A lot of forest plans were issued in 1985, and I managed to review 20 of them. Considering holidays, that was almost one every two weeks. It made for a hectic schedule, but each new plan taught me something so that the quality of my reviews steadily improved.
A group of wilderness activists in Quincy, California asked me to review the Plumas Forest plan. The activists included Mike Yost, who taught forestry at Feather River Community College, his wife Sally, who is an amazing artist, and attorney Michael Jackson.
While I was reviewing documents in the forest supervisor’s office, some of the planners were meeting in another corner of the office. I could tell their discussion was getting heated, and finally one of them blurted out, “He’s going to write about us in his magazine, and we’re all going to be in trouble!”
I don’t know what they feared I was going to write about, but the Plumas had the same problems with yield tables as the Klamath. According to the yield tables, the old-growth forests were growing so fast that the Plumas was easily an old-growth surplus forest, which meant that the roadless area-intensive management tradeoff that I had proposed in the 1970s would work very well on the forest.
I told Mike Yost that I didn’t trust the yield tables, but if they were accurate, the forest could preserve all of the remaining roadless areas from timber cutting and still sustain its proposed level of timber harvests. Mike and the other activists decided that, rather than challenge the yield tables, they would accept them and propose to save the roadless areas without reducing timber harvests. That was the nucleus for what became the Quincy Library Group, in which timber industry leaders and environmentalists worked together, over the objections of the Forest Service (and extremists in both the industry and environmental movement), to produce a plan that would meet both of their goals.
A few weeks after the Plumas, I was in Nevada City, California reviewing the Tahoe Forest plan. While I was there, a Forest Service employee discreetly slipped me a memo. It turned out to be a paper someone had written for a class.
The California region of the Forest Service had lost an affirmative action lawsuit and was under a court order to get more women in supervisory positions in the agency. To promote that, it started a training program called “Learn Now, Lead Tomorrow.”
A student in the program, Cherry Dulaney, was a silviculturist (a specialist in growing trees) who had felt pressured to meet tree planting targets. As a class project, she did a survey of other silviculturists in the region to find out if they had been under similar pressure.
Her paper indicated that many had felt so pressured that they did work that wasn’t needed, such as planting trees in clearcuts that already had adequate stocking and spraying herbicides on plantations that didn’t have serious brush problems. Some had even fabricated the numbers, claiming they reforested acres when they actually spent the money on something else.
I duly reported on this memo in Forest Planning magazine and thought that would be the end of it. It wasn’t. One of our subscribers was Dale Champion, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and he obtained his own copy of Dulaney’s report. Soon the words “Phantom Forests” blared from the top half of the front page of the Chronicle.
My congressman, Jim Weaver, happened to be the chair of the Forestry Subcommittee of the House Agriculture Committee, and he decided to hold a hearing on this report in San Francisco. Before the hearing, one of Weaver’s staff members urged me to figure out why silviculturists were being pressured to meet reforestation and other targets. A credible explanation, he said, would make Dulaney’s findings a lot more believable. Answering this question crystalized a lot of issues that I had uncovered in the previous few years.
First, the Timber Sale Reports that I had routinely asked for when reviewing forest plans and below-cost timber sales had noted that some timber receipts went into a reforestation fund authorized by a 1930 law called the Knutson-Vandenberg or K-V Act. In 1976, Congress allowed the Forest Service to use K-V funds for wildlife, recreation, and watershed improvements as well. Other laws allowed the Forest Service to use timber sale receipts for road maintenance, brush disposal, and (if it was a salvage sale) more salvage sales.
I also knew that the amount listed on the Timber Sale Report as going into the K-V fund wasn’t necessarily the amount that went into that fund. If the sale sold for higher than the minimum bid price, the Forest Service could revised the K-V plan (which had its own form numbered 2400-50) to use some of the additional money. I once asked a Forest Service official how long it had to revise the plan.
“Until the day the sale closes,” he replied. “And if you are going to revise it, you’d better do it by then because otherwise the money is lost — it goes to the U.S. Treasury.” Apparently, national forest officials, who were once proud to run the only federal agency that made a profit, now considered any returns they made to the Treasury to be “losses.”
I also learned that, since about 1958, a specific share of K-V funds went to the Washington, regional, and supervisors’ offices for administrative overhead. The percentages varied from region to region and forest to forest, but on average a third of K-V funds went for overhead, not for on-the-ground forest improvements. However, these higher offices weren’t allowed to spend their shares of overhead until the other money was actually spent on the ground.
The final piece of the puzzle had to do with the economy: to fight inflation, the Federal Reserve Bank had pushed up interest rates, sending the nation, and the homebuilding industry in particular, into a recession. Since there was no market for timber, many timber companies couldn’t afford to cut the trees from sales they had purchased, and asked for (and generally received) extensions on their contracts.
With no timber being cut, there were no opportunities for reforestation. With no reforestation, no K-V money was being spent, which meant very little money was being released to the higher offices for administrative overhead. Those offices had written their budgets assuming that K-V dollars would flow in as they always had, and rather than lay off employees, they put pressure on silviculturists in the district rangers’ offices to meet their targets.
This painted a very different picture of the Forest Service than the one environmentalists took for granted. Environmentalists had tended to agree with David Clary, a historian who wrote that the Forest Service considered itself to be on “a sacred mission to bring wood to the world to avert the evils of a timber famine.”
My analysis of the Dulaney report, however, suggested that Forest Service officials were merely people who were motivated by incentives, the same as everyone else. The incentives Congress had given the agency, whether intentionally or not, were to lose money on timber because, up to a point, the more it lost for the Treasury, the more it increased its own budget. This also explained why the agency had shifted from selection cutting in 1950 to clearcutting in 1970: selection-cut forests would reforest themselves, but clearcutting required expensive measures to bring back the forest, which in turn generated lots of administrative overhead.
