Soon after Reforming the Forest Service was published, we began to see signs of dissension within the Forest Service. They were subtle at first: a memo here, a policy decision there. They became more overt when an on-the-ground timber sale planner in Oregon started a group called Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. Then they became a flood bursting through a dam as all of the forest supervisors in the West joined a movement against decisions being made by the Washington DC office of the agency. The results figuratively turned the agency upside down.
The story actually goes back to 1979, when Max Peterson replaced John McGuire as chief of the Forest Service. Unlike all of his predecessors, Peterson was a road engineer, and he was probably picked precisely because he wasn’t a forester as the agency had been under fire for its timber dominance. But from an environmental view, road engineers were even more suspect since it was feared that his agenda would focus on developing the roadless areas.
But with Ronald Reagan’s appointment of John Crowell as deputy secretary of Agriculture, Peterson ended up spending most of this tenure defending the forests against increased timber cutting. Crowell made it clear that he believed the national forests should be selling 20 billion board feet of timber a year, not the 10 or 11 billion they had been selling. Allowable sale levels could only be increased through forest planning, and under Crowell the Department of Agriculture issued new planning rules that emphasized timber sales.
The Forest Service had always insisted that forest planning wasn’t a top-down process, but the truth was that the top played an important role. Before any of the plans were written, and before new inventories could be done of the forests, the supervisors were asked to estimate how much their forests could contribute to the national timber supply. The nine regional offices sent the totals for their regions to the Washington office. These in turn became the targets that the regions were expected to produce in the forest plans. Crowell’s game was to increase those targets by requiring every forest to prepare an alternative that maximized timber cutting.
In 1983 Crowell sent a memo to Chief Peterson expressing his concern that forest planners weren’t enthusiastic enough about increasing timber sales. “Appropriate changes will be made,” he ominously warned, if plans didn’t “improve significantly.” This was widely read to mean that Crowell was threatening to replace regional foresters, or possibly even the chief.
Just three months later, Pacific Northwest regional forester Jeff Sirmon and his deputy, Jim Torrence, met with Chief Peterson to tell him that timber targets were too high. With them were the supervisors of the Gifford Pinchot, Mt. Hood, Siuslaw, Umpqua, and Willamette national forests, which were the biggest timber producers in the National Forest System. The Mt. Hood supervisor cited a study saying that 30 percent of the land on his forest that the Forest Service had previously deemed “suitable” for timber production was, in fact, too steep, too rocky, or otherwise not suitable. Peterson responded by saying that they couldn’t simply reduce the targets: they had to use the planning process to justify a reduction.
The Mt. Hood study was the same one that I had used in our appeal of the forest’s timber management plan in 1977. What disturbed me — and apparently people inside the Forest Service as well — was that the study recommended reducing estimates of Mt. Hood Forest timber supplies by 30 percent, but a handwritten note authorized only a 15 percent reduction. This note was signed by Jack Usher, the Pacific Northwest region’s director of timber management.
Forest Service employees sometimes said that the real chief of the agency was the Pacific Northwest director of timber management. After all, timber was responsible for almost half the agency’s budget and the Pacific Northwest Region produced almost half of the agency’s timber.
Usher had taken that job when Richard Worthington, the man who compared old-growth trees with rotten apples, was regional forester. The two of them not only were aligned philosophically, they both looked like stereotypical “timber beasts”: both over six feet tall and built like an offensive lineman. In contrast, Sirmon — who replaced Worthington in 1982 — was a slender five foot seven and had spent most of his career on forests and regions where timber was much less important.
A story went around that, shortly after Sirmon’s arrival, Usher was overheard talking in a hallway of the regional forester’s offices. “That little shrimp is going to find out who is boss around here pretty soon,” he supposedly said. He then turned around to see the “little shrimp” was right behind him. Sirmon walked away, but a few months later the region had a new director of timber management — a very subtle sign that change was coming to the region and the Forest Service as a whole.
Meanwhile, Crowell’s assistant, Doug MacCleery, had previously been the chief lobbyist for the National Forest Products Association, the timber industry’s main DC lobby group. Despite his timber leanings, MacCleery was a thoughtful guy who I first met at the 1983 meeting of the Western Forest Economists. He gave a little speech saying he was a “process person” and that his door was always open to people. The Forest Service planners in the audience responded by giving him an earful of complaints about being ordered to fabricate numbers and meet political targets instead of what the land was capable of producing.
