26. The Counterrevolution

In 1975, I set out to replace Gordon Robinson’s “if it’s pretty, it’s good; if it’s ugly, it’s bad” mantra with a more scientific approach to environmental issues such as wilderness, timber cutting, and public land management in general. I was fortunate to work with James Monteith, whose background in biology gave him a similar approach, as well as other experts and specialists.

By 1990, it was clear that we had changed the environmental movement from one based on emotion to one based on science and technology. It was also becoming clear just how successful we were, as national forest timber sales were declining and people inside the Forest Service, from top to bottom, were trying to reform the agency from the inside. We had no idea that, by 2001, timber sales would fall by 85 percent, but we could still feel good about our work.

Unfortunately, two events would undo the revolution that had taken place within the environmental movement: the fall of the Soviet Union and the election of Bill Clinton to the White House. When the Soviet Union fell, it appeared to be a victory of free markets over government planning. “Socialism” was considered a tainted idea, just like communism and fascism. Polls showed that the vast majority of Americans agreed with the statement that “government messes everything up.”

Postmortems of the soviet empire revealed that this statement applied to environmental issues as well as other government functions. The soviet economy was based on centrally planned targets, and anything that got in the way of those targets, whether it was clean air and water or the safe operation of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, was ignored.

Despite this, polls showed that the environment was one of the few areas in which Americans still believed government action was needed. This drew people who still believed in big government to the environmental movement. We suddenly had an influx of people who were very inquisitive, very friendly, and who promised to help us out. When we asked them where they came from, they said “the labor movement.” If we had called them socialists, they might have denied it, not that it would have mattered as the environmental movement at the time didn’t have any litmus tests: Marxists or Friedmanites were all welcome.

Today, these people identify themselves as progressives. That term goes back to the 1890s, which not coincidentally is the same time that the national forests were first created. In fact, the Forest Service might be considered the first and most successful federal agency to come out of the Progressive Movement. As a result, I knew a lot more about progressives than most people.

Unlike socialists, progressives didn’t necessarily believe in government takeover of the means of production; they just wanted to control that production. Forest Service founder Gifford Pinchot in particular believed that only the federal government was capable of doing the conservation work he believed necessary; neither the states nor private enterprise measured up in his mind.

“I believe in free enterprise,” wrote Pinchot, in a statement that could easily said today by a Barack Obama or Elizabeth Warren, “freedom for the common man to think and work and rise to the limit of his ability, with due regard to the rights of others. But in what Concentrated Wealth means by free enterprise—freedom to use and abuse the common man—I do not believe. I object to the law of the jungle.”

Originally, the national forests (or forest reserves, as they were called before 1905) were managed by the Department of the Interior, while a budding young progressive named Gifford Pinchot headed the Bureau of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture. At the time, the bureau was little more than an extension service encouraging private landowners to practice forestry rather than just cutting and running.

Pinchot’s family was wealthy, and part of that wealth came from cutting timber in Ohio and then disposing of the land, as no one bothered with sustained yield forestry in those days. Perhaps out of guilt, Gifford’s father suggested that he study forestry in France, where he could learn to manage forests rather than just cut and run.

Pinchot’s goal when he returned to the United States was to prove that forest management could earn a profit. “I will take a forest and I will make it pay,” he vowed. As head of the Bureau of Forestry, he noted that the Department of the Interior was losing money managing the forest reserves, and he used that fact to persuade fellow plutocrat Theodore Roosevelt to hand the reserves over to the Bureau of Forestry, which he promptly renamed the Forest Service.

Pinchot was an inspiring leader; though he was chief of the Forest Service for only five years, he had an influence on every chief who came after him until he died in 1946 and, in fact, had met and known every man who became chief after that until 1979. However, he never “made the forests pay” during his lifetime, and the agency’s reputation as one that earned a profit was based on a few years in the 1950s and two in the 1960s.

Roosevelt, of course, handed the White House over to Taft in 1908. Pinchot didn’t find the Taft administration to be sufficiently supportive of his platform of federal control. In particular, Taft’s Secretary of the Interior continued to sell federal lands that Congress hadn’t reserved for federal management. Such sales were merely complying with Congressional law, but that wasn’t good enough for Pinchot, who openly criticized the Interior secretary and was deliberately insubordinate enough that Taft was forced to fire him.

