Mechanisms of Policy Change: An Analysis of Salvage Logging on Federal Lands Including a Case Study of the Biscuit Fire Salvage Sales

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Title

Eng Mechanisms of Policy Change: An Analysis of Salvage Logging on Federal Lands Including a Case Study of the Biscuit Fire Salvage Sales

Creator

Eng McGaughey, Jothan Kelvyn

Date

Eng 2011

Subject

Eng Environmental Studies

extracted text

MECHANISMS OF POLICY CHANGE:
AN ANAYSIS OF SALVAGE LOGGING ON FEDERAL
LANDS INCLUDING
A CASE STUDY OF THE BISCUIT FIRE SALVAGE SALES

by
Jothan Kelvyn McGaughey

A Thesis: Essay of Distinction
Submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Master of Environmental Studies
The Evergreen State College
June 2011

 

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©2011 by Jothan Kelvyn McGaughey. All rights reserved.

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This Thesis for the Master of Environmental Study Degree
by
Jothan Kelvyn McGaughey

has been approved for
The Evergreen State College

by

________________________
Linda Moon-Stumpff
Member of the Faculty

________________________
Date

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Abstract
Salvage logging on federal lands is a very controversial issue. The issue is
centered on conflicting paradigms that seek to define how forests and natural
resources are to be used. The belief in Manifest Destiny, the timber industry and
historical president all support the harvesting of damaged or dead trees after
natural or human created disturbances. The growing scientific understanding of
disturbances and the remaining dead and damaged trees now realizes they are
fundamental to the health of forest ecosystems. This thesis analyzes the current
state of salvage logging on federal lands through a review of the current
ecological knowledge pertaining to salvage logging, a case study of the Biscuit
Fire salvage logging sales and interviews of forest ecologists and advocates.
Evidence is provided that salvage logging is an institutionalized practice within
federal land management agencies. The mechanisms of policy change that have
effectively challenged the practice of salvage logging are identified as; Federal
laws and rules governing salvage logging, the scientific method, the agency’s role
in policy formation, adoption and implementation, and the role of advocacy in
policy formation. The thesis concludes with recommendations including: the deinstitutionalization of salvage logging; increased transparency and accountability
in policy formation at the agency level; improvements in funding mechanisms for
environmental protection programs; increased partnerships with environmental
organizations; more scientific research in forest carbon sequestration; and the full
incorporation of adaptive management into land management policies.

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Table of Contents
Abstract ………………………………………………………
List of Figures ……………………………………………….
Acknowledgements ………………………………………….
Introduction ………………………………………………….
Methods ……………………………………………………...
Ecological Review …………………………………………...
Salvage Logging as an Institutionalized Practice ……………
Federal Laws Impacting Salvage Logging ……………….....
Scientific Method in Policy Formation ……………………. .
Policy Implications at the Agency Level ……………………
Advocacy Groups and Civil Disobedience ………………….
The Biscuit Fire Salvage Sales Case Study …………………
Discussion ……………………………………………………
Conclusion and Recommendations ………………………….
References ……………………………………………………
Appendix A …………………………………………………..
Appendix B …………………………………………………..
Appendix C …………………………………………………..
Appendix D …………………………………………………..
Appendix E …………………………………………………..
Appendix F …………………………………………………..
Appendix G ………………………………………………….
Appendix H ………………………………………………….
Appendix I …………………………………………………...

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List of Figures

Figure 1 …………………………………………………………………… 20
Figure 2 …………………………………………………………………… 21

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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Evergreen community in general and especially my
Environmental Studies cohorts for their support, encouragement and commitment to
forward thinking. The Evergreen State College Library and staff proved to be a great
resource in tracking down sources and resources both within and outside the library. The
Evergreen Writing Center was an exercise in refinement, thank you Amanda Jenkins and
Andrew Olmsted for your word smiting skills. Evergreens Computer Center’s staff was
very helpful with technical computer issues. Special thanks to Andrea Barberi of
Centralia for her tremendous altruistic services in transcribing the interviews contained
within this thesis. The depth of the thesis is due in great measure to the interviewees
willingness to honesty divulge their knowledge and experience. I would like to thank
Professor Jerry Franklin, Professor James Agee, Richard Fairbank, Chad Hanson, Josh
Laughlin, Doug Heiken and the three interviewees who remain anonymous for their time
and insights. It was a pleasure to conduct the interviews. I would also like to thank Susan
Snyder of The Bancroft Library for granting permission to use selections from the
library’s manuscript collection. A special thanks is due to my faculty adviser and reader
Linda Moon-Stumpff for her patience, encouragement, and insightful comments and
suggestions on this project. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their love and
support.

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Introduction
Salvage: (1889): to rescue or save esp. from wreckage or ruin. (MerriamWebster Collegiate Dictionary, 1997).
Salvage logging today is a highly divisive practice that is composed of the
complex intersection of essentially conflicting paradigms. Attempts to integrate
forest ecology, timber economics and political agendas into working policies are
extremely challenging. The difficulty of reconciling the opposing goals of profit
through resource harvesting and protecting these same resources as sustainable
ecosystems creates quite a dilemma for policy makers. Although there are wildly
varying opinions as to the usefulness of salvage logging, there is mounting
scientific evidence that the practice is ecologically detrimental (Strittholt &
Rustigian, 2004; Lindenmayer & Noss, 2006). It is also questionable from an
economic perspective (Niemi & Whitelaw, 1995; The Wilderness & National
Audubon Societies, 1996). Recent changes in federal management objectives
from that of maximum timber production to ecologically centered policies have
increased the importance of understanding the impacts of salvage logging
(Franklin, 2005; United States Government Accountability Office, 2006). The
result is that ecologists, biologists, economists and forest managers are
encountering a need for more scientific information in order to better understand
this issue in its entirety. In addition it is crucial that legislators receive data from
all these perspectives so that they may make informed decisions that are not
biased by the conflicting interests that surround this issue.
Salvage logging refers to the harvesting of trees after natural or humancreated disturbances, commonly due to floods, volcanic eruptions, various types
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of windstorms, insect attacks and wildfires. Removal of live and dead (standing
or downed) trees is common. Logging techniques can vary from the traditional
high-impact to the less invasive methods of extraction that use low-impact ground
skidders, cable systems or helicopters to remove timber. Regardless of which
method is used, there is a premium placed on the speed of recovery due to
economic loss as the timber deteriorates. The term “salvage” itself reflects the
economic reasoning behind the practice, that damaged or dead trees can be
harvested to reduce monetary loss (Murkowski, 1996; Franklin, 2005).
Manifest Destiny and its lingering influence provide insight into this
spendthrift mindset that accepts the values and beliefs on which the practice of
salvage logging is based. It is a uniquely American form of evolving
expansionism that mixes republicanism, democracy, freedom of religion and
Anglo-Saxonism (Merk, 1963). John L. Sullivan first coined the phrase in 1845. It
gave form to a growing consensus that the United States was preordained by
Heaven to expand its borders until they had reached their God given limits (Merk,
1963). A main component of establishing these boundaries had to do with the
“beneficial use” of natural resources (Merk, 1963). The defining characteristic of
this use was improvement, of changing a landscape from its wild state into one
more suited for civilization. To not use natural resources is akin to the economic
concept of opportunity costs that values a resource at its highest potential
economic value possible. It was felt that we as a people had a God given duty to
take, convert and make use of all resources for the betterment of our society.
Salvage logging embodies this model by making use of a natural resource that

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would otherwise be completely wasted and worse still would constitute a fire
hazard.
Contained alongside these beliefs is the practice of exceptionalism that is
still in use today (Saito, 2010). The narrative stemming from manifest destiny
holds that human history is linear and is evolving to ever more advanced stages.
The United States is the apex of this advancement and as such is justified
pursuing its interests even if they cause harm or are illegal or immoral (Saito,
2010). The continuation of ecologically harmful salvage logging becomes
understandable within the context
Although salvage logging is practiced worldwide and has occurred
alongside the development of modern forest management its effects have not been
studied in the same depth as green-tree logging (Lindenmayer & Noss, 2006;
United States Government Accountability Office, 2006). Part of this is due to the
perception that natural disturbances are viewed as creating a “mess” that needs to
be cleaned up and not allowed to remain for study (Ne’eman, Perevolotsky, &
Schiller, 1997; Lindenmayer & Noss, 2006). The idea that salvage is also an
economically sound practice is deeply ingrained in the national consciousness and
still lingers. Recent rationales for salvage logging are based on the premise that it
can improve forest health, reduce the risk of catastrophic forest fires and is
economically viable.
Climate change will increase the quantity and scale of disturbances
affecting forests. The March 2009 meeting of the Copenhagen Climate Council
made it exceedingly clear that the worst-case scenarios of the Intergovernmental

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Panel on Climate Change are being realized and that these may be understated
(Copenhagen Climate Council, 2009). The Australian fires of 2009 burnt more
forest than ever before (Larsen, 2009). Natural disturbances, fires, wind throw and
bug infestations, are all increasing and will continue to on a scale that will test
humanity. The effects of these disturbances will be amplified in specific areas by
the rapidly changing climate. Ecosystems will be forced to absorb both. Salvage
operations may well represent unnecessary watershed events for specific
geographic locations and species located there from which there may be no
recovery.
In light of the rapidly changing environmental conditions it is important to
examine the mechanisms that affect policy formation. Mechanisms are both the
institutionalized process of policy formation and the methods by which
conflicting viewpoints are able to influence policy and policy formation. Vitally
important questions for our society include the following. Are the mechanisms of
policy change able to cope with the realities of climate change within a relevant
time frame? Are the fundamental assumptions and objectives on which current
policy is based able to address current needs? And finally, are the mechanisms of
change able to translate ecological knowledge into policy? This paper will attempt
to shed some light on these questions through an examination of Salvage logging
on federal lands.
The first part of this thesis will explain the methods used and why they
were chosen. The next section will present findings of the current literature on
salvage logging from an ecological and silvicultural perspective. The third part of

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this thesis will provide evidence that salvage logging is an institutionalized
practice through a critique of past and current laws, which dictate land
management policies. The forth part will demonstrate that the practice of salvage
logging has been and currently is being successfully challenged through a varity
of means. These mechanisms, that have influenced policy change, will be
investigated through a combination of a review of the literature, interviews of
professionals within the forestry community and a case study of the Biscuit Fire
salvage sales. The mechanisms of policy change examined include: 1) Federal
laws and rules governing salvage logging, including the insurance of citizenstanding in court; 2) the scientific method, specifically the integration of science
and law in policy formation; 3) the agency's role in policy formation, adoption
and application; 4) the political process involved in shaping laws and policies,
with regards to advocacy and direct action civil disobedience groups that have
impacted the salvage logging debate. The thesis will conclude with a discussion
revolving around the mechanisms of policy change, how policies related to
salvage logging may come into alignment with ecological concerns and what
lessons regarding policy change may have been learned or reinforced.

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Methods
The realm of policy formation is itself dependent on a combination of
quantifiable data, qualitative information and socially based interests. Further, the
underlying debate surrounding salvage logging is essentially a focal point of two
conflicting paradigms: ecological verses economic. The complexity of the issues
involved in this thesis necessitated a mixed methods research strategy capable of
integrating the historical, scientific, social and political continuum that embodies
the salvage logging debate and allows for a through and holistic analysis of the
issue. The research conducted for this thesis fell into three separate parts.
The project began with an extensive literature review of salvage logging
with an emphasis on its ecological ramifications. This allowed for a quantitative
understanding based on peer reviewed scientific writings on the impacts of
salvage logging. The review also supplied substantial qualitative information by
way of historical, testimonial and news accounts. A case study of salvage sales
was conducted to gain a contextual understanding around salvage sales, to
investigate causation factors and to uncover fundamental principles involved.
Case studies are recognized for excelling at clarifying complex issues by “detailed
contextual analysis of a limited number of events or conditions and their
relationships” (Soy, 1997, p. 2). Lastly, interviewing was chosen as a research
method to fill in areas of inquiry that were not covered by the literary review. This
allowed for in depth responses and clarification on issues from professionals
working within the forestry field who have experience to varying degrees in forest
ecology, advocacy, policy formation and salvage logging. This was instrumental
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in shedding light on specifics of policy formation around salvage logging and the
case study.
The ecological impacts of salvage logging were made clear through
Salvage Logging and Its Ecological Consequence by Lindenmayer, Burton and
Franklin (2008) and Wildfire and Salvage Logging: Recommendations for
Ecologically Sound Post-Fire Salvage Logging and Other Post-Fire Treatments
of Federal Lands in the West by Beschta, Frissell, Gresswell, Hauer, Karr,
Minshall, Perry, & Rhodes, (1995). Supplementation to these two books included
current peer reviewed articles, technical reports, historical accounts, transcripts of
hearings before Congress and other books on salvage logging and policy issues.
For a fundamental understanding of laws governing policy related to salvage
logging the National Forest Management Act of 1976, the National
Environmental Policy Act of 1969, The Endangered Species Act of 1973 and The
National Forest System Land and Resource Management Planning Rule in their
revised forms were the main laws studied.
The Biscuit Fire salvage sales were chosen as the case study for a number
of reasons. The fire, subsequent sales, advocacy involved, resulting litigations,
scientific studies and continuing public debate are a fairly recent series of events.
It was and continues to be very controversial. One of the main reasons was the
discrepancy between different official reports written regarding the ecological
impacts of the sales. The sales also represented a test run of new Governmental
policy towards salvage logging. Finally, there have been numerous
groundbreaking scientific studies done on those sales that have directly impacted

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the salvage logging debate. These studies have looked at restocking effects,
economic benefits and fire hazard impacts of salvage logging, all of which at one
time or another have been used as key rationalizations for salvage logging. The
salvage sales of the Biscuit Fire offer an ongoing and current vehicle for
understanding the issues contained within the salvage logging debate.
Interviews with knowledgeable professionals on salvage logging issues
were conducted. These gave invaluable insights on the processes through which
ecological knowledge is incorporated into policies. Specifics on the Biscuit Fire
salvage sales were also gained through the interviews. Interviewees included:
Professor Jerry Franklin of the University of Washington, who has published
numerous forestry and ecological articles and has played a key role in developing
the Northwest Forest Plan; Rich Fairbanks, former Forest Service employee who
initially drafted the purposed Biscuit Fire salvage sales; James Agee, author and
Professor of Forest Ecology; presently employed Forest Service ecologists who
will remain anonymous; Doug Heiken, Josh Laughiln and Chad Hanson
employees of environmental advocacy groups; and a former member of Earth
First! who will remain anonymous. These interviews were made up of open-ended
questions regarding various aspects of forest ecology, salvage logging, forest
planning, public input, litigation and civil disobedience.

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Ecological Review
The industrial forestry-based paradigm has reasserted in recent years that
salvage logging helps to ecologically restore disturbed forests (Sessions,
Bettinger, Buckman, Newton, & Hamann, 2004). The view is based on the
assumption that removal of the dead or damaged trees does not affect the recovery
of biodiversity or the ecosystem involved (Sessions et al., 2004). This view is
reinforced by the assumption that recovery will be accelerated and helped by
management techniques used to speed up the re-establishing of forest cover
(Bartlett, Butz & Kanowski, 2005; Sessions et al., 2004). These management
techniques include salvage logging, burning or removal of generated slash
(logging debris), planting of trees, herbicide and fertilizer application, and
thinning. Another perception is that disturbance and the disturbed areas have
limited significance for biota (Morissette, Cobb, Brigham, & James, 2002).
Although these views influence policy they are viewed with skepticism
and as outright untruths by most ecologists (Lindenmayer, Burton & Franklin,
2008). These ideas are rooted in industrial thinking that has dominated forest
management since 17th century Europe until relatively recently (Puettmann,
Coates, & Messier, 2009). As population and industrial demand for wood
products increased during the 17th century, silvicultural actions began to be based
more on economic considerations than on site-specific ecological realities
(Puettmann et al., 2009).

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The importance and value of wood products as commodities eventually
led to the development of the Normal Forest Concept (NFC) to enhance the
production of timber under economic liberalism in the nineteenth century
(Puettmann et al., 2009). Hundeshagen (1826) and Heger (1841), as described by
Puettmann, Coates, and Messier (2009), developed this conceptual model, which
helped to further the field of forestry, specifically in terms of growth and yield
relationships as well as growing stock. The NFC was also intended to determine
sustainable harvest levels (Puettmann et al., 2009). This ushered in the change
from a product-driven forestry to an industrial concern with productivity
(Puettmann et al., 2009). The prevalence of the NFC model is apparent in today’s
forestry practices, as are the assumptions of this model.
One of the most fundamental assumptions is in relation to the term
“stand”; the meaning is defined as a unit of forest that can be efficiently harvested
all at once, not considering ecological boundaries. To fit the NFC model stands
are homogenous as monocultures or in species compositions. They are similar in
acreage, soil types and site conditions. They should be fully or homogenously
stocked and should produce homogenous commodity quality. They are laid out to
facilitate harvesting procedures. The roles of natural disturbances are kept to as
low a level as possible to ensure the most product (Puettmann et al., 2009). The
definition of stand is important as it influences the manner in which forests are
conceived, highlighting economic over ecological concerns.
The NFC model was the dominant paradigm until an ecological view
began to challenge and change how forests are conceptualized. The shift from

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stand based to landscape or watershed level management concerns is continuing
to evolve. This debate has continued for centuries; Von Carowitz (1713) stated
that maintaining or duplicating species compositions found naturally is the most
sustainable way to provide a wood supply over time (Puettmann et al., 2009).
However, these ecologically based views did not greatly impact United States’
forest policy until the early 1990’s. Part of this is due to the entrenched nature of
industrial forestry and some is due to the relatively new science of ecology in
Western thought, which is still coming to grips with the complexity of the
environment and environmental processes. The remainder of the chapter reviews
what is currently known in ecological terms about forests in general and,
specifically, the impacts of salvage logging on publically owned forest
ecosystems.
There are conflicting ways of understanding the assumptions underlying
the intertwined terms “succession” and “disturbance”. A forest stand can be
described as being in a particular stage of succession at a specific time.
Succession refers to the process of development, changes of species composition
and other ecosystem attributes (e.g. biomass, diversity) that are relevant to a
particular succession model (Shugart & West, 1980). Succession is broken down
into descriptive stages that include early and late. An early stage refers to the first
plants and trees that attain dominance. These trees are usually deciduous, which
are fast growing and do well in sunny areas. A late stage will be made up of trees,
which eventually gain dominance over the early stage trees and usually include
the shade-tolerant conifers. The theoretical end result is termed the climax stage

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and can take up to 1000 years to reach in conifer forests of the Northwest
(Brubaker, 1980).
The understanding of disturbance has changed from one of being an
unwanted interruption in succession to an intrinsic factor of forest dynamics.
New models like patch-dynamics have modified the idea of a climax stage.
Disturbances cause an ecosystem to be in a dynamic state made up of many stages
of succession from early to late. The traditional NFC term disturbance implies an
interruption in the wood supply. Fire, wind throw, bug kill, and volcanoes are all
considered natural disturbance agents. New understanding recognizes the benefits
and ultimately the necessity of “disturbances” in terms of forest health. This
variation is good for biodiversity and the health of a forest (Pickett & White,
1985). Disturbances are viewed as essential to the functioning of ecosystems
(Puettmann et al., 2009). However, from a silviculture perspective they are
undesirable and should be avoided or minimized. These fundamentally different
views held by silviculture and ecology regarding disturbances is one of the main
reasons for salvage logging being such a controversial issue.
Lindenmayer and Noss (2006) have stated that environmental impacts due
to salvage logging are best classified into three broad categories: impacts that
affect the physical structure of forest stands and associated aquatic systems;
impacts involving ecosystem processes such as hydrological cycles, nutrient
cycling and soil formation; and impacts on specific flora, fauna and species
assemblages. The first is the easiest to observe and study. It has a direct cause
and effect relationship to the remaining categories. The three are interrelated and

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affect each other in biofeedback loops. The removal of logs and trees does alter
the forest’s structure, and hence affects its ecology in an ongoing process. The
question becomes whether the changes produced are deemed beneficial,
detrimental or some combination thereof. The answer, as well as the terms used in
discussion, can change based on whether the goal is measured by an ecological,
economic or political yardstick. In short, the answer is contingent upon which
paradigm has the most influence on policy development.
Ecologically, after a disturbance occurs, the remaining trees and logs are
referred to as “biological legacies” as opposed to timber. The removal of these
legacies is known to reduce the complexity of forests (Hutto, 1995; Franklin,
Lindenmayer, MacMahon, McKee, Magnuson, Perry, Waide, & Foster, 2000).
This also affects the landscape pattern (Radeloff, Mladenoff, & Boyce, 2000) and
isolates unburned or unaffected areas (Morissette, et al. 2002). Biological
legacies include intact thickets of the understory (Ough, 2002), large snags and
living trees (Gibbens & Lindenmayer 2002), logs (Harmon, Franklin, Swanson,
Sollins, Gregory, Lattin, … & Anderson, 1986) and sections of non-disturbed or
only partially disturbed forest areas (Delong & Kessler 2000).
The true importance of these legacies is manifested by their many critical
roles related to biodiversity. They help the recovering vegetation by providing
essential nutrients as well as providing seed sources for the next cohort (Hansen,
Spies, Swanson, & Ohmann, 1991). The role of “nurse” logs is a well-known
example. The ability of species to survive and remain in the immediate area is
increased (Hutto, 1995; Whelan, 1995). Habitat for various different species that

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return to the affected area is provided as well (Lindenmayer, Cunningham, &
Donnelly, 1997). In forests, up to two thirds of animal diversity is associated with
dead trees (Serial No. 109-39: Scientific research and the knowledge-base
concerning forest management following wildfires and other major disturbances,
2005). Decaying woody debris makes energy and nutrients available for a variety
of organisms (Perry, 1994; Hutto, 1995). Lastly, these legacies help stabilize the
environmental situation in disturbed areas (Perry, 1994) and encourage both
plants and animals to re-colonize (Whelan, 1995).
There is a temporal element to biological legacies in general and snags
(dead standing trees) in particular. The amount of time to replace legacies is a
variable figure that depends on the stand in question and relates to its age,
complexity and other environmental factors. The removal of snags can postpone
for many decades the recruitment of large woody debris to the forest floor and
riparian zones (Minshall, 2003). Old-growth trees with cavities that some species
rely on for habitat (e.g. the spotted owl) may take more than 200 years to replace
(Lindenmayer et al., 1997). After a burn, large trees can remain standing for over
fifty years, but are more likely to fall if the area is logged and the remaining slash
is burned (Ball, Lindenmayer, & Ossingham, 1999). This temporal element
affects approximately 150 known species of vertebrates alone that depend on
snags for nesting and denning (Rose, Marcot, Mellen, Ohmann, Waddell, Lindley,
& Schreiber, 2001). The removal of legacies will slow down re-colonization to
varying degrees and have cascading effects on the entire plant and animal

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community. The extent of the impact depends on the sensitivity of the ecosystem
and the scope and scale of the logging.
The negative effects of logging and other landscape changes on
biodiversity are due in large part to habitat fragmentation, which can be critical
depending on the species in question. Fragmentation due to natural or humancaused disturbance creates a transition zone or edge between undisturbed and
disturbed areas. Some types of edges are considered “soft” which means that the
transition is gradual and the effects are less severe. Logging, especially clear cuts,
leaves a “hard” edge that creates a sharp contrast. The effects of these edges are
grouped into abiotic and biotic categories. Abiotic effects create microclimatic
changes due to increased temperature, light and wind, as well as decreased
humidity. These effects range over tens to hundreds of meters, depending on
conditions at the site. Biotic effects include diseases, invasive species and
predators, and can have an influence over hundreds of meters. Edge effects are
known to significantly influence both distribution and abundance of species and
can result in habitat degradation or loss (Lindenmayer & Fischer, 2006).
While soil impacts, such as erosion and soil compaction, have been
extensively studied with regard to green-tree logging, there is a shortage of data
on impacts caused specifically by salvage logging. This is significant, as the act
of salvage logging constitutes a combination of disturbances in the same area
within a relatively short amount of time. First, there is the original disturbance,
and then the additional disturbance of salvage logging. It is highly probable that
there would be additional consequences other than what is caused by either a

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natural disturbance or traditional logging alone (Lindenmayer & Noss, 2006).
Impacts may also be further amplified not only because salvage can be more
intensive but because it can occur in areas of national forests that are normally
protected from logging due to their sensitive nature (McIver & Starr, 2000). Also,
larger areas can be cut under salvage guidelines than can be cut for normal
logging on federal lands (McIver & Starr, 2000).
The salvage logging undertaken after the 1938 New England hurricane
covered a huge area, and, although no studies were done at that time, there have
been some very interesting ongoing studies by the Harvard Forest Long Term
Ecological Research (LTER) program related to this event. There were changes of
the hydrology to two major New England river systems, most likely caused by a
decrease in evapotranspiration due to the salvage logging (Foster, Aber, Melillo,
Bowden, & Bazzaz, 1997). Also there was evidence of reduced ecosystem control
caused by forest structure removal, soil heating and soil biogeochemical processes
(Foster et al., 1997). Another study by LTER suggests serious long-term impacts
may be caused by salvage logging after wind events (Cooper-Ellis, Foster,
Carlton, & Lezberg, 1999). Their results indicate “downed and damaged trees
play an important role in forest recovery and ecosystem resilience” (Cooper-Ellis
et al., 1999).
Soil impacts directly related to salvage logging need further research,
although several studies have found increases in both soil erosion and in-stream
sedimentation (Karr, Rhodes, Minshall, Hauer, Beschta, Frissell, & Perry, 2004;
Reeves, Bisson, Rieman, & Benda, 2006). Similarly, soil compaction and erosion

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were found to increase when salvage logging took place in fire damaged areas
(McIver & Starr, 2000). In Portugal, it was found by Hansen (1991) that post-fire
areas prepared for reforestation using salvage logging lost sediment at rates 100
times higher than areas left alone after fire. In high-severity fire areas that were
salvaged, it was found that the soil was depleted of calcium, magnesium and
phosphorus. It was also determined that these elements would not be present in
pre-fire amounts during the projected rotation time of 100 years (Brais, David, &
Quimet, 2000). A study of a repeatedly burned area found that the salvaged sites
had less soil and organic material than the unsalvaged sites (Hansen et al. 1991).
Plant regeneration is another important area of the salvage logging debate.
In plant regeneration it was found that logging equipment associated with salvage
logging did in fact have a negative result (Cooper-Ellis et al., 1994; Lindenmayer
& Ough, 2006). This finding was confirmed by Donato (2006) in what has
become an important study that also found that un-salvaged units had high natural
regeneration of conifers after the high severity Biscuit Fire in Southwest Oregon.
There are cumulative effects associated with the deterioration of forest health
caused by salvage that can encourage the influx of invasive species (McIver &
Starr, 2000). One of these effects involves species whose seeds are serrotinous
(activated by fire) but are then destroyed by the process of salvage logging.
Lodgepole (Pinus contorta) is an example of this as they have adapted to fire and
have an advantage in fire prone areas. Their seeds will be released and sprout
while other plants’ seeds will not; salvage logging reduces this advantage and

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allows for invasive windblown seeds to colonize the area (Van Nieuwstedt, Sheil,
& Kartawinata, 2001).
The last example of serrotinous seeds reinforces the finding of Rulker
(1994) and Bunnell (1995) that many species and associated ecosystems evolved
in conjunction with and adapted to natural disturbance. Pahl-Wost (1995) called
natural disturbance a “key process” in most ecosystems. Further, natural
disturbances of differing sizes, scales and intensities over varying locations and
times are essential to maintaining biodiversity within ecosystems (Lindenmayer
and Noss, 2006). These observations have in fact led to new paradigms like
patch-dynamics, which center on the non-equilibrium state of nature produced by
the recurring feature of disturbances (Pickett, Parker, & Fiedler, 1992). Although
this may sound like all disturbances are beneficial, Paine, Tegner, and Johnson
(1998) have discovered that organisms that have adapted to disturbances are
vulnerable to new forms and combinations of disturbance, especially to one right
after another. Equally important, the specific combination of a natural
disturbance followed by salvage logging was found to have adverse effects (Van
Nieuwstadt et al., 2001; Lindenmayer & Ough, 2006).
Studies on salvage effects upon specific species are fairly limited and have
mostly focused on bird populations. There are numerous studies that have
established an increase in abundance of cavity-nesting birds, aerial insectivores
and shrub and ground-foraging birds following fire (Hutto, 1995; Cahall and
Hayes, 2008). Some species of birds may be dependant on burned forests (Hutto,
1995). Studies have found greater abundances of black-backed and hairy

  18
 

woodpeckers in unsalvaged than in salvaged stands (Saab & Dubley, 1998; Cahall
and Hayes, 2008). It has been suggested by researchers that more studies need to
be done in regards to partial salvage. It is difficult to draw significant results
regarding various species of birds due to a myriad of factors that influence their
behavior; many of the studies have been short term and some have not been
replicated (Cahall and Hayes, 2008).
Currently, one of the largest disturbances facing forest managers is the
infestation of Western lodge pole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia) by mountain
pine beetle (Dendroclonus ponderosae) in the interior of British Columbia
(Lindenmayer et al., 2008). In 2006 there were 9.2 million hectares affected, and
by the end of 2007 13 million hectares were infested (British Columbia Ministry
of Forests and Range, 2006). This problem continues to grow and represents one
of the largest ongoing salvage operations ever. Climate change and past forest
practices are implicated as co-contributors to this problem. The beetle is kept in
check or killed by extreme cold (-40° C.) and/or continuous low temperatures
below -25° C. A series of mild winters since 1993 has allowed the bugs to
explode in population. The homogeneity of the forest caused by large harvests
and re-planting has lead to the abundance the large pine trees that beetles need to
thrive as a species. In the past there have been outbreaks before in various areas in
Canada and the U.S., which often led to fires that consumed the dead trees. These
fires were an important part of the natural disturbance process and of forest
dynamics.

  19
 

In response to mountain pine beetle infestation the British Columbia
Ministry of Forests and Range has established “emergency management units”
and authorized extreme control measures. One part of this plan is to salvage log
with the goals of limiting the spread of infestations, recovering some of the
economic value of the timber, sustaining logging levels to maintain forestry
companies, limiting fire risk and facilitating re-plantings. It is unclear if salvage
logging will be an effective part of the strategy to control the mountain pine
beetle. What is clear is that the sheer scale of this phenomenon represents a major
impact to the forest at all levels.
Figure 1. Conifer Regeneration and Woody Fuels on Salvaged and Burned
sites within Biscuit Fire.

Figure 1. (A) Natural conifer regeneration and (B) surface woody fuel
loads before and after postfire logging of the Biscuit Fire, Oregon, USA.
(Donato, Fontaine, Cambell, Robinson, Kaufman & Law, 2006, p. 352).

