Forest Planning/Watch had many excellent editors over the years, and I can’t really rank them. But a case could be made that the best editors were people who were writers themselves. One of those was Jeff St. Clair, who had led the group that brought me to Indiana to review the Hoosier Forest plan (his group was called Forest Watch, after which we named the magazine) and then decided to move to Oregon City at about the same time I was moving from Eugene to Oak Grove. He took over as editor in August, 1990.
Soon after that, the CHEC staff was joined by Karen Knudsen, a Colorado native who said she had climbed all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks by the time she was 21, a claim I found fully believable after trying to keep up with her cycling in the mountains of Utah. She had a degree in economics from Colorado College, which forever endeared me to that school as I have always felt she was the smartest person I’ve ever had the privilege of working with.
I could tell her to work on a particular topic and soon she would have a full report. She wrote reports on such topics as the Knutson-Vandenberg Act. I cried a little when she told me she was moving to Montana because its snow was better for skiing than Oregon’s. After she moved there, I received a phone call from the Clark Fork Coalition asking for a job reference. I told them if they didn’t hire her they should shoot themselves. She now is the group’s executive director.
After the Otter Crest conference that had alienated me from the progressive environmentalists, I told Jeff St. Clair that I was thinking of shutting the magazine down. He agreed that it was frustrating to watch the environmental movement be taken over by people who cared less about the environment than they did about making government bigger.
Before any final decisions, however, there was news to cover. President Clinton kept his campaign promise to hold a Northwest Forest Summit in April, 1993, bringing with him Vice-President Gore and six members of the cabinet. More of a hearing than a summit, the one-day meeting took place in three sessions in which the president heard from the timber industry, forest scientists, and environmentalists.
The summit was necessary because a series of court cases had shut down much of the Forest Service’s timber program in the Pacific Northwest in the name of protecting fish and spotted owls. In response, Oregon and Washington Congressional delegations had added a series of riders to the 1985 through 1990 appropriations bills exempting timber sales from judicial review and setting timber targets that the agency was supposed to meet.
Growing controversy over these “riders from hell” kept Congress from extending them after 1990. While mill owners and timber workers wondered why we should shut down the Northwest’s economy for the sake of an owl, scientists were discovering that close to 200 species of wildlife actually depended on old growth and economists were realizing that the Northwest economy had become so diversified that it no longer depended on timber (though many small towns in the region did).
During this time, Jerry Franklin had taken a sabbatical at Yale University and met John Gordon, dean of the Yale School of Forestry (which had been founded with donations from the Pinchot family). Gordon’s research had focused on the biological basis of forest productivity. Together, Franklin and Gordon had developed what they called the “New Forestry,” which placed more of an emphasis on what was left behind after timber cutting than what was removed, on the theory that it was necessary to leave biological material to maintain future productivity. It also recognized that old growth itself was an important component of productivity; for various reasons, if all old growth disappeared, the remaining trees wouldn’t grow as fast.
The controversy over the owl led the Forest Service to create a scientific team consisting of Franklin, Gordon, Jack Ward Thomas, and Norm Johnson, the author of FORPLAN. This so-called “gang of four” recognized that the spotted owl was a key indicator species for old growth. While not the only species dependent on old-growth Douglas-fir, if a plan that would save the owl would also save the other old-growth dependent species as the other species tended to have less stringent habitat requirements. The Northwest Forest Plan that they wrote was really a series of documents but the plan itself was pretty much fleshed out by 1991.
Despite the shared credit, the plan was really Franklin’s. The spotted owl and Douglas-fir old-growth was found mainly west of the Cascade mountains in Washington, Oregon, and northern California, where Franklin had done most of his work. Thomas’ expertise was on forests east of the Cascade mountains. Johnson’s main role was to use agency data and his computer skills to estimate the effects of the plan on national forest and Bureau of Land Management timber sale levels. Gordon’s main role was to provide the patina of respectability that comes with being associated with Yale University.
Implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan, said timber industry leaders, “would be the death knell to the industry.” In reality, the industry was deeply divided between companies such as Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific, which had their own land bases, and small local mills that relied almost exclusively on federal timber sales. Since the Northwest Forest Plan relied almost entirely on those same federal forests to provide the old growth needed to protect the spotted owl, it would actually enhance the values of land-owning companies since it would take away much of their competition.
With thousands of timber jobs at stake, debates were heated. Some of my friends, including Andy Kerr and Andy Stahl, were hung in effigy at timber rallies, though I never had that honor. This was the timber war that Clinton promised to negotiate.
My own message, which was that the Forest Service was a creature of its incentives just like everyone else and should not be trusted as a neutral party, was lost in the crowd, or more likely lost in the progressive takeover of the environmental movement and, via the election of Bill Clinton, the departments of Agriculture and the Interior. The administration’s failure to understand this point made it impossible for the forest summit to find a possible win-win solution. Instead, it became either-or: either that portion of the timber industry that was dependent on federal timber sales would survive or the environmentalists would win.
