I once attended a conference in Washington state and met some employees of the Washington Department of Natural Resources. Most western states owned and managed forests, but Washington owned more timber, and made far more money selling that timber, than any other state.
Knowing I was interested in old growth, one of the employees asked me, “Have you seen our giant western red-cedar on the Olympic Peninsula? It’s the largest western red-cedar in the world.” I told him I hadn’t seen it.
“It was part of a timber sale, but the company that bought the sale measured it and realized it was a world-record tree, so they left it standing. Another tree nearby was the world’s second-largest western red-cedar, but they cut it down.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You mean they cut down every tree around the world’s largest tree, and left it unsheltered from the wind?” Yes, I was told. “Aren’t you afraid it will get blown over?”
“No,” he said cheerfully, “that’s cedar. If it blows over, we’ll be able to salvage it all.” Western red-cedar was known to be exceptionally resistant to the funguses that rotted and killed Douglas-fir and many other trees. But his attitude reflected the position of many foresters that trees were here to be managed and used, not preserved.
Another cedar, Port Orford-cedar, was not as fortunate as western red. With a natural range limited to southwestern Oregon and northwestern California, Port Orford-cedar wood closely resembles a Japanese tree called hinoki cypress, which is used in Japan for making temples. Since hinoki cypress is scarce, Port Orford-cedar is in great demand in Japan for building temples and other buildings whose owners want them to look as if they were made with hinoki cypress.
As a result, Port Orford-cedar was the most valuable softwood tree in North America, sometimes selling for as much per board foot as some other species sold per thousand board feet. However, Port Orford-cedar had no natural resistance to an Asian root rot called Phytophthora lateralis. Hinoki cypress and other related Asian trees could survive attacks by this root rot, but once the spores of the fungus entered a watershed, every Port Orford-cedar in that watershed was doomed.
In 1983, we published Management of Port-Orford-Cedar and its Influence on Phytophthora Root Rot by Thomas Lawson, who had earned a Ph.D. in forest pathology from Oregon State. He had studied under Lew Roth, a professor who I remembered complaining that disease did ten times as much damage to forests as insects and insects did ten times as much damage as fire, yet fire and insects got a lot more attention than disease.
Lawson noted that Phytophthora spores were spread from watershed to watershed by motor vehicle tires that picked them up in the mud and dirt. Thus, building a road into a watershed with Port Orford-cedar was almost guaranteed to wipe out the cedars in that watershed. The Forest Service claimed it could limit the spread of the rot by washing log truck tires before the trucks drove into new watersheds, but it couldn’t wash the tires of every recreation vehicle that drove on national forest roads. Saving the Port Orford-cedar, then, became a powerful scientific reason for saving all of the remaining roadless areas in the tree’s range.
Thom pointed out to me that it was unlikely that the Port Orford-cedar would ever go extinct, as it has been planted in gardens throughout the world as an ornamental shrub coincidentally known as Lawson cypress. However, the Forest Service’s mandate to preserve forest diversity should have stopped it from actions that spread the disease that would kill the tree throughout its native habitat.
The provisions of the National Forest Management Act that required the Forest Service to write forest plans were actually an amendment to the Resources Planning Act of 1974, which required the Forest Service to write a national plan for forests and related resources. It revised this plan every five years, and in 1984 CHEC published a detailed review that I had written of the draft 1985 RPA plan.
The Forest Service liked to claim that its planning was not a top-down planning process, but the give-and-take between RPA planning and national forest planning indicated otherwise. The Forest Service wrote its first RPA plans before forest planning began, and it based the national plans on supervisors’ estimates of how much timber, livestock grazing, and other resources each forest could contribute to the national total. These estimates were often based on outdated inventories or just best guesses.
The RPA plans in turn set timber and other targets for each of the nine Forest Service regions. The regions, in turn, disaggregated those targets to each of the national forests. If a new inventory revealed than a particular forest would be unable to meet its target, the region was required to reallocate the difference to other forests.
Naturally, I strongly argued against this process, particularly pointing out that economic values and costs had played almost no role in determining the targets that were given to each region and forest. Thus, the system perpetuated below-cost timber sales simply because forests had historically sold timber below cost.
I also pointed out that the Forest Service’s own estimates of resource values indicated that recreation, not timber, grazing, or mining, was the paramount value of the national forests. Other resources could be found on private lands, but only public lands were specifically managed for recreation and only public lands had large amounts of roadless areas that attracted some of the most highly valued recreation.
If the market values of recreation and wildlife developed by economists under contract to the Forest Service were correct, then recreation (including wildlife-related recreation) was worth several times more than all of the extractive resources combined. Yet forest plans were written as if timber was paramount and recreation was merely a side-effect.
Despite the strategy of Quincy wilderness advocates to use the Forest Service’s optimistic yield tables against the agency, I was fed up with seeing the RAM PREP yield tables that were used in every California forest plan. These yield tables were biologically impossible and the plans based on them had no credibility in my mind.
California forests were the last in the National Forest System to switch from selection cutting to clearcutting, and there were still some timber companies and private foresters who objected to the change. The Forest Service said that its measurements of selection cut forests revealed that they weren’t responding to the thinning of the trees by growing faster, which greatly reduced the benefits of that cutting method, at least in the minds of national forest timber planners.
