Exaggerated yield tables. Misclassification of unsuitable timber lands. Below-cost sales. Overestimated timber prices. Fallacious FORPLAN models. Perverse incentives. Conflicts between timber and other resources, especially those dependent on old growth. All of these issues indicated that the Forest Service was selling far more timber than it could sustain.

Associates such as Cameron La Follette and Andy Stahl were focusing on the old-growth question, while Tom Barlow had identified the below-cost sales problem. Since Barlow left NRDC, however, I had been leading the charge on all of these issues other than old growth, and in fact on most of them I was the sole person in the environmental movement doing the research showing that the Forest Service was off course.

The Forest Service was clearly very different than it had been some forty years before. While clearcutting was the dominant timber prescription in the 1980s, in the late 1940s the Forest Service bragged that it almost exclusively practiced selection cutting. The Forest Service had a large photo file for media purposes with photographs going back many decades — a few taken by the agency’s founder, Gifford Pinchot, himself — and some of them compared “bad forest practices” on private land, namely clearcutting, with “good forest practices” on national forests, namely selection cutting. Continue reading →

Tom Barlow, who coined the term “below-cost timber sales,” left the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1982 to move to Kentucky where he, improbably, managed to get himself elected to Congress for one term. Soon after that, his associate Gloria Helfand, who gathered most of the data for NRDC’s forest-by-forest analysis of timber profitability, ran off to Berkeley to get her Ph.D. in economics and now teaches at the University of Michigan.

That left the Wilderness Society, which had a couple of economists, and me to do the heavy lifting on money-losing timber sales. While NRDC was the first to look at timber profitability on a forest-by-forest basis, I was the first to look at it on a timber sale-by-timber sale basis in my analysis of 10,000 Forest Service timber sales sold in 1983.

In addition to reporting on the issue in Forest Planning/Watch magazine, I wrote many reports on timber sale economics. In 1980, Subsidizing the Timber Industry described how the Forest Service lost money on timber sales. The Citizens’ Guide to Forestry and Economics in 1986 looked at the overall picture of the inefficiencies of national forest management. In 1991, Growing Timber Deficits performed a detailed analysis of the Forest Service’s 1990 timber sale program. The Citizens’ Guide to the Forest Service Budget in 1992 went step-by-step through the timber sale process to show how the Forest Service increased its budget by losing money on timber. Continue reading →

By the late 1980s, forest planning was far from complete. As of 1987, eight years after the Forest Service published its final planning rules, more than half the plans were still unfinished. Still, the process was winding down, as reflected by the number of forest plan reviews I did each year. As near as I can tell, I had reviewed some 20 plans in 1985, but only eight each in 1986 and 1987, seven in 1988, and one a year for the next couple of years after that.

After considering appeals and do-overs resulting from those appeals, the planning process was taking a lot longer than originally projected. The plans were also a lot more expensive. Though Chief McGuire had guessed in 1976 that each plan would cost about a million dollars, Northern Arizona University forestry professor Richard Behan estimated that the actual cost was well over $10 million per plan.

One of the plans I reviewed in 1987 was for Ohio’s Wayne National Forest. Since the Wayne and the Hoosier were both only about a hundred thousand acres each, compared to western forests that were typically close to a million acres, both the Indiana and Ohio forests were managed out of the same supervisor’s office in Bedford, Indiana.

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Soon after Reforming the Forest Service was published, we began to see signs of dissension within the Forest Service. They were subtle at first: a memo here, a policy decision there. They became more overt when an on-the-ground timber sale planner in Oregon started a group called Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. Then they became a flood bursting through a dam as all of the forest supervisors in the West joined a movement against decisions being made by the Washington DC office of the agency. The results figuratively turned the agency upside down.

The story actually goes back to 1979, when Max Peterson replaced John McGuire as chief of the Forest Service. Unlike all of his predecessors, Peterson was a road engineer, and he was probably picked precisely because he wasn’t a forester as the agency had been under fire for its timber dominance. But from an environmental view, road engineers were even more suspect since it was feared that his agenda would focus on developing the roadless areas.

But with Ronald Reagan’s appointment of John Crowell as deputy secretary of Agriculture, Peterson ended up spending most of this tenure defending the forests against increased timber cutting. Crowell made it clear that he believed the national forests should be selling 20 billion board feet of timber a year, not the 10 or 11 billion they had been selling. Allowable sale levels could only be increased through forest planning, and under Crowell the Department of Agriculture issued new planning rules that emphasized timber sales. Continue reading →