This was one of the rare times that Forest Service’s quiet resistance to pressure from the Reagan administration came out in the open. Another example was when the Pacific Northwest regional office prepared a memo estimating the effects of increasing timber sales to meet a national target of 20 billion board feet. The increased cutting, the memo found, would have serious detrimental impacts on wildlife, fish, and water quality. The memo also said that cutting that much timber would increase log truck traffic so much that the national forests would have to be closed to recreation on weekdays. The memo was leaked to the press so that everyone would know that Crowell’s plan was unworkable.
As I’ve noted before, Crowell’s plan was undermined by the fact that the United States was in a severe recession and timber harvests had dramatically dropped. This not only made it appear that selling 20 billion board feet was unnecessary, but it changed the way political leaders and the Forest Service itself looked at timber. Once considered vital to the local economies of the West, many people realized that recreation could play just as important a role, especially if rampant timber cutting didn’t destroy the recreation values of the forests.
For the Forest Service, the downturn in timber shattered an unspoken pact it had had with the timber industry for several decades. As my analysis of the Knutson-Vandenberg Act revealed, the Forest Service made almost half of its budget through timber sales. In good years, the Forest Service would sell timber for high prices, keep the funds it needed for reforestation and other activities, and turn the rest over to the Treasury. In bad years, the Forest Service would sell timber for low prices, keep the funds it needed for reforestation, leaving almost none left over for the Treasury. In good years and bad, local economies continued to have timber jobs, and more important to the agency, the bureaucracy thrived.
But in the early 1980s, the economy was so bad that the timber companies virtually stopped cutting timber. Since the Forest Service could only spend K-V money after the timber was cut, it had to lay off thousands of employees simply because the money wasn’t there to pay their salaries. I think this led some in the agency to decide they didn’t want to be dependent on the timber industry for their main source of funds.
Despite the poor economy, and despite the growing microcomputer revolution, the Forest Service began installing Data General minicomputers in all of its offices in 1984. Some predicted that this would lead the agency to become more centralized as it would allow the chief to better monitor local employees and to give specific direction to people in any office. Instead, the reverse happened. Where agency communication had previously been almost exclusively vertical, between the Washington, regional, forest, and district offices, now every Forest Service employee had their own email addresses and could communicate horizontally with anyone else in the agency.
Disaffected wildlife biologists in Arizona could now reach other biologists in Montana. Economists in Utah could contact economists in Georgia. And timber sale planners upset with cutting old-growth forests in Oregon could send an email to the chief and have that email forwarded to Forest Service employees throughout the country.
This is when 1970s’s National Environmental Teach-In began to have an effect inside the Forest Service. Before the teach-in, most people going to forestry school had rural backgrounds and readily accepted the Forest Service’s wise-use ethic which said that resources existed to be used and the forester’s duty was to make sure that we wouldn’t run out. After the teach-in, most people going to forestry school were urbanites like me who had a very different view of conservation, believing that the best “use” of some resources was no use at all and that some areas should be left uncut, ungrazed, and unmined in order to protect non-harvestable things such as rare species and clean water.
One of those urbanites was Jeff Debonis, who graduated from Colorado State University’s forestry school in 1974, the same year I graduated from Oregon State. Debonis was a timber sale planner who at first focused on meeting timber sale targets. But at some point he was struck by the impacts of large-scale clearcutting of Oregon’s Willamette National Forest on fish, water, and other resources. He wrote a letter to the chief, discovered that many other employees were similarly concerned, and started the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics in 1989.
Andy Stahl was another urbanite who had gone to forestry school. After working for the timber industry for a couple of years, he switched sides and went to work for the National Wildlife Federation, helping them bring a lawsuit against the Siuslaw National Forest. Located in the Oregon Coast Range, the Siuslaw has the most productive timber land in the National Forest System, but it also produces a lot of salmon and other fish. In fact, the forest logo was once a fish jumping over a clearcut – later modified to a clearcut that was in the shape of a fish.