Yet the RAM PREP yield tables said exactly the opposite. According to the yield tables, poorly stocked old-growth stands, which mostly poorly stocked because they had been selection cut in the recent past, were projected to double in volume in as little as 20 years.
Although RAM PREP grew poorly stocked old-growth forests very fast, it grew second-growth forests even faster, such that forests were projected to grow more timber in as little as 50 years as were found in uncut old-growth forests. This allowed the Forest Service to write plans that rapidly cut all old growth on the premise that second growth would grow fast enough to maintain a non-declining flow.
In 1986, I wrote a paper criticizing RAM PREP. It might have been a wonder when it was first written in the 1970s, but its assumptions about diameter and height growth were overly simplistic and it had no place in plans of the 1980s.
I asked the California regional forester’s office if I could make a presentation to the regional forester. The regional forester wasn’t available, but his deputy was. The two authors of RAM PREP, Jack Levitan and Klaus Barber. Barber was the California region economist, and I suspect he helped with the programming while Levitan did the yield-table work.
I remember being so nervous during my presentation that my hands shook as I tried to put view charts on the overhead projector. I wasn’t the only one who was nervous: as soon as the meeting was over and we stepped out into the hall, Levitan exclaimed, “I need a drink.” He wasn’t talking about water. I was unsuccessful in getting the region to discard its yield tables in the midst of planning, but it was one more form of pressure on the agency.
In 1983, a group called the Greater Yellowstone Coalition was founded in recognition of the fact that Yellowstone Park, Grand Teton Park, and six national forests that surrounded the parks formed one of the greatest intact natural ecosystems in North America. In 1986, the coalition’s director, Bob Anderson, asked me to do a study of all of those national forests. The result was a 1987 paper called the Economic Database for the Greater Yellowstone Forests, which graphically compared timber values (mostly negative) with grazing values (ditto) and recreation values (highly positive) on each of the forests.
A couple of years later I did a similar database for three Idaho forests, the Challis, Clearwater, and Sawtooth. One of these forests — I think it was the Challis — had mainly sold small timber sales and bidders had mostly paid the Forest Service’s minimum bid price for the sales. But shortly before my visit, it had sold a large sale — almost as large as the forest’s annual allowable cut — and received a huge bid premium.
Forest officials were all excited about this bid premium, because they could rewrite the Knutson-Vandenberg plan for the sale, keeping most of the premium for various forest improvements. It was like seeing dollar signs in their eyes: suddenly, they realized that their budgets were better off if they sold large sales rather than small ones.
I realized that the same thing had probably happened on other forests in the past. Someone in the 1950s figured out that clearcutting required more reforestation activities, thus allowing the ranger district to keep a larger share of the receipts, thus allowing the supervisor’s and regional offices to get more for overhead. As national forest staff transferred from forest to forest, this information spread across the agency. After a few years, the rewards from clearcutting were so ingrained into the agency that people didn’t even realize why it had switched from nearly all selection cutting in 1950 to nearly all clearcutting by 1970.
In 1985, CHEC’s wildlife biologist, Dieter Mahlein, wrote a report gathering all available information on the spotted owl and old-growth forests. As previously noted, the spotted owl was the first wildlife species that had been found to need old-growth Douglas-fir, thus destroying the one-time claim that old growth was a biological desert.
It turned out that the “biological desert” conclusion was based on 100-year-old forests, which tended to be so dense that little light penetrated to the forest floor, thus allowing no shrubs to grow. When the forests grow older, some trees start to die off, leaving openings of light that create a vertical diversity, with separate ecosystems working in the canopy of trees from those on the ground level.
Every once in awhile I’ll hear someone say that spotted owls don’t really need old growth. While it is true that spotted owls can survive without old growth, they can’t breed without it. Spotted owls aren’t the top of the food chain: the great horned owl will gladly eat spotted owl eggs and chicks, which they obtain by swooping down on spotted owl nests and knocking them to the ground.
Spotted owls defend their nests by building them in the forks of trees whose side branches have grown upwards. The ideal fork is one that is wide enough for a spotted owl adult to fly through but too narrow for the larger great horned owl to fly through. Only old-growth trees are large enough to form the right-sized fork.
By the time Dieter wrote his report, biologists had found nearly 200 species of wildlife that depended on old-growth Douglas-fir, so the spotted owl was really just an indicator species for all of these others. One of them was the northern flying squirrel, a rodent that was a major source of food for the spotted owl. So the owl needed old growth both as for food and to protect its young.
When CHEC published Dieter’s report, the Forest Service’s attitudes toward the spotted owl were still in flux. It would take lawsuits by the Sierra Club Legal Defense Funded, aided by attorney Todd True and forestry expert Andy Stahl, to persuade the agency to set aside millions of acres of old growth for the owl and other species.
Individually, these papers had very little impact on national forest planning and management. Collectively, with the forest plan reviews and continued reporting in our magazine, our work was having significant though subtle effects on the agency.
I could see the effects at the spring meetings of the Western Forest Economists. One economist told me, “You always get nervous when you hear that Randal O’Toole is coming to visit your forest.” He went on to say that, “A few years ago, whenever you would speak up at these conferences, the forest planners in the audience would sneer and ignore you. Now, when you speak up, they sneer and then carefully listen to every word you say.”