Taft’s action brought Roosevelt, who had been hunting in Africa, back to the United States. Indeed, it was probably Pinchot’s firing that led Roosevelt to decide to run for president as a Progressive Party candidate in 1912. Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican vote, leading to the election of Woodrow Wilson, arguably the worst president of the twentieth century. Wilson himself ran on a progressive platform and then put people in jail for belonging to a political party he didn’t approve of, promoted segregation, and blundered the nation into a mistaken war. Pinchot himself later went on to be elected governor of Pennsylvania, the highest elected official ever who ran under the Progressive Party ticket.

In the meantime, being fired made Pinchot a martyr, which is exactly what he wanted. A few months after losing his job (which, being wealthy, he hardly needed for the income), he held a National Conservation Congress that drew 10,000 delegates and their friends to St. Paul, Minnesota. Although President Taft was invited to speak as a courtesy (and Pinchot pointedly did not attend), Pinchot mainly invited speakers who supported his platform of federal control of natural resources.

Since the conference was being held in St. Paul, Pinchot invited Great Northern Railway founder James J. Hill to speak as well. Pinchot had previously heard Hill speak about soil conservation at the White House and expected Hill to repeat that speech in St. Paul.

Instead, as he was practically the only speaker on the agenda who didn’t support Pinchot’s agenda of centralized control, Hill gave a fiery speech advocating for local, not national, management of natural resources. The problems with national control, said Hill, were that “The machine is too big and too distant; its operation is slow, cumbrous, and costly.” On the other hand, the “home people” were “just as honest, just as patriotic, and infinitely better informed on local conditions than the national government can possibly be.”

In a direct swipe at Pinchot, Hill observed that, “Of certain administrators, it might be said they make a desert and call it conservation.” While the national forests were losing money, he pointed out, states such as Minnesota were earning a profit on their forests, profits that helped fund local schools.

“The West believes in forest preservation,” Hill continued. “But it believes practically and not theoretically. It realizes that a good thing may cost too much, and is not ignorant of the extravagant financial tendency of every federal department and bureau.”

Pinchot responded by having a later speaker, Francis Heney, attack Hill for being a hypocrite, claiming that Hill himself was among the people “responsible for the great waste in the natural resources of our country.

“Do you know what we gave Mr. Hill to build that railway?” Heney asked. “We gave to Mr. Hill 60,000,000 acres of land–a strip 2,000 miles long, 40 miles in width through the territories and 20 miles in width through the states.” Heney argued that people such as Hill should build railroads “out of a spirit of patriotism” and not in anticipation of profit.

Heney had obviously confused Hill’s Great Northern, which was built without land grants or other subsidies, with its competitor the Northern Pacific, which had received the land grant Heney described. “The Great Northern never received a dollar in money nor an acre of land from the federal government,” Hill angrily told a reporter. “If Mr. Heney’s charge relates to the Northern Pacific instead of the Great Northern, the federal grant to the Northern Pacific was made fifteen years before I went into the railroad business and at a time when I was working for $75 a month.”

Heney’s claim that patriotism, not profit, should have been the motive for building railroads revealed an underlying belief that the public should rely on altruism, not the profit motive, to get things done. Progressive presumed that, once trained and in government service, experts such as foresters and engineers would automatically work “for the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time.” This, in turn, allowed the experts to quell any criticism of what they were doing by claiming it was for “the greater good.” The Forest Service’s experience with the Knutson-Vandenberg Act proved, however, that bureaucratic opinions of what was the greater good could be heavily colored by what happened to be best for the bureaucracy’s good.

Although Pinchot’s Forest Service managed more than 100 million acres (and in later year nearly 200 million acres) of land, that wasn’t enough for him; he wanted to also control how all private landowners managed their forests. This continued to be a Forest Service goal for many years. In fact, it was incorporated into a New Deal law that was struck down by the Supreme Court, but the Forest Service continued to work towards this goal until President Eisenhower quietly informed then Chief Richard McArdle that it should give it up, and McArdle did. Eisenhower was the first president to take office after Pinchot’s death, and I suspect no president before him could have convinced the Forest Service to turn away from one of a still-living Pinchot’s objectives.