Much of the forest is located on very steep slopes. Cutting the timber, particularly in the forest’s Mapleton Ranger District, often led to landslides as the tree roots that held the soil in place rotted away, and those slides destroyed the fish habitat, sometimes all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Stahl and NWF’s attorney, Terry Thatcher, persuaded the court to shut down the Mapleton’s timber sale program. Later, Stahl would work with my old friend, Todd True, in the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund on lawsuits aimed at protecting the spotted owl.
In 1987, Max Peterson retired from the Forest Service and went to work for the International Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies, where he surprised almost everyone by lobbying against the Forest Service’s timber program. “Anyone could figure out on the back of an envelope that the Forest Service is overcutting,” he told a reporter. Of course, I figured it out, but most people didn’t have the expertise to do so, and if he figured it out while he was still Chief, he never said so, probably because of the pro-timber administration.
Peterson was replaced by Dale Robertson, who had impressed me when he was supervisor of the Mt. Hood National Forest. The Forest Service was famous for its esprit de corps, but Robertson took over as the agency’s morale was at an all-time low after being under fire by so many groups for so many issues.
Robertson turned out to be less charismatic than expected. His low point took place in 1989, during a ABC Primetime interview that charged that the Forest Service was primarily a “government logging agency.” “We’re changing that balance,” he asserted. “But Chief Robertson, they say this has been going on for 20 years.” He froze like a deer caught in headlights for seven seconds that seemed to stretch into eternity, finally saying, “I don’t have complete control of my budget.”
To his credit, however, he took no action to discipline Debonis or other dissenters within the agency. Later, he did take some actions to reinvent the agency before the term was popularized by Al Gore. But it took pressure from the grassroots within the agency to get there.
Most of the turmoil within the agency had to do with targets. As noted above, the targets were more-or-less settled before forest plans had been written or forests had done new inventories. One Oregon forest did a new inventory and found that the previous one had greatly overestimated the amount of timber on the forest.
Forest Service inventories measured plots on a grid 1.7-miles apart. There are about 1,850 acres in a 1.7-mile square, so if a plot was old-growth Douglas-fir, it was assumed to represent 1,850 acres of old-growth Douglas-fir, while if a plot was in the middle of a meadow it was assumed to represent 1,850 acres of meadows.
During its reinventory, the Fremont National Forest found that some of the previous inventory crews had misunderstood the directions. If one of their plots landed in a meadow, they simply moved to the nearest forest and measured that instead. The result was something like a 30 percent overestimate of timber on the forest.
Yet the timber target remained the same. If the regional office reduced the Fremont’s target, it would have to increase the targets for other national forests to make up the difference.
The targets became even more significant because Oregon’s congressional delegation responded to NWF’s Mapleton lawsuit by exempting the Forest Service from legal requirements and mandating that it achieve its timber targets. Where previously the allowable cut had been the maximum a forest was allowed to sell, the congressional mandates turned it to a minimum. On many forests, achieving that minimum became more and more difficult each year.
Some forests didn’t have the budgets to do reinventories, so for planning purposes they just assumed that the plots in the previous inventories had grown as fast as their yield tables projected. Since the yield tables themselves were supposed to be tempered by the reinventories, the lack of a new inventory was doubly bad. I found a memo from the supervisor of a national forest in northern Idaho who said his field crews couldn’t find the timber that the forest plan claimed it had, so he simply refused to meet his timber target.
Things came to a head in 1989 when the Forest Service published its draft 1990 RPA Program, which was the national plan that assigned timber and other targets to each of the regions. Regional and forest officials had let the chief know that the targets they had been given were too high, so they were upset when the chief testified to Congress that the national forests would have no problem meeting their targets.
“The Washington Office leadership is in a position where the oars are out of the water and the Diesel engines are shut off,” the California deputy regional forester wrote in a memo. “The most we can achieve is [90 percent] of the target,” said California’s director of timber management, and in the long run he predicted California forests could sustain only half of the target.
“What can we do to convince the Chief of the true situation?” asked the California regional forester, who admitted that he was “reconsidering his future career goals” in the face of Washington’s unwillingness to listen to the regions and forests.
As if in answer to the California regional forester’s question, the forest supervisors for all of the Pacific Northwest forests prepared a video titled Up from the Ground. Times have changed since “some of us were coming up in the ranks,” said the video. “Perhaps it’s time to reconsider program emphasis and round out multiple use.”