Recent research has focused on one of the assumptions used to support
salvage logging, namely that it helps prevent and reduce the intensity of wildfires.
  20
 

Donanto’s study (2006) found that salvage logging might actually increase shortterm fire severity (see figure 1). A study by Thompson (2007) conducted in
Southern Oregon examined fire intensities of re-burned stands in the 2003 Biscuit
Fire that had been salvage logged compared with those that had regenerated
naturally after a 1987 fire. Four fuel types were included and all showed higher
intensity burning in the salvaged logged and planted units (see figure 2). This is a
single snapshot in time of specific conditions and as such cannot scientifically
prove future results. It does suggest that younger forests planted after salvage
logging in this type of mixed-severity fire regime may be at risk to positive
feedback cycles of high-severity fire for at least 15 to 20 years (Thompson, Spies,
& Ganio, 2007).
These studies, in aggregate, strongly suggest that salvage logging is
significantly detrimental in regards to forest ecosystems. But substantially more
research needs to be done in relation to impacts on specific species. However, it is
feasible to use the habitat that a species depends on as a proxy for that species to
estimate impacts caused by salvage logging. In light of new federal management
practices and directives based on using ecologically sound practices it is
somewhat surprising that salvage logging is increasing as a percentage of the
overall harvest from National Forests. The next chapter attempts to clarify this
issue by providing evidence that salvage logging has become and is now an
institutionalized practice.

  21
 

Figure 2. Fire Severity of Salvage Logged and Unmanaged of Four
Different Fuel Types on the Biscuit Fire.

Firgure 2. Fire severity on the Biscuit Fire (2002) of areas that had burned
during the Silver Fire (1987). Plots were established for salvaged-logged
and planted, and unmanaged for four fuel types. (Thompson, Spies &
Ganio, 2007, p. 10746).

  22
 

Salvage Logging as an Institutionalized Practice
 

In·sti·tu·tion·al·ized: to make into an institution: give character of
an institution …especially: to incorporate into a structured and
often highly formalized system [i.e. institutionalized values].
(Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 1997). 
 

The importance of wood products in our society's history and their
continuing role in supporting our economic system are key to understanding how
and why salvage logging has become an institutionalized practice. Timber’s
economic and strategic importance, along with its history and the laws that govern
salvage logging all provide insight into the institutionalized nature of salvage
logging. Employment in logging has ranged from a low of 69,000 to a high of
88,000 people per year between the years 1972 to 2002 with roughly twice that
amount employed in mills (Howard, 2003). Lumber-dependent industries have
easily employed 3 to 8 million workers per year during this same time frame
(Howard, 2003). Exports of timber products from 1965 to 2002 have ranged from
2.7 to 4.8 percent of all commodities exported from the U.S. This represents a
range in 1997 dollars from 3,614 million to 22,518 million (Howard, 2003).
National Forests provide 20 to 25 percent of this raw material (Alvarez, 2007).
The economic value of timber products caused logging to gain and maintain a
status of vital importance to this country’s economic security. 
The rapid growth of our nation was made possible through the use of
timber. Before European colonization U.S. territory contained about 1 billion
acres of forests, which declined to about 755 million acres by 1900 (Alvarez,

  23
 

2007). The largest reduction occurred from 1850 to 1900 and was critical to
supporting the rapid expansion during the industrial revolution in the U.S. 
Our system of forestry is largely based on a European system that was
shaped by a few key players. Gifford Pinchot, appointed chief of U.S. Division of
Forestry in 1898, forbearer to the Forest Service, studied forestry both at Yale
School of Forestry and in Europe at the French Forest School at Nancy (Lewis,
1999). His father, James Pinchot, was involved in creating the Yale School of
Forestry, one of the first two professional forestry schools established in the U.S.
in 1898 (Lewis, 1999). By this time in American history the elder Pinchot
characterized the Eastern forests as” gone" and that this "forced us to think of its
preservation" (Lewis, 1999. p. 3).  
Central to Pinchot's idea of conservation was the concept of sustainedyield forestry. This entailed harvesting in a year only what forests produced in
new growth during that year. Theoretically, this is a very sound idea that would
keep the forests in a perpetual state of production. By 1907 this was expanded
with the recognition that forests were intimately interconnected with water and
minerals and that there was a need to manage all three in a unified approach. This
conservation policy was embodied in the slogan "the greatest good of the greatest
number for the longest time" (Walsh, 2010). Inherent in this philosophy is the
assumption that trees represent a natural resource to be utilized by society. 
The focus of forestry was shifting from harvesting an endless natural
resource that needed no stewardship to an understanding that the forests were in
need of a management plan that incorporated the idea of conservation.

  24
 

Conservation as understood in Pinchot's time was directly in line with the Normal
Forest Concept (NFC), discussed in the previous chapter, which evolved out of an
economic system that valued timber as a commodity, not as an essential part of an
ecosystem1. 
There are a number of laws and subsequent funds that effectively
continued to develop salvage logging into an institutionalized practice. Support
for logging, and by extension salvage logging, was strengthened, in both the
public and within the Forest Service, by laws that offered financial benefits. The
National Forest Receipts Act of 1908 and 1911 mandated that 25% of logging
related receipts from National Forests would be given to the state where the forest
was located (Holmer, 2004). These funds were to be used for schools and roads of
the counties in which the sales took place. The Brush Disposal Fund of 1916
allowed the Forest Service to charge a deposit on timber sales to provide for
disposing of the logging slash left after harvesting (Holmer, 2004). The KnutsonVandenburg (K-V) Fund was established in 1930 for reforestation and restoration.
The funds were also provided by timber sales and were to be used within the same
forest where they were generated. These forest restoration funds were only
available for lands that had been logged (L. Moon-Stumpff, personal
communication, June 6, 2011). The two trust funds have been used to pay for
administrative overhead costs. The more logging of forestland, including salvage
logging, the more funds were available. This financially beneficial relationship for

                                                            
1 The term ecosystem is used because it most accurately encompasses the 

idea being expressed, although it did not enter the lexicon until the 1940’s.  
  25
 

Forest Service administrators was an early incentive leading to the eventual
institutional acceptance of salvage logging.  
The institutionalization of salvage logging can be concretely demonstrated
in the enactment of laws focused on the implementation of salvage logging. On
September 21, 1938 the six New England States suffered the most destructive
hurricane of the last 175 years (Foster & Orwig, 2006). Winds in excess of 220
km/hour blew down or damaged 3 billion board feet of timber within a 150-km
wide area of forest land (Foster & Orwig, 2006). Within days numerous calls for
help were coming to the Forest Service, The Secretary of Agriculture, and even
the President of the U.S. from Governors and representatives in Congress of the
affected states (Peirce, 1968). The United States Government established the New
England Timber Salvage Administration (NETSA) to coordinate and promote
salvage logging operations, purchasing of timber and fire hazard reduction (Spurr,
1956). The Forest Service was the logical choice to lead this coordinated effort, as
there was no single organization that had the necessary experience and all the
needed equipment (Peirce, 1968). The operation required the resources and
cooperation of many local, state and federal agencies. It was the first such largescale salvage operation in the history of the Forest Service, and there were no
previous examples, of this magnitude, on which to base actions or policies
(Peirce, 1968). 
NETSA came about in an odd way. At the time of its creation there were
not any Federal funds available and Congress was not in session. The Forest
Service and the Secretary of Agriculture were not authorized to borrow funds.

  26
 

However, a corporate agency within the Department of Agriculture, the Surplus
Commodities Corporation (SCC), was able to borrow funds. The SCC produced
NETSA as a sub-division, giving it the authority to meet its goal of mitigating the
results of the hurricane (Peirce, 1968). The Loan was secured from the Disaster
Loan Corporation with the understanding that principal and interest were to be
paid back “to the full extent possible” (Peirce, 1968). The foundation of NETSA
financed as a business transaction as opposed to disaster relief is a key step in the
development of salvage logging as an institutionalized practice. The blow-down
and products to be derived from it were viewed as collateral as opposed to a onetime occurrence that required action (Peirce, 1968). In essence, it represented the
precedence of salvage logging as a funding mechanism that the Forest Service
could incorporate into its modis operandi. 
The Forest Service Chief Forester therefore became the administrator of
NETSA as well as vice-president of the SCC. November 14, 1938 was the day of
formal authorization. A historical report written in 1965 by Earl S. Peirce, who
directed the Division of State Cooperation within NETSA, which used official
reports and records from the late 1930's to supplement his personnel experience
relates the granting of authority.  
… [A]uthority to use all facilities and personnel of the U.S. Forest
Service and of such Federal, state, local and private agencies as
may be willing to cooperate, and to employ such additional
personnel as needed and to assume full responsibility for the
procuring, handling, processing, exchanging, storing, transporting
and sale of all inventories of the corporation, acquired in
connection with the timber salvage program and shall execute
contracts in connection therewith and to designate field agents of
the corporation to carry out the last named functions, pursuant to
his direction. [As well as] to establish state offices and such
  27
 

administrative units and offices as he may deem necessary to
efficient effectuation of the salvage program, to negotiate with the
Disaster Loan Corporation and to obtain a loan to be made to the
Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation in an amount not in
excess of $15,000,000. (Peirce, 1968, p. 17). 
 

A main focus of the law was to reimburse landowners for timber that had been
blown down or damaged without disrupting local markets. NETSA accomplished
this by buying the logs from the landowners, having the logs sawn into lumber
and then selling the lumber in a controlled manner. The government was not
interested in making a profit but was beholden to cover costs if possible. The
original loan agreement called for purchasing the logs at 80% of their appraised
value. After much controversy and various bills failing to pass in Congress, an
Executive Order increased the price to approximately 90% of appraised value.
This increase had the effect of really getting the program moving as contracts
were signed and logs began arriving to the 721 receiving sites. By December 31,
1943 the program had completed its tasks and was terminated. A total of 651
million board feet was salvaged with more than eight million dollars paid out to
thirteen thousand landowners. The total cost of the program was $16,269,300 with
the sales of the lumber recovering nearly the whole $15,000,000 loan (Peirce,
1968). NESTA enacted funding and established a bureaucratic structure for
salvage logging essentially institutionalizing the practice for the first time. 
In the 40 or so years after the New England hurricane there was an
increased demand for wood products that led to very environmentally destructive
logging practices being used on national forests. The amount of logging continued
to rise due to World War II and the resulting need for timber products. Use of

  28
 

wood products continued to rise after the war to meet new job and housing needs.
By the 1950’s private lands were largely exhausted due to overcutting, especially
of old-growth (Holmer, 2004). To compensate the National Forests increased their
sales from 3 billion board feet in 1950 to 9 billion board feet in 1959 (Holmer,
2004). 1959 also saw the Forest Service's release of Operation Multiple Use, a
plan that foresaw 21.1 billion board feet logged on an annual basis by 2000
(Holmer, 2004). Clear cuts and other destructive practices continued on a large
scale. By the 1970’s the public exerted enough pressure to pass the National
Forest Management Act (NFMA) of 1976. But salvage logging continued to be
practiced.  
NFMA was intended to protect the natural ecosystems contained within
the National Forests from harmful extraction practices. It has become the primary
statute influencing management policy of the national forests. It requires the
Forest Service to co-ordinate and balance multiple use with sustained yield so that
citizens’ needs are meet for perpetuity. It contains provisions that established the
Salvage Sale Fund and protects the practice of salvage logging within the
management practices of the Forest Service.  
Section 472(h) of NFMA establishes the Salvage Sales Fund to pay for the
salvage logging of "insect-infested, dead, damaged or down timber" (NFMA,
1976). The fund was conceived to be self-sustaining after its initial establishment.
Congress made two 3 million dollar appropriations to initiate it, one in 1977 and
another in 1979 (U. S. General Accountability Office, 1996). After the
establishment of the fund, payments from a portion of the purchase price of

  29
 

salvage sales are deposited into the fund. In this self-sustaining way, salvage sales
pay for the planning, preparation and supervision of future salvage sales (U. S.
General Accountability Office, 1996). After the severe fire season of 1987,
Congress expanded the fund by appropriating another $37 million to increase
salvage sales (U. S. General Accountability Office, 1996). The establishment of a
permanent self-perpetuating funding mechanism for salvage sales indicates that
salvage logging fits the criteria of an institutionalized practice.  
There are concerns that the salvage fund has been used for other purposes
than for what it was intended. In a hearing conducted on June 4, 1998 by the
Committee on Agriculture of the House of Representatives it was revealed that
the Washington office had increased expenditures charged to the fund from
$581,879 in 1993 to $8.4 million in 1997. This 800% increase in administrative
overhead costs was troubling to the committee. It represented a loss of funds for
on-the-ground work that the fund was created to accomplish. The U.S.
Government Accountability Office in its May 6, 1998 report found that the Forest
Service spends about 30% of the Salvage Fund on administrative costs while
other programs only use 8% of their appropriations for administration costs. It
seems obvious that administrators would favor the practice of salvage logging if it
provides for their salaries. 
NFMA states that lands not suitable for timber production must be
identified and set aside from harvesting. However, NFMA does allow for salvage
logging to occur on those lands deemed unsuitable for green tree logging. NFMA
also requires that an annual timber harvest level is set that allows for removal of

  30
 

timber "in perpetuity on a sustained-yield basis". Again salvage logging is exempt
from environmentally based management practices. NFMA allows stands of
timber that have been "substantially damaged by fire, wind throw, or other
catastrophe, or which are in imminent danger from insect or disease attack" to be
salvage logged regardless of if this harvesting is within sustained-yield
parameters. Timber harvested by salvage sales may be counted within the annual
amount or may be sold "over and above the plan volume" (NMFA, 1976). 
The National Forest System Land and Resource Management Planning
Rule mandates the Secretary of Agriculture to establish regulations based of the
principles of multiple-use and sustained yield for development of land
management plans (16 U.S.C. 1604 (g)). It is derived from and mandated by
NMFA. The intent of NMFA is implemented through the development of
National Forest Plans. These plans determine the actual policies at the forest level.
Language in the planning rule is identical to what is in NMFA. This holds true for
sections relating to salvage logging. Currently the planning rule is being updated
and is close to being adopted (Federal Register, 2011). The sections regarding
salvage logging have not changed since the original plans of 1978, indicating that
it is unlikely that policy around salvage logging will undergo any major changes.
It seems that salvage logging will remain an institutionalized practice for the
foreseeable future. The next sections will examine the basis and issues
surrounding challenges to the practice of salvage logging on National Forests. 
 
 

  31
 

Federal Laws Impacting Salvage Logging
There are a number of laws that govern and lay out the parameters for
forest policy formation and that land management agency actions must abide by.
These laws have direct impacts on salvage logging operations taking place on
federal lands. The Wilderness Act of 1964 (16 U.S.C. § 1131) prohibits salvage
logging from taking place on any federal land designated as “wilderness”. The
most relevant laws for this thesis are the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) of
1946 (5 USC § 551 - 559), U.S. Forest Service Decision Making and Appeals
Reform Act (ARA) of 1992 (42 U.S.C. § 1612), the National Environmental
Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 (42 U.S.C. §§ 4321-4347), the National Forest
Management Act (NFMA) of 1976 (16 U.S.C. §§ 1600-1624) and the Endangered
Species Act (ESA) of 1973 (7 U.S.C. § 136, 16 U.S.C. § 1531). NEPA, NFMA
and ESA often have a synergistic effect. This section will explain their
importance as mechanisms for incorporating scientific knowledge into forest
policy, directly affecting salvage logging on federal land. These laws collectively
provide for public participation within the agency decision-making process
through comment and appeal as well as insuring citizen standing in court. They
also provide stringent protections of the environment, endangered or threatened
species and their critical habitat.
The 1996 APA is a procedural statue establishing public involvement
procedures covering all federal agencies. It established the right of citizens to be
notified, provide evidence pertaining to and have access to hearing officers for
any government agency rule or regulation formation. In cases when the Forest

  32
 

Service decides to move forward against citizen concerns, the APA also provides
an opportunity for the public to submit an appeal to the courts. If the appeal is
found to have merit, the APA mandates the court to nullify any agency rule or
regulation found to be "arbitrary", " capricious" or outside the intent of law (5
U.S.C. § 706, 551:13; George, 2006).
The ARA is similar to the APA in that it also guarantees citizen’s rights in
the decision making process through notice, comment and appeal. But the ARA
only pertains to the Forest Service and it mandates public input down to the
individual project level (i.e. a salvage sale). The Forest Service is required to
document all public comments in this process. Any citizen who participated by
commenting on a decision is able to file an administrative appeal. This act made
the Forest Service the only federal agency having statutory bindings for
administrative appeals (Coulombe, 2004).
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is a procedural statute
that sets forth the requirements that governmental agencies must follow in
preparing Environmental Assessments (EA) and Environmental Impact
Statements (EIS). The act’s purpose is to increase public disclosure and to prevent
or eliminate damage to the environment (Schultz, 2008). NEPA requires that
federal agencies must explicitly solicit reviews and comments before reaching a
final decision on purposed projects “significantly affecting the quality of the
human environment” (42 U.S.C. § 4332(2)(C)). This effectively mandates the
public’s right to participate in federal decisions. It also allows citizens to sue
under the law, providing the public with “standing” in legal terms. It also requires

  33
 

the Forest Service to obtain opinions from the Fish and Wildlife Agency
regarding adverse effects to endangered or threatened species under the ESA
resulting from any major actions undertaken by federal agencies including salvage
sales.
The National Forest Management Act of 1976 was created to resolve
lawsuits that had effectively shut down clear-cut logging on national forests
(George, 2006). The litigation was based on NEPA and its requirement that
federal agencies provide Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) for logging
projects (Parent, 1992). NFTA is principally procedural but does include powerful
requirements. It requires the Forest Service to conserve biodiversity, limit harvest
methods (i.e. clear cutting) and enforce soil and water quality (Schultz, 2008).
NFMA reorganized the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act
of 1974 that had replaced the 1897 Organic Act. Its purpose is to allow timber
production without compromising recreational and environmental goals (Schultz,
2008).
NFMA begins with a section of findings that serves to clarify its purpose.
The findings start by stating that the management of renewable resources is an
extremely complex issue that will change over time. This necessitates a national
renewable resource program that is periodically updated. This program must
include the renewable resources on both public and private forests and provide for
public involvement in the development of the program. Finding number four
makes clear that public and private research will be coordinated and will produce
new knowledge to be incorporated into the resource program. The Forest Service

  34
 

is also found to have a responsibility in leading the nation in conservation and
resource use that will be sustainable in perpetuity. NFMA requires the Secretary
of Agriculture to complete an assessment of the renewable resources administered
by the Forest Service every ten years. This includes an inventory of resources, the
programs of the Forest Service, a discussion of policy considerations and laws, as
well as an analysis of affects caused by climate change on renewable resources.
NFMA’s main significance to this thesis is its statutory protection of
public participation in the development process of National Forest Land and
Resource Management Plans (LRMP or forest plans) that are to be completed
every 15 years for each National Forest. It increased the amount of public input
allowed above previous laws by instituting pre-decisional requirements for public
comments on forest plans. This combined with NEPA had the effect of
scientifically changing the “level and intensity of public interaction with agency
officials in the planning of land management programs and projects” (Coulombe,
2004, p.10). NFMA additionally provided access for the public to appeal forest
plans. It also required the Forest Service to document and make available the
environmental analysis undertaken for projects (i.e. timber sales) in accordance
with forest plans and that they be able to “withstand scientific challenge and
public scrutiny” (George, 2006, p. 36).
The Endanger Species Act (ESA) provides protection to plants and
animals that the federal government has listed as endangered or threatened. ESA
entails that killing or harming, known as "take", of a listed animal or significantly
modifying its critical habitat is unlawful. Federal agencies are also required to

  35
 

guarantee that their activities are unlikely to endanger the continual existence of a
listed species or to destroy or alter critical habitat of the species. The U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS)
enforce the ESA. Endangered species are defined as being "in danger of
extinction" within all or a significant amount of their habitat (16 U.S.C. §
1532(6)). Threatened refers to a species that is "likely to become endangered"
within a short amount of time (16 U.S.C.§ 1532(20)). Only one of five criteria
needs to be meet for a species to become listed. They include excessive damage to
a species habitat, human overuse (i.e. hunting), disease or predators, ineffectual
current legal protections and an “other” category for anything else threatening a
species existence.
A critical point is that the decision be made only on biological grounds
without considering economic or other impacts caused by the listing (50 C.F.R §
424.11(b); Albrecht & Christman, 1999). Also the nomination of a species for
listing can be made not only by the FWS and NMFS but also by any other agency,
group or person (16 U.S.C. § 1533(b)(3)(A); Albrecht & Christman, 1999). If the
petition is rejected the decision can be subjected to court review (16 U.S.C. §
1533(b)(3)(C)(ii); Albrecht & Christman, 1999). If a species is listed, a critical
habitat must be designated. This area is defined as where physical or biological
features are found that are essential for the species conservation. The agency is
beholden to use the "best scientific data available" in determining the critical
habitat. However, economic considerations can be considered here as long as the
potentially excluded critical habitat would not cause extinction (Albrecht &

  36
 

Christman, 1999). The ESA within its provisions “called for an unprecedented
degree of scientific involvement in the identification, protection, and recovery of
threatened species” (Meine, Soule, & Noss, 2006, p. 635).
The ESA also ensures that federal agencies adhere to a consultation
process with FWS or NMFS before they begin any project or activity that may
impact listed species or their critical habitat. There are several steps involved, the
first is having FWS or NMFS determine if a listed species may be in project area.
If this is a possibility then the agency must conduct a biological assessment that
will determine any impacts. A biological assessment is automatically required for
major construction projects done by any federal agency (Meine et al., 2006) or
any project done by non-federal agencies with significant federal funds (L. MoonStumpff, personal communication, June 6, 2011).
This unique set of environmental laws have had major impacts on agency
actions down to the individual project level and have proved invaluable in
protecting ecosystems. These mechanisms, enforced by public oversight and
participation, help insure that sound scientific principals and methods are used by
federal agencies. They have been effectively used to mitigate environmental
impacts as well as stop numerous salvage logging sales. The Biscuit Fire salvage
sales case study will explore this in more depth.
These laws have also provided a mechanism for public and private
interests to effectively participate in policy formation and enforcement. This was
accomplished by initiating the synthesis of science and policy into a powerful and
progressive mode of decision-making. This may lead, eventually, to an inevitable

  37
 

massive reduction in salvage sales on National Forests and other federal lands.
These laws have effectively changed the process of policy formation and have had
some interesting outcomes and implications that are discussed in the next section.

  38
 

Scientific Method in Policy Formation
The previous section demonstrated that science has become a fundamental
factor contained within the environmental laws governing salvage logging
activities on federal lands. These laws require that policies take into consideration
environmental concerns along with economic, recreational and other interests
vying for rights and access to the National Forests. However, there is a
fundamental tension between science and law in the process of policy formation.
The implications of integrating policy, science and the law include the necessity
of developing a process for this combination to work successfully. One such
development has been the advent of policy-driven science. There are conflicts that
arise in combining these three distinct disciplines. How these issues are being
resolved and the results of this new combination will be examined in this section.
The scientific method is an ongoing formal process that attempts to
understand the world. It accomplishes this through an endless cycle consisting of:
observation of a problem or process; theorizing as to the cause; development of a
test that should prove or disprove the hypothesis. This continues until a
satisfactory answer is found, and then a new problem or observation undergoes
the process. Law progresses in a similar fashion except that a definite finding is
necessary at specific points in time (Brosnan, 2011). This comes into play when
litigation is necessary to resolve issues and during policy formation. Further, law
uses an adversarial approach, while science is a cooperative process in that ideas
are shared and tested. Environmental policies dealing with salvage logging as put
forth by land management agencies are, in one sense, an attempt to navigate
  39
 

within the constraints of the environmental laws to avoid litigation between
adversarial parties.
After the Endanger Species Act (ESA), National Forest Management Act
(NFMA) and National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) were passed, and
science had become an integral part of producing forest policy, there developed a
sudden interest in scientific concepts. Forest stakeholders, lawyers, scientists and
politicians became very concerned with what defines a species, forest ecology and
the scientific standards on which science is based (Brosnan, 2011). The
development of conservation biology in the mid-1980s allowed for very directed
scientific participation in policy formation. In fact, the passing of environmental
laws and various international agreements effectively increased the importance
and scope of biologists. The formation of conservation biology was due, in large
measure, to the growing need to establish accepted standards for the new interface
of science, law and policy (Meine, et al. 2006).
One result of this new arrangement was termed “policy-driven science”
which, implies that research responds to policy needs as well as to legal decisions
(Brosnan, 2011. p. 2). This changes the scientific method from one of seeking
answers for knowledge's sake to one prioritizing a resolution of an adversarial
case or for meeting a politician’s desire for an answer (Brosnan, 2011). An
example of policy driven science can be illustrated by the example of Congress, in
1978, enlarging the ESA’s definition of species to include “Distinct Population
Segments” for vertebrates (Brosnan, 2011.) Scientists up to this time had never
employed the term in the scientific literature, although the use of subspecies was

  40
 

common (Brosnan, 2011). Also the fact that the term referred only to vertebrates
might be seen as biased. There followed an effort by scientists to define the term.
By 1996 the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries
Service (NMFS) clarified the issue by defining the term as a group of animals
discrete from other segments of that species that are significant to the species
holistically (Brosnan, 2011). This has had ramifications, especially for the logging
industry involving the spotted owl controversy. The Californian subspecies that
shares genetic traits with the protected spotted owl was found to be a discrete
population and as such also gained protection under the ESA, effectively
enlarging the area off limits to logging (Brosnan, 2011).
A fundamental area of concern impacting the interface of science and law
is the question of acceptable levels of uncertainty. The scientific method never
proves a hypothesis completely--it only fails to disprove it. While policy and
courts rely on “certainty” to inform and support decisions, scientific progress is
often gained through a healthy questioning and retesting of results. Often science
uses a 95% confidence level to qualify something as significant. This confidence
level of 95% means that there is a five percent chance that the finding is wrong.
Policy and decision makers may use a simple majority for rationalization
purposes. Using higher standards for some and not other expert opinions can
cause a discrepancy involving the different types of issues being considered (i.e.
environmental, social and economic). This can be the deciding factor for both
policy formation and legal decision (Brosnan, 2011).

  41
 

Uncertainty is virtually unavoidable in conducting land management
actions directed by forest policy. This creates a condition where different policy
recommendations could be proposed on the merits of the same scientific data. In
addition, Schultz (2008) says that scientific data should not be viewed as totally
objective because of contextual and methodological values infusing the research.
Ecosystems are extremely complicated systems having copious variables, some
unknown, which are also impacted by random events (Schultz, 2008). Statutes do
not provide a clear answer for addressing the scientific uncertainty inherent in
shaping forest policy (Schultz, 2008).
In terms of forest policy, science has enjoyed a major role in helping to
resolve these issues left in limbo by NFMA. Congress mandated that the Forest
Service convene a Committee of Scientists to clarify the intent of statutory
language used in the NFMA. This first committee stated that the Forest Service
must maintain viable populations of vertebrate species. By 1982 the
recommendations were being used to generate forest policy and create the
required forest plans. The same scenario was repeated in 1997 to update the forest
plans as required by the NFMA. However, during George W. Bush's term as
president these regulations were replaced without input from a Committee of
Scientists. There have been a number of changes in recent years that have caused
the Forest Service to switch back and forth between the 1982 and the 2005
regulations (Schultz, 2008). Currently, in 2011, there is a new planning rule
proposed by president Obama's administration that is undergoing refinement. It
contains the same language in terms of salvage logging as in the past.

  42
 

Perhaps the most important question brought up, as a result of the
environmental laws is what constitutes the “best scientific data available” used to
dictate policy? There is no definition provided by the acts themselves, leaving this
as an outstanding issue, which adds to the uncertainty that policy-makers already
face. Unanimity is starting to be included in reports to policy-makers to reduce
confusion over uncertainty and the possible misuse of scientific findings
(Brosnan, 2011). This allows politicians to recognize which findings the majority
of scientists support and to ferret out suspect findings with little acceptance in the
scientific community.
In 2000 the Data Quality Act was passed, without hearings, to help with
these issues. However, the reaction to this law was lukewarm at best. Critics of
the act say that it inherently favors industry by requiring that data meet a rare
level of certainty. The level required is much higher than the 95% confidence
level accepted as significant. This effectively removes scientifically accepted data
from legal consideration and forces scientist to strive for extremely difficult or
unreachable confidence levels. Rena Steinzor, professor of law and director of the
Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland, describes the act as
amounting to “censorship and harassment” (Weiss, 2004, p. 2). Logging groups
have filed petitions to challenge calculations used to restrict timber harvests on
federal lands. These petitions have been rejected by the agency (Weiss, 2004).
Often the results of these issues of uncertainty at the project level end up
in the courts (i.e. Biscuit Fire salvage sales). One of the considerations is if the
relevant scientific data was considered and towards this end agencies are required

  43
 

to document and explain their decision making process (Schultz, 2008). Because
the relevant laws do not provide directive in how to proceed with regards to
scientific uncertainty the responsibility of making those decisions falls to the
agencies. Agency decision-makers invariably include political and value choices
concerning risks in their decisions. This process is often not transparent and often
excludes public input into the process at critical points (Schultz, 2008). The
problem from the standpoint of environmental protection is that the decisionmakers can claim that their decisions are science-based when they may have been
value-based (Schultz, 2008). In ligation the courts will follow the tradition of
judicial deference in regards to federal agencies that is based on the constitutional
separation of powers (Schultz, 2008). If agencies can demonstrate thorough and
adequate documentation of following the statutory language, and have a
reasonable rational their decisions they will be granted deference by the courts
(Schultz, 2008).
Uncertainty is a long-term problem that will continue to come up in the
realm of land management decision-making. There is a need for an improved
method of responding to uncertainty. Suggestions for improvement include:
increased transparency of agency decision-making threw judicial review; peer
review and unanimity; adaptive management; and full implementation of NEPA
(Schultz, 2008). Because of the complexity of forest ecosystems a fully integrated
adaptive management process is needed. A full implementation of NEPA would
accomplish this. These issues will be further discussed in the next section as they
relate to agency policy.

