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 →

Growing up in Portland, I was taught that the city had the cleanest water in the world because it came from a watershed on the Mount Hood National Forest that had been set aside exclusively for Portland’s use. The Bull Run Trespass Act of 1904 closed the 102-square-mile Bull Run Watershed, along with a 41-square-mile buffer around it, to all public entry, and only Forest Service officials and employees of the Portland water bureau were allowed to enter the area.

This belief was so well known that a medical doctor named Joseph Miller bought a piece of land on the edge of the buffer strip and built a home. There he and his wife lived for many years, content in the knowledge that behind their house was 143 square miles of pristine wilderness that, unlike most wilderness, wasn’t even open to public recreation.

I was in Corvallis studying forestry when this myth came tumbling down in the form of a landslide in 1971. Portlanders woke up one morning to find their “pristine” water to be muddy brown, and they were advised to boil it before drinking it (as if anyone would want to drink brown water). The Forest Service hastened to announce that the landslide that had polluted the city’s water wasn’t caused by one of the clearcuts in the watershed. What it didn’t say was that the landslide was caused by a road leading to one of those clearcuts. Continue reading →

One of the requirements for graduating from the Oregon State School of Forestry was that students had to spend at least one summer working for a forestry company or agency. On application, the school agreed that work studying forest policy for OSPIRG would qualify. Since my 1972 internship earned so much publicity, OSPIRG was happy to hire me again for the summer of 1973 and to put me to work on a forestry project.

I wanted to study the Forest Service but OSPIRG asked me to study the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) instead. While I was still in school in Corvallis, OSPIRG’s main office in Portland had been visited by a strange man named Robert Bradley Jones who was concerned about BLM lands in western Oregon. He had written a book called One by One which told the sordid story of how Congress had given every other square mile of land between Portland and the California border (as well as between Roseburg and Coos Bay) as grants to the Oregon & California Railroad and wagon road builders and then took them back when the railroad failed to comply with the terms of the grant. Known as the O&C lands, these revested land grants represented less than 1 percent of the area managed by the BLM but produced something like 90 percent of its timber.

In 1937, Congress had written a law directing the Secretary of the Interior to manage the O&C lands for timber on a sustained yield basis, probably the first time Congress had used the term “sustained yield” in a law. The law also directed the secretary to give 75 percent of the revenues to the counties in lieu of the property taxes the counties would have collected had the lands been private. Most of the counties had agreed to give a third of their share of the funds to the BLM to pay for roads, reforestation, and other costs of accessing and managing the timber. They reasoned that, if the BLM didn’t have any money, it couldn’t sell much timber, so 50 percent of a lot of sales would be better for the counties than 75 percent of not much. Continue reading →