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. Continue reading →

In 1998, my friend Karl Hess invited several people to take a tour of southern Africa to see how wildlife was managed in other parts of the world. Among the people who joined the tour were National Wildlife Federation attorney Tom France (who was also part of the Forest Options Group); Earth First! Co-founder Dave Foreman; economist Bob Nelson, who had worked as a policy analyst in the Department of the Interior and later as a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland; and Brent Haglund, director of the Sand County Foundation, which manages Aldo Leopold’s land in Wisconsin and teaches corporate executives how they can improve their bottom lines by being more sensitive to the environment.

We were also joined on various parts of the tour by a Peace Corps volunteer named Stephanie Jayne. Unusual for Peace Corps volunteers, she had taken the trouble to learn the local languages and insisted on living with the villagers she was helping, rather than in quarters maintained by the Peace Corps. Apparently, she had invited Karl to help with some institutional issues, which was how he got involved in the region.

I had already been exposed to the political institutions of a few other countries during my years studying forest planning. In the early 1980s, some environmentalists in British Columbia invited me to Victoria to study the B.C. Ministry of Forests. In the late 1980s, a member of the Tasmanian parliament, Bob Brown, invited me to Australia to study the Tasmanian forest ministry. Continue reading →

In the mid-1990s, that portion of the timber industry that depended on federal timber sales was on the ropes. National forest timber sales had declined from 11 billion board feet in 1989 to less than 3 billion in 1995. Mills that had bought most of their timber from the national forests for the previous five decades were hard pressed to find alternate sources of wood.

So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that timber industry representatives were eager to talk with environmentalists about finding common ground for reforming the Forest Service. Nor was it surprising that environmentalists were reluctant to talk; after all, they were winning, so any talks that might lead to a compromise seemed to be unnecessary.

But I wasn’t a typical environmentalist, and as the term was defined by the “progressives” in 1995, maybe I wasn’t an environmentalist at all. I was less interested in “total victory” than I was in getting the answer right. How much was the right amount of timber to be cut from federal lands? What was the right amount of wilderness? What was the proper balance between clearcutting vs. selection cutting given their differing impacts on wildlife, watershed, and other resources? Continue reading →

After winning the battle of Oak Grove, I wanted to help other neighborhoods in the Portland area that were facing similar densification plans. One of the first things I did was call a meeting of people who were fighting densification in their own neighborhoods. Quite a large number of people showed up, and the group decided to call itself Ortem, which was Metro spelled backwards. Ortem never became very powerful but it did help people throughout the region network together and get access to resources and expertise.

About this time, two students from the Maxwell School of Public Affairs at Syracuse University came to Portland to work for me as interns. I hadn’t looked closely at Portland’s light-rail system, so I asked them to study it. Their first response was, “We love light rail!” I told them to look at it with an open mind.

They came back a week or so later and announced, “It’s awful!” They had interviewed some critics who convinced them that it was a huge waste of money. It cost far more than buses and most of the people riding it were former bus riders. In fact, the share of Portland-area residents taking transit to work dramatically dropped after Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, built light rail because it had to cut bus service and raise bus fares to help pay for rail cost overruns. Continue reading →