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Policy Implications at the Agency Level
Policy formation, adoption and ultimately application at the agency level
involves a complicated process based on laws formulated by Congress and
directives issued by the executive branch of the government. Legislative policy
(i.e. laws) is a public process while executive agency level policy is derived from
rules, plans, codes and directives to implement the legislative policy. The
complexity involved in environmental science-based policy formation to maintain
bio-diversity requires new techniques, documentation and direct communications
along with adequate funding and personnel to be thoroughly successful in its
implementation. The difficulties arising from issues of funding and capacity to
perform a change in mission under apparently conflicting legislative laws and
performance objectives (i.e. harvest level goals) caused an intermediate level of
policy formation to occur between Congress and the agency. This intermediate
stage of policy formation will be examined in this section. Also the meaning of
policy and how it pertains to forest management will be explored. The Forest
Service’s methods of policy inputs will be examined including problems the
agency faces implementing policies and the mitigation actions taken. Policy
formation pertaining to salvage logging and it’s role are also brought out through
interviews with Forest Service ecologists.
Policy is defined by Webster’s dictionary as a settled course adopted and
followed by a government, institution, body or individual. This allows for a
simplification of the decision-making process. Policies are based on and follow
from the general objectives and attitudes of society as expressed through public

  45
 

processes. Specific objectives are not always clearly stated, but they do support
our society’s fundamental objectives. Worrel (1970) breaks these into five
categories: Security and national defense; health and welfare of U.S. citizens;
support of a free enterprise economic system and democracy; economic
development; and equitable distribution. At a more specific level, as in forest
policy, the development and addition of further objectives comes into play. The
multitude of objectives inevitably leads to conflicts between objectives and a
hierarchy of policies (Worrel, 1970).
An example of hierarchy in forest policy can be seen in a first-level broad
policy of multiple use of forestland. Lower levels of policies help carry out the
overriding policy. Conflicts can cover a broad range and cover several categories.
There are physical conflicts, both mutually and partially exclusive, economic
conflicts between different groups representing different goals and opinions, as
well as conflicts involving time perspectives (i.e. individual vs. a social group).
Policy is charged with resolving these conflicts. This is often an ongoing and
extremely involved process that points out a basic nature of policy, namely that
policy is an evolutionary process. Policymakers never develop policies in a
vacuum; there is always a historical context involved (Worrel, 1970).
Our society is composed of an overwhelming majority of urbanized
people. This led to forests being considered as an entity to be dominated and used
(i.e. manifest destiny). Specialists emerged to manage forests because the forests
are outside the immediate area of concern for most citizens (Worrel, 1970). This
attitude, which is based on manifest destiny, has increasingly come into a state of

  46
 

conflict with ideas of conservation and preservation espoused by a growing
consensus among the public (Protasel, 1980). The passage of environmental
protection laws was the outcome of changing ideas within our society. These laws
allowed for watershed change in forest policy.
The term "punctuated equilibrium" has been used to describe this process
of change in federal forest policy. It is borrowed from evolutionary biology and
refers to long periods of equilibrium and stability that are disrupted by occasional
salient changes, or punctuations (Cashore & Howlet, 2006). Requiring policy to
respond to indicators of forest ecosystem stress fundamentally changed policy and
management objectives. The mandatory requirements within the provisions of the
ESA, NEPA and NFMA laws, by virtue of being enforceable by the courts,
created the conditions for punctuated equilibrium policy change to take place
(Cashore & Howlet, 2006).
These fundamental changes manifested themselves through various levels
of policy formation from the overarching strategies that affected the forest plans
to policies geared to the project level. The higher-level policy formation required
massive input from Forest Service employees. Jack Ward Thomas (2004) gives an
account of the toll that creating the conservation strategy for the northern spotted
owl caused:
In the last two months of the job there was no respite, no days off,
nothing but work and sleep with more work and less sleep with the
approach of the deadlines. When the end came, we felt that we had
done a good job and had arrived at the only possible place that
would satisfy our mission. We finished without exultation, but
with exhaustion, and a profound feeling that something had

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changed forever for each of us, for the agencies that employ us,
and for the management of the public lands (Thomas, 2004, p. 16).
A similar situation occurred during the formation of the Northwest Forest Plan.
Congress commissioned Professor Franklin and three others to head up a
scientific commission to analyze old growth forests and provide options for a
forest plan. This was an intermediate step between laws passed by Congress and
the agency producing the final plan. Professor Franklin had this to say about the
consideration given to salvage logging during the development of the Northwest
Forest plan:
We didn't do a good job on that. And you know we'd spent a huge
amount of time talking about it but it didn't show up in the report.
And it goes along this way that basically in the late successional
reserves and the riparian reserves, only minor salvage should be
allowed. That was the intent. But we were very tired, and we'd
already set aside so much that we wanted to be, wanted to try to
appear to be reasonable with regards to that. So we didn't say no to
salvage. And I have to go back and look at what the language says
in FEMAT and the Northwest Forest Plan, but I can tell you the
sense of the team was we'd rather not have any salvage at all.
That's probably unreasonable so we'll leave a hole for them to do a
little bit. [When asked if he would change anything if he could do
it over again Franklin responded with:] Yeah we'd probably just
flat ass prohibit it. (J. Franklin, personal communication, May 5,
2009, appendix A, p. 120).
These sorts of conservation plans are higher up in the policy hierarchy and form
an umbrella like framework that policy at the forest and ranger district level must
abide by. Franklin’s (2009) comment that salvage logging should have been
prohibited under the Northwest Forest Plan and FEMAT speaks volumes and I
believe underscores the idea that salvage logging is an institutionalized practice
currently in the process of losing its protected status.
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Another very interesting facet of the Northwest Forest Plan had to do with
the Adaptive Management Areas (AMA). The intent was to encourage forest
managers to experiment with new and different ways of managing the forest to
develop ecologically beneficial tactics (J. Franklin, personal communication, May
5, 2009). The punctuated equilibrium shift that had occurred in forest
management changed the goal from timber production to ecologically based
practices, and the shift resulted in a need for an adaptive management technique.
The Forest Service describes adaptive management “as a means of linking
learning with policy and implementation” (Stankey, Clark & Bormann, 2005, p.
1). It is an “approach that treats on-the-ground actions and policies as hypotheses
from which learning derives, which, in turn, provides the basis for changes in
subsequent actions and policies” (Stankey, et al. p. 1). The speed at which
scientific knowledge is increasing makes a mechanism like AMA necessary for
management to keep abreast of scientific advances in the understanding of forest
ecosystems. Unfortunately, AMAs were not quickly accepted, as Franklin points
out:
And we created adaptive management areas where it was the intent
that we would encourage people to explore different ways of doing
things. And in the end this was a place where we as scientist were
very naïve. We thought everybody would want and there's a logic
to adaptive management. The notion is you've got to learn
something that is going to give you better ways of achieving your
objectives…. Well it turned out that none of the stakeholders
really want adaptability. They want rigidity. They don't want to be
told that you know something may change next year because of
something new that you learned. And so it turned out that the
courts really didn't like building in change, adaptation. It turns out
the agencies don't like it because, you know, we've got this nice
rule and I don't want to get mixed up with making changes in that,
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the stakeholders, the environmentalists don't want you to change
(J. Franklin, personal communication, May 5, 2009, appendix A, p.
126).

Originally, both the report by Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team
(FEMAT) and the Northwest Forest Plan had AMA’s with very specific language
saying that no plans were required before starting to experiment within the
AMA's (J. Franklin, personal communication, May 5, 2009). After FEMAT and
the Northwest Forest Plan were completed they went through the process of
revising, which was done by the agency. None of the main authors was present
during this process. Franklin related that the federal biologist involved in the
revision changed the language to "…make the AMA's the most restrictive land
allocation in the Northwest Forest Plan" (J. Franklin, personal communication,
May 5, 2009, appendix A, p. 127). The restrictions that were added effectively
caused the AMA's to be too difficult to use due to the multi-stakeholder group
that would need to be formed and come to a consensus on a plan. The agencies
felt that the amount of money and time needed to implement experiments within
the AMA's could be better spent in other areas (J. Franklin, personal
communication, May 5, 2009). Not taking advantage of the possibilities that
AMA’s potentially provided for policy development was short sighted, and the
need for adaptive management is still felt on the forest level as of this writing in
2011.
The subject came up in an interview with a Forest Service ecologist. The
employee interviewed explained the role ecologists take on within the agency as
including monitoring post fire salvage sales and reporting on the findings to forest
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managers. The managers use this information to adapt policies concerning salvage
logging as well as other management activities. He made clear that the
monitoring, although very important for land management, is very difficult to
accomplish for a number of reasons. One is the funding is hard to get because
“it’s chronically underfunded” (Anonymous R. A, personal communication, May
20, 2009, appendix B, p. 140). It’s also logistically hard to set up a study and
carry it out for a number of years. This is a key issue because short-term studies
are not adequate for developing the knowledge needed for responsible long-term,
ecologically sound land management policies. Recently the region he works for
developed uniform standards for monitoring. This allows for data collected being
useful on a much larger scale, although other agencies (i.e. Bureau of Land
Management (BLM)) use different standards. The Forest Service now has an
interagency and interdisciplinary Field Vegetation Team (FVT) that coordinates
the monitoring within the region. The contact stated that the next step is “to
incorporate this adaptive management strategy so that we build it right into EIS’s
or ES’s right from the start. …making learning one of the specific needs or the
objectives of the NEPA effort” (Anonymous R. A., personal communication, May
20, 2009, appendix B, p. 139).
Other issues impacting the implementation of adaptive management
strategies, including the necessary monitoring, that would improve the policy
formation process revolve around stakeholders’ perceptions and the lack of public
involvement. The Forest Service ecologist stated: “And it may be in the interests
of certain organizations to keep fighting the timber wars and to refuse to

  51
 

collaborate with the Forest Service. …it creates a strawman and false arguments”
(Anonymous R. A., personal communication, May 20, 2009, appendix B, p. 143).
He goes on to say that some people are threatened by the idea of monitoring and
that both sides (i.e. liberals and conservatives) may not like the answers found. He
does believe that adaptive management portrayed as a learning experience (as
opposed to a policing activity) could make monitoring less threatening and
encourages a better chance of being accepted by stakeholders. The interviewee
said that public support for issues like monitoring or AMAs is vital, without the
public weighing in on the issue change is unlikely to occur. The issue has to do
with status quo: “… if you come from a bureaucracy you tend to follow the roles
and norms rather than break outside the box” (Anonymous R. A., personal
communication, May 20, 2009, appendix B, p. 142). The diversity of public
viewpoints results in a long and involved process to build public support and will
require “exceptional leadership” to be accomplished (Anonymous R. A., personal
communication, May 20, 2009, appendix B, p. 141). A general mistrust of
government by the public is another factor mentioned as hindering progress in this
area. He also cites a larger concern with issues such as the recent economic
downturn, health care and private property rights taking priority over
environmental issues and thus causing a lack of public support for adaptive
management techniques.
Another Forest Service ecologist from a different region also echoed many
of these same issues, especially around monitoring and adaptive management. In
addition he stressed that science was just one of many issues being considered

  52
 

within decision-making and policy formation. These include social, economic,
political and logistical issues. When asked if he thought these issues were well
balanced within the decision-making process he gave this answer:
I think it very much depends on the situation. You know I mean it
depends a whole lot on, oh it just depends so much on the
situation. … I mean the politics in particular, … if you’ve got a
group or a person or an organization that you are sort of at odds
with that’s kind of high profile and strong political connections,
then it’s likely that politics are going to play a really big role in the
decision. … [W]here science makes a difference in those kinds
of decisions are where you’ve got really big ecological issues, say.
I mean it’s like a court case right? … and then the issues here
become … can you document what actually the ecological issues
are. … So … sometimes science itself may be the principle issue
and sometimes it may not be, and it may be asked to just support a
decision that’s been made for another reason. … someone like me
has very, very little influence on those kinds of decisions
(Anonymous R. B., personal communication, May 25, 2009,
appendix C, p. 153 - 154).

From these comments it can be inferred that science is not the only consideration
on the project level and that at times it is used to justify decisions based on other
factors.
When asked how scientific information is passed on to management for
policy formation and decision making the ecologist gave this answer:
It can be done a lot of different ways. Since we are internal, … it’s
a little bit easier because there’s a lot of word of mouth stuff that
goes on. But we submit reports as well. It really depends of the
circumstances. It depends on who the individuals engaged are. If
it’s something … highly likely to have a high profile or there’s
likely to be an appeal or a court case or something … [we] will try
to generate a paper trail. … typically … I will try to get a summary
of the results out into a peer reviewed publication somewhere in a
scientific journal because results in a peer reviewed scientific
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journal hold a lot more weight in court proceedings than just
someone’s opinion (Anonymous R. B., personal communication,
May 20, 2009, appendix C, p. 153).
The answer reveals the need for the agency to document results of studies,
especially if there is a likelihood of an appeal or court proceedings. On the other
hand it points out the streamlined process that can occur in-house, which
increases the efficiency of decision-making.
When asked if the Forest Service had been successful in the
transformation from a primarily timber extraction based organization into one
who’s main goal is to protect bio-diversity the ecologist responded with an answer
that was quite long and candid. The answer reveals some fundamental issues that
will have to be dealt with to insure that the Forest Service lives up to its rightful
position as a leader in ecological stewardship practices and applications:
Well I would say the thing you have to understand about the Forest
Service right now is really they are primarily a fire department
right now. I mean that’s just a fact of the matter. Basically half our
budget goes to putting fires out. …the difference between that and
when it was largely a timber organization is that the timber side of
the organization brought funds in and that’s not what goes on with
fire. It’s essentially just a dispersement. So it’s really
fundamentally changed the way the organization is and the agency
is organized and all those kinds of things. But to answer your
question more directly, I think that currently as you know it’s
difficult to change the nature of agencies because it’s like you
know gradual change versus revolution. You know I mean gradual
change, it does happen. It just takes a long time. And a lot of
people get frustrated about that. I can tell you that the rhetoric in
the agency has changed a lot. Some people would scoff at that and
say that’s all that’s changed but I mean that’s always the first step
anyway, you know when you start realizing that there are other
issues. But the fact of the matter is that when you look at the
agency’s current … strategic goals for example and kind of our
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focus areas. I mean basically they are at least as stated by …
headquarters, they are climate change, they are you know
ecological restoration; they are ecosystem services, …that sort of
stuff. And obviously taking for granted all along that … fire
management is a huge part of our job. But what I would say, …
that although there appears to be a desire within the agency to
make the shift towards … what’s the right word… Well let’s just
remember the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act that’s old stuff,
right? That was late 60s, right? So the concept of managing for
multiple things, that’s decades and decades old, all right. So the
agency, well we have most of the … wildlife biologists. You know
we’ve got soil findings …, we’ve got hydraulics. We didn’t have
those people before. But the fact is that over the last 10 to 15 years,
the numbers of most of those people have been dropping fast. And
they were largely funded off of timber receipts, all right, because
you need those people to do that work. And the fact is, is that
because the budget of the agency has not been going up rapidly
and in fact we’ve lost a lot of people. I don’t remember where we
are but we, you know, we’re tens of thousands of people less than
we were in the 1960s and 70s. … I don’t know which staffed areas
the biggest losses are in but I can tell you that with respect to for
example people who are called ecologists in the agency, that
in [Redacted location] we lost 50% of those people in the last 10
years. And I know it’s no different for soils or hydrology and for
some of these other staffed areas. So I guess the reality is that even
though I think we’re starting to say the right things, my opinion is,
is that we are not staffed to be able to do those things. And I think
you would find pretty broad agreement there … independent of
who you talk with, whether it was an external/internal you know
environmental groups will tell you the same thing that they’re just
almost chagrined at, how poorly staffed we are on the science side.
And you know that’s going to change and it is changing. But I
think it’s a critical issue because when we make these suggestions
that you know climate change, ecosystems services and restoration
et cetera are our top goals, we’ve got to have the right people to do
that. You can’t for example you couldn’t say that fire management
was our top goal and then have an agency that was 95% …
ecologists … and hydrolysis. It doesn’t work. And … we’re kind
of in the reverse situation right now where I think we’re getting a
good handle on what the actual issues are but we have not had or
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been able to yet make the kind of changes and modifications in
staff to be able to actually appropriately deal with those kinds of
issues. And I think you see that to a certain extent in the record
over the last say 10 years in, well you brought it up. You know
some of the salvage logging stuff for example. I mean come on
let’s be candid. I mean most of the salvage logging issue came
from the fact that that was an economic imperative that was
driving that, right? But you know we try to clothe it in sort of a
quote-unquote “ecological” terms but you know there … isn’t an
ecological term to cloak it in. I mean come on you know
(chuckles). And we lost a lot of court cases for a lot of years and
continued to because we just don’t really have the right kind of
staff to be able to make … a coherent case for the ecological
necessity to do a lot of these kinds of things. And that’s basically
because really … what we were for a long time was a timber
organization. We’re now a fire organization and … we know how
to do that and to do this but in terms of doing a lot of that timber
and fire stuff for ecological reasons, we’ve never been really good
at that and we need to figure out how to do that. So I don’t know.
… [other agencies] haven’t had nearly the trouble … dealing with
sort of the schizophrenic nature of how you manage for … timber,
watershed, fire suppression, recreation, watershed, wildlife, rare
species. … you name it all at the same time. Or oil and gas, you
know, all that stuff, coal. … look at their staff …[T] hey have
three, four, five ecologists on every unit and they have permanent
standing crews of technicians who are out there monitoring and
doing studies on a constant basis. I mean every unit has got a
couple of these crews that are there every year. And we don’t
have anything like that although we should. But the question
comes down to whether Congress is ever going to … provide …
funding to have that kind of staffing. (Anonymous R. B., personal
communication, May 25, 2009, appendix C, p. 158 - 160).
The problem of being under staffed in environmentally important areas is
paramount to hindering the Forest Service from being able to adequately carry out
its duties pertaining to managing for protection of bio-diversity. The answer as he
says is to develop adequate funding, which will require extraordinary leadership
as well as increased public support. The issue of salvage logging occurring due to
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“economic imperatives” but being “cloaked” in ecological terms is a key
statement for this thesis. It brings to light that the agency is aware that salvage is
rarely if ever ecologically beneficial.
Mitigating the problem of understaffing is accomplished in a few ways.
One is to contract that work out to private companies (Anonymous R. B., personal
communication, May 25, 2009). Problems in work quality sometimes arise which
may require additional Forest Service time to correct. Another mitigation is
provided through the formation of "enterprise teams". They are made up of Forest
Service employees who are considered internal contractors. They travel to were
needed and provide NEPA support work. Issues with these teams include the fact
that they are expensive and their use does not build the local knowledge and
understanding of the local ecological issues. They come in and do their work and
then leave. The cost of both these methods is an issue. The ecologist felt that
funding was an issue not so much in amount but more so in its distribution. A lot
of funding goes to the fire program for instance which lowers the amount
available for ecological areas. Another related issue is the need for a lot of up
front ecological input for the forest planning rules. However, the fire program is
often prioritized over ecological studies because it is of immediate concern where
as the needed studies are something that can be delayed (Anonymous R. B.,
personal communication, May 25, 2009).
The Forest Service has undergone a fundamental shift in its goals as an
agency. The change from a primarily timber based organization to one whose
prime directive is now to preserve bio diversity is truly a paramount change.

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Policy is, in one sense, a way to simplify the decision-making process but the
Forest Service is currently faced with a rising tide of complexity. The nature of
forest systems, their complexity and dynamic character, in conjunction with the
rate at which scientific knowledge is advancing our understanding of these
ecosystems requires an adaptive management approach (Anonymous R. B.,
personal communication, May 25, 2009). Currently forest plans constrain and
force management to develop set strategies (Anonymous R. B., personal
communication, May 25, 2009). This approach does not adequately allow for the
needed freedom to adapt to changes in conditions or to advances in
understanding. It also has not allowed for the needed incorporation of the adaptive
management paradigm that is crucial to meet the challenges that the Forest
Service faces. It may be time for policy to acknowledge and adapt to the growing
complexity now inherent in the decision-making process.

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Advocacy Groups and Civil Disobedience
The importance of advocacy groups within policy formation cannot be
overstated. The passage of the ESA, NEPA and NFMA has allowed these groups
to influence policy in significant ways. The main reason and defining
characteristic of these laws was the inclusion in the provisions that granted citizen
standing (L. Moon-Stumpff, personal communication, June 15, 2011). These laws
institutionalized formal avenues that allowed the public and environmental groups
to oversee and insure environmentally sound practices through court enforceable
mandatory requirements within the laws that established legal standing (Cashore
& Howlet, 2006). This section will draw on interviews of members of the
advocacy community to explore how this influence is accomplished. The success
of their actions in bringing about environmental protections and in challenging
salvage logging practices will be explored. The role of civil disobedience in
affecting policy change will also be explored.
Advocacy groups tend to be focused on a few major issues causing them
to be somewhat specialized. To look at one example, the group Oregon Wild
started out as a wilderness advocate but has evolved its scope to include
restoration of federal forests. There is a triage prioritization process of ongoing
projects on federal lands in Oregon. Projects potentially having the most
environmental impacts will get first priority. Large timber sales in roadless areas
for instance would be a top priority (D. Heiken, personal communication, May 18,
2009). Within this process there are a number of ways that the organization tries
to succeed in their goals, as Hieken relates:
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… [W]e have to … work at all levels. … [W]e're bringing science
to bear in our comments [i.e. comments within the NEPA process].
We're bringing the law to bear through our lawsuits. …[W]e're
directly talking to members of Congress and we're talking to our
members, encouraging them to … write letters to the editor and
talk to members of Congress. (D. Heiken, personal
communication, May 18, 2009, appendix D, p. 169).

One of the main methods of accomplishing their goals is gained through
participating in the NEPA process. This allows the group to comment on planned
actions by the federal land management agencies and suggest the use of
ecologically sound practices based on current scientific knowledge. This often
improves the projects' end results by mitigating environmental impacts when
these suggestions are incorporated by the agencies. The group also tries to
influence the front end of the process by talking to and educating Congressional
members, officials within the agencies and the public so that projects will be well
planned from the beginning and not need modification. "We engage with the
agencies on a daily basis” (D. Heiken, personal communication, May 18, 2009,
appendix D, p. 172). This constant interaction helps ensure that the agencies
conduct ecologically sound projects. Sometimes, however, lawsuits are filed if the
NEPA process fails to bring the desired results (D. Heiken, personal
communication, May 18, 2009).
To be effective in a sustained and influential way requires the organization
to garner public support. This requires outreach as well as an educational effort.
The Internet is an important tool of the organization. Oregon Wild has a large
website with lots of information on it dealing with current issues and providing
educational information. The Internet is also used to alert the membership of
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important issues as they arise. Participation in conferences to share and to gather
information is part of the activities of the organization. Oregon Wild also hosts
events in the local community to educate the public about environmental issues
like climate change or the role of forests in carbon sequestration. The group also
produces educational publications on environmental issues. One issue that
requires a lot of effort is confronting and correcting the misinformation being
disseminated by the timber industry. This is mostly related to the industry's point
of view that logging creates rapidly growing forests. When combined with carbon
storage of wood products they claim that logging stores more carbon than not
logging. It's important to rectify this misperception being promoted to the public
and policy makers by revealing scientific studies, which show this is not true
when considering all the factors involved (D. Heiken, personal communication,
May 18, 2009).
As projects come up Oregon Wild acquires the agency-generated
environmental documents pertaining to the project. The group reviews the
documents and then checks to make sure that the proposal is in line with current
scientific knowledge. There are three points in the NEPA process where the
public (i.e. environmental groups) can officially engage the agency. The first is
during what is known as the "scoping stage", which includes the agency
informing the public of an upcoming project. The environmental organizations
will study the proposed project and any environmental impacts it may incur. If the
environmental group has concerns of adverse environmental impacts occurring
they will send a formal letter to the agency requesting that the agency analyze

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their concerns. The agency is required to address the issues brought up in the
preparation of either Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) or Environmental
Assessments (EA) depending on the scope of environmental impacts that may
occur. After this step the public can comment again if they feel that the agency
has not adequately addressed the issues within the EIS or EA. In this commenting
phase the public or organizations will explain their opinion of what is wrong with
the agency's proposal and will provide evidence to support their claim, such as
scientific studies or reports. The agency will then consider this information and
write a final document called a Record of Decision (ROD). If the group does not
believe the agency has met its obligations under the NEPA process with the ROD
they can then file an administrative appeal. During the appeal more evidence can
be entered into the administrative record (D. Heiken, personal communication,
May 18, 2009).
It’s very important for the groups to get all the relevant scientific
information into the administrative record of the NEPA process. If an
organization is still concerned that a project will have unnecessary detrimental
environmental impacts or that the agency has not followed the NEPA process
correctly they can then file a lawsuit, which will lead to litigation. Within
litigation the parties involved are limited to the administrative record of the NEPA
process. In the case of new scientific information arising during the NEPA
process or litigation there is a clause in NEPA requiring the agencies to look for
and disclose any new relevant information. If new scientific information is found
by the agency the NEPA process must be started over. This occurs if the new

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information significantly changes or undermines the analysis. If the agency does
not start the process over then a new lawsuit may be filed or a complaint can be
amended that charges that the agency did not consider new information and did
not prepare another EIS addressing the information (D. Heiken, personal
communication, May 18, 2009). During litigation it is possible to submit
affidavits from experts. These are considered enhancements as opposed to
additions to the administrative record but they can serve to expand the scientific
knowledge used within a case (D. Heiken, personal communication, May 18,
2009).
One of the concerning issues within the NEPA process, as pointed out by
Mr. Hieken, includes agencies sometimes meeting the requirement of notifying
the public through publishing the information in obscure rural newspapers of rural
Oregon. He suggests that the information in this day and age should be
transmitted through a website. Another issue involves the maps released by the
agencies that locate the project sites. Sometimes the section lines are left out
which makes it very hard to locate the exact location of a project. At times the
maps are issued in layers so that the road layer is separated from the layer
showing the actual layout of a unit. This also adds to the difficultly of finding a
proposed project location (D. Heiken, personal communication, May 18, 2009). It
is possible with today’s geographic information systems (GIS), global positioning
systems (GPS) and programs like Google Earth to easily and exactly locate
project sites and relay this information. It would seem to make sense that the land
management agencies should provide top quality, easily accessible information on

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these proposed projects; not doing so would seem to create an adversarial climate
that is counter productive to the NEPA process and to the directives that require
an ecologically sound approach be used for all federal land management agencies.
Modern technologies have improved other aspects of how environmental
groups disseminate their messages. Mr. Laughiln of Cascadia Wildlands Project,
related that images have become a very powerful tool, whether they are
photographs or video footage of a forest that may be logged or an actual
iconographic image that embodies a larger goal (i.e. spotted owl used for old
growth preservation). Digital photographs or video can easily be sent to websites
or decision makers in Washington D.C. instantly from across the country. These
images can clearly and graphically communicate on a level not possible through
language alone. Laughiln did stress that taking people out to sites is more
effective than looking at pictures. Actually visiting a proposed project site and
being able to experience it through all the senses makes for a stronger connection
to a project's consequences. Because of this many environmental groups provide
tours to project sites or to proposed wilderness areas. However, pictures are
especially used in the cases of politicians who are unlikely to don the appropriate
gear and hike through rough country.
Some environmental organizations are active in the production of
scientific knowledge that directly relates to their areas of concern. The John Muir
Project is one such organization that was founded in 1996 by Chad Hanson, who
has a Ph.D. in ecology. The focus of research is placed on questions that are
highly relevant to forest management decisions, especially in the area of fire

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ecology of forest ecosystems. He is particularly drawn to “where management
decisions are being based upon an assumption that hasn’t really been empirically
tested” (C. Hanson, personal communication, May 28, 2009, appendix F, p. 223).
This shapes or directs the research into poignant areas and falls into the category
of policy-driven science, discussed in an earlier section. One assumption that has
been disproven is the belief that in a frequent low severity fire regime there would
be no significant occurrence of less frequent high severity fires. This was assumed
to be true because the low severity fires would keep surface fuel and understory
foliar fuel from accumulating to levels that would facilitate high severity fire.
Hanson asserts that the two fire regimes "operate on two different spatial and
temporal scales" and are occurring on some landscapes at the same time (C.
Hanson, personal communication, May 28, 2009, appendix F, p. 224). Related to
this is a current fire deficit at all levels of severity "that has major implications for
wildlife, especially the wildlife species that are associated with burned forest
habitat" (C. Hanson, personal communication, May 28, 2009, appendix, p. 224).
Another example he gave dealt with perceptions verses the reality of high
severity fire impacts to the environment:
…even where you get high severity fires it’s not like this particular
fire is a high severity fire. It’s generally some percentage of high
severity. But where you do have a high severity patch the
assumption in the past was that basically its an ecologically
damaged or destroyed portion of the landscape that supports very
little wildlife habitat or plant species diversity … the terminology
that’s been used … destroyed, damaged, ravaged, ... This is not
just in the popular media. This is also used by policy makers. …
also by people, land managers and even a lot of scientists ... But
now we’re coming to understand that these areas are actually
biodiversity treasures. They are extraordinarily high in biodiversity
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and higher plants and wildlife species and invertebrates. They
support a considerable number of species that are largely restricted
to that habitat type. And by and large these species, rare endemic
species, are in trouble from a conservation biology standpoint, a
viability standpoint. Either they are declining or the populations
are so low that we can’t even detect their population trend, which
is an even bigger concern. Of course the response of the land
management agency is …, well, we don’t know if the population is
declining so we might as well keep salvage logging and
suppressing fire, which is scientifically a very inappropriate
response... And of course the one that you alluded to before which
is if you do have a high severity fire patch there won’t be natural
conifer generation. Of course that’s turning out to be wildly
incorrect. Sure, there are always going to be patches you can find
here and there where Mantage Deperelle (?) will come in after a
high severity patch and will persist for some decades even more
than a century which is actually a really important thing
ecologically because that’s extremely important habitat for wildlife
and it has declined fairly dramatically since the 19th century
because of fire suppression and post fire salvage logging and
plantation establishment which eliminates the chaparral. Oh here’s
one more I should mention just because it just really contradicts so
much, some very deeply held assumptions. You know in fire
suppressed forests, forests that have missed the most fire returns,
the assumption that these are the areas that will burn most severely
and that they will burn almost exclusively at a high severity. It
turns out that’s not true at all where we’ve gathered data. There’s
three different studies on this. And all in California, … the areas
that missed the most fire returnables still burned overwhelmingly
at low and moderate severity. In fact if anything the high severity
of percentages or proportions were a little bit lower than the areas
that had missed fewer fire returnables. Again, totally
counterintuitive. We think we’ve figured out why this is. And
basically as the stands mature since the last significant fire event,
they get more big trees, the canopy closes more, there’s less
sunlight reaching the forest floor and this has a number of
implications. The crown base side of the forest increases. It’s
higher above the ground because the big trees are self-pruning their
lower branches because they’re not getting enough sunlight. …
And the small trees are self-thinning because some are dying off
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because of competition for increasingly scarce sunlight and the
surface fuels on the forest floor are staying more moist later into
the fire season because of the cooling state of the forest canopy.
And on top of that you’ve got more large tree bowls which
decreases mid play wind speeds when a fire does come through.
That’s a fire physics issue but all of these things combined
basically create a tendency, it doesn’t always work this way by any
means, but a tendency for mature and old growth canopy forests to
burn at relatively lower severity or to have relatively lower rates of
high severity fire. And of course it’s important that some mature
old growth closed canopy forest does burn at high severity
periodically because there are some species that actually really,
really need dense mature forest that burns at high severity. That’s
their habitat, like the black backed woodpecker. It can’t be just any
habitat. It has to be a very narrow type of habitat. (C. Hanson,
personal communication, May 28, 2009, appendix F, p. 225 - 227).