As members of the press, Jeff St. Clair and I were allowed to attend the summit, but that just meant that we could be in the same convention center where the president was hearing from the interest groups and experts. They were in a room that held, perhaps, 75 people, but with the press corps being many times that number, most were in another room entirely watching the summit on television monitors. Each press organization was allowed to send a photographer into the actual meeting room for about an hour, and as publisher I pulled rank and took photos of Franklin and other experts talking to Clinton, Gore, and the cabinet members.
Forest Watch magazine probably provided the best coverage of the summit for anyone who wasn’t able to attend. We put out the largest issue in our history — 60 pages long vs. our usual 28 to 32 — including statements from Clinton, Gore, and eleven other people who spoke at the summit, and commentaries by journalists, environmentalists, economists, and Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR), who had taken Jim Weaver’s seat in Congress.
The president was well briefed and gave a good performance at the conference. At the time, the Speaker of the House was Thomas Foley, a representative from eastern Washington who was sympathetic to the timber industry. Foley was desperate to keep the subject of the conference confined to the western part of the Northwest. But, when National Wildlife Federation ecologist Rick Brown was speaking, Clinton specifically asked him to cover the east side as well. This opened the door for the eventual expansion of the Northwest Forest Plan to the entire northwest, not just the westside.
After hearing from the industry, environmentalists, and scientists, Clinton appeared to took no sides. Instead, he referred the controversy back to the Forest Service to decide. I fretted that this meant there would be no real change in policy. However, turning the issue over to the Forest Service didn’t mean Chief Dale Robertson, who Clinton didn’t trust (and who wasn’t invited to speak at the summit), but Jerry Franklin and the gang of four. They were allowed to flesh out their plan with more science, more money, and funding for job-retraining programs to buy off the timber workers. In effect, the president had decided to kill a large part of the timber industry that was dependent on federal forests.
As I noted in a previous chapter, Franklin once told me that scientists “were the worst” when it came to maximizing their budgets, and now he was able to prove it. Historically, the Forest Service had set aside something less than half a percent of its land as “experimental forests” for research purposes. Given presidential authority, the gang of four wrote a plan that set aside something like a quarter of the federal forests for research.
The plan also funded some specific research that I considered to be vanity projects. One would study the biology of the upper canopies of old-growth Douglas-fir. Biologists had discovered that, far from being biological deserts, old-growth trees created their ecosystems among the giant branches they had grown. A rodent known as the red tree vole lived its entire life in those branches.
To study those ecosystems in greater detail, Franklin proposed to build a 250-foot-tall tower crane — the kind usually used to build skyscrapers — in an old-growth forest to allow researchers to access and monitor the upper canopies. Franklin had apparently heard of a similar crane used to study Brazilian rain forests when he was on his Yale sabbatical. Purchase and installation of the crane cost about a million dollars, and the Forest Service probably spent at least million paying researchers and maintaining the crane over sixteen years. While I’m sure it was interesting, the research did nothing to resolve the old-growth debate and seemed to me to be just taking advantage of the opportunity created by giving the gang of four that much power.
Regardless of what the gang of four did, the Forest Service seemed ready for a change. Although the Northwest Forest Plan only covered about a dozen national forests, timber sales were falling nationwide, having declined by 49 percent by the time Clinton took office. My sense was that, far from resenting the spotted owl, Forest Service employees welcomed it as another excuse to reduce the pressure of meeting timber targets.
Despite these changes, Clinton replaced Dale Robertson with Jack Ward Thomas in December, 1993, eight months after the summit. Thomas may have been a brilliant researcher, but he spent his entire career in one region of the country, and hadn’t taken the usual route to the chief’s chair of working at various levels in the Forest Service hierarchy. As chief, he was in over his head, and the administration took advantage of this to do end runs around the usual chain of command to please its environmental constituents. After he retired in 1996, Thomas wrote a book bitterly complaining about the way administration officials would call his district rangers and demand that they withdraw timber sales. That’s probably why he stayed in the job for less than three years.
Meanwhile, the progressives who took over the Department of Agriculture had become budget maximizers just like almost everyone else who runs a government agency. I made a few trips to Washington hoping to get them thinking about the incentives they were creating for agency managers. The responses I got were dismaying.
“We thought about asking Congress to repeal the Knutson-Vandenberg Act,” one political appointee told me, “but we realized doing so would reduce the Forest Service’s budget, so we didn’t.”
“Why do we need to reform the Forest Service?” another asked. “I talked to the chief the other day, and he said its budget is growing.”
And then there was my favorite: “Forest planning would have worked if we had been allowed to plan all of the private lands around the national forests too.” Yes, because a plan which is too complicated when it covers a million acres is somehow simplified if it covers several million acres.
