was some validity to his view. As it turned out, optimistic predictions about future value would come back to bite the Forest Service in a few years.
In response to the new forest planning rules, environmentalists held a meeting in San Francisco that included leaders from the Sierra Club, Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Wilderness Society, and other groups. Jim Monteith and some other OWC staff joined me on an Amtrak ride to San Francisco to participate.
While we were there, we also tried to do some fund raising. In those days, few foundations gave money to environmental groups, but we had heard about a new organization called the Shalan Foundation, headed by a man named Drummond Pike that was giving money to unusual causes. Jim had applied for OWC and I applied for CHEC. On the train trip, Jim told me that, if OWC got funded and CHEC didn’t he would share the money with me, and asked if I would do the same if CHEC got funded and OWC didn’t.
I had to say no. CHEC was a consulting firm and OWC was a client. If OWC wanted to use some its funds to hire CHEC, I would be happy, but consultants don’t generally pay their clients.
As it turned out, Shalan awarded a $10,000 grant to CHEC, but nothing to OWC. The grant allowed CHEC to start a National Forest Planning Clearinghouse that would help activists all over the country monitor and respond to forest plans. Starting in April, 1980, we published a monthly magazine called Forest Planning that included articles from a wide range of viewpoints on the planning process and individual plans.
For the first time, I was actually earning an income and not only that could hire employees. I decided that, even though I was CHEC’s executive director, every full-time employee would get paid the same as me, and every half-time employee would get paid half as much as I did. Although Forest Planning had a succession of editors, all of them did a great job for not very much money.
Just south of the university campus were some tiny, one-bedroom homes that had built as student housing, probably in the 1940s. Little better than shacks by the 1970s, they were allocated to various departments to use as graduate student offices. With the support of some professor, OWC had commandeered one, and for a time I used another one for CHEC’s offices.
As a result of these events, the 1980s would be very different from the 1970s. Old growth would supplant wilderness as the main issue in the Northwest. Forest planning would preoccupy the Forest Service almost to the exclusion of everything else. Planners and environmentalists alike would avidly read Forest Planning magazine to see what new scandals we had uncovered. My own time increasingly was spent traveling to every region of the country reviewing these plans.
By the time we started publishing Forest Planning in 1980, it was already close to four years since Congress had passed the National Forest Management Act, and the agency had only recently finished writing the rules for forest planning. It clearly wasn’t going to finish all of the plans in five years. Even by 1984, five years after the final rules were published in 1979, only a handful of plans had been completed. Some plans were still unfinished more that five years after that. As for $1 million cost per plan, the actual costs were at least ten times that.
With no plans to review, the first issues of Forest Planning magazine focused on helping people get involved in the early stages of the planning process, including the identification of issues and concerns and the development of alternatives. We published articles on old growth by Cameron La Follette, articles on Forest Service yield tables by me, and even an article objecting to clearcutting by Gordon Robinson. Other articles covered timber land suitability and departures from non-declining flow,, and old growth.
The magazine’s circulation was never huge, averaging about 1,100 for most of the years in which it was published. The Forest Service alone bought hundreds of subscriptions, as the magazine provided a way for people in the agency to get a different perspective on what was going on. Communication within the agency was mostly top-down, but we provided a channel for horizontal communications, especially when Forest Service employees themselves contributed articles.
The Forest Service handed us a controversy to work on in our very first issue when it designated that sixteen different forests would specifically look at departing from non-declining flow. These included forests from California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. I suspect that this was the chief’s response to President Carter’s order that the agency study the question.
Departures became an even bigger issue in 1981 when Ronald Reagan entered the White House. Reagan appointed James Watt, an advocate of more oil drilling and other resource extraction, as Secretary of the Interior. Major environmental groups in Washington DC greatly increased their memberships and contributions by using Watt as a poster boy for everything that was wrong with public land management. Unfortunately, little of that money reached grassroots groups like OWC or CHEC.
For us, the problem was not Watt but John Crowell, who the administration made assistant secretary of Agriculture overseeing the Forest Service. Crowell had been the general counsel for Louisiana Pacific, the company that bought more national forest timber than any other. The company was created when the Justice Department ordered Georgia Pacific to split up due to antitrust issues. GP kept most of its land for itself, giving LP the mills that weren’t supported by company-owned land. Louisiana Pacific had operations in eight states, most of which relied heavily on national forest timber.
Crowell was even more aggressive than Carter had been about stepping up national forest timber sales. While the Forest Service had been selling 10 to 11 billion board feet of timber a year since the 1960s, Crowell stated he thought sales could be increased to close to 20 billion. While the movement for saving old growth was growing, Crowell openly said that protecting old growth was “not conservation.” Crowell’s bias in favor of timber gave us an issue to work on and, as it turned out, helped tip the Forest Service to our side of the issues.
While waiting for the first forest plans, we did a lot more than publish Forest Planning. In 1980, I wrote papers on subsidies to timber and subsidies to grazing, both of which were published by CHEC. CHEC also published a report on forest genetics by a Eugene expert named Lance Sentman and a paper reviewing northern California wilderness proposals by a University of Oregon economics student named Karen Foster. In 1981, CHEC published a report on forest diversity by Cameron La Follette. She also wrote a paper predicting that state lands in Oregon would be “a financial time bomb,” which turned out to be way ahead of her time as that bomb seems to have gone off in the last couple of years.