The gist of this passage is that disturbances, even the most extreme, are an
essential part of healthy, biologically diverse forest ecosystems. Further,
ecosystems are self-regulating. In addition, many of the assumptions that
influence policy may not be accurate. Scientific research is needed to correct
faulty assumptions to insure that policies are based on the best scientific data
possible. An important point brought up by Hanson is the severe decline in
diverse young forests compared to historical norms and their ecological
importance. Recent studies are confirming this shortage of young forests with
legacies and reveal the across the board shortage of dead wood in areas studies
(Nonaka, Spies, Wimberly and Ohmann, 2007).
Some groups such as Earth First! engage in direct action, a form of civil
disobedience. This entails knowingly breaking laws to prevent an unwanted event
from occurring. The Earth First! Journal describes direct action as “action that

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either symbolically or directly shifts power relations” (Bell, Cookson, Hogue and
Reinsborough, 2002, p. 2). The group espouses the belief that corporate
globalization and consumer capitalism are not only very destructive to the
environment but that they are “invading the thought space of the individuals that
make up U.S. consumer culture” (Bell et al. 2002, p. 2). In this way the
corporations gain control not of how people think but what they think about. The
issue becomes one of context and the production or control of truth (Bell et al.
2002). To combat the structuring of reality that views nature as a commodity,
Earth First! uses direct action to apply pressure at critical points of importance
within the consumer system in a way that can “re-pattern reality” (Bell et al. 2002,
p. 2). Earth First! recognizes at least five such points. They are: destruction,
consumption, decision, assumption and potential. One of the questions asked in
many of the interviews conducted for this thesis was whether or not civil
disobedience was effective. All of the responses were that it was, but to varying
degrees. Salvage logging has been the cause of many direct action events. Warner
Creek salvage sale in Oregon was one such event in which Earth First! used direct
action at the points of destruction and potential (Bell et al. 2002). A road blockade
is an example of direct action at a point of destruction while proposing an ongoing
scientific research area in Warner Creek is an example of direct action at the point
of potential.
In October of 1991 an arsonist started a fire on the Willamette National
Forest in Oregon that burned roughly 9000 acres of old growth timber in the
Warner Creek drainage. Part of the area was considered a Habitat Conservation

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Area (HCA) for the endangered northern spotted owl. The Forest Service drew up
plans under the salvage-logging rider signed by President Clinton to salvage log
part of the area. However Earth First! started a direct action located on the road
leading to the Warner Creek sales. They (and eventually other groups) effectively
blocked the road for 343, days making it the longest blockade of a Forest Service
road in history (Davis, 1996). This blockade represents direct action used at the
point of destruction. The objective, as stated by Bell (2002), is to polarize the
debate (i.e. salvage logging) to garner media and public attention to a clear
injustice. The blockade was covered by local, regional and eventually national
news outlets such as the New York Times and 60 Minutes (Davis, 1996). The
effort was highly successful in that it engaged the public from all over the U.S. in
what in effect was a regional issue of salvage logging in the Northwest. The
Clinton administration withdrew the sale in 1996 partly due to public pressure
against salvage logging. Direct action was critical in effectively stopping not only
the Warner Creek and other sales but was also a catalyst for the repeal of the
salvage-logging rider itself (Davis, 1996).
Warner creek also serves as an example of direct action used at the point
of potential. The activists recommended that the Warner Creek burn become
permanently protected as a Fire Ecology Research Natural Area. The local
community, scientists and environmental groups ultimately supported this idea.
By suggesting this alternative future Earth First! believes that it is successful in
“reclaiming our ability to shape the future” (Bell et al. 2002, p. 4). The goal is to

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refute the accepted wisdom of conventional politics and offer an alternative
reality to “society’s destructive institutions” (Bell et al. 2002, p. 4).
When asked if civil disobedience is necessary to bring about change in a
timely matter an anonymous source that took part in the Warner Creek direct
action gave this response:
Oh incredibly. Because I mean the reason why activists put
themselves out there, their safety, their security, their time and
their resources is because they feel … the pain of the injury, of the
larger injury being done. And it’s also … a matter of self
preservation, of survival for their family. … we’re at the eleventh
hour, fifty-ninth minute [in regards to climate change]
(Anonymous, D. A., personal communication, May 6, 2011,
appendix I, p. 319).

When prompted about informing oneself about an issue before conducting direct
action the contact gave this response:
I have considered all those issues before I put myself on the line
because … what if the burnt timber was a fire hazard and had no
ecological benefit and more trees would sprout from the space
they’re taking up? … what if that was the case? … to hell if I want
to spend a couple of weeks in jail pushed around for the wrong
reason. So I think most people will look into that and make their
own decision (Anonymous, D. A., personal communication, May
6, 2011, appendix I, p. 322).

Later in the interview when asked about the ultimate goal of direct action the
source responded with:
Generally the goal is to bring this to a larger stage. Sometimes you
have well meaning politicians and corporate stakeholders … [who]
don’t even know what’s going on … [in] their mining operations
or logging operations. They didn’t know that arson was … the
cause of this timber sale that they’re profiting from. You know I
think people are generally good and won’t stand for it if they know
the truth. Money speaks volumes though …and that’s used to just
squelch that knowledge you know. … I would say most actions I
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have been involved in have been successful because they’ve
been well planned. [We’ve] adhered to non-violence and we’ve
done a lot of organization before to make sure that what we do gets
… shared with the public (Anonymous, D. A., personal
communication, May 6, 2011, appendix I, p. 329).
A common thread for mainstream environmental groups and direct action groups
is the importance of informing and activating the public. It seems that ultimately
the key to bringing about significant change lies in garnering public support for a
cause. It’s also clear that environmentalists care deeply about their causes and are
willing to back up their beliefs through serious investment of their time, energy,
resources and in some cases themselves.

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The Biscuit Fire Salvage Sales Case Study
The Biscuit Fire was a combination of four fires started by lightning that
joined and eventually burned 499,965 acres, making it the largest wildfire in the
U.S. in 2002 (USDA Forest Service, 2003). It was Oregon's largest fire in 137
years and the most expensive, resulting in more than 150 million dollars in
suppression costs (Azuma, Donnegan, Gegney, 2004; Woody, 2007). It burned
across multiple jurisdictions and two National Forests, the Six Rivers and the
Siskiyou. Land ownership of the area was 97% Forest Service, 2% Bureau of
Land Management and less than 1% private or unknown (USDA Forest Service,
2003). Most of the Kalmiopsis wilderness burned, as well as 68,000 acres of
monitored and protected Northern Spotted Owl habitat under the Northwest
Forest Plan (Woody, 2007). Seventy-eight percent of the burn was within
Inventoried Roadless Areas (210,913 ac) and wilderness (178,385 ac) (Strittholt
& Rustigian, 2004). Wildland firefighters witnessed extreme plume-dominated
fire behavior (J. Mshoi, personnel communication, June 2, 2011). Although there
was very extreme fire behavior (i.e. plume dominated and fire whirls) in parts of
the area burned, it is important to realize that the fire burned with a mixture of fire
intensities.
An interview with Professor Agee, fire ecologist and author, revealed
some interesting facts about the fire behavior and the resulting impacts on the
forest:
…there was a lot of pretty intense and severe burning of the
Biscuit on the southern end. But a lot of that terrain that burned
pretty hot was serpentine country, and so it's got a pretty sparse
tree canopy already and it was mostly brush that burned…. scorch
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from the brush or the heat from the brush scorched the crowns of
the conifers. So it was pretty well stand replacement across a lot of
that. But in a lot of areas where you had pretty dense canopy cover
of mature trees-- that was under burned…. I review[ed] this paper
… they said that only 10% of the area was stand replacement in
terms of … 90 to 100% of the canopy scorched. And about a third
of it was 25% or less and the other 40% or 50% was somewhere in
between the low and the high [severity]. So an interesting mosaic
there, kind of similar to what Carl Skinner and Alan Taylor have
shown in the past. (J. K. Agee, personal communication, May 8,
2009, appendix G, p. 273 - 274).
A report by the Forest Service notes that 45% of the burned area is considered to
be low-productivity. Of the remaining area only 20% of study plots were
determined to be of high or moderate fire severity. The report also states that, “As
site productivity decreased, the proportion of area classified as higher severity
increased” (Azuma et al. 2004, p. 12). Although the government report grouped
high and moderate severity together in its analysis, it is in basic agreement with
Agee’s statements. The Biscuit burn overall was a majority of moderate severity
fire behavior. The report and interview both reveal that the high severity fire
behavior occurred mostly on low productivity sites. The overall pattern was one
of a mosaic of mixed severity. For the most part, the conifer older growth stands
were under-burned which left the large trees alive and clearing out the
undergrowth (T. Agee, personal communication, 2010).
The region of the Biscuit fire is unique in a number of ways. The geology
of the area is made up of a combination of faulted granitics and serpentine
peridotites surrounded by igneous rocks of the Cascades and the sedimentary
rocks of the Coastal ranges. The Klamath Mountains were formed approximately
200 million years ago. Serpentine soils along with other geological conditions are
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ideal for a number of sensitive plant species (Whittaker, 1954). Its ecology is a
mixture of six neighboring regions (Smith and Sawyer, 1998). Fire is endemic to
the area and is one of the most important factors influencing the unique
biodiversity of the region (Beschta, Frissell, Gresswell, Hauer, Karr, Minshall,
Perry, & Rhodes, 1995; Strittholt & Rustigian, 2004). To give some perspective,
the World Wildlife Fund has recognized this area as globally exceptional in terms
of its species variety and endemism. Due to its rugged terrain it has remained far
less influenced by human intervention (namely logging) than other areas in the
Northwest.
It was shortly after the Biscuit Fire was contained (August 22, 2002) that
President Bush announced his “Healthy Forests” initiative in Portland, Oregon.
The Presidential elections were drawing near. Richard Fairbanks felt that the
Biscuit salvage sales were used as political fodder by the Republicans to win
votes by characterizing the issue in this manner: “… not salvage logging is
wasting jobs, wasting wood and the environmentalists are locking everything up
and so forth” by Republicans (R. Fairbanks, personal communication, May 16,
2009, appendix H, p. 291). Overnight the Biscuit fire was in the political limelight
as the initiative favored logging of burnt lands, along with increased thinning of
green forests. The reasoning provided was to prevent damage from wildfires,
improve forest health and for “other purposes” (Healthy Forests Restoration Act
of 2003). Although not stated in the law itself, economic rationales were used to
support the initiative. The importance of this area had been tied to the economic
health of the timber and related industries in Oregon. This was a powerful lever,

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especially in light of the decline in timber sales generally and the potential
bonanza that these burnt lands seemed to represent if they could be logged. While
overall timber sales had been going down during the early 1990s, the salvage
sales had increased from 14% to 21% of the overall harvest by the mid 1990s
(Duncan, 2002).
By September 2002 the Forest Service had begun conducting studies
assessing the opportunities regarding salvage sales and restoration in the Biscuit
area. When interviewed about the Biscuit sales Richard Fairbanks explained:
I was ID team leader for the Biscuit Fire Recovery Project, which
was a half million-acre fire here in Southern Oregon that was very
controversial. … The ID team recommended 100 million board
feet [mbf] … [W]ith a minimum of pain and a minimum of
disruption of natural ecosystems and watershed values … You can
get about 100 million [mbf]. (R. Fairbanks, personal
communication, May 16, 2009, appendix H, p. 289 & 291).

The original environmentally sensitive plan was rejected and a request was made
for an alternative that called for 1 billion board feet from his supervisors
(Fairbanks, 2006). This was mostly the result of what was known as “The
Sessions Report”, which was produced by John Sessions (2003) (Professor at
Oregon State University (OSU) School of Forestry) and three other professors
from OSU. None of the authors were biologists (Durbin, 2003). The report was
central to the controversy surrounding the Biscuit salvage sales and also impacted
the Healthy Forests Initiative. For these reasons it is worth analyzing. The report
concluded that 2.5 billion board feet was economically salvageable from the
Biscuit area (R. Fairbanks, personal communication, May 16, 2009; Sessions et

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al., 2003). Douglas County Commissioner Doug Roberson (who happens to be a
conservative Republican) commissioned the report, which cost 25,000 dollars
(Douglas County Republican Central Committee, 2007; Durbin, 2003). The
increase in volume was accomplished by including environmentally sensitive
areas for salvage that had originally been excluded for consideration because of
their importance to the biodiversity of the region. The report called for logging in
roadless areas, late successional reserves and other previously off-limit areas
(Durbin, 2003). Mr. Fairbanks called into question some of the timber used to
arrive at the 2.5 billion board feet:
Of course when you look at the tables in the back of his report
[Sessions Report] you found out he was counting dead tan oak.
There’s very little market for live tan oak, none for dead tan oak.
What was he talking about? Dead tan oak was part of his 2.5
billion board feet. It was nonsense. (R. Fairbanks, personal
communication, May 16, 2009, appendix H, p. 290).
Fairbanks later made a very interesting connection between the billions of board
feet predicted by the Sessions report and the perception it generated:
So basically it was this insanely optimistic prediction that Sessions
was making and the Forest Service went along with it. The Forest
Supervisor, his final decision was to cut 380 million board feet
or something like that. And then of course you could then say he
was being real moderate because Sessions had set him up by
saying there was 2.5 billion out there, right? So it was supposed to
make him look moderate. Of course they never found that much
wood, the first time presale came to a meeting, that’s the people
who actually go out and look for the [specific] wood. They were
like laughing the project leader out of the office. They were saying
[redacted] where do you think all this wood is? It wasn’t there.
Okay what they wound up getting was about 90 million board feet
that they actually cut, which was very close to what the ID team
tried to tell them in the first place. So it was a very interesting
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exercise in magical realism (R. Fairbanks, personal
communication, May 16, 2009, appendix H, p. 291).
The Sessions report in essence enlarged the playing field. It allowed wildly
overestimated timber volumes available for salvage harvest to seem like
legitimate and moderate judgments.
Fairbanks was far from the only person who found problems with the
Sessions Report. Professor Agee had this to say about the report: “It was not well
thought out and it didn’t have a very good sense of place.” (J. K. Agee, personal
communication, May 8, 2009, appendix G, p. 274). When Professor Franklin was
asked about the so-called "ecologically sound" proposals based on the Sessions
Report he responded with, “ …they claim that. That’s correct. But I … disagree
completely. Fundamentally” (J. Franklin, personal communication, May 5, 2009,
appendix A, p. 121). The Sessions Report called for the salvage logging by
helicopter to be followed by planting and aerial herbicide applications which were
portrayed as the best and fastest way to restore forest health and reduce the risk of
wildfire. Sessions reasoned that the severity of the burn would prevent tree
regeneration (Sessions, et al., 2003). This assumption was later proven false by a
scientific study that found that salvage logging in the Biscuit fire area had
hindered tree regeneration and had actually increased the short-term fire risk
(Donato et al. 2006).
There are several serious flaws in logic within the Sessions report, due to
its weak assumptions and comparisons. One is the comparison of the Biscuit area
with a salvage operation in Arizona that was extensively logged. The Arizona fire
was not in a roadless area, was of an entirely different fuel type and had major
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differences in its ecology. Eighty-four percent of moderate to high burn severity
areas of the Biscuit burn were within 200 meters of potential natural seed sources
(Strittholt and Rustigian, 2004). Recent studies have established that the Biscuit
burn was capable of natural regeneration (Shatford, Hibbs &Puettmann, 2007).
The point here is that very sloppy science was used to help justify an extremely
harmful series of events on an environmentally unique and sensitive landscape.
The predominant trend in ecological research clearly reveals that salvage logging
is environmentally detrimental and does not reduce fire risks (Donato et al. 2006;
Beschta et al. 1995; Lindenmayer et al. 2008).
Although several respected scientists (including Dominick DellaSala,
World Wildlife Fund’s Klamath-Siskiyou Project’s forest ecologist) publically
denounced the Sessions report, it still caught the attention of President Bush’s
administration (Durbin, 2003). According to County Commissioner Robertson,
who commissioned the report, Mark Rey the Undersecretary for Natural
Resources and the Environment, who oversees the Forest Service, reviewed the
report with his staff (Durbin, 2003). Mark Rey worked as a timber industry
lobbyist for over a decade before appointed by President Bush as Under secretary
(Evans, 2003). Rey’s appointment sent a clear message that timber sales would
become a priority for the agency (R. Fairbanks, personal communication, May 16,
2009). It should also be noted that the timber industry made major campaign
contributions to the Bush campaign (Common Cause, 2011). It was shortly after
the report's release that the Siskiyou National Forest Supervisory Scott Conroy
made the announcement that the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS)

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on the Biscuit Fire salvage sales would be delayed to allow incorporation of the
Sessions report (Durbin, 2003).
The final alternative chosen included 518 million board feet, which was
later reduced to 372 million board feet. The final plan also called for a lot of the
logging to be done by helicopter due to the lack of roads in the area. Helicopter
logging is restricted for economic reasons to about a mile and a half. Any further
makes profit unlikely (R. Fairbanks, personal communication, May 16, 2009). Of
note is the one million dollars given to Oregon State University’s College of
Forestry by the wife of the founder of Columbia Helicopters after the Sessions
report came out (Pope, 2006; Fairbanks, 2006).
What are left are political and economic reasons to justify salvage logging
not only for the Biscuit Fire area, but also for all other subsequent salvage sales.
Very telling is the assertion by a Forest Service review team that salvage logging
in the Biscuit Fire area was not meant as a restorative action but rather it was
concerned primarily with recovery of economic value (Sensenig & Shull, 2006).
Although the Sessions report was used to justify the major increase in board feet
harvested, its “environmental friendly” rational of creating healthy forest
regeneration had been switched to economic reasons by the time policies were
written pertaining to salvage operations on the Biscuit Fire area. That economic
reasoning, at least for the Biscuit sales, turns out to be just as flawed as the
scientific reasoning. The real world economics of salvage logging are extremely
opaque, mainly due to the complicated record keeping of governmental agencies
involved (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2006). There are many factors

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that influence the end result, not least of which is who actually does the
accounting.
The steps involved in calculating the net economic benefits or costs of any
agency's salvage logging operations are relatively straightforward, as explained
by the group ECONorthwest. The first step involves determining the amount that
mills will pay for the logs. Often the amount projected during the planning stage
is not the actual price paid in the end. In 2009 Fairbanks related that “… several
of the sales on Biscuit didn’t sell the first time [they were bid on]. They [Forest
Service] had to re-advertise them at a lower rate” (R. Fairbanks, 2009 personal
communication, May 16, 2009, appendix H, p. 306). This can be a function of
supply and demand. A large salvage-logging sale can significantly increase
supply and thus reduce demand causing lower prices than initially projected. The
next step involves subtracting the costs of logging and transporting the logs to the
mills. In the case of a Forest Service sale this would be represented by the
winning bid. The company involved would obviously have already determined
that the sale would be economically beneficial. Included within this particular step
are factors that affect not only the economic, but also the ecological impacts on
the environment. Often this would be displayed as a negatively correlated line;
the faster the logging, the lower the labor costs. This translates to higher profits
but also increase risks of environmental harm. Step three is the figure remaining
after step two is subtracted from step one. This is what the agency receives from
the sale. Step four involves determining the agency's costs related to the sale. This
includes preparing and administering the sale on the local, regional and national

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levels in the case of federal land management agencies. It also includes cleaning
up the remaining fuel after the logging. Planting, herbicides and monitoring are
more costs incurred by the agency. Step five indicates if the agency realizes a
profit or a loss by subtracting step four from step five.
Within this system there are numerous factors that may be misjudged with
the end result of a faulty conclusion. A good example of the contrasting views of
the economics of salvage logging can be found in the case of the Biscuit Fire
salvage sales. The Forest Service still maintains that the Biscuit Fire salvage sales
were economically successful, however there are reasons to question this belief.
The original Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) by the Forest Service
had a preferred alternative, which called for 518 million board feet (mbf). This
was later reduced to 370 (mbf) in the F.S. Record of Decision: Biscuit Fire
Recovery Project (ROD). Part of the reason for this may lie in the original
assumption by the F.S. that logs down to nine inches could economically be used
while a report by ECONorthwest found that logs less than sixteen inches would
have no commercial value. Also the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the
Environmental Protection Agency found that the original level of logging would
cause unacceptable environmental damage.
The Government Accountability Office (2006) found that only 59 mbf had
been harvested through December of 2005. The Forest Service gives two reasons
for the amount of timber sold being so much less than they had estimated. The
first reason had to do with an overestimation of timber available for harvest. The
environmental protections of the Northwest Forest Plan reduced the amount of

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area that could be legally harvested and there was a double counting of some
hazard salvage sale timber as part of the salvage sales. Also, the estimate of
available timber based on remote sensing was incorrect. The second reason was
that the amount of decay was underestimated. Delayed harvesting because of
difficulties encountered by the agency having to do with adhering to legal
requirements of the Northwest Forest Plan and litigation over a number of the
sales caused increased decay (U. S. Government Accountability Office, 2006).
The ROD emphasizes economic recovery over environmental concerns
through salvage logging. However there are major concerns as to the economic
viability of the project. The ECONorthwest report points out that the figures used
by the F.S. in regards to logging-related costs are much less than what the agency
has actually incurred in the past decade. In administering the sales the F.S.
assumed costs of $27 per mbf while its best figure of the last decade is $85 per
mbf (Niemi et al. 2004). In clean up the agency used the figure of $48 while its
best performance in the last ten years was $164 per mbf (Niemi et al. 2004).
Another concern expressed involved the log prices. The F.S. does not take into
account the effect of a large volume of logs on the market in its DEIS, although
F.S. economists do point this out in Appendix I: socio/economics of the DEIS.
The Sierra Club, through the Freedom of Information Act, has determined that
there was an abundance of timber on the market during the Biscuit salvage timber
sales.
The value of the timber was overestimated while the cost of recovery was
underestimated. Administrative costs as well as on the ground costs were

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underestimated (Niemi et al. 2004; Bybee & Cosgrove, 2005). Because of the
disassociated accounting process of the Forest Service, the true economic costs of
the sales are not known (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2006). The
Forest Service does not include the costs associated with the NEPA process,
indirect costs, law enforcement or litigation in its estimates (U.S. Government
Accountability Office, 2006). Also the economic benefits are expanded from what
the sales themselves garnered for the taxpayers, to include the monies generated
in the local communities (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2006). Using
Robert Wolf’s figures, a policy analyst for the Congressional Research Service, it
is estimated that the Biscuit salvage sales generated a loss of about 13 million
dollars after logging 3800 acres (DellaSala, Nagle, Karr, Fairbanks, Odion,
Williams, Frissell & Ingalsbee, 2006). Although the GAO report made the
recommendation that the Forest Service continue to track the Biscuit Fire salvage
sales it is hard to find any updated information after the 2006 GAO report.
An article from Environmental Economics dated February 27, 2006 titled
“The science and politics of salvage logging show both are unhealthy” illustrates
the portrayal of salvage logging as a political issue (Thoma, 2006). The salvage
logging issue was used to portray environmentalists as interfering in legitimate
forest management decisions and carried the message that legislative changes
were needed to correct the problem. Basically, the choice was portrayed as one of
jobs versus the environment in popular culture.
Under the Healthy Forests Initiative the Bush administration attempted to
vastly increase salvage logging levels and the Biscuit Fire Salvage sales (the

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largest salvage operation in recent Forest Service history) represented a test case
for increasing salvage logging. There were numerous ways sought to increase the
logging. One was to allow salvage to occur in inventoried roadless areas, which
had not occurred since the passage of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.
Another was that logging was planned in reserves that had been set aside by the
Northwest Forest Plan as habitat for old growth species (Durbin, 2005). Two
thirds (12,540 acres) of the area planned for logging was within these latesuccessional reserves. The Sessions report allowed the rationalization for the
administration to make the tremendous increase in volume over what Richard
Fairbanks and his team had originally planned. Although the Sessions report made
claims that its recommendations were environmental sound the Forest Service
eventually used economic reasons for justifying the salvage logging.
The results of the Biscuit Fire salvage sales are mixed. Logging did occur
in roadless and late-successional reserves but the amount actually logged was in
line with the environmentally sensitive plan originally proposed. Litigation by
environmental groups played a large part in this reduction. The environmental
laws also caused reductions in the areas logged. Although neither side was happy
with the end results, the gains expected by timber companies have not come to
pass. It seems that although salvage logging is still being practiced it has been
drastically reduced from the timber industry’s expectations.

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Discussion
This section summarizes and discusses the findings of the research
covered by this thesis. The major issue of the salvage logging debate is centered
upon the two conflicting paradigms vying for dominance over the management of
our National Forest lands. On the one hand is the entrenched belief that forests
having experienced disturbances represent potential economic benefits. This view
comes from the strong current of Manifest Destiny that has shaped our history.
The view is supported by the long established capital of the timber industry as
well as historical precedence and the institutionalized nature of salvage logging.
On the other side is the growing scientific understanding of forest ecosystems.
The overwhelming evidence has proved that salvage logging is detrimental to
forest ecosystems. The environmental laws governing forest management
practices are a result of this growing understanding. They have prioritized
environmentally sound management practices with the public's support and
approval and they seek to embed decisions in peer-reviewed science.
Salvage logging continues to be a complicated issue, and there are no easy
answers that might cover all possible scenarios. It is clear that a shortage of
information still exists on the environmental effects of salvage logging in a
variety of different forest environments, especially in regards to specific species.
However, enough evidence exists to conclude that the impacts are
environmentally significant and that they are primarily negative (Beschta et. al.
1995; Lindenmayer et. al. 2006). Also, much if not all the effects of green-tree
logging can be assumed to pertain to salvage logging. The arguments for salvage
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logging based on ecological benefits and fire reduction have been shown to be
faulty. Economic rationales have also been called into question, especially with
regard to roadless areas. Potential impacts to adjacent wilderness areas are also
present. It is safe to say that the federal agencies need to adjust their policies
about salvage logging so that they are brought in line with ecological goals.
Unfortunately, the language of the laws and the institutionalized funding structure
(e.g. Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003, Nation Forest Management Act)
allows for detrimental actions to continue. At present, natural disturbances of a
large-scale nature are not addressed in the “Healthy Forests” plan (Cox, 2005).
The law should be amended to address large-scale natural disturbances so that
continued degradation of forests does not continue under questionable premises as
occurred during the Biscuit Fire salvage sales.
Biological legacies have been shown to be essential to the health of a
forest’s ecosystem. Removing them through salvage logging under the so-called
“Healthy Forests” initiative is ironic. When compared to the scientific evidence
presented earlier this takes on an Orwellian quality. The paradigm of patchdynamics recognizes the endemic and essential place that natural disturbances
play in the health of ecosystems, and therefore should be incorporated into
management policies. Preliminary work has suggested that ecosystems have
adapted to natural disturbances but not to the quick combination of disturbances
that salvage logging constitutes. The issue of habitat fragmentation is also of
major concern, especially as it relates to impacts occurring in sensitive areas
normally off limits to logging. Currently these sensitive areas can be opened up to

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salvage logging after an area has experienced a disturbance. The layering of
events inherent in salvage logging needs more investigation so that irreversible
actions will not continue to happen.
The findings show that if managed through salvage, the initial problems
of fire danger and forest health tend to become worse. The area in question will
require continued treatments that really amount to mitigation of the original
decision to salvage log. It is possible that many of the effects attributed to natural
disturbances in the past may in fact have been the result of the salvage logging
that followed the original disturbance (Minshall, 2003; Lindenmayer & Noss,
2006). It is highly likely that studies aimed at determining the long-term viability
of natural recovery (both ecologically and from an economic standpoint) will
increasingly prove the advantages of natural regeneration over the quick “fix” of
removal. Economically, factors that take into account the true costs associated
with salvage logging as well as the economic and environmental benefits derived
from not logging must be entered into the equation.
It’s clear that laws and policies that expedite the process of clearing trees
from areas for safety (e.g. hazard salvage) and even convenience (e.g. road
clearing) make sense and should be retained. To stretch these laws to include
sensitive areas like the roadless and late-successional reserve areas, as was the
case on the Biscuit Fire salvage sales, makes little sense from any perspective
except maybe from a shortsighted political one. Recent events (such as the
Weapons of Mass Destruction not being found in Iraq or the highly selective
“science” about climate change) have shown that administrations are capable of

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ignoring facts to further short-term political goals. An old-growth ecosystem is
irreplaceable after salvage logging for at least a hundred years, and often longer,
depending on forest type and structure. Short-term political goals should not be
allowed to artificially alter the few old-growth forests that remain or to negatively
impact late-successional reserves identified as future old-growth forests. The
consequences may be irreversible in light of increasing environmental stresses
due to climate change and pollution. Distinctions between tree plantations and
unlogged environmentally sensitive areas need to be incorporated into federal
policies governing salvage logging, this can only happen when the ecological
knowledge takes precedence over economic and political factors. One way to
hasten this change is through educational programs that emphasize forest ecology.
Also fostering more partnerships between Federal land management agencies and
environmental groups with specialized knowledge would increase the capacity for
restoration. Presently, federal policies still allow salvage logging to continue
despite the mounting evidence against this practice.
Salvage logging has been shown to be an institutionalized practice through
the language of the laws governing National Forest policies. However the public
response to destructive logging practices has effectively lowered the amount of
salvage logging occurring on public lands. Although the agency has made some
changes in policy to reflect the shifting public opinion and goals, the funding
mechanism of salvage logging (i.e. salvage fund) has insured that the practice
continues and will likely continue for the immediate future.

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The mechanisms that have successfully challenged and reduced salvage
logging on National Forests identified in this thesis are: environmental laws
requiring ecologically sound land management practices as well as procedures
that allow for public participation in policy formation and legal standing in
litigation; inclusion of the scientific method both inside and outside of the
environmental laws; the agencies' methods of policy formation based on the
environmental laws and the public's involvement in the policy formation process.
Although all these mechanism work synergistically, the laws can be said to be the
most important element of a successful challenge to salvage logging as they have
allowed a vehicle for the other mechanisms to have an influence. Direct action
functions as a mode of challenging salvage logging directly outside of
institutionalized means, and can be considered a wildcard within the continuing
debate. Ultimately it will be scientific knowledge along with clearer economic
accounting in regards to salvage logging combined with public demand that will
remove the institutionalized status from salvage logging.
Scientific knowledge has already caused the rational for salvage logging to
retreat from ecological and fire reduction to an economic rational. Because of the
obscure accounting methods employed by land management agencies a clear
economic picture on salvage logging sales is very difficult. However, if the
agencies change their accounting methods as the Government Accountability
Office has suggested the economic losses incurred through salvage logging would
become clear (United States Government Accountability Office, 2006). This
would probably be the final log removed from the logjam of the institutionalized

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salvage logging status quo, which would then cause a punctuated equilibrium type
of shift basically ending salvage logging on national forests. This type of
transparent accounting by the agencies will require the public to demand it.
At present the agencies are shown deference by the courts regarding issues
of uncertainty in scientific information. This allows for the agencies to make
decisions regarding salvage sales that may be based on economic or political
factors, as evidenced by the Biscuit Fire salvage sales. More transparency and
accountability within the decision-making process would limit the influence of
these other factors. Again, a strong public demand for this will be necessary for
this to occur in a timely manner. The other possibility is that scientific
understanding will eventually reach a point where there is no longer an issue of
uncertainty, as has emerged in regards to climate change.
This issue of policy change brings up questions posed in the introduction.
One such question asked if the mechanisms of policy change could produce
needed change in a timely fashion? The question was originally asked in regards
to climate change. The answer is unknown because of the inherently high number
of uncertain factors involved in climate change. For salvage logging and its
impacts the answer is probably yes. The changes in policy have greatly reduced
the amount of land undergoing salvage operations. There are also restoration
actions being taken on federal lands that will mitigate damage done to forest
ecosystems. The second question asked if the fundamental assumptions and
objectives upon which current policy is based able to address current needs? This
is a grey area. Environmentally sound land management policy is in theory able to

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meet current environmental needs. However there are still beliefs ingrained within
the agency's economic assumptions and objectives that produce harmful effects
on the environment. The last question raised inquired if the mechanisms of
change can incorporate ecological knowledge into policy? They can but there is
again the issue of timeliness and the ongoing struggle between the two paradigms.
The public input has been the driving factor in incorporating ecological
knowledge into policy. It was public pressure that led to the passage of the
environmental laws. The work of environmental organizations has been
instrumental in strengthening and overseeing the implementation of
environmentally sound policies. Civil disobedience has played a major role in
bringing the issue of salvage logging into the public consciousness as well
actually stopping specific salvage logging sales. The conclusion will suggest areas
of needed research and make policy recommendations.