Bob Devlin, the supervisor of Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest who had a reputation of being very pro-timber, laid it on the line in the video. “I understand why targets are emphasized and how those targets generate dollars,” he said. But he warned that he couldn’t meet his targets and still comply with other environmental standards. “The people who I am familiar with on the ground are not comfortable with this, and neither am I,” he said. Unless this problem is solved, “I can’t be the steward of the public lands that you depend on me to be.”
The supervisors presented this video to the chief at a meeting in November, 1989. The supervisors of every other national forest in the West signed letters backing up the video. “We are not meeting the quality land management expectations of our public and our employees,” said Montana/Northern Idaho forest supervisors. Pointing out that timber funding was ten times the funding for recreation, fish & wildlife, and soils & water, Rocky Mountain forest supervisors said, because of this imbalance, “the allowable sale quantity issue will continue to be a problem for us, and some supervisors feel our ASQs are unrealistic even with full funding.”
At first, Robertson caved in to pressure from Congress and the Bush administration to meet timber targets. In 1991, John Mumma, the regional forester for the Northern Region (Montana and northern Idaho), was given a choice of being kicked upstairs or leaving the agency, and he decided to leave. Later, Robertson’s deputy, George Leonard, argued that Mumma wasn’t disciplined for objecting to the targets but because he wasn’t a good enough manager to meet the targets — which is a distinction without a difference, as in fact Mumma was a good enough manager to listen to his people who said the targets were unsustainable. The Forest Service also engaged in a witch hunt against some of Mumma’s forest supervisors, charging them with felonies for such trivial things as buying Mumma a going-away present — charges that were dismissed in court.
While Mumma’s departure generated lots of negative publicity for the Forest Service, Pacific Northwest regional forester Jeff Sirmon had previously accepted a transfer to the Washington Office. He eventually became deputy chief in charge of international forestry, which must have been a fun job as it involved lots of travel. I don’t know if the transfer was due to the conflict over timber targets, but when I met him in Washington and asked him how he was adjusting to the move, his face just fell: it was clear he would rather have been out on the national forests.
His place was taken by his deputy, Jim Torrence. When Torrence retired in 1989, he told reporters and anyone else who would listen that he thought the Forest Service was overcutting. Torrence was particularly upset with efforts by Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield and Representative Les AuCoin to pass riders to the annual appropriations bills mandating higher cutting rates than forest officials thought could be sustained.
What nobody said was that these debates revealed the complete failure of forest planning. By 1987, the plans were supposed to be done and to have resolved these controversies. Instead, half of the plans were still unfinished, and done or not the plans made the controversies worse by polarizing the public and locking the forests into targets which their own on-the-ground managers agreed they could not meet.
Despite Robertson’s kowtowing to congressional pressure, I was happy to note that agency officials were paying more attention to the relationship between targets and budgets, which was a major focus of Reforming the Forest Service. Before the book was published, most people in the agency were unaware that budgetary aspects of the Knutson-Vandenberg Act and similar laws were influencing their decisions.
“At first, your book made me angry because I thought you were accusing us of being corrupt,” a Forest Service employee told me after a presentation I gave in Portland. “Then I remembered that, just last week, I had signed off on a timber sale because it would allow me to increase funding for wildlife.”
I don’t know how widespread this was, but I sensed that many Forest Service officials had an epiphany of some kind when reading the book. In 1990, Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute sponsored a meeting of environmental, industry, and Forest Service leaders that was moderated by former Senator Dan Evans (R-WA). After listening to industry spokesmen and environmentalists present their beefs about the Forest Service, Dale Robertson got up to speak.
“We can talk a lot about multiple use,” he said, “but, let me tell you, it’s the budget that drives the Forest Service.”
“But Chief,” asked Evans in surprise, “if there was a conflict between the budget and doing the right thing, do you think the agency would follow its budget?”
“Yes, I think we would,” Robertson soberly replied. Robertson had clearly taken to heart my message that incentives were the key to fixing the Forest Service. Over the next few years, he initiated several experiments aimed at changing the agency, including fixing those incentives, in a program called New Perspectives. I applauded those efforts, but for many environmentalists, Robertson didn’t move fast enough. This became a major issue in the early 1990s.