There was one hope on the horizon: the Reinventing Government program. A book by that title published just a few days after Clinton was inaugurated promised that, in spite of the fall of the Soviet Union, government could be made to work by instilling an “entrepreneurial spirit” into the public sector. The progressives loved it because it apparently answered all of the objections to big government.
Just before the Northwest Forest Summit, Clinton asked Gore to run a “national performance review” that would make government “work better and cost less.” One of the authors of Reinventing Government was a key advisor to the program. Gore held a series of conferences and town hall meetings inviting the public to suggest ideas for improving government. By September, he had a report with 384 general recommendations and 1,250 specific actions aimed at improving dozens of government agencies.
In the end, they only demonstrated why big government doesn’t work. The federal government consists of hundreds of agencies that, at that time, collectively spent nearly $50,000 every second. (In 2019 it is spending $140,000 per second.) Overwhelmed with hundreds of ways to make these agencies work better and cost less, Gore effectively gave up. In particular, he threw out nearly all of the ideas for “working better” and all but a few of the ideas for “costing less.”
Instead of trying to implement 1,250 or more specific actions, the administration simply issued orders to all federal agencies: reduce their budgets by a specific percent and let go of a certain number of employees. To keep bureaucracies from becoming top heavy, a certain percentage of the employees that the agencies laid off had to come from the central offices. This resulted in empty desks, but the agencies kept the positions open, filling them again after a couple of years when Congress started nudging their budgets upwards.
Little or no effort was made to instill an “entrepreneurial spirit” in the remaining bureaucrats. As a result, while the administration bragged that it had saved taxpayers so many billions of dollars, the savings were for only a short term. A real reinvention of government would have been permanent.
Meanwhile, I was trying to reinvent my career. I was dimly aware that, with forest planning ending and timber sales declining, there was less demand for my services. I was much more keenly aware that my approach no longer fit in with an environmental community that was dominated by progressives. I was surprised when Greenpeace asked me to write a report about reforming the Forest Service, but less surprise when the radical group simply rejected out of hand my recommendation that the agency be allowed to charge fair market value for recreation.
While my work with environmentalists was winding down, Jeff St. Clair’s was taking off. His coverage of the Northwest Forest Summit had caught the attention of Alexander Cockburn, an investigative journalist who had started a magazine called Counterpunch, and the two of them co-authored many articles and, eventually, several books.
Before the forest summit, Jeff had seemed to agree with me that it was time to stop publishing Forest Watch. Perhaps he was just trying to placate me, or perhaps his feelings changed with the attention gained from the forest summit. In any case, when I announced that August, 1993, would be the last issue, he protested. That led to a schism that I deeply regret to this day.
We agreed that I would move out of our joint offices and he would keep publishing a monthly magazine. I loaned him desks, computers, and other furniture that had been purchased by CHEC for the magazine.
In the meantime, the Oregon Natural Resources Council was undergoing its own schism. Jim Monteith, who had run the organization for nearly two decades, was a workaholic who had developed a reputation for being late to meetings and overpromising what he could do. In particular, people were upset that he was unable to raise the money to sustain an organization that had grown from a couple of people earning $50 a month to a large staff that expected regular salaries, health insurance, and other benefits. Fed up, the group fired him at about the same time as I wanted to shut down Forest Watch.
Monteith approached St. Clair and promised him that he could raise enough money to sustain a Forest Watch-like magazine. I wondered why Jeff believed him since he had been unable to raise enough money to keep his job at ONRC. In any case, I blame Monteith for the clash that followed.
Instead of publishing a monthly news magazine, I wanted to transition to a quarterly investigative report. That meant I wanted to keep the magazine’s mailing list and subscriber base. I viewed whatever Jeff produced as a new publication, so I let him have the mailing list but not the expiration dates. I also asked the Postal Service to forward any mail addressed to Forest Watch to my new address. If I received any mail from people wishing to subscribe to Jeff’s new magazine, I had planned to give it to Jeff.
Things came to a head when Jeff cancelled my mail-forwarding order with the post office. Angered, I confiscated the computers that I had loaned Jeff for his magazine. I didn’t need them; I only needed one for me and one for Vickie. But I felt like he was trying to steal something from me.
Jeff responded by writing an extremely nasty and far from factual article about me in his inaugural issue. As I recall, he accused me of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan and various other insane organizations. Our subscriber base essentially split in two: the half that couldn’t stand my free-market leanings went with Jeff, while the half that wanted in-depth research went with me. Many years later, I eventually reconciled with both St. Clair and Monteith, and am sorry I overreacted back then.
Over the next several years, I did some incredible research and published it all in my quarterly magazine. Unfortunately, the small circulation meant that few people were reading it. More important, since I wasn’t doing the research for a client base, there was no one to follow up with grassroots organizing, lobbying, or otherwise trying to make use of the research. Nevertheless, I was proud of some of the work I did. In view of my iconoclastic direction, I called the new quarterly Different Drummer.