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Conclusion and Recommendations
Although salvage logging has been reduced on federal lands it still retains
its institutionalized status. Further research and policy changes are needed to deinstitutionalize the practice. All areas of scientific investigation are important in
terms of the impacts of salvage logging, especially in regards to those impacts on
specific species. There are two areas of research, which could prove to bring
about fundamental shifts in salvage policy. One such area of research is in the
higher value of carbon sequestration that intact forest ecosystems (i.e. old-growth
forests) offer (Smithwick, Harmon, Remillard, Acker & Franklin, 2001;
Luyssaert, Schultze, Borner, Knohl, Hessenmoller, Law, Ciais & Grace, 2008).
This will help in changing the conception of forests from a natural resource to be
exploited to one of an essential ecosystem performing valuable ecological
functions including carbon sequestration. The importance of global climate
change will ensure that forests are managed in the future to help mitigate global
warming. Another issue to be further expanded on is the historical makeup or
structure of forests. Studies that tie historical species' health in terms of
population dynamics to historically available habitat would be very interesting.
They could be instrumental in providing the impetus for returning public lands to
a state more in line with historical forest structure to foster a restored forest
ecosystem. This would include the reintroduction of natural disturbances into
forest ecosystems without salvage operations.
As regards policy recommendations, there are policies in place which need
to be better implemented. A lot of this is simply a function of funding. The
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National Environmental Protection Act, the National Forest Management Act and
the Endangered Species Act and the policies that are derived from these acts all
need more funding to be effectively implemented. The Fish and Wildlife Service
Agency, which enforces the ESA, has a backlog of species that need to be studied
to determine if they are in need of listing. Unfortunately, the agency does not
currently have the funds to complete all the studies needed. This is also true for
the Forest Service, which does not have sufficient funding to employ the required
numbers of ecologists and others needed to carry out mandated environmental
work.
It is clear that congress must devise new funding mechanisms for the
Forest Service, to replace timber sales and salvage sale funds used to pay for
agency programs. If this structural funding mechanism is not replaced salvage
logging will continue because it is used to fund administrative costs as well as
new salvage logging sales. The costs involved in administering and supporting
(i.e. road maintenance and mitigation measures) salvage and timber sales could be
shifted to support restoration and prescribed fire projects. Separate funds for
firefighting should be established so that capital for environmental programs are
not used for other purposes. The problem of funding is a serious issue, which may
take a long time to correct. This is due in part to the economic slump the country
now faces, but the wars that the U.S. are involved in are also a huge drain to
economic resources. The energy crisis, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and
the related issue of climate change will both require capital investments and are
viewed as more pressing issues than forest health. Eventually science will show

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the compatible connection between forest health, carbon sequestration and
mitigation of climate change. Currently, there are limited economic resources and
the majority of them are spoken for.
Stewardship contracts are an interesting new funding mechanism being
used by land management agencies that combine restoration projects on National
Forest Lands into contract packages called Integrated Resource Contracts (IRC).
These contracts work by removing forest products (goods) combined with
restoration projects (services). The contractors offset their costs of removal and
ensuing projects with the goods removed. The funds generated must be used for
on-the-ground projects including, which include the removal of vegetation to
increase forest health or reduce fuel hazards, the restoration of watersheds, and
the restoration of fish and wildlife habitat. Excess funds must be used to
implement other stewardship contracts (U.S.D.A. Forest Service, 2011). These
types of agreements are much more likely to provide ecologically beneficial
results than salvage sales. One issue of concern with these contracts is that they
may increase the use of biomass for energy production. Biomass for power
generation may increase greenhouse gasses and contribute further to climate
change (Makhijani, 2011). Stewardship contracting should be extended past its
expiration date in 2013, but oversight must continue to ensure that
environmentally harmful practices are forbidden.
An area of paramount importance for land management agencies is the use
of adaptive management. The nature and complexity of forest ecosystems and
their current state of imbalance with historical forest structure make it a necessity

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for land management agencies to incorporate adaptive management to most
effectively carry out restoration activities. Congress needs to clarify that adaptive
management is consistent with the NEPA process and mandate its use by land
management agencies. Failing congressional action, the Council of Environmental
Quality, which regulates agencies in regard to NEPA, should consider reviewing
its regulation to encourage implementation of adaptive management practices (L.
Moon-Stumpff, personal communication June 16, 2001). Failure to monitor and
assess have limited the NEPA process to a one-time procedure that is focused on
present impacts of project implementation. Assessing long-term impacts is
currently not undertaken in the NEPA process, and severely limits the potential
for advancement in environmentally sound land management policies and
practices. To work effectively, adequate funding from either the legislative or
executive branches of government must support the NEPA process to include
monitoring and future assessment. A closely related issue is that of the Adaptive
Management Areas as set up under the Northwest Forest Plan. Policy needs to be
implemented which will ensure that these areas are used as originally foreseen, as
areas to experiment with management techniques so that relevant ecological
knowledge can be gained.
Policy reform is urgently needed in terms of scientific uncertainty and the
loop-hole this provides for the continuance of salvage logging. Oversight of
decision-making is needed. A scientific committee for each region could be
established which would ensure that peer-reviewed science meets accepted
scientific standards and is used for decision-making. Policy enforcing

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accountability to clearly stated objectives would also help in restricting political
influence over such decisions. Political influence is a key issue and as long as
vested interests in salvage logging are allowed to influence policy and decisionmaking the threat of salvage logging will continue.

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Appendix A
This interview of Professor Jerry F. Franklin appears in its entirety. It was
conducted on the University of Washington campus located in Seattle,
Washington on May 5, 2009. Professor Franklin is Professor of Ecosystem
Analysis at the College of Forest Resources, University of Washington, Seattle
Washington. Professor Franklin worked as the Chief Plant Ecologist for the Forest
Service from 1975 to 1992.
JM (Jothan McGaughey): What I’m writing about is how the ecological
knowledge that people develop you know going to school and how that gets
brought into policies. And I thought you’d be a really great person to talk to about
it because of your whole involvement with the Northwest Forest Plan. And I
know that there was quite a few groups of people that met Jack Ward Thomas and
yourself and some people that put out a few reports before that final plan came
about. And the way I’m looking at this is, or the way I’ve started to, and it might
branch out, is through the lens of salvage logging as an example to see how
knowledge about that gets brought into policy. And so, I have some questions but
I was wondering if maybe you could talk about a general experience with that first
off? Or…
F (Franklin): Sure. Well you know first of all you know science gets incorporated
into policy in just a variety of ways. And sometimes you know it really turns out
to be very straightforward in the sense that well the management agencies are
really looking for that kind of information and they simply adopt it. And you
know probably the best example of experience to that was when we began to get
in, well we, in the late 60 and early 70s we were involved in an international
biological program and we got involved in a new disciplinary research program
down in the Andrews experimental forest funded by the National Science
Foundation. And one of the things that came out of it emerged from it was the
importance of coarse wood and specifically the importance of coarse wood in
steam systems. And you know in some senses it was a rediscovery of something
that you know fishermen have known for a long time (chuckles). But we had been
in a process you know in the Forest Service of aggressively removing wood from
stream systems. Part of it came out of the history of a whole lot of green slash
being dumped into small streams and streams becoming anoxic because of that.
So there’s you know there’s a whole big push you know not to keep a lot of
organic matter in the stream. And then we had the 64 floods and you know we
just, the 64 floods just trashed a lot of roads. And you know there was a lot of
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concern on the part of engineers that a lot of this was due to wood that was in the
stream systems. And so in the late 60s there was a really aggressive program that
emerged of removing wood from streams. Not just fresh wood and slash but get
all the wood out of there. And so we were paying loggers a lot of money to go and
pull old wood out of the stream systems. Well it became really clear very early in
the research program there in the late 60s and early 70s, boy that wood is really,
really important for those systems both from the standpoint of hydrology and
geomorphology but also from the standpoint of fish habitat. And it was amazing
how you know once that science emerged and it really you know emerged in
publications and a series of workshops. The agency, the Forest Service turned
itself around in a matter of probably five years from an aggressive program of
removing debris to in fact retaining debris and in fact trying to restore it in some
systems. Let’s say well it certainly it was a complete reversal of policy in a
decade. So that was a case where you know wow, nobody had to do much of
anything other than just to make sure the management folks knew and understood
you know what the science was showing. Now you know on the other hand, you
know, a lot of science related to for example our studies of old growth forest you
know really involved a major policy change. And so this was a case where
science sort of converged with where society was going and it was sort of mutual
reinforcement. We had you know owl science and you had old growth ecosystems
science and you had just a general social movement in support of stopping
logging in old growth. Well in the early 80s you know it didn’t seem like a whole
lot of that science was going to be incorporated in forest plans. And I can
remember Fritz Waltson (?) and I talking about how frustrated we were because
there was the forest planning effort but none of this science was getting into it.
But what happened in that case was lawsuits associated with the National Forest
Management Act and the Endangered Species Act that focused primarily on
biological diversity. And in the end of course the agency wasn’t able to, the
agencies were not really able to respond adequately as judged by the courts to
their, to effectively to what they were charged to do by federal law. And
ultimately what happened was because of Judge Dwyer basically you know
putting an injunction on any further timber sales and suitable owl habitat, the
agency and the administration was forced into looking for some solutions. And
what Dwyer said basically was you can’t do it until you give me a credible plan
for conserving the owl. And the Bush administration looked for a solution and just
couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a cheap way around this. They couldn’t and so
they dilly dallied and after about a year Congress said okay, let’s find out what the
hell is going on and see if we can do something about this because the Bush
administration wasn’t going to do anything. So, they brought in four people, John
Gordon who was the dean at Yale, me, Norm Johnson forest policy person and a
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guy that had written the fore plan program and Jack Ward Thomas. And it goes
back to a hearing room and there were three congressional committees in that
room. And they basically you know queried us as to what the hell, what was
really the story out here, what was the problem and what were some possible
solutions? That was the first time that they’d ever heard that we were actually
overcutting. Norm Johnson told them that you know we’ve been overcutting for
several decades in the National Forest so we do have a problem. So basically we
went off to a lunchroom after the hearing and Congressman Volkner started
writing some legislation on the back of an envelope. And I asked him what he was
doing and he said, “Well, I’m writing down what we have to put in a law to
resolve this.” And he went back to that and then he looked up at me and he said,
“You know if you could just tell us where the good old growth is we could solve
this.” And I said, “Well, you know, we could do that,” which my partners in crime
you know were not at all sure how the hell we’d do it but anyway basically what
Congress did was they chartered a gang of four exercise. We called it the gang of
four. It was the scientific panel on late succession forests and they gave us
ultimately an assignment of mapping and grading the old growth and coming up
with a plan for how to deal with conservation of old growth and spotted owls.
And one of the last things Volkner said to us as we left this back room was, “And
don’t forget the fish. We don’t want some damn fish blowing us out of the water
after we’ve got this all settled.” Basically what happened was, we produced going
back and we got over 100 people together and in a matter of about six weeks we
produced a report and it was this report. And basically what we did was we got a
bunch of scientists together, hydrologists and aquatic biologists and other folks
together and we mapped the old growth and graded it and then we developed a
whole bunch of alternatives based on different levels of set asides (?)
fundamentally and looked at what the economic impacts of those different levels
would be. And so this incorporated a whole lot of science. There had been a
proceeding report by Jack Ward Thomas and a team on a recovery plan on a plan
for conserving the northern spotted owl. And I don’t know if I’ve got it here or
not. So we started with this, we started with this thing and what that team had said
was, “You need big blocks of habitat and you need to do something about the
areas in between those blocks of habitat.” So we started with that and then we
added what we knew about the science of the fisheries and fish habitat and what
we knew about old growth forests and came up with the alternatives there. Now
that became the gang of four report and the owl report before it became the sort of
became the framework for a FEMAT. And so basically a lot of what happened in
FEMAT fed directly off of this scientific analysis. So basically it’s a long story.
The short of it is, is a result of the injunction, first Congress then the President
turned to a group of scientists to develop alternatives for them. Now that’s the
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antithesis of the woody debris and rivers story in terms of putting a bunch of
scientists in charge of developing management alternatives for the Northwest
International Forests. That’s very extreme. That’s not a good way to make policy
but that’s exactly what they did. So those represent two extremes in how science
gets incorporated into policy and obviously in the gang of four exercise and the
owl conservation plan exercise and FEMAT, you had a bunch of scientists totally
structuring alternatives on the basis of their understanding of these systems and
these organisms and how they worked.
JM: Yeah and that was over quite a period of years there.
F: Yeah our report was ‘90; gang of four report was ‘91. There was a scientific
analysis team report in ’93, there was, at the beginning of ’93 and there was
FEMAT in ’93 and then there was the Northwest Forest Plan in ’94.
JM: So and I imagine that the alternatives were there as, would you portray that as
like compromise, having the different options in there to choose from? Or…
F: Not really. Here’s how it worked. First of all, the chafe was the one that asked
Jack Ward Thomas to do the owl. He said, “Give me a credible scientific plan for
conserving the owl.” He said, “A plan.” Now Congress on the other hand when
they commissioned the gang of four said, “Okay. We want you to look at where
the old growth forest is and grade it into good, better, best and the we want you to
take consideration of old growth, owls, murrelets, fish habitat and come up with a
plan that will…Come up with a plan.” Well we didn’t do that. Thank God Norm
Johnson was smart enough to say, “No, we’re not going to give them a plan.
We’re going to show them what the tradeoffs are between different levels of
conservation or preservation on the one hand and timber harvest on the other,”
and say, “We’re just going to give them a marginal cost benefit analysis,” and
basically the primary access was about 12 steps long from heavy timber harvest to
preserving everything. Well and in the end then, well that summarized the whole
damn thing. Basically this is what happens as you go, here was the historic, here
was the high timber harvest and here was sort of preserve everything and you can
see how the timber harvest goes. And then here was our risk analysis for whether
or not we were going to achieve various objectives. So what we did in that case,
and you can have that if you want it, where they effectively did for Congress is
we said, “Okay here’s our analysis and you can see you know how the probability
of succeeding and preserving owls is going to change with each step along this
gradient from brown to green. You decide you know what you want to do. It’s
your responsibility, not us, to tell you what your decision should be.” And the
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congressional folks know exactly where their decision space was. Even the most
brown of them. And so a republican congressman from southwestern Oregon
looked at that chart which was up on an easel and he said, “We won’t legislate
anything less than eight.” What?
JM: And this, eight is off the…
F: No here’s, yeah here’s the alternative…
JM: Oh, oh I see, less than eight, I see. I thought you were talking board feet.
F: And Norman asked, “Well Congressman, why is that?” He said, “We won’t
legislate anything with a low in it. In other words, less than a 50% probability of
achieving our objectives with regards to those five levels.” And that was the
first…
JM: Do you think that that was because of the injunction shutting down the timber
harvest for…? I mean it shut it down for a couple years, correct? Do you think
that that played a big part in that decision to go for the 50% or better in preserving
these things? Like that they didn’t want to risk another injunction, they wanted
to…?
F: Well that probably entered into it but also it was a political statement by him
effectively saying that we can’t defend any kind of a decision that doesn’t have at
least a 50% probability of success. And in effect the legislation under which we’re
operating will require us to do that. So he knew he couldn’t go back and change
the National Forest Management Act or the ESA and so he was making a
judgment. Now in the end, Congress didn’t do anything and that’s why Clinton
said when he was campaigning for President, “I will resolve this issue.” And what
he had told us was, “Okay, I want you to do a scientific analysis. I want you to
give me alternatives, which are scientifically credible, which are legal under
existing law. I don’t want you to have to change any law and which given those
first two try to cut society some slack in terms of timber harvest.” So he put you
know, “I don’t want any alternative from you that isn’t going to stand up in court
scientifically.” So you know he laid it out for us and in the end that’s exactly what
we did. We, all the alternatives we gave him and they went from green to very
green basically would have met those criteria.
JM: I see. Yeah I read an article that you’re involved with, with the gang of four
fairly recently, well a few years ago I guess now, talking, that was looking back at
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the Northwest Forest Plan. And in that, and it went over a lot of what you’ve gone
over here, in part of it, I think that you basically make the recommendation of not
cutting anymore old growth. Do you see that getting into policy or?
F: Now I was going to go there. I haven’t yet but I was going to. The current
situation is this. First of all, in the case of old growth really didn’t need to set
aside all of the old growth, we thought, as a scientific group to meet the goals of
maintaining viable populations and the other objectives. So we didn’t set aside all
the old growth and we actually assumed that a compromise would require
sustaining some level of timber harvest and you can only do that if in fact you are
cutting some mature and old forest. So we didn’t have to set it all aside to achieve
the goals. So the alternative that the President picked was one that in fact left
some out. Now, what we didn’t understand at that time was society just wasn’t
going to abide cutting anymore old growth on the federal lands. Where they begin
to try to do some, they literally ended up as little old ladies in tennis shoes out
there. And so the agencies and the Congressman said this ain’t going to work. We
cannot end up with police out there taking you know people off to jail for
obstructing. And so basically even though it’s allowed under the Northwest Forest
Plan, nobody is cutting old growth even though it’s not set aside. So anyway we
misjudged that. You know we followed the rules and we gave them alternatives
that met the criteria. The President chose an alternative that didn’t set aside all the
old growth but in the end…
JM: There’s public pressure, huh?
F: Public pressure stopped it. Now, what we’ve been doing for the last eight years
is continuing to fight old growth and roadless areas, both issues that are
unresolved. Bush Jr. tried to put them all back on the table. And so what we spent
the last eight years doing is fighting over the same damn issues. If we’re going to
move ahead you know my own thinking was we’ve got to get that off the table so
that we can move ahead on what we do agree to do. So basically there’s
legislation right now that’s about to be introduced by Ron Walling (?) initially
just for Oregon. That effectively takes all of the old growth off the table and he’s
been using Norm Johnson and I as a source of information. And one of the things
that we urged him to do was recognize that a policy has to distinguish between
moist forest and dry forest. And you take old growth forest off the table in the
case of the moist forest but you can only take old trees off of the table in the case
of the dry forest because so much of it is an uncharacteristically dense and fire
prone condition. So my point is we’ve encouraged the senator to incorporate a lot
of science in this proposed bill, proposed law. And it uses plant associations as a
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basis for setting policy. It distinguishes between moist and dry forest. It uses an
age definition, an age distinction as opposed to a size distinction, those kinds of
things.
JM: Now there’s that 80 year for the trees. Is that when they’re considered old
growth because of the structure or the size of them?
F: Well no. That’s got a long story to it too. And basically the way the 80 years
got started was in the gang of four exercise where we were considering forests
that provide habitat that’s important to a broad array of late successional
organisms. We figured that a lot of the mature forests also did that. And
particularly you know Tom Spees (?) and I were thinking about a lot or the Cusan
(?). I don’t know if you know the Cusan area. Burned in 1902, the same time the
Ackle (?) burnt dead but it only burned once as did some of the Ackle and they
had a lot of structural complexity to it, a lot of carryover from the old forest. So
anyway we decided we needed to have a broader concept in old growth. We
needed to consider a larger population of forests. So we created the concept of
late successional forest, which was everything over 80 years old, which included
the 1902 burns that happened, okay. So that’s how 80 years got in there, 100 years
would have been more logical. But anyway and now you know what you take off
the table, what you call quote “old” is a political call. And so it was up to Senator
Wyden to decide what age do you want to use. He decided to use 120 years. So it,
interestingly he now does all that or old growth he calls it mature and old. But
anyway that decision about what we take off the table and whether or not you call
it old growth in a political sense or not is strictly a political call.
JM: Sure, yeah. Well you know I’ve seen that the book that I think that you
helped put out that I think he was a guy, I can’t remember the name, works for
DNR.
F: Bob (Robert) Van Pelt?
JM: Yes, yeah, put out those great little handbooks about defining old growth.
And yes certainly it seems to be not so much an age thing at all but more of a
structural component to it and mixture and the whole thing with disturbances
coming in and creating this matrix of different aged forest.
F: DNR made a political decision, a policy decision too but they took everything
off the table on the west side that was over 160 years old but not…

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JM: Not on the east side?
F: No on the west side. But they didn’t take off the table the stands that were 100160 years old. But just in an ecological sense, just as a footnote, you know
generally I consider young forests to be forests up to 80 to 100 years, mature
forests to be 100-200 and old forests to be over 200. What the department decided
to do was they really didn’t want to try to take a lot of those mature forests off the
table because that’s where a lot of your volume is.
JM: And they, the DNR of course is…
F: Is trust management.
JM: Is trust yes so that…
F: What they did decide to do was to take the old growth off the table and actually
go you know down to 160 years and take everything down to that age off the
table. On the basis that those are forests that preceded human settlement in age.
Anyway they had a rationale but it was fundamentally a political decision as to
what age grade they used.
JM: Well I wonder you know I haven’t really seen a map that states that of you
know about the state of Washington and DNR land I mean how much land that is,
what percentage of their overall holdings that represent. Do you know by any
chance?
F: It’s not big. There is a report…
JM: I wouldn’t think it would be very much.
F: There is a report. I think it’s about 60,000 acres on the west side. I don’t know
if I have it here but it’s about 60,000 acres and basically the department decided
that well we’re just going to take that all off the table and you know we’ll buy
some of it out. We’ll use some of it to meet our other obligations under the HCP
but we’re not going to try and put any timber sales in any of it. It’s about 60,000
acres or less than. I don’t know if I’ve gone in the direction you’ve wanted we to
go.

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JM: That’s fine. I think that’s great. I’m just going to sort of review some of this
stuff. Do you think that the economic and the ecological concerns were well
balanced out of the Northwest Forest Plan?
F: No. No, they weren’t because basically the federal government decided to carry
most of the load for the Northwest. So you know it was very clear that in the case
of the federal lands the priority is to meet the ecological goals. And in a sense you
know biodiversity has more of a mandate than timber harvest does. And so
anyway no, ecological values came first.
JM: Does that include the state and private land or?
F: No, no it’s just the federal.
JM: Just the federal, okay. And about the salvage logging you know I know that
since the Northwest Forest Plan has happened and there’s been less logging,
actual salvage logging has made up a larger percentage of the logs that get done.
So what consideration did the gang of four and the Northwest Forest Plan give to
salvage logging and the its role I guess?
F: We didn’t do a good job on that. And you know we’ve spent a huge amount of
time talking about it but it doesn’t show up in the report. And it goes along this
way that basically in the late successional reserves and the riparian reserves, only
minor salvage should be allowed. That was the intent. But we were very tired and
we already set aside so much that we wanted to be, wanted to try to appear to be
reasonable with regards to that. So we didn’t say no salvage. And I have to go
back and look at what the language says in FEMAT and the Northwest Forest
Plan but I can tell you the sense of the team was we’d rather not have any salvage
at all. That’s probably unreasonable so we’ll leave a hole for them to do a little
bit.
JM: I see. If you had to do it over again would you change that part of it?
F: Yeah we’d probably just flat ass prohibit it. And where this finally you know
came to a head was in the Biscuit. And you know I gave, I sent in some comments
on the Biscuit EIS and effectively I said you know that you know you have the
said to the regional forester, in fact I went out with her. You have the authority to
do this but what you’re proposing to do is not what the intent of the FEMAT team
was. And you in any case cannot justify ecologically. So you know you can do it
and you can say you’re doing it on the basis of economics but you know all you
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will not ever be able to defend it in court if you say that you’re doing it for
ecological reasons.
JM: And well I guess that brings up the Sessions report which it’s my
understanding that that was saying that it could be done ecologically or did I
misunderstand that?
F: No they claim that. That’s correct. But that’s not, I disagree completely.
Fundamentally, I argue you know I used to work with John Sessions a lot and I
called up John and I said, “John, you cannot argue that salvage logging is going to
accelerate the reestablishment of habitat for the northern spotted owls.” It isn’t
going to. And in fact it’s likely to delay development of habitat. But anyway his
vision of what you wanted to do was one of now let’s salvage it and let’s replant it
with create a dense plantations on the area. And neither of those are particularly
useful things to do from the standpoint of well I’m going to help you with regards
to the owl and they clearly are not going to be advantageous from the broader
perspective of biological diversity and actual ecological processes.
JM: Well it really it seems that that’s it would be more for timber production to do
that, yeah.
F: Absolutely.
JM: And if, I’m not sure how much of that went on because I know it kept getting
cut back and cut back the amount that they okayed for that. But then when you do
that, there’s the whole question of having to manage that planning afterwards or
to prepare the ground to site prep and then herbicide applications and eventual
thinning as well. So yeah I’ve looked a little bit into the economics of it. And it
seems like in terms of salvage if you cannot do anything and have it come back
because there’s seed trees, there were seed trees in areas that would get to most of
that spot and not have to pay anything versus salvage with kind of a low
economic return on the wood versus the costs that are continual for you know five
years out or maybe even more with the thinning I suppose. That it just is very
hard to make that add up.
F: Yeah well I asked John, I said, “John, would you invest some of your money in
reforesting that land that kind of land?” He said, “Oh no of course not. It’s for the
owls.” You know John’s a rich man. And so I just, “John, you’re talking about
spending all this money to reestablish forests quickly. Would you invest your own
money on those kinds of sites?” And he said, “Well no, of course not.
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JM: Do you think there’s anything to it? That it could be, do you think that a
human managed forest from say from the start from after it’s being burned there’s
some kind of natural disturbance can be brought to an old growth state quicker
than just allowing it to do it on its own?
F: That I do believe in the sense of you know existing plantations for example. I
think we can significantly accelerate the development of a number of structural
attributes of older forests. So yeah I think you know active management in
plantations or other young managed stands can in fact accelerate property by
several decades, maybe many decades, the development of some of the
complexity that you want. So that I believe you can do.
JM: That does make sense I mean with all the well there’s they started out with I
guess girdling trees or topping trees. And now I think the thing is, is to inoculate
wood with the fungi and put them in and you know that seems to work fairly well
from what I’ve heard. And that obviously would speed all that up. I guess for
myself I wonder with the you know there’s a lot of forest out there on federal land
that you know was planted with the Douglas fir from seedlings and you know
they’re the same age and stuff. Even though there’s a lot of hemlocks in there. I
guess I’m familiar with the Olympics I guess. You know there’s hemlock in there
and some other trees but I wonder how, and I don’t know if the information is out
there but how closely that resembles what would be there if there hadn’t been any
active management and what the difference in terms of the biodiversity is, you
know, in the fauna and I guess the associated flora that goes along with the forest.
F: Probably quite a bit.
JM: Quite a bit yeah.
F: Certainly the genotype, the genetic makeup of the forest is the Douglas fir
component of course is probably different because nature tends to put seedlings
through an environmental sieve. You know its issues like heat and drought that
are selected. You know we’ve put those to a greenhouse or a nursery sieve where
the traits we select for our growth not resistance to environmental stress. So I
would think you know that the old growth spectrum, genetic spectrum is different
than it would have been with a naturally regenerated cohort of Doug fir. Nobody’s
looked at that.

