The last monthly issue of Forest Watch magazine was August, 1993. The first issue of Different Drummer was winter, 1994. Although less frequent than Forest Watch, each issue was 64 pages long compared with 28 for a typical Forest Watch. Each issue focused on one topic: the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Endangered Species Act, state land and resource agencies, and so forth.

Different Drummer eventually published 13 issues. I was the sole writer of about six of them, and the main writer for several more. One person who helped write a couple of issues was Karl Hess IV, who had a Ph.D. in range ecology and whose father, Karl Hess III, was a well-known libertarian. While I was an environmentalist who had become libertarian, Karl was a libertarian who had become an environmentalist, so we fit well together.

In line with the Different Drummer idea, I changed the name of Cascade Holistic Economic Consultants, which had always been awkward, to the Thoreau Institute. Henry David Thoreau is sometimes considered the first environmentalist, but he was also deeply suspicious of big government. I felt this represented the focus of my work: finding ways to improve the environment without big government. Continue reading →

Forest Planning/Watch had many excellent editors over the years, and I can’t really rank them. But a case could be made that the best editors were people who were writers themselves. One of those was Jeff St. Clair, who had led the group that brought me to Indiana to review the Hoosier Forest plan (his group was called Forest Watch, after which we named the magazine) and then decided to move to Oregon City at about the same time I was moving from Eugene to Oak Grove. He took over as editor in August, 1990.

Soon after that, the CHEC staff was joined by Karen Knudsen, a Colorado native who said she had climbed all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks by the time she was 21, a claim I found fully believable after trying to keep up with her cycling in the mountains of Utah. She had a degree in economics from Colorado College, which forever endeared me to that school as I have always felt she was the smartest person I’ve ever had the privilege of working with.

I could tell her to work on a particular topic and soon she would have a full report. She wrote reports on such topics as the Knutson-Vandenberg Act. I cried a little when she told me she was moving to Montana because its snow was better for skiing than Oregon’s. After she moved there, I received a phone call from the Clark Fork Coalition asking for a job reference. I told them if they didn’t hire her they should shoot themselves. She now is the group’s executive director. Continue reading →

In 1975, I set out to replace Gordon Robinson’s “if it’s pretty, it’s good; if it’s ugly, it’s bad” mantra with a more scientific approach to environmental issues such as wilderness, timber cutting, and public land management in general. I was fortunate to work with James Monteith, whose background in biology gave him a similar approach, as well as other experts and specialists.

By 1990, it was clear that we had changed the environmental movement from one based on emotion to one based on science and technology. It was also becoming clear just how successful we were, as national forest timber sales were declining and people inside the Forest Service, from top to bottom, were trying to reform the agency from the inside. We had no idea that, by 2001, timber sales would fall by 85 percent, but we could still feel good about our work.

Unfortunately, two events would undo the revolution that had taken place within the environmental movement: the fall of the Soviet Union and the election of Bill Clinton to the White House. When the Soviet Union fell, it appeared to be a victory of free markets over government planning. “Socialism” was considered a tainted idea, just like communism and fascism. Polls showed that the vast majority of Americans agreed with the statement that “government messes everything up.” Continue reading →