In the late 1970s, I wrote comments on enough draft plans for people in the Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service to know who I was, but not enough to have a major impact on the plans. But I found or developed three tools that helped.

The first was described in a book titled The Economics of Natural Environments by John Krutilla, of Resources for the Future, and Anthony Fisher, an economist from the University of California at Berkeley. The book argued that, since development of a roadless area was irreversible, a special calculation was necessary to weigh the benefits and costs of such development. Their proposal was to assume that the recreation and other amenity values of undeveloped areas would increase forever because such areas would become increasingly scarce. Even if today’s amenity values didn’t outweigh today’s commodity values from development, they argued, the discounted sum of future amenity values might do so.

I applied Krutilla and Fisher’s method to Oregon roadless areas in a paper called An Economic View of RARE II. The paper showed that, while some areas had tremendous timber values that outweighed potential wilderness values, most were more valuable for amenities than commodities. Continue reading →

The West in the 1970s and 1980s was the site of increasingly strident conflicts over the national forests that became known as the Timber Wars. On one hand were the sawmills that depended on sales of federal timber, along with the loggers, truck drivers, mill workers, and others who depended on those sales for jobs. On the other hand were environmentalists seeking protection for wilderness, endangered species, fisheries, and other resources that weren’t so easily marketed.

Environmentalists appealed timber sales, went to court over endangered species, and lobbied Congress to pass wilderness legislation. Timber companies asked their employees to attend rallies and engaged in their own lobbying. Both sides rallied their supporters to comment on Forest Service and BLM land-use and timber management plans.

Eventually, the hostility got so bad that some of my friends were hung in effigy by timber industry supporters. I worked far enough in the background that I escaped that fate, but I still stuck my neck out on several occasions. Continue reading →

As a student at the University of Oregon, my main source of income was a federal program called work-study. The federal government paid 80 percent of the wages for part-time student employees, and non-profit organizations willing to pay the other 20 percent were eligible to hire students under the program. I received a call from Dave Brown, an assistant director of the Survival Center, an on-campus environmental group, asking me to work for them writing reviews of Forest Service plans.

The Survival Center was located in the latest, 1973 addition to U of O’s student union. I had office space, a desk, an IBM Selectric typewriter to write on, and a phone that was hooked into the state telephone network, allowing me to make unlimited calls to any city that had a state college or university. Although I rented a small room in a house in nearby Springfield for, as I recall, $55 a month, the Survival Center became my real home, and initially I only left because the building was closed to students after 11 pm. Later, they allowed students with a key to stay after 11 and I sometimes would work there until 2 or 3 in the morning.

I continued my cycling advocacy in a small way. Part of the cycling route between Eugene and Springfield was on a designated bike path that emptied onto a city street in Springfield. The city of Springfield had decided that it was too dangerous to let cyclists ride in the street and required that they use the sidewalk. The sidewalk wasn’t very wide and had something like 40 driveway cuts, each one requiring bicycles to go down a dip and then up a bump. Sometimes part of the sidewalk was blocked by signposts and it often had wet leaves, litter, and other obstacles. Continue reading →