Hal Salwasser R.I.P.

The Forest Service has historically been dominated by foresters and engineers, so a wildlife biologist who joined the agency in 1978 wouldn’t expect to advance very far. But after getting a Ph.D. in wildlife ecology from the University of California at Berkeley, Hal Salwasser went to work for the Forest Service and quickly moved up within the agency.

In the 1980s, just a few years after he began working for the Forest Service, he was the agency’s deputy national director of wildlife and fisheries. In 1990, Forest Service Chief Dale Robertson was searching for a way out of the environmental controversies that beset the agency and asked Salwasser to run what Robertson called the “New Perspectives” program. Salwasser made an earnest effort to find new ways of managing the national forests. In one sense, the program was a dead end, but in another sense it contributed to major changes including an 80 percent reduction in timber sales.

Salwasser then left the agency for a short time to become the Boone & Crockett Professor at the University of Montana. In this chair, Salwasser not only taught students but hunted and fished with the 100 wealthy members of this exclusive club. “Am I having fun, or what?” he enthused.

As it happened, shortly after Salwasser left the Forest Service, another wildlife biologist, Jack Thomas, was named chief of the agency–the first non-forester or engineer to hold the position. Thomas soon asked Salwasser to be Regional Forester for the Northern Rockies region, which included Montana and northern Idaho. Salwasser was also president of the Wildlife Society in 1993-1994. (Coincidentally, when Thomas left the Forest Service in 1996 , he took Salwasser’s old job as Boone & Crockett professor.)
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In 2000, Salwasser left the Forest Service for good to be dean of the Oregon State University College of Forestry. This was another first for a wildlife biologist, and especially surprising considering that OSU was considered one of the more traditional sawlog-forestry schools in the country.

In 2006, Salwasser stumbled when he was associated with an effort to persuade Science magazine not to publish a peer-reviewed article by OSU graduate students that reported ecological damage from salvage logging following a wildfire. One of the professors argued that the article was politically motivated and represented a failure of the peer review process. What started out as a scientific debate quickly descended into a debate on academic freedom. Salwasser soon apologized for the school’s involvement and affirmed his support for academic freedom.

In 2009, when Oregon State got the strange idea that all of its eleven “colleges” should be under one of four “divisions,” Salwasser became the executive dean of the division of earth systems science, which included forestry, agriculture, oceanic, and atmospheric sciences. Last year, at the age of 68, Salwasser retired as dean of the college of forestry, but planned to keep his executive dean position until the end of this year. Unfortunately, he never got to enjoy retirement, as he died “of natural causes” last week.

Elsewhere, the Antiplanner has argued that the tremendous changes that took place in the Forest Service in the early 1990s were as much the result of people inside the agency as of outside pressures. Salwasser was one of the unsung heroes who oversaw those changes and, in doing so, ended up reshaping the forestry profession itself.