Eighty years after Pinchot was fired, the environmental movement saw an influx of Progressives whose goal was not environmental protection but federal control. I viewed the 187 million acres of national forests as a wildly diverse set of ecosystems, each of which required their own set of management tools and prescriptions. This meant local managers needed to understand those ecosystems and respond to their needs.

My proposals for marketizing the Forest Service would make local managers responsive to the relative revenues and costs of managing forests for timber, wildlife, livestock, recreation, minerals, and watershed. Timber cutting might be justified in some places to enhance wildlife habitat, buffer adjacent lands against fire, or even just to provide valuable products when it could be done without damaging other forest resources.

The progressives joining the environmental movement didn’t have time for such nuances. Instead, they knew exactly how every acre of the national forests should be managed, so why risk the possibility that markets might come up with the “wrong” answer? After I gave a workshop on the importance of incentives in public resource management, one wrote me to say, “Thanks to your workshop I now believe in incentives, with just a few minor prescriptions: no logging, no grazing, no mining, and no off-road vehicles.”

“Zero cut,” meaning no timber cutting from federal lands, became the mantra of the progressives. Where the environmental movement of the 1980s grew strong by demonizing people like James Watt and John Crowell, the progressives gained power by demonizing other environmentalists who disagreed with their zero-cut platform.

The Quincy Library Group, for example, consisted of dedicated environmentalists such as Michael Jackson — an attorney who had won an important lawsuit over Sierra Nevada water issues — and Mike and Sally Yost, who had both dedicated years of their lives to the wilderness movement. They worked with local timber companies to develop a plan that preserved roadless areas in the Plumas National Forest while it provided wildfire buffer zones around the forest through selection cutting of timber within those zones. The progressives viciously attacked the group, claiming Jackson and the Yosts weren’t “real” environmentalists and had only posed as such to sell out the environment to the timber industry.

A more sensible point of view might have prevailed, but then the second event happened: the election of Bill Clinton. With Republicans in the White House for the previous twelve years, major environmental groups such as the Wilderness Society and Sierra Club had grown their membership and funding through direct mail campaigns claiming that the environment was threatened by the likes of Watt and Crowell, and only donations to their organizations could save it.

Much of the increased funding that they received went not to new environmental programs but to increase the salaries of their lobbyists. In fact, the groups engaged in bidding wars for their staff, with Sierra Club staffers moving to the National Audubon Society, Wilderness Society staffers moving to the Sierra Club, and so forth. “We believe that our DC employees should be paid enough to be able to buy a house in Georgetown in ten years,” one Sierra Club staffer told Monteith. DC real estate was less expensive then than it is today, but still — a house in Georgetown?

Of course, none of this money trickled down to state wilderness groups such as the Oregon Natural Resources Council née Oregon Wilderness Coalition (and now called Oregon Natural). The Sierra Club in the 1970s had prompted the formation of these groups in almost every western state, knowing that a local group might be more politically acceptable than a national one, especially a national one with the reputation of being as extreme as the Sierra Club.

In fact, the local groups ended up being a lot more extreme than the national ones, which was a continuous source of tension as the national staffers considered the local groups to be “unrealistic” while the local groups feared the national ones would sell them out to get some compromise bills passed. Of the state groups, the Oregon Natural Resources Council was the biggest and most powerful, having fostered some one hundred local activist groups, each promoting wilderness or other preservation of some piece of land or forest. The local groups were also less dependent on direct mail fundraising than the national ones.

Since the message of those direct mail campaigns was “the environment is threatened by Republicans,” as soon as a Democrat took the White House, the people who were making the contributions figured the problem was solved and dropped their members. This led to a financial crisis for many of the big environmental groups, particularly the Wilderness Society, National Audubon, Natural Resources Defense Council, and several others.

Into the breach stepped foundations, which previously hadn’t been too interested in funding the environmental movement. Suddenly, led by the Pew Charitable Trust, a whole group of foundations became willing to contribute. However, there was a string attached: staffers at Pew believed that the environment movement was too chaotic, and they demanded that all the groups that wanted funding meet together to form a strategy that they would all follow. Only groups that followed that strategy would be funded.