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JM: Yeah, do you think that there will be issues with that with say climate change
coming up?
F: Very possibly. Someone like Weyerhaeuser doesn’t really care.
Weyerhaeuser’s attitude you know with regards to climate change is well if we
get into trouble we’ll just cut the stand and put in a new strain or a new species.
So they don’t worry a whole lot about it. But you know when you’re dealing with
something like federal lands, then we care a whole lot about it.
JM: That brings up an interesting point I guess in my mind. You know I think that
as society is getting close to being able to genetically come up with a super
Weyerhaeuser super treatments okay with climate change but then you and you
have the federal lands which are being with the Northwest Forest Plan are more
being conserved for biodiversity. But then you have this interesting issue, which
is kind of similar to the whole Monsanto horn thing where the genetically
modified corn got into some guy’s field there and Monsanto was actually able to
sue that guy for stealing their corn.
F: (laughter) He should have sued them back for polluting his field.
JM: Well yeah but I think it comes down to not being able to hire a good enough
lawyer and he lost. But do you have any thoughts on that aspect of it? I mean…
F: Not really because you know I’m not a great fan of genetic engineering but the
reality is we’re going to be doing a lot of genetic engineering. And you know we
may be doing some of it in connection of trying to deal with climate change. So
you know I think that’s, there’s going to be a lot of it in the future but that’s not
where I want to go.
JM: Yeah. Well I agree with you there. How about institutional structures? I guess
you know we could be talking about the universities or the Forest Service
structure itself. Can you talk to about how they facilitate or hinder ecological
knowledge being used to develop policies?
F: Well you know my sense is and most of the management agencies these days
are a lot more open to new information than they were before and really want it.
You know we went through a period particularly in the 80s in the Forest Service
where boy there was a lot of anger on the part of the management branch of the
agency towards researchers. And a lot of talk about we have to get those scientists
under control. They’re completely out of control. But you know you don’t see that
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anymore. And I think you know basically part of it is that first of all managers
know that they get themselves in trouble if they are not cognoscente of the most
current science. They’re liable to have to look at it in court. But I think much
more positively they are prepared to, they want to know what the most recent
findings are and they’re a lot more accepting of the notion that the research may
really end up changing what some of our you know it may result in some
fundamental shifts in what we do and how we do things but that’s okay. So I think
at least in the Forest Service research is considered to be much more of an ally
and a source of useful information than they were in the past. I think you know in
the old days the you know I think most managers in the Forest Service sort of
looked at scientists as being for the most part harmless enough and you know it’s
probably good to keep them engaged and keep them off the street rather than
getting into trouble (chuckles). Then there was like I say a period of the 80s when
there was a lot of conflict. But I think that that’s changed now. And I look at DNR
and similarly you know the attitudes have changed a lot and as a recognition you
know that we may have a mission but you know we’d better at least understand
but we want to have the best understanding we can have of how the system works.
It’s in our interest. It’s in the resource interest and maybe in our legal interest. I
don’t think we’ve got the institutional barriers we want.
JM: And do you think that that’s basically due to societies changing the
conception of how they view the forest?
F: Yeah I think so. It doesn’t mean you don’t get into conflict sometimes but it’s
not at the agency level. It may be at the level of policy makers. And you know
Brian Baird for example was involved in developing with an Oregon congressman
I (unclear) but anyway they introduced a bill in a previous session of Congress to
mandate salvage. And Brian was not prepared to hear that you know salvage
doesn’t do ecological good. This was not what he wanted to hear. And you know I
paid a price for saying that. So you know there still are people who in situations in
which you know a scientist risks telling truth to power but it’s not really in the
agencies.
JM: I see. That’s interesting. Why do you think he’s so invested in that, the belief
that salvage would do some good?
F: Well first of all you know the notion that salvage isn’t good, it isn’t good to go
out there and get dead trees and capture that value, you know wow that’s kind of
counterintuitive, what are you saying? You know, they’re not valuable out there
anymore and you know we can have jobs and isn’t it good to go out and do that?
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And we can plant trees and get the forest back. And you know the way foresters
are trained with the notion that if a forest is destroyed, the most important thing
that you can do is go out there an put that forest back and salvage you know
whatever commercial value is there. Well given some of the kinds of management
pools we have today that’s not necessarily true. And so you know you’ve got this
whole history of viewing salvage in that way and then you have a set of political
objectives that Brian had in connection of that. He wanted to do some good things
for labor and he was pissed at environmentalists. He didn’t much give a shit what
they had to say. And what do you mean it’s not good? So you’re you know in that
case there’s something of a long tradition of momentum to it. So now some
scientists are stepping up and saying no we understand all of what’s going on. It’s
not necessarily a good thing to do from an ecological perspective. And so that’s
why you know I think it had to do with oh my God you know I don’t want that
science right now. Thank you very much. I have another kind of objective in
mind.
JM: Yeah. What do you think is the most the best way to get scientific knowledge
into practice? I mean do you think it’s at the policy maker level like at Brian
Baird or do you think maybe it’s the institutional level or a federal laws or some
mixture of both?
F: It’s both. You know you have to have state law; you have to have federal law
that lays down some general objectives and boundary conditions. But at the same
time you know that with we’ve got to have a lot of latitude in adapting to a
particular landscape and a particular forest stand so that you can have national
policy that comes down to making prescriptions. So basically you know what
we’re trying to do with Wyden is set a policy that says okay now if we want to
take old growth off the table you know we’re going to recognize that there’s some
places where we take the forest off the table because those are standard placement
environments and we didn’t really influence, haven’t really modified them and
they’re adapted to that kind of thing and there are other places where we screwed
things up so we take the old trees off the table but we’ll allow active management.
We won’t mandate it, which is to say we have permission to work in federal
forests and dry sites defined by some plant associations that have old trees on it
excluded. Okay that gives a framework then for the agency. Oh yeah okay. Old
growth forests however that’s defined by age or size or whatever it is are off the
table on post plant associations, we won’t even talk about doing anything
(unclear). But on the dry sites you know we’re going to go ahead an in some cases
we will do a restoration treatment and in other cases we won’t but we have the
latitude to do that and a number of trees that we’re going to manage for the basal
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area et cetera are going to vary with different plant associations et cetera. So no I
think you know you have to have some broad policies that sort of define how to
put it that basically lay out some basic goals and some boundary conditions but
provide for a lot of latitude within that general guidance. Then it’s up to the
agency then to take that guidance from the legislature and say okay, so this is how
we’re going to do this. This is how we’re going to implement this. And in the
proposed legislation incidentally we have some third party activity to assess
performance on the part of the agency. So we’ve got some objective third party
that’s looking at okay how well is the agency meeting the intent of that law and
the intent and character of their regulations? Are they doing well?
JM: That would be interesting. In that article from a few years ago, you also
talked, you’re talking about the Northwest Forest Plan and then you know there
was the adaptive management areas that were a part of that too, to sort of to look
to the future I guess to find to explore different ways of managing the forest that
will work and what not. And in the article I believe you said that they have not
been, that they haven’t been used to their full potential or something like that.
Could you talk about that a little bit and how important do you think that adaptive
management areas are you know for finding…? Also in that article, you talk about
looking towards the future and maybe even shaping opinion I think or being ready
for however society is going to change…
F: Right, that in effect society’s going to change its objectives and you got to be
aware of that. And at the same time you’re learning more from a scientific point
of view. That’s part of the adaptation process as well. And well you know in
FEMAT in the Northwest Forest Plan we tried to provide a lot of opportunity to
be adaptive, to be flexible. So the Riparian (?) buffers were interim buffers that
would ultimately be changed following watershed analysis. And we created
adaptive management areas where it was the intent that we would encourage
people to explore different ways of doing things. And in the end this was a place
where we as scientists were very naïve. We thought everybody would want
flexibility and there’s a logic to adaptive management the notion is you’ve got to
learn something that is going to give you better ways of achieving your
objectives. You know you’ve got to learn that some of the stuff you’re doing isn’t
getting what you want, that there are, you’re going to have to change or there are
other you know you’re learning the different ways’ they’re going to achieve it
better. Well it turned out that none of the stakeholders really want adaptability.
They want rigidity. They don’t want to be told that you know something may
change next year because of something new that you learned. And so it turned out
that the courts really dealt like building in change, adaptation. It turns out the
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agencies don’t like it because you know we’ve got this nice rule and I don’t want
to get mixed up with making changes in that, the stakeholders, the
environmentalists don’t want you to change. You know you’re going to tell me
you might change the boundaries on some of the late successional reserves? Or
you know more likely you know you’re going to change for (unclear) buffers. I
don’t want that. Or we allowed for example for restoration treatments in dry forest
LSR’s. Nobody wants to do that. So they said we could do it. I’m going to get
sued if I try. I’m not going to do this. And so for all of those reasons it turns out
that not many of the participants really want to practice adaptation. With regards
to the adaptive management areas, we in FEMAT basically said these are places,
these are places where you can try and you can think. You don’t get to change the
objectives of the plan but you can try different ways of providing for the owl or
protecting Riparian or for that matter you know for the way that you collaborate
as agencies or even economic approaches, all kinds of possibilities. Well we
wrote the FEMAT that way and they wrote the initial EIS for the draft EIS for the
Northwest Forest Plan that way and basically there was a lot of push back by the
stakeholders and so at the end when they were revising the Northwest Forest Plan
(unclear) I asked the lawyers wanted to be very sure that Judge Dwyer (?) would
go along. So they said to the biologist among others we want to make any changes
that you think will potentially plug holes, reduce the risk of this being ejected.
Well, a lot of the biologists hadn’t liked the whole notion of adaptive management
areas. They didn’t like it when we were working on FEMAT but those of us
where were sort of the master group running the thing put it in. Well when they
were revising the Northwest Forest Plan, Jack Thomas wasn’t there, I wasn’t
there, Norm Johnson wasn’t there, Tom Spees (?) wasn’t there. The people that
had created the concept of the AMA’s (?) including we vary specifically said you
don’t have to do any plans before you start experimenting. You don’t have to do a
plan for the AMA’s (?) before you start. What the federal biologist did was make
the AMA’s the most restrictive land allocation in the Northwest Forest Plan.
Before you can do anything you have to have a plan. You have to get a multistakeholder group, multi-community group together and they’ve got to agree on,
so anyway they put in a whole bunch of conditions. And so after the Northwest
Plan was adopted, the agencies looked at the AMA’s and said Jesus, we try to do
anything you know we’re going to have to spend a whole bunch of money and a
whole bunch of time. We’re going to take that money and spend it where we can
get going. And so they just basically said the AMA’s are just too difficult to work
with and so we’re not going to invest either our best people or any money.
JM: That sounds very unfortunate doesn’t it?

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F: It’s very unfortunate. And it wasn’t what we intended in FEMAT. It was
entirely a process of preparation of the final revision of the EIS.
JM: And you know it seems like that Judge Dwyer it seems like that those that he
wouldn’t be too concerned about these areas being, yeah I mean it sounds like…
F: It wouldn’t. He would have been fine with it.
JM: And another question that occurred to me was, were the AMA’s were they
actually big enough to be able to do these sorts of things and get answers for…?
F: Yeah they were. They were the size of ranger districts for the most part. You
know they were anywhere from oh I drew them all. They were anywhere from the
size let’s say 150,000 acres to 500,000 acres and some of them actually ended up
getting used. The last one I selected and drew the boundaries on was the Goose
Nest Ranger District, the whole ranger district on the Shasta of Trinity National
Forest. And the forest basically took that and made the whole district into a giant
restorational experiment.
JM: That’s neat.
F: It was. It was a district that had been heavily logged over, railroad logged, that
had a very even structured pine stands, so…
JM: Is it still continuing?
F: Still continuing.
JM: Yeah that’s pretty interesting. Let’s see…
F: All in all you know with regards to where the plan worked and where it didn’t
work, it tended to work very well at stopping activities. It didn’t work very well at
stimulating activities from an active management (unclear). So that was
unfortunate.
JM: Yeah it really is. And you seem to be very much believe in this idea of
change. That there will be change…
F: There’s got to be.

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JM: Yeah. And I guess the forests, they change as well, you know there’s a
natural disturbance and then they start (unclear). The old growth boundary is
going to change whether people want it to or not. What do you think about civil
disobedience in any roll that it may have played in regards to salvage logging or
the Northwest Forest Plan?
F: It played a significant role. You know I think it was civil disobedience that
made it very clear that no you’re not going to log any old growth forest. We’re
not going to stand for it. In the end, it pretty much on most of the national forests
made it clear that no you’re not going to do regeneration harvest on any mature
forest either. You know there was a huge long running civil disobedience on the
sale on Mount Hood called the Eagle sale (?) and basically it was a mature stand,
about 150 year old stand. Now it turned out that the forest, well there was a whole
bunch of contributing factors but anyway it was a mature stand and it was in the
matrix but in the end for a whole bunch of reasons it was not going to happen and
that was that civil disobedience ran for a couple of years maybe 2 ½ years until
finally the Forest Service said well we give up.
JM: Can you speak about the paradigm shift that happened with the Northwest
Forest Plan? I mean it kind of went from basically you know timber harvest being
the main thing to more concern for biological diversity. And that’s a really big
change, yeah.
F: Huge. And you know as always what happened in this region sets the tone for
what happens in the rest of the United States. So in the end you know change has
gone on everywhere in the National Forest System.
JM: And how did it, because originally you know it started well the concern was
for the owl after the owl was I don’t want to say discovered but noticed or
something like that. And that it had the association with the old growth forest. But
during at some point in the plan it changed from just being concerned about the
owl to the whole system.
F: Sure. Well it’s interesting and there’s no basis for that in law but it did you
know Congress when they put the gang of four together said you know this isn’t
about owls. It’s about old growth. Judge Dwyer said this is not just about owls.
This is about old growth. And so everybody recognized that but legally the real
lynch pin in this was the National Forest Management Act of 1976. And in that
act is a little bit of a provision for biodiversity, biological diversity. And from that
the Forest Service wrote a regulation that said you will maintain viable
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populations of all native vertebrates in each planning area. That seems simple
doesn’t it? It’s not a big deal. Well it turns out to be a huge deal. So that
regulation based on the National Forest Management Act was much more potent
than the Endangered Species Act. Now subsequently of course the Bush
administration did away with that regulation. They also did away with the
requirement that national forest planning would involve a NEPA type analysis.
But the reality is there’s going to be some kind of regulation and the regulations
that had been written to replace that maintain viable populations of all native
vertebrates have all been ultimately as difficult or more difficult to meet than that
one. So anyway all I’m saying is that yes it involved a sea change but it was based
on the National Forest Management Act and it was not just about endangered
species. And obviously as you think about maintaining viable populations of all
native species the only way you’re going to do that is maintain a lot of natural and
semi-natural ecosystems, habitat. And so if you’re going to do that basically
ecological stewardship now becomes the overriding goal, constraint. And there’s
no provision in the National Forest Management Act that says you will provide X
amount of timber. So…
JM: Right. There is a law in there that talks about you know economic
development or support of communities isn’t there in the …
F: The National Forest Management Act?
JM: Yeah.
F: I don’t think so. In any case you know the mandate of stewardship really seems
to override economics.
JM: Interesting. What do you think about the categorical exclusions and there’s
just recently the Supreme Court upheld the fact that salvage logging could be
done on 250 acres or less just down on the Sequoia I think it was Forest there was
a lawsuit that just happened this year at the beginning of this year…
F: I don’t know about that but I know there has been a court ruling that says you
can do it on economic grounds.
JM: Okay. And is that just to say you know well if we leave the trees out there
we’re going to lose the value of them as they are or?

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F: Yeah something along those lines. And there’s just been one case like that but
it’s a very scary precedent you know it could set up a pattern of economic return
overrides everything else. So we’ll just have to see where that goes.
JM: Yeah. And what do you think about that, the size of 250 acres? I mean on the
Biscuit they were doing you know much more than that but it got broken down
into these smaller units. So do you think that there should be some rule about
having to add all of that up in say a watershed or you know?
F: Well I fundamentally think you know that any decisions like that need to be
made in a landscape context. One of the things that’s upset me a couple of times
with the Forest Service is well they said well we’re only salvaging 10% of the
(unclear) or in the case of the Biscuit maybe 5% of the (unclear). Yeah but you
cherry picked the landscape. The areas that you picked to salvage are the only
ones that have any large timber in them. And in the case of the Biscuit I knew that
absolutely because I drew the boundaries on the LSR’s down there to include the
concentrations of timber. Again you know the Deschutes did this on a salvage.
They had a fire called the Davis Fire and said well they only salvaged 5% of it,
yes. The other 95% of it was log pull pine (?). You salvaged the 5% of it that
burned it was ponderosa pine. So fundamentally all I’m saying is I think that
always you need to be thinking about what you do on a landscape context and it’s
truer of the drier forest land, it’s most true of the dryer forest landscapes. You
really have to be very conscious of patterns and heterogeneity in those dryer
forestlands because that’s the way they work. In the case of the moist forests, the
typical west side forest you know, some of the large fire events tend to be pretty
large sized patches. And there was heterogeneity out there but not quite in the
same way it was in the dry forest.
JM: Are there any documents that you know about that spell out the paradigm
shift that happened with the Northwest Forest Plan? I guess the Northwest Forest
Plan would be probably the main one (unclear)?
F: Well no I don’t. And you know there’ve been some good materials on how we
got to where we did with the crisis with the train wreck. You want to call the
wisdom of the spotted owl it sort of analyzes the agency’s behavior, how we got
there. But I haven’t seen anybody sit down and write a book that really analyzes
you know that effectively says you know documents effect that this you’ve
undergone a total shift in how we’re managing. Everybody knows it. But the
closest thing you know that might come that article by Jack and Norm and I and
Gordon is part of a series of papers in conservation biology and some of the other
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papers may kind of allude to that. But you would have thought that somebody
would have wanted to you know write a book about it.
JM: It might be too soon maybe or… There might be one coming out.
F: I don’t know. Norm and I have talked about it but Christ we just we’re having a
hard time writing a new forest management text. So (chuckles)…
JM: And you know the National Forest Plans I guess are required in the Forest
Management Act correct? And I believe it’s a 15-year time that it needs to be
done in. Do you think that, I mean, do the forests pretty much stick to that? Do
they draw that out do you think? Or…
F: That’s been drawn out. I mean they’re way, way behind the schedule that was
stipulated.
JM; Oh okay, so they’ve gone over 15 years on some of the forests. I just you
know in terms of adaptive management and change and stuff it seems like that
that would be too long a period of time. That and I guess I’m thinking of climate
change now too because of the rate of change is probably going to accelerate here.
That it you know it seems like 15 years is too long and they’re saying that…
F: I’m kind of, I agree with you. You know I think originally it was supposed to
be on a ten-year cycle and that would have been you know more reasonable
particularly if you had some reasonable process for updating. But you know it’s
such a ponderous process and of course supposedly you know eliminating the
NEPA requirement is supposed to make it less ponderous. I don’t think it’s going
to. It’s going to make it more contentious than ever but we’ll see.
JM: Because that whole NEPA is kind of a conflict resolution.
F: It really is. It’s also a bearing of one’s soul. I mean it tends to make the process
very transparent. As far as I can tell it’s not transparent now.
JM: And that’s because of the Bush law that repealed that?
F: Well it was a change in the regulation. It wasn’t a change in the law. It was a
regulatory change and candidly I don’t know how they did it because I thought
that the law provided the requirement that the planning be done according to
NEPA. But in any case it’s a change in the regulation. And the Forest Service you
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know certainly wanted it. But I think you know be careful what you wish for
because you know the chief at that point in time was talking about what did he
call it oh it’s sort of something like we were totally overwhelmed by regulations,
we’re locked into place by all of this documentation and planning and analysis we
have. He had a word for it, a phrase for it, two words. I don’t remember what he
called it. But effectively you know we’re totally incapable of moving forward
because of all of these requirements and so if we can get rid of that then
everything will be okay. I remember confronting him not in this room actually but
confronted Mark Ray in this room but in another meeting in saying of the chief
you know there’s something in paralysis, paper paralysis, analysis paralysis
maybe. But anyway I said you know to him you know, “Do you really believe
that? You know the real issue that’s facing the agency is a lack of trust on the part
of the stakeholders. And you think removing these requirements is going to make
them trust you more?” “Oh yeah, that’ll do the job.” That’s what he wanted. He
wanted to clean out as much of the planning and regulatory types of requirements
as he could. He thought that was (unclear). And it won’t because transparency is
critical to trust. And I told him that but…
JM: And the congressional charge is pretty straightforward. They ask for a group
of people to as you’re talking about doing the different parts of the Northwest
Forest Plan or the studies that came before it that you were given a charge to do
by a congressional committee and they have the authority to do that…
F: They have the authority to do that. They don’t do it very often. I mean, nobody
had ever heard of such a thing. It all started just by being four of us back there
that they considered to be experts. Jack on wildlife, me on ecosystems, John
Gordon you know just generally a wise you know one of our statesmen in forestry
if we have one at all and Norm Johnson who’s outstanding economist and
planner. But that translated into you know we would like for you to do this for us.
And our response was sort of well we don’t know if we really want to do this for
us and the response to that was well if you don’t we will do it. Oh, you’re going to
map the old growth in the Northwest and rank it? I don’t think so! I’ll do it. You
know so they knew how to leverage us. Oh no we don’t really want you, we’d
better do this. And then of course what they did was they told the agency they told
the Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service to cooperate with us. They
didn’t give us any money to do it with.
JM: You were unpaid doing that?
F: Yeah.
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JM: Wow.
F: But we did have leverage on effectively almost anybody we wanted in the
agency. And like I said we brought about 120 agency people together in Portland
for two weeks to do the mapping for the (unclear). Anyway, interesting process.
But it didn’t start with them commissioning us. It started with come in and tell us
what’s going on. And then that translated into okay here’s what we’d like for you
to do. We modestly demurred and they said well that’s the case you know what’s
going to happen. Well okay so we’ll do it.
JM: Yeah. Well that really, you know that you know they could have chosen quite
a number of people I think to do that so it seems like that a large part of the
outcome depends on who they ask to do that. So it seems fairly transparent you
know like you’re saying.
F: The situation was that they didn’t trust the agency anymore. That was a
problem that would reach the point where the court didn’t trust the agencies
anymore; Congress didn’t trust the agencies anymore. And so they went to four
people who they thought that they could trust. Whatever these people are going to
tell us is going to be pretty straight. And it was.
JM: That’s very interesting. That 1991 report, Johnson, that wasn’t the first report
to state that it wasn’t possible to maintain the timber harvest levels while
protecting old growth was it? Or was that…?
F: It was. Could have laid it out for them. It was very clear there’s no free lunch.
You can have old growth or you can have 5 billion board feet of timber a year but
you can’t have both and that simple chart showed that too. It was awesome it
just…
JM: Is this the chart you’re saying…?
F: Yeah, it was awesome. They understood exactly the tradeoffs. You know hey
you want owls with a high probability of success in terms of still having them 100
years from now? Well hell you can’t do it with the level of timber harvest we
have going on right now. And so you know okay you know you decide what
you’re going to do.
JM: Where is the timber harvest now do you know?
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F: It’s about 600 million on the federal lands within the range of the northern
spotted owl with we did it, Norm and I did an analysis in connection with the
Wydno (?) legislation that suggests that we could get that up to about a billion
board feet. You do two things. One is you get into an aggressive program of
restoration…
JM: In the east side forest.
F: Primarily but also with young stands on the west side. That will give you about
200 million more. The other thing you do is you begin to do regeneration harvests
again in matrix forest that is less than exsage (?) and that will give you another
200 million. That would give you a billion. That’s probably conservative but you
have to get aggressive particularly on the east side forest and you’d have to start
regeneration harvest again. Not clear-cuts but you know you’d have to begin to do
something other than just thinning. So anyway that’s, we’re at 600 million on
federal lands.
JM: I see. And let me get this straight. You think that salvage logging should not
be done on…?
F: It should be, it, what you do with regards to salvage should be based first of all
on what is the management objective for that land allocation? That it’s
ecological? Probably not. I won’t say never but most of the time though if it’s
timber production is a major goal, then salvage and planning makes sense. So
basically you know my position is the first thing you look at is what your
management objective for that allocation. And just because it burned or blown
down it shouldn’t change automatically. Now there may be times when you do
change it one way or the other and like Mount St. Helens would actually change it
from being production land to ecological. And you could also do some the other
way. But it shouldn’t be done either automatically or without a careful assessment
of why you’re changing the land allocation. So…
JM: Do you happen to know like the percentage of federal land that is for
harvesting the matrix I guess it is?
F: Sure. It’s 4 million acres.
JM: 4 million acres out of the whole nation or?

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F: No, the federal timberland in the area of the northwest spotted owl I think is
something like 24.6 million acres.
JM: Okay, then so of that 4 million is…
F: I think about 4 million of it is in the matrix.
JM: So that’s not really a large part of it is it?
F: Oh my gosh no. It isn’t. No, it’s you know we flipped it over on its back.
Matrix 4.0 million acres, 16% of the federal land. And then the AMA’s are
another 1.5 million acres, 6% of the federal land.
JM: Very interesting. I think I’ve pretty much gone through everything I could
think of to ask you.
F: You could always circle back on me.
JM: Okay. That’d be great. I’d appreciate that.
F: You bet.
JM: Is there anything you can think of that might be good to add in terms of
specifically salvage logging and ecological knowledge getting into policies?
F: Not really. No. There’s you know I gave some congressional testimony on the
bill.
JM: I think I’ve read some of your…
F: Okay so that’s my best statement. And there is another book but it’s very
general and you won’t give anybody any better flavor than, okay you’ve seen that.
JM: Yes, definitely.
F: Okay. So then you’ve got all my current thinking on it.
JM: All right. Well it’s…
F: You can have that if you want it…
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JM: It’s been a real pleasure for me to have this opportunity to talk with you.
F: Well obviously I like to talk about it.
JM: Yeah great, I’m glad. I hope I haven’t kept you from getting anything to eat
or anything like that.
F: No I’m going to go ahead and head home at this point. I think what do we got
about 5?
JM: About 5:30.
F: Oh wow, I’ve got to call my wife. It went a little longer than I thought we were
going.
(End of recording.)

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Appendix B
This interviewee will remain anonymous. The interviewee is currently employed
by the Forest Service as an Ecologist. The interview took place on May 20, 2009
by phone.
JM (Jothan Mcgaughey): Hey, how are you doing?
R. A: Good.
JM: Good. Yeah, just to let you know I’m recording this but like I told you before
I won’t use any of it until asking your permission for specific parts.
R. A: That’s fine.
JM: Okay. And to get started, we talked about this a little bit before but what I’m
interested in is the process by which ecological knowledge gets incorporated into
policies and specifically I’m looking at salvage logging. And I understand that
you don’t have a whole lot of work experience with that per se but as a forest
service ecologist you do have a lot of experience with getting this scientific
ecological knowledge end of policies. And I was wondering if you could maybe
start out with talking generally about that?
R. A: Well, we have a program here in the region with ecologists organizing
areas. And by region I mean [Redacted] national forests. They have them
organized into six areas and each of those areas has two to three ecologists. And
ecologists have many roles but they have two main roles. One is to implement
regional goals and the other is to make our local needs for services. And that latter
regard there functions very much like extension agents. They’re providing
information to people in the field. They’re helping to solve problems. They are
generating publications and maps and data people find useful. And at the regional
level, they contribute there as well in much of the same way with data products
and mass publications. They also have a role in advising the NEPA process, not
fully engaged with it all the time but they have an advisory role and those teams
need information or to sort of fill in the blanks. That’s the basic of what we do. So
in all salvage logging, we would have a role in post fire monitoring and helping to
design ways to answer those questions.
JM: I see. And in, how is the post fire monitoring done? I mean, are there long
scale studies that are going on?
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R. A: Well that’s a good question because we’re in the process of getting our
work on this better organized. We have a regional field vegetation team that
interagency forest service and BLM and all the disciplines are represented. We
over the past five years have established some monitoring standards for post fire
events and fields treatments but we struggle to implement them. Another thing we
are doing is collaborating with research. We’re ramping up our interest in this.
We’re working with [Redactecd] at the lab in [Redacted] on an adaptive (unclear)
idea whereas you work with the researchers to set up monitoring post fire and
then also potentially with field treatments as well as an adaptive management and
a learning exercise. And Bernard has met some success on that, on the biscuit
(sp?) fire working with Tom Sensnet (sp?), our ecologist down there.
JM: When you say that you struggle to implement them could you elaborate on
that a little bit? Like what are…
R. A: Monitoring is very difficult to do in natural resource management to get
funding for it, to maintain the forests. Logistically it’s difficult to set up a study
and have it carried out over a number of years. We’ve had problems that you
know, 19 forests doing 19 different ways. Although in recent years we’ve been
able to get things a lot more standardized. And you have you know problems.
Other agencies look at things in different ways. In a larger sense you also have
problems and your different interest groups approach it in different ways. Some
people see it as threatening. Some people don’t like the answers that they may
discover and that’s true with both liberals and conservatives. So it’s a very
difficult thing overall and it’s often sort of an afterthought in the process. And you
know we’re really trying to work with the different groups to make an integral (?)
process of what we do. But that’s a challenge.
JM: Right. Do you, from your experience, would there be any, have you thought
of any ways to improve that process? Or can you think of ways that it might be
encouraged better or that it would have a better success?
R. A: Well as I said, there are a number of things that are being coalescing now
with, we do have regional standards now. We have the ecology teams for these six
areas. So there’s a delivery mechanism. We have the field vegetation team which
deserves to coordinate all this and it’s interagency and it’s interdisciplinary. And
then the final piece of the puzzle really is to incorporate this adaptive
management strategy so that we build it right in to EIS’s or EA’s right from the
start. You know, in some cases making learning one of the specific needs or the
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objectives of the NEPA effort. But we’re, in a way we’ve got this figured out but
we just need to figure out how to better implement it and improve on what we’re
doing now.
JM: I see. Do you think that that has to do with possibly the funding for it? You
know, having the money to do it?
R. A: Yeah well it’s chronically underfunded but where there’s a will there’s a
way. You find out ways to do things. They take time and effort and patience. But
you really don’t have a constituency that’s clamoring for monitoring. That’s the
main problem from a government perspective.
JM: I see. So, do you think if there was more call for the monitoring… And do
you mean that as it pertains to adaptive management I guess?
R. A: Well we think adaptive management is a way to make monitoring more
attractive and less threatening by say that this is a way that we’re going to learn
together rather than this is a way we’re going to police what you’ve done or this is
a method that some people may feel has an objective to it.
JM: Do you think, you say that if it was more accepted or maybe more of a call
for it, do you feel that public education or a call from the public is an important
part in that? Or do you think it’s maybe not so much with the public but maybe
more with the partners that are involved with it?
R. A: Well in the long run to do anything you want to have public support but that
can get (?) eventually challenging and it takes a lot of time and patience because
as you know it’s a pretty diverse country with a lot of different interest groups.
You know, finding that common ground and that consensus on natural resource
issues is very difficult. There’s a lot of mistrust that’s built up over the years. And
you know frankly our understanding of the environment is much more complex
than it once was and our population is bigger and more complex.
JM: Yes. I think that that’s a really excellent point because I believe that so much
has been learned in recent years in general with ecology that is really you know
changed the way people understand it and use it for purposes. Do you have any
thoughts on that or can you think of any examples of maybe major discoveries I
guess in the field?

