36. An Invitation from Yale

In the spring of 1998 I received a phone call from someone at the Yale School of Forestry. The school was offering fellowships to people who had worked in the conservation movement. The fellowships–lasting one semester per year alternating with a fellowship to someone from the timber industry–were given out on a competitive basis, but my caller informed me that if I applied he guaranteed I would get it.

That was very flattering, though it turned out he had previously made the same offer to my friend Andy Stahl, who had garnered more headlines than I had during the spotted owl wars. Andy couldn’t do it, but he suggested my name. I applied, was accepted, and made plans to spend fall semester, 1998, in New Haven.

As part of the fellowship, I was encouraged, but not required, to offer a course relating my experiences to students. There were also funds to bring in several guest speakers. The school would provide me with an office, an apartment, and an intern. In addition, they would pay me more for four months than I had ever previously earned in two years. According to my friends, it wasn’t more than I was worth, but I was still living in voluntary poverty as a part of being an environmental activist, even though I was no longer really accepted in the environmental community.

As it happened, I was also interested in moving out of the Portland area. So, after returning from Africa, Vickie and I packed up almost all of our belongings into storage units and put our Oak Grove home up for sale. Then we loaded up our minivan with the essentials we would need for four months in New Haven and drove across the country with our dog, Chip.

The Yale School of Forestry had been created by an endowment from the Pinchot family when Gifford Pinchot was orchestrating his takeover of what would become the Forest Service. Unlike schools like Oregon State, which provided undergraduates with on-the-ground forest management training, Yale was exclusively a graduate program that focused on policy.

John Gordon, Jerry Franklin’s friend and one of the “gang of four” who wrote the Northwest old-growth plan for President Clinton, had been dean of Yale’s forestry school. I remember being impressed by his deep voice that would have been perfectly suited for radio or some other career in the entertainment industry. As I arrived, however, Gordon was stepping down and his place was taken by William Smith, who served as acting dean while they made a worldwide search for someone prestigious enough to head a program at Yale.

After I arrived, I received invitations from many of the professors to meet and chat. Too many of the conversations followed the same pattern. “I understand you believe in markets rather than regulation.” Yes. “Would you call yourself a . . . libertarian?” Yes. I felt like I was an alien being put on display.

I put together a class called “incentive-based conservation” that focused on how market incentives could be used instead of government regulation to protect resources. Each week of the class covered some issue that I had covered in my research and writings: the Forest Service, Park Service, endangered species, urban planning, and so forth.

The students who took the course were excited to learn about markets and incentives. Several told me that they knew such ideas existed, but no one at Yale ever mentioned them, so this was an opportunity that they didn’t want to pass up.

The guest speakers were also well received. They included Randy Simmons, the head of the political science department at Utah State University who had written a book on endangered species; John Baden, from Bozeman; Andy Stahl; and several more. In addition to the class, the speakers attracted many more students, though few of the professors, at a public forum. I invited the students taking the class to each pick one speaker and I would take them and the speaker out to dinner after the forums. In fact, I paid for the students’ dinners even if they came to more than one.

The most interesting part of the course proved to be a field trip that most of the class was able to attend. The field trip was arranged by my intern, who I could tell didn’t really buy into my incentive-based ideas, but he worked hard to make everything work.

First, we visited with the district ranger for the Androscoggins Ranger District of the White Mountain National Forest. When my intern told me the ranger was George Pozzuto, I got a little worried, as I had encountered him when he was a forest planner on the Olympic National Forest. Although forest planning rules encouraged public involvement during all stages of the planning process, he was annoyed that I visited their offices and asked for planning documents before the draft environmental impact statement had been published. They were on a deadline, he said, so couldn’t I come back later, preferably after the plan was done? Of course, waiting until the plan was done meant I would have much less of an opportunity to influence it, so I refused to leave. Now that we were going to meet again, I wondered if he would feel any resentments.

As it turned out, I couldn’t have found a better spokesman for my ideas. He told the students that he strongly supported recreation fees and my other market-based reforms of the Forest Service. In particular, he suspected that he could run his entire district out of recreation fees if only he were allowed to charge them. He would be glad to rely on those fees rather than tax dollars because the latter came with so many political strings attached.

Next, we went to up into the national forest where the Appalachian Mountain Club operated a series of lodges and other recreation facilities. After spending a night at the lodge, we met with lodge mangers, who turned out to be graduates of the Yale Forestry School, so they were only too happy to show us around.