I don’t know whether Pew was working in lockstep with the progressives or not. Pew staffers visited my office in Portland and listened politely but without enthusiasm as I pitched incentives. Whatever their political beliefs, Pew’s demand contributed to the progressive takeover of the environmental movement. Anyone who disagreed with the progressives was drummed out as sell outs, leaving only those willing to go along with their top-down policies.

The Pew demand that all groups follow the same strategy seriously weakened the environmental movement. Later, when I started working with libertarian groups, I realized that the modern environmental and libertarian movements had both started in the late 1960s. Both built on foundations that ran deep in America’s psyche: conservation for one and freedom for the other. If anything, freedom had the longer history. Yet the environmental movement had been so wildly successful that everyone claimed to be an environmentalist, while libertarians were regarded as somewhat kookie.

The difference, I perceived, was that the environmentalists welcomed everyone in. I remember the Oregon Environmental Council had nuclear engineers who were fighting logging at the same time as it had loggers who were fighting nuclear power. I remember people who attended Oregon Wilderness Coalition meetings who were open Marxists being welcomed as much as my free-market views. The goal of environmental protection, not the means, was what counted.

In contrast, the libertarians had all sorts of litmus tests that people had to pass before they would be accepted. The Libertarian Party is the only political party in the United States that required people to take an oath to join. People might support 90 percent of libertarian ideas, but if they disagreed with the other 10 percent, they were shunned. I remember in 2016 when Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, one of the two most libertarian members of the United States Senate (the other being Arizona’s Jeff Flake), made a run for president, most libertarians turned away. One of them told me that she hated Paul because he wasn’t as perfect a libertarian as his father, and she would rather see Hillary Clinton be elected than Paul.

The environmental movement had grown strong because it was diverse. Different environmental groups would try different strategies. The ones that were successful would be emuluated by others. Pew’s demand that all environmentalists follow a single strategy would end that diversity.

The timber wars had become enough of national issue that, when a candidate from Arkansas came to Portland campaigning for the presidency during the 1992 primary season, he promised that, if he won, he would hold a “timber summit” in Portland to resolve the old-growth issue.

Prompted in part by Clinton’s promise, reporters flocked to the Northwest, including a writer for Newsweek who was doing a cover story about “the war over the West.” She was fascinated by my incentives arguments, but the magazine’s editors wanted a passion play between jobs and spotted owls and cut that part from her story. As compensation, she listed me among “twenty people to watch in the West,” and I was not only first listed but one of the few with a photo.

While that was gratifying, it didn’t help against the progressives. In December, 1992, a few weeks before Clinton took office, CHEC held a national conference on what the Clinton administration should do to reform the Forest Service. We received a small grant to cover the travel expenses of environmental leaders from all over the country to the Inn at Otter Crest, a resort on the Oregon Coast.

Unfortunately, the foundation that gave us the grant insisted that we invite the leaders of the progressives, who promptly took over the conference. “We don’t need to worry about incentives,” they said. “We’re going to fire the chief and run the Forest Service from Washington, DC.”

I thought that was a terrible idea: Chief Robertson hadn’t acquitted himself well over the Mumma affair, but he was the one who was experimenting with pilot forests and new perspectives. Despite Congressional mandates to keep cutting timber, Robertson had also allowed timber sales to drop by almost 50 percent, from 11.3 billion in 1987 to 5.8 billion in 1991.

Since Taft fired Pinchot and lost the presidency in the next election because of it, no president had ever fired a chief of the Forest Service. Instead, the chiefs served until they felt like retiring and then had a large say in picking their successor (who was technically chosen by the Secretary of Agriculture, but the secretary was traditionally was more concerned about hog futures than lumber). If Clinton fired the chief, it would set a precedent allowing the next pro-timber president to install an anti-environmental chief.

As the conference was winding down, I went outside to look at the ocean view. The progressives had never tried to drum me out of the movement — I had too much credibility for that — but I realized that I couldn’t work with an environmental movement that was based on top-down planning. In my mind, I was still an environmentalist, but I no longer fit in with what the movement had become.