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R. A: Well I think it is possible to build that consensus that takes exceptional
leadership and a lot of time and hard work.
JM: I see. I guess getting back to the money aspect for a moment. Do you know if
the KV funds get used for monitoring or adaptive management?
R. A: I don’t believe they are at present. I could be wrong on that. I’m not a KV
expert. There were issues in the past about whether it was appropriate or not to
use KV funds for monitoring and you know back in the 90s or late 80s and I think
the agency sort of went back and forth on that. And just speaking for myself I
never really got a clear picture of it. So I prefer not to go that way, not to try to
use KV funds for monitoring.
JM: I see. Let’s see here. Do you think that it’s a fairly straightforward process
when things are learned about ecology to bring them into policy? Or do you think
it’s a mixed bag? And what sort of obstacles have you experienced with getting
ecological knowledge into policies?
R. A: Well you know our role is advisory and in a democracy the elected officials
you know ultimately make the decision and the hope is that they represent the
population as a whole. And as you know that’s a very complicated process. But I
think conceptually it’s set up the right way. And I think society ultimately needs
to make decisions about what their priorities are and an opinion poll as
consistently ruining the environment is a lower priority and I think what we do
reflects that. Our funding has been declining for years and at the end of the day I
think the public as a whole doesn’t make the environment a priority, particularly
in this economic downturn. Although you know I think so you work with things
as they are and I think you know with the stimulus funding and much of that’s
gone into forest work, that’s an opportunity to build public support just as the
government did during the 30s with the CCC. I think that’s an opportunity and it
remains to be seen whether the agency will embrace that and run with it.
JM: But one of the things that I’ve been interested in and really impressed with
like you said you feel that overall it’s a good system and I guess I’m referring to
the you know the endangered species act and NEPA and you know the clean
water act and all those things that came about in the Nixon era and how those
laws you know provided for public standing in that process. Let’s see, where am I
going with this question… Do you think that it’s, well I guess you know it seems
that with that mark is a transition. That maybe the forest service was concerned
with timber harvesting for the most part before that and then during that time it
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sort of got switched over to conserving biodiversity and being more ecologically
conscious about how things were done. Do you feel that this switch is taking
place… Do you think like we’re still involved in that switch? Or do you think that
it’s happened?
R. A: Well I think it’s in the rearview mirror and I think that in reality happened a
long time ago. And what the agency is struggling with now is to find a new
purpose which I don’t think it has yet done. And that may you know reflect the
public’s ambivalence as well.
JM: I see. So you think that maybe the agency as a whole is waiting for direction
from the public vis a vie elected officials?
R. A: But I think the agency could be asserting its own leadership and building
those kind of coalitions to develop a constituency on its own you know entirely
within policy and the law.
JM: I see. And so I think did you say that you think that they could be doing a
better job of that? Is that what you’re saying?
R. A: Yep.
JM: I see. And why do you think that they’re not I guess?
R. A: Well it’s a complex set of reasons. I’m not sure that that’s a problem with
the forest service. That could be a problem countrywide in the way that we deal
with government and how we address problems.
JM: I see. Would you characterize it that certain practices are institutionalized and
that there’s a you know a leftover sort of way of doing things that maybe hasn’t
caught up with new ideas?
R. A: It’s complicated. I’m not sure you can give a simple answer to that. Like I
said, it’s a very complicated country now. We’re in an economic downturn and
leadership is a much more difficult thing than it once was I think. People have a
general distrust of government. The issues are much more complicated. You
know it seems to be very difficult to ask people for any kind of sacrifice, which
makes the government very difficult. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you come from a
bureaucracy you tend to follow the roles and norms of that rather than break
outside the box.
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JM: Yeah, it seems that well it’s kind of like turning a boat around or something
with the bureaucracies, that there’s really a whole set of practices that are there
and that to change the way things are done takes a lot of time and takes place on a
lot of levels. So that could be you know making a transition a more lengthy
process than maybe it should be or something.
R. A: And you know that’s where leadership really is a challenge because you
may think of certain policy ideas that are rather straightforward and make sense
but then when you try to implement them you find out very quickly that people
protect their interests and it’s difficult to overcome that. And that’s true across the
political spectrum.
JM: Yes I see. And there’s quite, I guess there’s quite a history and people are
obviously very invested and are used to things working a certain way.
R. A: Well and you know and then people have their own interests and
organizations have their own interests. And it may be in the interest in certain
organizations to keep fighting the timber wars and to refuse to collaborate with
the forest service. And it creates straw man and false arguments. And then you
know then there’s the whole you know sheer enormity of the problem too with
say climate change that becomes a very abstract thing for people when they lose
their job or trying to get healthcare.
JM: Yes. Yeah, do you feel that if we weren’t in such an economic downturn I
guess that this issue would get more publicity and…?
R. A: Well you know in contrast I think it’s almost easier in a way when there’s a
sense of crisis to articulate to the public some changes that may need to be made.
And I think in our own case in the forest service we can show some real
leadership on the whole carbon sequestration and setting out the forests and then
so forth. And like I said it remains to be seen whether we seize that and build a
new social contract with the public.
JM: Right. On the question of carbon sequestration you know there’s some
arguments on both sides of the issue. And I guess I’m speaking or thinking
specifically about the old growth issue. I mean, on one side you have people say
that there would be more carbon sequestration if those trees are taken out and put
into wood products and then new trees put in there that will sequester more
carbon. And on the other side there’s people saying that there’s a greater carbon
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sequestration in the older growth lake successional reserves. What’s your opinion
as an ecologist on that issue? Or do you…
R. A: Well you know in the long run the system has an ability to fix so much
carbon over time. And you know what I think we may be talking about is the
short-term capability to fix carbon and then opportunities to reduce other forms of
carbon use like the whole biomass issue. If we could take these forests and thin
them out that would reduce their short-term fire risk. So we have if this were, it’s
a bit hypothetical, but if we could thin the forests out it would not burn with the
same severity. So we would reduce that carbon loss there and then we could turn
around and use the fittings to fuel power plants that would reduce our dependence
on natural gas and oil. And you know it’s an attractive model that there’s a
number of logistic and economic problems with it. But you know I think we could
be showing some leadership there.
JM: I see. Well from what I understand of the thinning process is that often the
fine fuels end up being left where it’s the larger fuels that get taken out. And so
that there’s some studies that suggest that that increases the short-term fire risk.
R. A: Right. It all depends on how you do it. And the methods to remove those
(unclear) fuels of course jack up the cost of the thinning.
JM: Right. It’s a lot harder. As an ecologist, how do you stand on just the salvage
logging issue itself? Do you feel that it should continue? Or do you think that
maybe east side forest with what’s grown, the shade tolerant species that have
come in over the years that those sorts of forests that ecologically speaking it
would be good to salvage log those areas? And is there a difference between the
east and the west side? Can you speak to that a little bit?
R. A: Well I’m not convinced there’s an ecological reason for salvage. Now there
may be economic reasons but there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. In a
way, this issue has been a way for both sides to keep fighting the timber wars
because the amount of timber taken out in salvage is relatively small. And but you
know to argue that there’s ecological benefits to salvage; I’m skeptical of that.
And again you know it’s really our role to provide the data to help answer these
questions. So that’s what we focus on.
JM: I see. And so you do the monitoring I guess and then after a study is designed
and funded and put into place and then you get some results, can you describe the
next step in the process? Or am I even correct in assuming that it goes that way?
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R. A: Well like I said, we struggle to do a good job on this. And in some ways
we’re just getting our act together as a regional program on this sort of
monitoring. Now there is a number a folks who have done academic studies and
some of our folks have been cooperators on those. But in terms of coordinating a
regional strategy, we really just are starting to get together. But yeah sure the
findings would be made known to everybody and hopefully would shape the
NEPA documents that come out.
JM: I see. And now is that, but how does that process work? Would it be
considered like a technical report? Or how do you disseminate that information to
the rest of the agency?
R. A: Well there’s a variety, there’s journal papers, there’s journal technical
reports, there’s presentations to different groups, there’s working with the folks in
the field one on one. Those are all avenues for communicating.
JM: I see. And is there, well it sounds like that there’s these different avenues but
it doesn’t sound like that there’s you know a thought out, well that’s not what I
mean to say, that it’s not regulated in a way like that there’s not a specific path
from inside the agency ecological knowledge to get out or is that not true?
R. A: Well you know it’s a complicated problem and when you start one size fits
all regulations you very often run into problems. And you know we tend to say
that you know certain decisions should be worked out on a case-by-case basis on
the ground. And sometimes people feel like that’s a cop out where we’re banning
our duties. But as you know, nature is complex and varies from one place to
another and it’s difficult when you make one size fits all prescriptions. And you
see that when things are implemented. Now on the other hand you know like I
said, people don’t trust you and they’re going to want to see some numbers on
things. But again you know both sides keep fighting the timber wars and we
spend a lot of time on things that really are now relatively minor issues.
JM: What do you think, why do you think that timber wars continue? And I guess
you’re speaking about what started happening in the early 90s with the beginning
of the Northwest Forest Plan?
R. A: Well you know I guess its human nature to continue you know on the path
that you’re on because that’s what you’re familiar with. And there are legitimate
reasons to criticize things at times. And I’m not saying that we should just drop
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these issues and ignore them. But for example when we did the ten-year report on
the Northwest Plan, there were about seven times as many acres lost to fire, as
there were to clear cutting. And that tells me that it’s not the issue that it once
was. You know within the region I think we have real natural resource issues and
most of them are not on public lands. I think maybe the number one issue besides
climate change is development, lots of land to you know constructing homes and
shopping malls and what have you. And then there’s a you know kind of a similar
thing on water quality issues but again most of those problems are off the national
forest. I think sometimes we become a scapegoat for other issues and it’s easier
perhaps to you know raise money and get people worked up about the
government in which they inherently distrust anyway than to talk about private
property rights and my summer cabin.
JM: Yes. Well, how do you feel that this issue of lots of land elsewhere on private
land and also you know I’m familiar with up in Washington that the state DNR
lands, the trust lands, are managed really for timber production and so that there’s
less of the wildlife support from that land than if it was managed the way the
national forests are. I guess my question is, do you think that the loss of land
that’s happening and that other issue with like private tree farms and that sort of
thing, do you feel that this puts more pressure on the forest service to play a role
of having managing for biodiversity in wildlife and that sort of thing because of
the loss of land elsewhere?
R. A: Well it’s certainly a pressure. And there are laws that affect federal lands
that don’t affect private lands or affect them to a lesser degree. Things like
Endangered Species Act and of course you know the forest planning laws. Now I
know there are state forest practices acts but they tend to be not as stringent as the
federal ones.
JM: Tom, can you talk about an example or maybe two examples of how new
ecological knowledge or even older stuff that how it gets incorporated into
policy? Like maybe a good example where it happened with relative ease to…?
R. A: Well you know the whole fire thing, you know we used to put out fires and
you know we invented Smokey the Bear. But then research started coming along
showing that excluding fire was causing problems. That it was in some cases
outside the natural range variation that some areas were building up fuel levels
that were not occurring historically and then we were getting comparatively larger
fires. Now again it’s not a simple issue either because there’s you know climates
involved and weather patterns and different ecosystems. But that’s one where I
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think the management community embraced that pretty quickly. It doesn’t really
question that anymore. I think anyone in this profession agrees that not all fires
are bad, that it was a mistake to exclude fire so consistently. But then again when
you try to change things, you run up against most of public concerns. It might be
very well for me as an ecologist to say well it’s ok for this forest to burn up
because that’s what it’s supposed to do. Ecologically I know that’s true but if
there’s a whole network of summer cabins in that forest, I don’t think people are
going to stand by and say yes we support ecology and want the forest to burn.
JM: Do you have any idea the timeframe of that change that happened? Like you
know how long it took?
R. A: Well it was really jumpstarted by the 2000 fires in Idaho and Montana. That
really caught the public’s attention because there were very extensive fires there
and smoke in the air in Missoula and other places for days on end. And Congress
got involved and they commissioned you know high-level studies. And that
jumpstarted a number of things from the agency like land fire mappings of
vegetations and fuels and associated technology transfer and it’s guided I think a
lot of our thinking. So it’s really now that our firefighting efforts are constrained
by you know this issue of the wild land urban interfaces we say that that area
adjacent to communities and homes and other public concerns like smoke. We’d
like to be doing more prescribed burning than we are now but one of the issues we
run against is that people don’t want smoke in the air for health reasons. They
don’t want wild land fires to go loose because that may threaten their homes and
communities. So you find very quickly that you can gain public acceptance of the
abstract but when it starts to make concrete impacts on their interests then it
becomes very difficult.
JM: Right, yes. Can you think of an example where it wasn’t so smooth? Well it
sounds like it’s still not so smooth with…
R. A: Well the whole thing with climate change, the previous administration
denied it for a long time. And then towards the end of the administration they
embraced it. But even in the current environment where there’s been you know a
substantial change in administration and outlook, my hunch is that concerns for
climate change are going to take a backseat to the economy, healthcare and other
issues. And then something has to be sacrificed in the efforts to familiarize (?)
climate change. There won’t be these other things.

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JM: Right. Well this is maybe off the topic, but do you think that there would be
any way to address the two simultaneously?
R. A: Sure. And that’s what leadership is, isn’t it? It’s building a coalition on
common goals. It’s a social contract through your government that what you think
and what I think aren’t important. What’s important is the goal that we commonly
agree on. And I think you know there could be public initiatives with you know
renewable energy sources. And in our own area of policy we can look in the
national forest to things we could do to mitigate or adjust to climate change and
still get people jobs.
JM: Right. Yeah, I don’t know. It seems to me that there’s a big possibility for
something like that. You had mentioned the CCC groups earlier and you know the
use that they were put to and you know it seems to me like the time is fairly ripe
for a similar type of thing happening in terms of climate change and putting
people back to work. Well, let’s see. Let me ask you about this. It seems to me
that this country has a fairly rich history involving civil disobedience in issues.
And I know that there has been civil disobedience with regard to salvage logging
and you know I guess the argument can be made that you know people have tried
to work things through the proper channels and have felt like that that’s not
working or that there’s not time for that to work and then have resorted to civil
disobedience. Do you have, can you say anything about that, what you feel about
that?
R. A: Well you know I’m a firm believer in civil liberties and you know I tend to
look favorably on civil disobedience as long as you know there’s no violence or
(unclear) damaging property. But you know again I say it’s kind of in the
rearview mirror. And I think that as people are fighting about it’s long over, that
you know again I think the amount of salvage logging we’re doing is rather minor
and that there are much more important issues to focus on, ones that maybe aren’t
so dramatic. Or again it’s an easy target to beat up on the federal government
because there’s a widespread public distrust of government and some of that is
well founded and some of it I think is sort of a cultural norm that’s not always
born out by reality.
JM: Well hasn’t salvage logging, hasn’t it increased in the amount that it has
increased it’s percentage of what is harvested? Or is that not true?
R. A: Well sure but you know if I used to pay you a dollar an hour and now I pay
you two cents an hour, and half of that’s you know coming from one source, that
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you know the amount’s so small, you know we’re looking at relative proportions
is not an accurate way to look at the picture I don’t think.
JM: Well you might not be the person to ask this because you’re not involved
specifically with salvage logging but do you happen to know you know the
acreage or the board feet?
R. A: I don’t.
JM: Okay.
R. A: I don’t. I suppose if you wanted to know I could find out but…
JM: Okay. Well, I was going to talk to the ecologist in Region [Redacted] so that
person may have those numbers as well. Well, [R. A.], is there anything that you
could say about this process that we haven’t touched onto yet? Anything you can
think of that would be helpful?
R. A: Well I think we’ve covered the bases.
JM: Okay. Well you know I certainly appreciate you taking the time to do this. I
can’t really think of anything else to ask you at the moment but I sure appreciate
you taking the time and helping out like this.
R. A: Sure.
JM: Okay. Thank you very much. Is there anything that you need from me or
anything?
R. A: I’m just curious about your studies. So is this a thesis that you’re working
on or?
JM: Oh I’m sorry. Yes it is. It’s for a Master’s of Environmental Studies out of
the Evergreen State College up in Olympia, Washington.
R. A: Okay. Yeah, great.
JM: Yeah, and yeah hopefully I’ll be done by the end of the summer with it.
R. A: Well good.
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JM: Yeah, and I’ll certainly send you a copy and ask your permission to use this.
And is everything that you’ve said today, is that okay to use and put your name
to?
R. A: Sure.
JM: Okay. I certainly appreciate it.
R. A: Okay.
JM: All right. If I have any follow up questions, can I email them to you?
R. A: Sure.
JM: Okay. All right, [R. A.], thank you very much.
R. A: Okay, thank you.
JM: Yep. Bye-bye.
R. A: Bye.

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Appendix C
This interviewee will remain anonymous. The interviewee is employed by the
Forest Service as an Ecologist. The interview took place by phone on May 25,
2009.
JM (Jothan Mcgaughey): This is Jothan. Hey, how are you doing?
R. B: Well. You?
JM: I’m doing okay.
R. B: Good.
JM: Yeah, like I said before, in this interview I will get your permission to use
anything by your name if I decide to.
R. B: Great. I appreciate that.
JM: Yep, not a problem. And so just to start out with…by your name if I decide
to. Yep, not a problem. And, so just to start out with, you had said that you’re not
really so much involved with the salvage logging but that you are involved with
getting ecological knowledge incorporated into policies.
R. B: Yes, yep.
JM: So as an ecologist for the forest service, I was wondering if maybe you could
start out talking about that in a general sense and maybe give some examples of
that possibly?
R. B: Of involvement of science and management?
JM: Yeah, and I guess the you know specifically like any cases you’ve been
involved with where maybe from monitoring or adaptive management plans that
sort of thing where studies have been done and you’ve discovered something or
something has come to light that may be an example of bringing that to fruition
and into policy.

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R. B: Okay. Well I can give you some sort of ongoing examples right now. The
first thing that you have to remember though is that decisions that get made by
land management agencies like any organization with respect to the way you’re
going to manage something are based on a lot of different factors and science
ends up being one of them. Right, so you’ve got social issues, you know you’ve
got economic issues, you’ve got political issues (chuckles), right? There are
logistical issues, can we do it, you know? So all of those things are really, really
important to understand. And so in the way these things work is that from the
science side, some input can be provided but in many cases, in no case is it the
only thing that’s being considered. And in many cases it may very well be a
minority viewpoint (chuckles), right? I mean that’s kind of the reality of it. So
with that in mind, I’m just trying to think of some good examples. One right now
is on the [Redacted] National Forest in the [Redacted] Wilderness. And there we,
that wilderness area supports the last populations of the state fits (?) (unclear),
right? And that whole area is contained within four grazing allotments. And the
grazing there has been going on there for a really long time, I mean you know a
century or more actually, 120-130 years maybe more. And early grazing,
particularly sheep grazing, ate up parts of the landscape pretty seriously. The way
that grazing is done today I think is a lot lighter on the land but be that as it may,
the big issue there was you know our grazing practices appropriate in a wilderness
area that’s supporting you know the state fish which is kind of on its last well it
wouldn’t be leg, the last caudal fin I guess. And so based on some evidence that
the [Redacted] National Forest had from water quality monitoring that had been
going on, they decided to shut, to close, well the term is vacate. In other words,
they didn’t shut the allotments down but they forced the permitees (?) to remove
their cattle from the allotments, from two of those four allotments. And then a
decision was made, and you know there was appeals and a bunch of things going
on, but basically in the end a decision was made to age up to about ten years as
we gather data and sort of what things settle out to make a more or less a final
decision on whether or not we were going to let cattle back up into those two
allotments. So first of all, the very decision to actually close the allotments was
based on primarily on water quality monitoring. But what we’re doing right now
is the forest and my program, the college program, and some other people have
been involved in a lot of different studies looking at different facets of the status
of the fish populations, the streams themselves both biologically and physically,
and the meadow vegetation that surrounds the streams which is where most of the
cattle impact happened, or well many of them. So the idea is that in the year 2011
that these different monitoring studies will then have had you know sufficient
time to kind of determine what the actual current conditions and trends are and
that would at least theoretically feed into the forest decision as to what it’s
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ultimately going to do with those two allotments. The decision is going to be very
political. The Cattleman’s Association and some other groups have made it clear
that they are going to be heavily engaged in this. And the allotments actually are
owned by the [Redacted] Corporation. So there’s quite a big political V ridge (?).
So that’s going to be an interesting one but that’s an example of you know the
kind of the way that I think that in certain circumstances science can you know
provide the necessary information to make you know an important land
management decision. And then like I say you know in 2011 there will be sort of
a need for a more significant decision made and that is as to whether or not they
want to completely actually close those allotments and shut them down
completely. And you know to some extent at least, science will play a big role in
that and theoretically the primary role but that’s tough to say.
JM: Yeah. With these studies, as you go through the studies, how does that
information get disseminated to management? I mean do you send in reports or
you know what’s that, how does that work?
R. B: That’s a good question. It can be done a lot of different ways. Since we are
internal, the you know its a little bit easier because there’s a lot of word of mouth
stuff that goes on. But we submit reports as well. It really depends on the
circumstances. It depends on who the individuals engaged are. If it’s something
that is (yawning)… Forgive me. I’m just bushed from this week (chuckles). It’s
something that is you know highly likely to have a high profile or there’s likely to
be an appeal or a court case or something and of course will try to generate a
paper trail. So yeah I think typically what will happen is there will be reporters
who, and then I, more often than not I will try to get a summary of the results out
into a scientific publication somewhere in a scientific journal because results in a
periodical scientific journal hold a lot more weight in court proceedings than just
someone’s opinion. So if possible that’s the way we do that.
JM: Okay. Let’s see here. Do you feel that the different factors that factor into a
decision making process like you’re talking about, the social, economic, political,
logistical… Do you feel like that they’re well balanced or would you say that this
is kind of one of those things that depends on the situation I guess?
R. B: I think it very much depends on the situation. You know I mean it depends a
whole lot on, oh it just depends so much on the situation. I mean, some, well you
know how it is. I mean the politics in particular, if you have you know if you’ve
got a group or a person or an organization that you are sort of at odds with that’s
kind of high profile and strong political connections, then it’s likely that politics
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are going to play a really big role in the decision. And what you, and so, if it’s,
where science makes a difference in those kinds of decisions are where you’ve
got really big ecological issues, say. You know what I mean? I mean you know in
some cases you don’t, you know how it is. I mean it’s like a court case right? You
don’t sue someone if you, you just don’t do it if you know number one they have
deep pockets and number two that they you know are completely and obviously in
the wrong. You’d be crazy, you know what I mean, to even try it. And so you’ve
got to, with every one of these projects you go through those kinds of decisionmaking processes. I know right now for example the Department of Justice in our,
the (unclear) within the forest service the Office for General Council, OGC they
call it, they have been pushing a sort of a wave of lawsuits for fires that we’ve had
to combat and put out that have been caused by other people right? But accidents
in which there was clearly a breach of law or something or regulation. And you
know there are hundreds and hundreds of fires caused every summer by people
being negligent. And if the people don’t have any resources it’s crazy you even go
after them. Why do it? You know unless someone, unless you’ve got a criminal
issue where someone perished as a result right? But don’t go after them if they
have deep pockets and then the issues there become you know can you document
what actually the ecological issues are. And then that’s where science will get
brought in. So you know sometimes science itself may be the principal issue and
sometimes it may not be and it may be asked to just support a decision that’s been
made for another reason. I mean you know how it goes. I mean someone like me
has very, very little influence on those kinds of decisions.
JM: I see. When you were talking just a moment ago about you know that it’s
kind of crazy to go after somebody who has a lot of money because of the I guess
you know able to buy the, or get really good lawyers and have all the resources. I
think in salvage of, because there’s somewhat of a time constraint tied up with the
economic value of the wood that anytime those groups file things into court that it
actually is somewhat successful because it can slow down that process. And I
think that there’s been cases where the forest service has withdrawn salvage sales
because they got dragged out for so long.
R. B: Oh I think there are many of those cases. I think that’s something with the
litigant’s perspective. I think to a great extent that’s the game plan. You know,
you know how it is. I mean you just basically out play within the parameters of
what a system will allow you to do in the way the court system is set up and the
way you know action works here, if you can get an injunction that’s good enough.
You know because in the end it will drag out. Once you head into your second
year then it’s over because you simply cannot make, you know, there simply can’t
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be any financial offset to actually try to get the project done. Now in some cases
there may not be a financial incentive may not be the major reason to go actually
do that work. I’m thinking of likely a glorifier (?) there in [Redacted]. I mean
they’re already well beyond any sort of financial payout. And what they’re
interested in is a couple of things and one is getting a core area within that fire
successfully replanted. But also they’ve got, a lot of people use that forest out
there and they’ve got some pretty major concerns about hazards from falling logs.
The other thing is, that whole fire are is in the wild and urban interface and so the
other thing that they have to worry about is once the trees start coming down, you
create a situation where it gets very difficult to fight fire in there. And I mean you
just can’t put people in there. And out in the middle of the woods I don’t think
that’s much of a concern but it definitely is once you get in you know within you
know a mile of homes. So in a case like that I don’t think, and you could drag
stuff out as long as you wanted there but if the agency decided that indeed this
was something they just absolutely needed to get done for other reasons then it
might not work quite as well. But in most cases I think a lot of the salvage is
(chuckles) kind of sticky territory. I mean let’s be candid. I mean there are, in
some cases there may be (chuckles)… I mean I don’t know. I don’t know whether
you can make the argument anymore really that there are ecological reasons per
se to be doing salvage logging. That’s a tough one. I mean there certainly are fire
control reasons to do it and there are certainly economic reasons to do it and I
don’t think those should be given short shrift. And the reason I say that is because
you know this is the Forest Service. It’s not the Park Service. It’s a very different
agency. And Congress perceives it as a very different agency. They will always
operate under the assumption that a significant portion of the budget of this
agency is going to come from you know production of timber for example. And
whether or not that’s in the long-term future of the agency I think is a question
that has to be answered. But that’s the fact and as a result it’s been very reluctant
to directly fund you know any of this kind of work. And that’s where you know
the way things get done in the US is to get done by the private, by private
enterprise, right? So if an agency wants to conduct something like that it doesn’t
matter what the agency is, that typically that’s going to get done by a private
concern. And that private concern is going to win a contract through some kind of
bidding process and then they are going to have to make a profit on it, right?
Because it doesn’t get done otherwise. And currently the only way they’d really
make a profit is if they can get some big trees out of it because big trees, you
know the whole cost efficiencies are such that you basically need to have bigger
trees to make a profit given how few mills there are left, given how expensive fuel
is starting to become and how far you have to transport that stuff. There’s some
major cost-benefit issues. So you know that’s kind of the rub and I think that so
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agencies, at least for a while there, there was a bit of a loophole. You know it
didn’t last very long but this idea that oh you know we burned up these forests
and then we need to try to you know salvage some of that at timber value. I think
that that’s, I think that’s become very uncommon anymore because it’s been made
so difficult by the certain litigation environment.
JM: Right. In terms of this aspect of the funding, is that, are you talking about the
KV fund by any chance? That through timber harvest that the forest service has
funded through that KV fund?
R. B: Well, you mean in terms of… What do you mean?
JM: Well you had a little bit earlier you’d said that the forest service is funded
through those type of…
R. B: Oh yeah, yeah. No that’s, yeah, exactly. That’s right. KV is the main portion
of that. And it used to be a huge part of our budget. It was massive. It’s not really
so much anymore.
JM: Oh it’s gone down has it?
R. B: Oh yeah a lot. I mean we don’t cut anything anymore. I mean if you look at
the volume that’s cut. Well certainly you’re familiar with the recent settlement
there on the Northwest Forest Plan, right?
JM: Well I mean I’m familiar with the Northwest Forest Plan and my
understanding at the present moment is that it’s time for it to be reworked and I
think that they, Fish and Wildlife was redoing the spotted owl portion of it and
that the Northwest Forest Plan to be redone was sort of waiting for that to happen.
Is that correct?
R. B: Yeah and what I mean is that the timber industry sued the government over
the fact that the plan had projected you know when it was instituted and projected
out sort of a minimal amount of timber volume that would be coming off of the
forest. It itself was a massive decrease from you know what has been getting cut.
And what’s actually being cut is actually significantly less than the minimum
amount they thought that would be coming off. And so there was recently a
settlement by which there is supposed to be increased amounts of logging on
certain parts of the Northwest Forest Plan and actually the government has been
allocating money to the Forest Service to begin the you know there’s a variety of
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different processes that have to go on to begin to do those kinds of sales. And I
think most of those sales are going to be happening on the dry side forests where
there’s some you know fuel thinning issues in which you could kind of tie those
two things together. That’s actually a big part of all of this is just that whole
economic side of a lot of these plans haven’t really ended up panning out like
people thought they were going to largely because of sort of the whole litigation
environment that developed.
JM: I see. So I guess you would say that that side of things has been effective for
the environmental groups?
R. B: Oh yeah. No they’ve been exceedingly effective. I think you know in some
cases for good reason and other cases for not good reason I think that you know
thing swing in like pendulums right? They kind of go one way and then they go
the other. And I think that what we’re in now though is, and I don’t know that the
salvage logging is such; well it’s kind of connected to this but maybe not so
directly. But you know we’ve got the long term effects of fire suppression to deal
with now and climate change and you know sort of traditional logging practices
that just all of which are resulting in extra fuel in the forest, a lot of densification
and pretty severe fires. You know when they do get out of control they tend to
burn hot and they tend to burn a lot of stuff. And so yeah the salvage side of it is
just an interesting one. It comes down to the questions of you know what you
value the forest for and what you think about you know what are the long term
visions for those landscapes versus short term visions.
JM: Yeah, and well I guess, yeah that kind of gets back to I guess the early part of
the Forest Service history was really you could say pretty much timber production
and I guess with the passage of laws and Endangered Species Act and NEPA
during Nixon’s time that it sort of, that the paradigm shifted away from economic
concerns to more of biodiversity and ecology concerns. Could we speak about
that at all? (Buzzing sound) This phone seems to be… There we go. Are you still
there?
R. B: Yeah I am. You’re kind of cutting in and out, yeah.
JM: Yeah there’s something that happened with the phone but I think it’s okay
now. Did you hear that last question?
R. B: Yeah I didn’t hear all of it, no. I’m sorry.

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JM: Okay. Well I was kind of wandering what your opinion is of if the Forest
Service has successfully made this transition from kind of being a timber based
sort of agency to I guess a transition into multiuse in there and that now I think
what I understand is from the Northwest Forest Plan that it’s really supposed to be
more of protecting biodiversity and along ecological concerns. Is that a good
characterization of it do you think?
R. B: Well I would say the thing you have to understand about the Forest Service
right now is really they are primarily a fire department right now. I mean that’s
just a fact of the matter. Basically half our budget goes to putting fires out. And
that is the, the difference between that and when it was largely a timber
organization is that the timber side of the organization brought funds in and that’s
not what goes on with fire. It’s essentially just a dispersement. So it’s really
fundamentally changed the way the organization is and the agency is organized
and all those kinds of things. But to answer your question more directly, I think
that currently as you know it’s difficult to change the nature of agencies because
it’s like you know gradual change versus revolution. You know I mean gradual
change, it does happen. It just takes a long time. And a lot of people get frustrated
about that. I can tell you that the rhetoric in the agency has changed a lot. Some
people would scoff at that and say that’s all that’s changed but I mean that’s
always the first step anyway, you know when you start realizing that there are
other issues. But the fact of the matter is that when you look at the agency’s
current you know strategic goals for example and kind of our focus areas. I mean
basically they are at least as stated by you know the headquarters they are climate
change, they are you know ecological restoration, they are ecosystem services,
you know that sort of stuff. And obviously taking for granted all along that that
you know fire management is a huge part of our job. But what I would say, and
this is where you know you have to get really careful in how you use my name in
this but I will just tell you that although there appears to be a desire within the
agency to make the shift towards a you know a what’s the right word… Well let’s
just remember the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act that’s old stuff, right? That
was late 60s, right? So the concept of managing for multiple things, that’s decades
and decades old, all right. So the agency, well we have most of the forests (?)
have bought as to a lot of wildlife biologists. You know we’ve got soil findings
(?) now, we’ve got hydraulics. We didn’t have those people before. But the fact is
that over the last 10 to 15 years, the numbers of most of those people have been
dropping fast. And they were largely funded off of timber receipts, all right,
because you need those people to do that work. And the fact is, is that because the
budget of the agency has not been going up rapidly and in fact we’ve lost a lot of
people. I don’t remember where we are but we, you know, we’re tens of
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thousands of people less than we were in the 1960s and 70s. And the, you know, I
don’t know which staffed areas the biggest losses are in but I can tell you that
with respect to for example people who are called ecologists in the agency that in
[Redacted] we lost 50% of those people in the last 10 years. And I know it’s no
different for soils or hydrology and for some of these other staffed areas. So I
guess the reality is that even though I think we’re starting to say the right things,
my opinion is, is that we are not staffed to be able to do those things. And I think
you would find pretty broad agreement there depending you know of almost
independent of who you talk with, whether it was an external/internal you know
environmental groups will tell you the same thing that they’re just almost
chagrined at, how poorly staffed we are on the science side. And you know that’s
going to change and it is changing. But I think it’s a critical issue because when
we make these suggestions that you know climate change, ecosystems services
and restoration et cetera are our top goals, we’ve got to have the right people to do
that. You can’t for example you couldn’t say that fire management was our top
goal and then have an agency that was 95% you know bondness (?) you know and
hydraulics (?). It doesn’t work. And you know we’re kind of in the reverse
situation right now where I think we’re getting a good handle on what the actual
issues are but we have not had or been able to yet make the kind of changes and
modifications in staff to be able to actually appropriately deal with those kinds of
issues. And I think you see that to a certain extent in the record over the last say
10 years in, well you brought it up. You know some of the salvage logging stuff
for example. I mean come on let’s be candid. I mean most of the salvage logging
issue came from the fact that that was an economic imperative that was driving
that, right? But you know we try to clothe it in sort of a quote-unquote
“ecological” terms but you know there isn’t for a lot of that stuff there just really
isn’t an ecological term to cloak it in. I mean come on you know (chuckles). And
we lost a lot of court cases for a lot of years and continued to because we just
don’t really have the right kind of staff to be able to make you know a coherent
case for the ecological necessity to do a lot of these kinds of things. And that’s
basically because really you know what we were for a long time was a timber
organization. We’re now a fire organization and you know we know how to do
that and to do this but in terms of doing a lot of that timber and fire stuff for
ecological reasons, we’ve never been really good at that and we need to figure out
how to do that. So I don’t know. I got (unclear) growing pains. I think all you
know some of the other agencies still (unclear) has exactly the same issues,
probably even worse. On the other hand you know National Parks System, the
National Parks Service has got a much easier job it. You know, they’re not
managing for multiple sustained use. You know they’re managing you know
landscapes and natural usually can (?) for people to go check out and walk around
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in. And so they haven’t had nearly the trouble you know dealing with sort of the
schizophrenic nature of how you manage for you know timber, watershed, fire
suppression, recreation, watershed, wildlife, rare species. You know you name it
all at the same time. Or oil and gas, you know, all that stuff, coal. You know and
so you look at their staff and again I speak from you know from the side of the
agency that I work in, from science and from ecology and that. They’ve got, you
know, they have three, four, five ecologists on every unit and they have
permanent standing crews of technicians who are out there monitoring and doing
studies on a constant basis. I mean every unit has got a couple of these crews that
are there every year. And we don’t have anything like that although we should.
But the question comes down to whether Congress is ever going to find any of our
tax we provide as a funding to have that kind of staffing. And that’s why they
haven’t.
R. B: Yeah, and so well this brings up a couple things I guess. It seems kind of
obvious that funding from Congress can greatly help or greatly hinder the
development of ecological knowledge I guess you might say. And but with this
kind of I guess I would portray it as a deficit from what you’re saying of resources
to develop this sort of knowledge. How does the Forest Service as an agency
supplement its own ecologists and stuff? I mean is there a process for that or does
it just kind of happen haphazardly? Or…
R. B: So what do you mean? I guess I don’t understand.
JM: Well I guess if we’re talking about maybe these adaptive management or
monitoring of certain areas and ecosystems to help in developing management
plans or to direct management to meet certain goals, and if there’s really not the
people on the ground necessary to be able to do this sort of ecology work, does it
just remain not done? Or do the management seek the answers to their questions
elsewhere possibly or?
R. B: Yeah, yeah well all of those are true. I mean there are definitely occasions
where you know as in all agencies the analyses just don’t get done right (unclear).
You know you’ve got deadlines, you’ve got to have to sound that out and if you
don’t have the staff or the people have to pick up. I mean that’s just the way it is.
So on the other hand though, there are other times where, yeah, it’s more and
more common for us to contract out a lot of the… You know what NEPA is I’m
assuming. A lot of the NEPA work is contracted out now, lots. It depends on
usually the forests. Some of them have the skills and the staff to do it but many of
them now are contracting out to mostly internal contractors. There are groups that
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we call enterprise teams that are Forest Service employees but they essentially are
like internal businesses and they’ll have a you know they’ll have a specific set of
skills that they’ll market. And they’ll go around and they’ll do you know in this
case there are a bunch of them that will do the NEPA work for forests.
JM: And you called them internal…?
R. B: Enterprise teams.
JM: Oh enterprise teams. So are they actually on the Forest Service clock while
doing this or?
R. B: Yes, yes they are but they’re their own business. They’re very interested.
And that’s actually been going on for quite a while. And you know they serve
some important functions. The only thing that worries me a little bit about
enterprise teams is that they can be kind of pricey. The other major issue is that
they’re not on the unit. And actually you know for NEPA maybe it’s some of
NEPA it’s probably not that important but it’s really important at least from my
viewpoint that you develop you know a knowledge of and understanding for the
land for resources et cetera locally, you know so you can manage the stuff. And
when everything you’re doing is actually being done by fly by nighters who are
coming in you know for three, four, five weeks and then splitting for some forest
on the other side of the country, you’re not developing that local knowledge base.
You know, you know how that goes. And it’s like, you move into a community
you know it’s a while. It’s four, five, six years before you’re really part of it,
right? You get to meet people, you learn people you develop connections, you
find out what store to go to, you know those kinds of things and managing
resources is the same way. And that really concerns me. But yeah I think those are
kind of the main things. And then you know sometimes they’ll share (unclear),
you know forests may be able to get someone to come help from a neighboring
forest if they’ve got the skills to come help them out. And in some cases they’ll
contact externally as well to have work done.
JM: Right, yeah. Well I guess briefly maybe because I think we’re sort of running
out of time here. When the Forest Service, I mean I know that the Forest Service
has been contracting out numerous things, engineering departments and recreation
and different things. Just as a personal thing for me, I kind of feel like that it’s not
really a money saver but that it’s sort of a shell game in a way that maybe on
paper it can make it look like you know money’s being saved. But in reality I’m