The students quickly realized that the club leaders were somewhat schizophrenic about market-based conservation. They understood very well how markets were working for them, producing income that funded their operations and conservation activities. When it came to anything else, however, they were just as prescriptive and regulatory as any other environmental group. Afterwards, some of the students apologized to me that some of Yale’s alumni were so uneducated about markets.

That evening we drove to Ashland, Maine and spent the night at a resort that was usually patronized by hunters. One of the things the resort did was bear baiting: they would buy hundreds of day-old doughnuts and leave them in the woods. During hunting season, hunters could go to the bait stations and have a pretty good chance of shooting a bear. The students thought this was unethical, but on talking with the guides, they realized, as one later said, they probably knew more about bear biology than most biologists, and their techniques were ensuring a sustained yield of bears just as big game hunting in Zambia was ensuring a sustained yield of elephants. That was a bonus that I don’t think anyone expected from the tour.

The next day we took a tour of the North Maine Woods, a thoroughly fascinating example of property rights in action. It consists of 155 townships, each township being 36 square miles, for a total of about 3.5 million acres. Not only do the 3.5 million acres have multiple owners, each square mile had multiple owners, and the ownership of the townships was undivided. This meant that one person or company might own 5 percent of one square mile, 25 percent of another, and so forth. Whenever anything that was done on one township that earned money, the money would be divided among the owners according to the share each owned.

The cooperation required for undivided ownerships of individual square miles led to cooperation between owners of adjacent blocks. This cooperation was expressed in a series of agreements between the owners. For example, if the owners of one square mile needed to build a road across someone else’s square mile in order to access their own land, the amounts they would pay for rights of way and timber removed were determined in advance, so there was no need to negotiate each individual right of way.

At some point, the owners realized that the woods were valuable not just for timber but for recreation as well. The woods have a limited number of entrances, so they set up pay stations at each entrance and charged fees for camping, hunting, and other recreation. At the time, they weren’t trying to earn a profit from the recreation but instead just to cover their costs. However, it was clear that many of the owners had modified their practices to make their lands more suitable for wildlife and recreation.

The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management often complain that their checkerboard ownership of some parts of the West where railroads had been given every other square mile of land made public land management difficult. Yet the North Maine Woods shows that it was possible for multiple owners to cooperate on a large scale as well as the ways that recreation fees could influence management.

This field trip was definitely the highlight of the course, and the students who participated returned with a solidarity that some of students who couldn’t make it failed to gain. Some of them told me that they left posters announcing “Incentives Rule!” in various bulletin boards around the school.

While I was at Yale, I wanted to do research on urban planning to follow up the work I had done in Oregon. I discovered that Yale’s library had many planning journals and publications up until the mid-1970s, then they seemed to have cancelled their subscriptions and stopped purchasing books. Apparently, the university decided it didn’t need a transportation engineering or planning department after that time.

Vickie and I also took the opportunity to visit New England cities, towns, and countryside. I remember it rained one day in September and I told Vickie we had better hurry to do some sightseeing. She told me there was no hurry.

“The weather here doesn’t work the way it does in Oregon,” said Vickie, who had grown up on the East Coast. “It might rain, but then the sun will return.” Having spent almost all of my life in the Willamette Valley, which is socked in with clouds and rain for most of the year, this was a new concept for me.

In any case, we visited New London, Providence, Danbury, Middlebury, and other cities and towns in the region. We were delighted to find Liuzzi’s Food Market in North Haven, which made their own mozzarella and wonderful sandwiches. Connecticut is notable for having the highest population densities in its rural areas of any state — about 175 people per square mile when we were there, compared with under 10 in many western states — but driving through the rural areas never felt crowded.

While there, I was invited to give a seminar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, so we drove up to Cambridge. The Kennedy School was an interesting contrast with Yale. While the professors at Yale may have been doing important research, they didn’t seem interested in finding out what anyone else was doing, and rarely attended the guest lectures I offered or even went out of their way to talk with me after our first meeting. Kennedy, on the other hand, pretty much demanded that all of the professors and visiting fellows participate in the seminars offered by other professors and fellows. The result was more of a free exchange of ideas than I experienced at Yale.

Despite this, my experience was so positive that I was willing to stay for a second semester and actually found someone willing to fund it. However, the school said it didn’t have room for another fellow since the office I was using was to be taken by the industry fellow.

As it happened, during one of the Forest Options Group meetings, Sally Fairfax had told me, “If I had known you were interested in a fellowship, I would have invited you to Berkeley.” My funder was as willing to fund a fellowship in Berkeley as Yale, so to Berkeley I went for winter semester, 1999.