I brought this all together in my testimony at the hearing, but first to testify were California Regional Forester Zane Grey Smith and Cherry Dulaney herself. After Smith testified, Weaver asked him if the Forest Service had done anything to publicize Dulaney’s findings.
“Yes,” said Smith. How was it publicized, continued Weaver. “I believe it was first published in Randal O’Toole’s magazine,” answered Smith.
While my analysis of the Dulaney Report offered important insights into the Forest Service, I didn’t have time to think about the big picture in 1985 as the year was mainly spent doing one forest plan review after another. In the fall, I went to Indiana to review the plan for the Hoosier National Forest for a group called Forest Watch, run by Jeff St. Clair and Andy Mahler. The Hoosier didn’t sell a lot of board feet, but it didn’t have many board feet per acre, and it also managed some of the few acres in Indiana that might be considered roadless and potential wilderness. So environmentalists there were just as critical of national forest management as those in the West.
In the Bedford, Indiana office of the forest supervisor, I learned right away that all of the timber the Hoosier sold was below cost. Yet FORPLAN happily chopped away at the forest even when its goal was to maximize the economic value of the forest. Looking at the FORPLAN model, I realized that planners had told the computer that recreation was very valuable, and that even dispersed recreation could only take place if there were roads. Further, they specified that such roads could only be built if there were timber sales. Effectively, they told the computer that wilderness users wanted to picnic in clearcuts.
One of the things that struck me was that recreation demand numbers that planners had entered into the model were very high. “Demand” is an economic term that refers to a relationship between price and quantity: at a higher price, the quantity demanded is usually lower. Even though recreation on the Hoosier Forest was almost all free, planners told the computer that the demand was much higher than the actual amount of recreation that took place on the forest. That could only be true if the price were presumed to be negative.
I asked the forest planners to bring me all of the documentation for recreation and they brought me a stack of files about two feet high. As I read through the papers, I realized there had been a debate between the regional and forest offices regarding recreation demand. Near the bottom, I found a memo written in the handwriting that, by then, I was able to recognize as belonging to the forest recreation planner.
“The regional office thinks my demand figures are too high,” said the memo. “I would agree they are high. I was told by the forest planning team to make demand greater than capacity. I did as I was told.”
Here was a true smoking gun, proof positive that forest planners had deliberately entered fallacious data into the FORPLAN model in order to write a plan that cut too much timber. I met with my clients over dinner that night and proudly presented this incriminating evidence.
They weren’t impressed. “We want to stop the clearcutting now,” they said. “Can’t you find something that will immediately stop them from clearcutting.” Inwardly I rolled my eyes, but out loud I said, “If we’ve discredited the new forest plan, they’ll continue working under the old forest plan. I’ll take a look at that and see if we can discredit it as well.”
The next day, I asked planners for a copy of the existing plan. They brought me a three-page document evaluating the environmental impacts of tripling the amount of timber that would be sold each year. Under “public involvement,” the document listed two people: the Forest Service soils scientist and the Forest Service hydrologist. In other words, they tripled the allowable cut with almost no environmental review and no public review at all.
After my report was published, the Hoosier Forest supervisor wisely realized that neither their old plan nor the new one was valid, and timber sales on the Hoosier Forest stopped for at least a decade. A couple of years later, I returned to review the Wayne Forest plan, as both forests were small enough that they were managed by one supervisor’s office. While there, I happened to see an employee newsletter.
“What’s all this talk about below-cost timber sales?” one Hoosier district ranger asked in the newsletter. “I sure don’t see any of those around here!” Obviously, this was said with tongue in cheek: with no sales, there could be no below-cost sales.
Incidentally, several years later I reviewed the plan for Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest, which is in the same Forest Service region as the Hoosier. I found the same problems with recreation yield tables. I also found a memo from the regional office saying that the Hoosier, which was the first forest in the region to write a plan, had developed a great method for getting FORPLAN to cut timber: simply tell FORPLAN that there was a shortage of recreation opportunities and the way to increase those opportunities was to build roads and cut timber.
The Kootenai National Forest in northwest Montana was in the heart of grizzly bear territory. Once common throughout the West, there are still plenty in Canada and Alaska, but it is considered a threatened species in the lower 48 states because there its range has contracted to Glacier, Yellowstone, and some nearby national forests.
Grizzlies are a solitude-loving species, so the Kootenai yield tables appropriately indicated that more would be found in roadless areas than roaded areas. But I noted a special twist: roadless areas that received permanent protection in the forest plan were predicted to produce more grizzlies than unprotected roadless areas. This allowed the forest to save some areas, log others, but say that it was providing just as much habitat as if it hadn’t roaded some of the areas.
I found another wildlife deception on the Gallatin National Forest. Elk biologists had estimated that the ideal habitat for elk was 60 percent cover (i.e., uncut forest) and 40 percent forage (i.e., meadows or other open areas). Aerial photos of the Gallatin showed that planners had assigned areas with complete forest cover to “wildlife,” giving the Forest Service a reason to cut a lot of the trees so that more land would be available for forage. But other parts of the forest already had a natural 60:40 cover-forage ratio. The plan assigned these areas to “timber,” meaning they would be cut — thus creating too much forage and not enough cover — regardless of the impacts on elk and other wildlife.
One by one, I was documenting that the Forest Service had inserted hidden timber biases into its forest plans. But my work on the Knutson-Vandenberg Act also indicated that it wasn’t doing this because its people were biased to timber, but because the incentives created by Congress rewarded it for losing money on timber and penalized it for emphasizing other resources. This became the focus of my work in the second half of the 1980s.