Also in 1981, Jerry Franklin — who had written off old-growth as a non-issue when interviewed by Cameron in 1979 — emerged as the leading proponent of old-growth preservation. In February, the Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station published a report titled Ecological Characteristics of Old-Growth Douglas-Fir Forests. The report had eight authors, but Franklin was listed first, probably because he had the most credibility in the forestry community. The other authors, including Fred Swanson and Glen Juday, who were regular attendees of OWC meetings, had a wide range of expertise, including wildlife, watershed, botany, geology, and ecology. Apparently, Juday brought them together and they realized that all of their research was showing that the past consensus about old-growth forests was wrong.
Far from being biological deserts, old-growth forests provided critical habitat for hundreds of species of wildlife. Far from being non-productive, old-growth forests produced large volumes of wood each year. Far from being unimportant to ecosystems, old-growth ecological processes were key to the continued productivity of Northwest forests.
A year later, the University of Oregon and Lane County (Eugene) League of Women Voters co-sponsored a conference on old-growth forests. I was invited to speak about economics, but the presentations by the ecologists and biologists were far more important. These included a Forest Service biologist from LaGrande, Oregon, who Loren Hughes had introduced me to named Jack Ward Thomas, a Montana biologist named Olof Wallmo, and an Oregon State University ornithologist named Charles Meslow, who was Eric Forsman’s graduate professor. The timber industry was represented by a consultant named Robert Vincent, who compared old-growth forests to cemeteries.
The principle ecologist to speak was Jerry Franklin. I had never met him before, and the first thing he said to me when we were introduced was, “Are you the Randal O’Toole who writes for Passenger Train Journal?” I had written articles covering the first run of Amtrak’s train between Portland and Eugene in 1980 and its first train between Portland and Spokane in 1981. It turned out Franklin was also a railfan and shared with me a love for the Great Northern Railway. “I have one of the largest collections of brass Great Northern steam locomotives,” he bragged, and invited me to see his model railroad the next time I was in Corvallis.
In any case, the old-growth conference in Eugene proved to be a landmark meeting that really turned the issue around. Few members of the public had read the February, 1981 paper on old growth, but few members of the public in Oregon would miss the press reports about this conference and how it revealed the importance of old growth for so many other resources.
Unfortunately for the timber industry, John Crowell’s push to increase timber sales came at exactly the wrong moment in history. Even if the Forest Service had wanted to increase sales, which it didn’t, no one was buying timber. With Reagan’s tacit approval, the Federal Reserve Board under Paul Volker decided to fight inflation by dramatically increasing interest rates. Unlike Carter’s token policies, this succeeded in bringing down inflation, but not without short-term economic pain.
The timber industry in particular was hurt by high interest rates, as it depended on home construction, which in turn depended on low interest rates. National forest timber sales had boomed in the 1970s were crushed in the 1980s.
This led many Northwest opinion leaders to rethink their support for the timber industry and opposition to wilderness and old-growth preservation. Why should the region be dependent on an industry that was so volatile? Wouldn’t it be better to diversify the economy? And one good way of attracting new jobs to the region was to brag about its environmental quality.
This could be seen in changes in the editorial rhetoric coming from major newspapers. Before 1981, the consensus was that 40 percent of Oregon’s economy depended on timber cutting. After 1982, this dropped to 6 percent. The main difference was that the 40 percent counted secondary and tertiary jobs, but the real difference was that opinion leaders realized that the secondary and tertiary jobs could be protected by finding a different source of primary jobs, such as the high-tech industry.
None of these issues were discussed by the ecologists, but I raised the jobs issue in my presentation when I talked about “the demand for standing old growth.” While the old-growth conference had a big impact, when combined with what was happening in the economy, the impact ended up overwhelming the timber industry. But we didn’t know that right away.
In the fall of 1982, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) invited environmental leaders to a closed-door meeting held near Washington DC to plot strategy for dealing with forest planning. They generously paid the expenses for out-of-town activists including me and Jim Monteith.
The strategy we adopted was simple. While we didn’t doubt that forest planning was possible, we believed the Forest Service would inevitably bias the process towards timber cutting. Our goal was to thoroughly document that bias so as the discredit the agency and its plans. NRDC in particular expected to legally challenge two plans in Colorado.
The meeting had more immediate consequences for my work. While publishing Forest Planning magazine, I had gathered a huge collection of internal Forest Service memos and directives. The Forest Service was four levels deep: the Washington office, nine regional offices, about a hundred forest supervisors’ offices, and about 600 district rangers’ offices. Forest planning was done at the forest supervisor level under the guidance of the regional offices, while the regional offices themselves were required to write regional plans. The Washington office wrote its own plan, called the RPA plan, named after the Resources Planning Act of 1974, a predecessor to the National Forest Management Act.
As a result, I had memos from the Washington office to regional offices, memos from many of the regional offices to forest supervisors’ offices, and letters from the supervisors and planners to people in higher offices. I brought a huge three-ring binder of these memos to the NRDC meeting and was able to use these memos to answer many of the questions people had about the planning process.
Other participants in the meeting were so impressed that they asked me to make these and other memos available to them. I agreed to send out a monthly bulletin of recent memos in exchange for which the national environmental groups — NRDC, Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, National Wildlife Federation, and one or two others — agreed to pay $1,000 a year. State and local groups could get the bulletin, which I called the Forest Planning Network, for $100 a year. The bulletins were just four pages long and included a card members could mail in to order copies of any of the two dozen or memos listed each month. This was a real coup as the Network ended up producing about half the revenue of Forest Planning magazine yet cost almost nothing to publish.
All of this was a prelude to the publication of the first national forest plans. One of the first draft plans came out in 1982, and by a happy coincidence it was for the Okanogan National Forest. This and other plans would occupy most of my time for the next eight years.