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just not sure how it’s possible that having contractors do the work would actually
save money.
R. B: No I don’t think it usually does. No I don’t think it usually does. I don’t
think that… And some of the units have started to come to that realization that it
can be really, really, really expensive. You know so I’m with you. And you know
I think it depends on the circumstances and you know how often you need them
and all those kinds of things as well. But that’s absolutely right. That’s been, to be
candid with you, that’s been mostly my experience, is that just the price has made
it impossible to continue to do business that way.
JM: So is that, would you say that that’s maybe a tradeoff between having a study
or whatever it might be that these contractors are doing done correctly? But at the
cost of money and maybe having being able to do more projects balanced with
doing more projects but maybe not having as good a job done for the data
possibly?
R. B: Well, I don’t know. I think it’s like the whole outsourcing thing in general. I
mean in the end you don’t save money. Come on; let’s be honest, you know.
What it does is it means that you don’t have to have those people on staff though
and it makes your life easier, at least if you’re willing to overlook the you know
all the inconsistencies in the issues because you could just bring someone and say
well I need task X, Y and Z done, here’s the money, don’t bother me. You know,
come back when it’s done, hand it to us and we’ll move on. The problem is, is
that very often you have to redo a lot of that work. There has to be, you know,
people have to review it and the cost I mean I don’t know. It really depends on the
situation. And then again there are some contractors who are efficient. They get
the work done incredibly quickly and they actually, maybe you end up saving
money if you do it that way. I think it just depends. But my concern is just the fact
that if you don’t have you know that sort of a basic level of scientific capacity on
the forests, then that information is not available on a day to day basis for
management, right? It’s only available on a spot by spot basis and typically from
someone who may not know the system all that well at all. And that’s the major
issue and that’s what concerns me a little bit about just kind of the trends in the
agency right now. I mean all of our major, the agency direction is all in you know
this science based management and all these ecological issues that are really
complex and simply are not staffed to really deal with them properly in terms of,
well what’s the right word, I don’t want to use… Well it’s kind of from the
intellectual basis. You know what I mean? In other words thinking about the
problems and determining you know what to do about them. Not so much just the
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issues related to the on the ground blue-collar kind of work. This agency has got a
lot of really, really good people with great technical capacity, you know, on the
timber side and the fire side and in a whole bunch of other places. But in terms of
the capacity to actually you know sit down and think of these things strategically,
I’m just not convinced that right now we’re really all that well staffed for that.
JM: Yeah, so that’s kind of the scoping process I guess?
R. B: Yeah, yeah. What is the issue and what do we do about it? And why do we
do something about it? On the other side you know what to do about it I think we
have a pretty good handle on but the question is where do you apply what tool?
You really have a lot of tools, we have to use a lot of them but the question is
where do you use which tool? And that kind of thing, we need to do a better job
of that.
JM: I see. So in, I think from what I’m hearing you say is that funding is a real
roadblock in terms of getting this ecological work done. So would you say that
that’s, then it sounds like that would affect would then kind of as a cascading
affect would affect policies if the work’s not getting done. Do you think that
that’s the biggest issue involved here with getting ecological knowledge into
policies as just the straight funding of things?
R. B: Well and it’s not so much necessarily the amount of funding but the
distribution of funding. Yeah I think the amount too is an issue but yeah I think
it’s simply… You know, right now we’ve got a lot of issues to deal with and
putting out the fires is a huge one. You’re talking property, life; you know human
safety, forest resources. And the problem is as a government agency it’s very
difficult for us to be proactive, right? I mean we’re basically; reaction is the safest
political thing because you don’t have to ask for anyone to pour (?) their input,
right? We’ve got to put it out, for example. And when you start trying to do, right
now we’re going into forest planning, right? And that is, there again is a place
where we really need lots and lots of up front ecological input and it’s going to be
a stretch. It’s really going to be a major stretch for us. But the planning process is
where this is supposed to happen. You should be thinking about the stuff up front,
not afterwards, right?
JM: Right, right. What is the situation with the forest plans? They’re supposed to
be done every 15 years…
R. B: That’s correct, yeah.
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JM: And is it on schedule to be, I mean it can be done sooner. Do you know
where that process…?
R. B: Yeah, well we’re, in [Redacted] we’re starting the process right now. Lake
[Redacted] is pretty far along. The [Redacted] are less far along and we’re doing
all the other forests in the region more or less contemporaneously. I generalize a
little bit but yeah that’s going on right now. And so that will take the next three
years or so, three to four.
JM: I see. And so will those plans be, will they be updated right around the 15year mark?
R. B: Yeah, and somewhat longer in some cases, yeah.
JM: Okay but they get an extension for that I guess.
R. B: Yeah well the National Forest Management Act which mandates this stuff
doesn’t I don’t think specifically state it has to be this or that. I think it’s more like
well it should be done about this often. A big process involving lots of people,
lots of input, lots of money, lots of time. And so it’s not an easy thing to start.
JM: Right, right. Do you think that that way of doing things is a good way? I
mean with all the cost involved in doing forest plans and doing them every 15
years or so, is that… I guess what I’m getting at is that like the way that
knowledge and our technology is, is that things move very quickly…
R. B: That’s a great point.
JM: And so do you think that that’s really a good model to continue with? Forest
plans redone at these step stages or?
R. B: No I don’t think so but I think that you should go and look at the new
planning rule. Although I think there’s some likelihood that it’s going to lose in
court here at some point, but basically you just got to the heart of the issue which
is when conditions changing the way they are and with our scientific
understanding of those conditions changing right all the time, you’ve got to be
able to make course directions right ultimately rapidly. But in order to do that the
public has got to be willing to trust the agency because currently right now the
way our plans look is they’re kind of straightjackets. You know what I mean?
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They kind of force us into doing this and doing that and you know you can’t cut
things bigger than this and you know you can’t this particular part of the ground
always has to be old forest. It’s like what? What if it burns down and it’s not old
forest anymore? What do we do about that? You know, and you know what about
climate change? Are we supposed to manage for this species here but in 20 years
anything living within 20 miles from here? You know, so those kinds of changes
have to be made constantly. And currently the public doesn’t trust us enough to
grant us that kind of leeway and we are going to, I’m telling you, this is going to
be fascinating the next three years or so as we get into the planning process and
the public has to come to grips with the fact that climates are changing that
systems (?) are changing. Science is changing just as fast as all of them. And so
the current planning rule basically creates very different kinds of plans. It doesn’t
even involve NEPA, there’s no NEPA engaged in the planning process. Basically
it sets up a framework for you to on a like about an every five year basis, develop
an analysis of condition and trend and you know where necessary make changes
to the plan. So it’s much different and a lot of people don’t like it because it gives
us a whole lot of freedom to do a whole lot of things we couldn’t do before. And
of course under the Bush administration in particular it just freaked people out
(laughs) between you and me.
J. M: So it sounds like it’s really maybe going towards a real adaptive
management sort of model of things.
R. B: Right, no exactly. And you know adaptive management; we talk about and
talk about it. To be candid, you’d be hard pressed to find a really good example of
it actually working anywhere. You know, the concept is fantastic but it’s really
difficult to actually pull off. And it requires a completely different planning
framework. You really do have to have the ability for science to be actively
engaged in management and for management to change its direction rapidly. And
right now we just don’t even have that ability. It just doesn’t exist, you know.
JM: I see. And well it sounds like that may be an up and coming problem if the
new planning rules are going in that direction and the agency isn’t really able to
do that. Is that, would you say that’s true and if so…?
R. B: Isn’t able to do it why, because it’s not ready to or because the public won’t
let them?
JM: Well that’s a good point. Are you saying that the… I see. You’re point was…

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R. B: Well (unclear) the people we get sued by all the time. They want to make us
do X, Y and Z. They’re not really willing to give us the freedom to say well we
were wrong on that and we need to go and do this instead, you know. That’s
going to be the big issue.
JM: So that’s really the environmental group…
R. B: Oh yeah, that’s just them and the industry groups as well, you know…
JM: Okay, right. Okay so on both sides of things. Well this is very interesting to
me.
R. B: You know, Jothan, I actually I have to go to a meeting but if you want to
chat again in the future I’m perfectly willing to do it.
JM: Okay.
R. B: I’m going to be working out of my [Redacted] office for most of the
summer but my cell phone is a really good place to call me.
JM: Okay. Yeah, I think that I would like to talk to you a little bit more about this
new planning rules and maybe how what can be done to make it work better on all
sides type of thing. But I certainly appreciate your time and so I think that I will
try to contact you again to continue this for a little bit more at least.
R. B: Good, good. Well it was great talking with you.
JM: Yeah, thank you very much.
R. B: You bet. Bye-bye.
JM: Bye.

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Appendix D
This interview of Doug Heiken was conducted in Eugene, Oregon on May 18,
2009. The interview has been modified by the interviewee, although the original
content and meaning remains intact. Doug Heiken has worked for many years for
environmental groups and is currently the Conservation and Restoration
Coordinator for Oregon Wild.
JM (Jothan Mcgaughey): Yeah, and your name’s Doug Heiken? Is that…
DH (Doug Heiken): Heiken.
JM: Okay, great. And yeah, I was going to ask you some questions about the
mechanisms by which environmental knowledge gets incorporated into policies,
and specifically with regards to salvage logging. That’s what my thesis is about.
So I was wondering if maybe you could start off with what the organization you
work for kind of you know an overview of what they do and maybe what you do
for them and then maybe we’ll get into other issues.
DH: Okay, sure. Oregon Wild started out in 1974 as Oregon Wilderness Coalition
and then shortly after that it became Oregon Natural Resources Council, which is
at that name for many years. And so we recently changed it to Oregon Wild and
we primarily got started as a wilderness advocate and we’re trying to get other
wilderness areas established in Oregon and working on federal forest issues. We
had a couple of Republican senators who went along up to a point and then
basically said no more wilderness. .., we’re going to log the rest. But that was not
consistent with our mission so we switched gears a little bit and started using the
Endangered Species Act and the viability requirements of the National Forest
Management Act to .. use species protection as a new way to protect the forests.
So the spotted owl and salmon and Marbled Murrelets and all these things ..
kicked in and we got the Northwest Forest Plan out of that process. Now we have
a new crop of senators and so we’re .. simultaneously going after additional
wilderness areas and trying to protect the last of the old growth forests that
remain. But it’s really .. .. wrapped in a restoration framework. .., now we have a
vision for how .. federal forests should be managed. It’s not about saving the last
scraps and .. sacrificing the rest but we really want to restore a lot of the damage
that’s been done and there are so many old clear cuts out there that we .. see their
great opportunity through thinning to see some benefits that .. help ease some of
the political pain of pure wilderness. But maybe we can .. do some thinning in the
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short term and just enter fire and putting to bed roads and .. getting a healthier
forest out of it and that win-win sort of thing.
JM: Yeah, and you’re position for this organization is?
DH: Okay, and I’m the conservation and restoration coordinator, which doesn’t
mean that much of those words. But basically what I do is we track all the
projects on all the national forests in Oregon and the BLM districts and we a have
.. a triage process. So we prioritize .. the things that we care the most about .. big
timber sales that might enter roadless areas or cut old growth forests. And then we
.. they go down to .. painting the picnic tables in the campground. .. we’re not
commenting so much on the things at the bottom of the list and we’re .. filing
lawsuits on the things at the top of the list. And we have levels of involvement in
between. So we maintain a database. We .. know who’s the decision maker and
we enter their effect (unclear) in the comments. .., when to engage the attorneys
and all that .. stuff.
JM: When you first started out you were saying that you were using the
Endangered Species Act to file claims to stop logging of old growth. Did you, was
there any concern in your organization about using the Endangered Species Act
too soon and like thereby not using it to its full effect possibly by acting too soon
on it for the Northwest Forest Plan or?
DH: I’m not sure exactly if I understand your question. Maybe you can rephrase
it.
JM: Well I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject and somewhere in there I
remember seeing that there was a debate between the different groups about when
to use it, that some groups, and it may have been the Sierra Club possibly, didn’t
want to use it too soon because then it wouldn’t be able to be used to its full
potential.
DH: Yeah, I guess I wasn’t here, or wasn’t in a position .. to get invited to those
key meetings where that decision was made. I .. came in at a point of enforcing ..
the injunctions that have been put in place .. by my predecessors. And there is
often tension in deciding the use of litigation that .. if you sued on the Endangered
Species Act too much then you create a political tension that could encourage
Congress to .. to reign in the Endangered Species Act and make it less enforceable
but it just hasn’t turned out that way very often. And if you don’t use the laws
then they’re really not there. .., so you either have to use them and use them to
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their fullest or basically they’re not doing their job. And the group conservation or
Center for Biological Diversity, .. they’ve used the Endangered Species Act more
than anyone and .. all that work has not lead to the .. the softening of the
Endangered Species Act, at least not in the last .. 10 or 15 years. Although Bush
did some things. And then obviously budget cuts are a big issue. If they don’t
have money to list species then not much new gets listed and that’s been a bit of a
problem but at least the law is there. We can force them to list species that are
truly endangered and enforce them to protect their habitat.
JM: Boy, that’s something that I was going to have… Well why do you think that
the Endangered Species Act has been able to not be watered down? Do you think
there is any particular reason for that?
DH: I think it’s a very popular law. I mean the idea that human activity will drive
a species .. completely off the face of the earth and lose that .. that look in our
genetic library, .., the American people are not interested in burning books or in ..
losing that genetic information. And so .. there’s obviously some political
elements that completely disagree with that but the majority seems to think that
it’s a wise thing to reign in human activities .. when they’re on the verge of
pushing species (unclear) to extinction.
JM: I see. So do you feel that the public support for that is instrumental in keeping
that…?
DH: Absolutely.
JM: Okay. So that seems to be saying that the getting public support is obviously
a huge part of what your organization does? I mean…
DH: Yeah, we have to .. work at all levels. .. we’re bringing science to bear in our
comments. We’re bringing the law to bear through our lawsuits. And then if you
have a successful lawsuit that may threaten to destabilize .. the Endangered
Species Act for the northwest forests then you’ve got to have the public support
behind them to make sure that .. there’s reinforcements there to keep the law
strong. So it’s an all of the above .. strategy and we’re directly talking to members
of Congress and we’re talking to our members, encouraging them to .. write
letters to the editor and talk to members of Congress.
JM: I see. And that’s, when you talk to your members that’s kind of like outreach
to the public. I guess you have a newsletter that you send to people to inform
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about the issues. Do you do any other sort of public outreach or educational type
programs to educate the public about things?
DH: Yeah, we had a full variety of things. Obviously the Internet’s a big tool
now. .. we have a big website that has a lot of information on it. We have activists
.. alert network so we can email a whole membership or subsets of our
membership to engage in certain issues. We hold these things called Wild
Wednesdays which is .. a little .. science seminar or an adventure .. slide show.
Somebody’s .. hiking on the waterfall or something like that. So anyway we have
.. those public in person events. We’ve held events here at the Eugene Pubic
Library where people come and .. we can get them up to speed on climate change
and how forests store (?) carbon or some new scientific engineering (?). And we
attend conferences and .. gather, we’re both, it comparably we’d both be gathering
information and .. sharing our perspective on things.
JM: I was looking at some of the flyers back at the office there and I remember
seeing in I think it was the latest one that your organization got an award for
demonstrating the old growth role in carbon sequestration. Is that true? Was there
something like that…?
DH: I don’t know about award.
JM: Or was it recognized for that or?
DH: I’m trying to think. There was a…
JM: I meant to bring that with me but I think I left it on the table.
DH: Yeah, I can’t think of an award. I mean it’s something that we’re definitely
interested in and we’re .. doing a lot of work on but I don’t know about a specific
order of achievement, a .. ongoing effort.
JM: Well I guess, right. It sounded like that that was something new in that it was
demonstrating the importance of old growth in this time of climate change. Have
you guys been doing work on that? And so there has been some new findings that
you guys have found or?
DH: Well we’re .. collecting all the information that’s available out there and ..
the pace of scientific research in regards to climate change in the global carbon
cycle is .. really accelerated. So .. we’ve been raising this issue since the early
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90s. I mean it’s been going on a long time. And then we’ve been especially
focused on it for the last three or four years, bringing all the new information into
line and it’s the science is just phenomenal in terms of lining up with our
objectives because forest conservation is a great way to store carbon and a great
way to prevent future carbon emissions. So it .. is a double bonus. And it also
helps prepare ecosystems for climate change itself. .., maintaining these intact
biodiverse places. They’re already .. well prepared to be resilient in the face of
(unclear) of climate change.
JM: I see. Well it sounds like from the perspective of my paper I’m looking at the
mechanisms for incorporating this. It sounds like your group that one way they do
this is to collect all this information and organize it and then present it to…
DH: Yeah. We wrote a big report on it, .. like a 50 page report, and then we
summarized that down into a slick .. publication with more photos and desktop
publishing and took out all the footnotes. We have a slideshow on the web. We’ve
gone around presenting the slideshow a bunch of times. We’ve had personal
meetings with different elected officials .. bringing that information to them.
Trying to educate our members, we’re trying to educate our colleagues; other
people in the environmental community are still getting up to speed. .., we’re a
few steps ahead of them. We’re .. we’re educating them and bringing them along.
And we’re also having to basically confront all the misinformation that’s being
put out there by the timber industry. .. their interest is to try to convince people
that logging is creating fast growing young forests and storing carbon in wood
products makes sense but when you review all the studies they’re just not fairing
that out and they’re showing a much stronger value in forest conservation rather
than logging. So anyway, responding to that, correcting that, trying to make sure
that we’re getting the ear of decision makers before they do.
JM: Right, I see. And so you take that to Congress and talk to the representatives
and…
DH: Or their staff.
JM: Or their staff. I see. Can you quantify or can you say how much of an impact
you think that has?
DH: It is difficult to quantify. And .. we’re .., we’ve been trying to become more
quantifiable in terms of our goals and how we’ve measured progress to our goals
but I think I’ve had low expectations since the beginning and I do not have my
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expectations increase since then. It’s just very difficult in this .. environment or
this .. area to measure progress. We’re not .. we’re not saving acres exactly. ..
because if, it’s just too complicated. I guess I’ll leave it at that rather than trying
to explain it. Unless you want to ask a more probing question.
JM: Well that’s kind of one of the things I’ve found going into this. I guess I was
somewhat naïve coming into this and you know because I wanted to look at well
you know we have this knowledge. What’s the process for getting it into policy?
And it seems like there’s quite a few different avenues that it can take and that it’s
not a straightforward process. I mean it can be. I’ve heard examples of where the
Forest Service has learned something and within a decade they’ve changed their
policies completely around which I guess for the Forest Service is fairly quick.
DH: Yeah, that sounds like a good example. I mean, it would be pretty quick.
JM: So I think when you say that it is a complicated issue I mean that’s what I’m
certainly starting to find out. Does your group focus in with the different like the
Forest Service and the BLM? I mean we were just talking about how you go to
Congress and try to educate members of Congress and…
DH: Yeah, we engage with the agencies on a daily basis. That’s the main thing
that the Eugene office does is we .. contract all of these proposed projects. We do
salvage sales or thinning sales or old growth clear cutting and we can get the
environmental documents, review them, .. check with their approach to the
science is correct as one of the things we do and then write a letter trying to set
them straight and get them to do a better job. You either stop a bad sale or make a
good sale better.
JM: I see. And so there’s that clause in NEPA I guess which says to use the best
possible science?
DH: .., I don’t think NEPA has that clause but they do have one similar that says
use accurate scientific analysis. And so they definitely do. NEPA, one of the basic
principles is full disclosure and accurately weighing the environmental
information and then looking at alternatives in ways that (unclear) for a different
alternative. So yeah they do something that’s unscientific in a NEPA context.
There’s a way to .. correct that. At least there should be. It doesn’t always work
but that’s the intent.

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JM: And so if your group sees something like that say with the salvage timber
sale what’s the process for trying to bring that to light? That they’re not using the
ecological knowledge and (unclear) the steps involved with that.
DH: Well, do you want a long answer or a short answer?
JM: Probably a long answer I guess.
DH: Okay, well I’ll .. frame it as the NEPA process but then there’s a bunch of
appendages on the NEPA process that might enhance the understanding. So
basically we would .. say they propose to do a timber sale or .. a forest (unclear).
It’s a salvage timber sale. And the NEPA process has basically three main time
periods when the public can engage .. formally and officially engage in the
agency. And so and we participate in all three of those. So they say they want to
propose a salvage sale at this location but they don’t tell you exactly .. where the
units are going to be or what the salvage logging .. methodology is going to be.
And so in our scoping we try to bring in information say that .. that area is a
habitat for black backed woodpeckers or that the retained structure in that area is
needed for spotted owl prey. And there’s nearby nesting, roosting and foraging
habitat and so that might still be important. And then we’ll say please analyze this
in preparing your environmental (unclear). So that’s .. stage one is scoping. Stage
two is they write a comment on the document and in there they supposedly
address these issues that we raise in scoping and then we see that they did so
accurately or adequately and we write a letter explaining what they did wrong.
And if we think they are really blowing it, then we might even include a scientist
to write a report or write a letter or try to go find a scientific study that’s just right
on point .. to make that point. And we include that to our letter. We’ll attach it to
our letter and then they take their draft environmental document and our letter and
they write a final document and a decision of some sort, usually called a ROD,
record of decision, or some .. decision notice at the end and once they make a
decision then we can appeal. So those are the three stages, scoping, comments on
the draft NEPA document and then administrative appeal. Through those three
avenues we try to bring all the science in that process but along the way there
might be .. letters to the editor, there might be opinion pieces in the newspaper,
there might be talk with the congressional office (unclear), there might be
bringing the scientists out in a peer review to look at it, there might be .. hiring
somebody to do some field work and .. try to bring some accurate scientific
information there. Because when we go to file a lawsuit we .. step outside the
NEPA process is litigation. In litigation you’re limited to the administrative
record, which is everything that went on it in prior conversations. And if it wasn’t
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in the record then you can’t bring it up in court later. So we’re trying to build that
record and get all of the scientific data that supports our (unclear). And sometimes
they listen early and they get it right and they say oh we’ll stay out of that area.
And other times they just say they read it differently or they say .. even the
science says this will be bad, the forest plan says it’s okay to do bad things in this
land allocation. .. this is the scenario saying set aside for doing bad things.
Sometimes they’re right .. but what we’ll say well you’d have to really carefully
consider the impacts of doing your bad things and they write the report saying
(unclear). They’re very reluctant to admit how .. they’re very reluctant to admit
negative impacts in general. So that’s one way for us to .. nail them is that we just
.. getting them to admit the honest truth that this has a negative impact is often a
pretty .. head to head battle.
JM: Sure. I don’t want to put words in your mouth. Because it’s, why do you
think it’s so difficult for them to admit that there’s a problem with something?
And specifically for salvage logging. I guess what I’m trying to get at is, is do you
consider salvage logging as being kind of institutionalized within the Forest
Service? Like that it’s become, it’s no longer questioned. Its just sort of accepted
type of things in normal business.
DH: Yeah, I mean it’s not become that, it’s been that forever. I mean as long as
there’s been big fires and a tolerance for roads. .., there’s been big salvage sales.
There may be a long time ago there may have been places that were burned that
were so remote that it wasn’t worth it to build a road out there because they had
plenty of old growth version (?) timber .. that’s (unclear) that was near the road
system. They didn’t need to go way out in the boondocks but since the 70s there’s
been a road system practically everywhere and whenever a big fire happened,
automatic big salvage sale. And what we’ve done over the last .. 10 or 50 years is
we’ve scaled them back. And so they’re salvaging a smaller fraction of the total
fire area and they’re building less roads than they used to. But the (unclear) of the
salvage logged was really very a little different from what they’ve always done.
And I think that things were starting to change under Clinton and then Bush came
in and it .. it all got erased. .. we’re all backwards, several squares backwards and
have a real big challenge now to get Obama to .. get back to the starting place we
were with Clinton and make some progress.
JM: Yeah, I think that’s true. I was reading the National Forest Protection Act I
guess a while ago and I happened to be reading the ’74 version and then there was
the ’76 version, which amended one of that. But in that first one, and I’m going to
have to look at the second one, but you know the, my understanding of that is the
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reason for putting that in there was so that there would be sustainable harvest and
that biodiversity would be protected and that sort of thing. And that things would
be done correctly and there would be this process for doing it in conjunction with
NEPA I guess which came a little bit later I think. But in there it specifically
exempts salvage from the rules in there. So it’s you know it was odd to me, I
guess I don’t have a question in that (laughs). But you know it just really seemed
like that it was at that sort of point (unclear) into it being institutionalized. That
that section was exempt from these environmental concerns which…
DH: Right. Not salvage logs would be considered wasteful and be morally
questionable to let (unclear) run the forests, ignoring the fact that forests .. recycle
perfectly and all that wood is put to some valuable ecological use or hydrological
use but .. the Forest Service mentality that were basically an agricultural model. ..
if you let forests rot in the woods that’s a waste. So it’s .. ignoring the whole back
half of the carbon cycle in the forest. But yeah it is very institutionalized.
JM: Do you guys deal much with the economics of it? And like I looked into the
Biscuit Fire which was down here in Southern Oregon and you know there’s that
whole Donato thing that happened in the Sessions report and everything but I
think EcoNorthwest put out a report about the economics of it and they were
basically saying that you know that the sales don’t pay for themselves. And I
know there’s been a GAO report that basically said a similar thing. Do you have
any opinion about that sort of thing on the…?
DH: We .. use it opportunistically, .. when we’re trying to stop something and
they try to use economics as a pro argument. We can .. counter with some other
information but it’s a little bit of a slippery slope because .. we don’t want, .. if
timber prices skyrocketed or if they find some patch of really bad old growth trees
and suddenly it makes economic sense, it doesn’t mean we support it ... So we
have to be a little bit careful. But another problem is that the cost side of those
cost benefit things, the cost side is all these environmental reviews that we want
to see done. .. they could make salvage profitable in a flash if they stopped doing
it in NEPA. It’s not doing environmental reviews and they did it in like private
land. Private land salvage logging is very prominent. So anyway it’s a little bit of
a dangerous area and so doing salvage sales correctly and doing all of these
environmental reviews and figuring out all of the sensitive areas you need to
avoid and only logging the narrow subset in investing all the staff time in
scientific resources and public process reports. .. democracy is a big waste of
time. Democracy takes resources. So involving the public and having public
meetings and responding to public comment, those are all big costs that we want
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to keep in the equation. But when you consider all those things it doesn’t make
any sense. You might as well not even salvage it.
JM: Yeah, and the whole standing issue is fairly recent historically for the public
to have say in that. And I mean if it came about with NEPA and those laws there.
And so how important do you think that the public standing is for…?
DH: .. it’s something that’s .. like one of the t’s you have to cross, one of the i’s
you have to dot, it’s not that big of a hurdle. The standing law hasn’t changed
dramatically over the last 15 or 20 years. There’s recent Supreme Court decision
that tweaks it this much ... But really they’re affirming most of what the lower
courts had said and basically the public just has to be harmed by a proposed
activity like salvage logging. So if you go to .. forests and you enjoy hiking in it
and you might see a black backed woodpecker there and if they salvage log and
take away that opportunity you’re harmed. And so you just need to have, ..
members of these environmental groups have to be (unclear – background noise)
visit these forests. But they actually are fun to visit (?) and .. they are in places
that select to recreate despite of them being burned. They’re not necessarily ugly.
So it works out. I mean it’s something you need to pay attention to but it’s not a
huge barrier.
JM: Yeah, there’s that recent Supreme Court case that was decided about the
salvage area that was down on the Sequoia in California. Do you know about that
case if this happened?
DH: Yeah and that ‘s the (unclear) case I was just referring to.
JM: Yeah, where they did have somebody who was, that’s the standing they were
talking about. But the Supreme Court I guess upheld the categorical exclusion
clause of under 250 acres per salvage. Is that right?
DH: I mean they didn’t necessarily uphold the CE. They basically said that the
lower court stepped over the line by deciding the case when there wasn’t a direct
conflict about .. this issue. So anyway since they basically settled the issues about
that salvage sale, since those issued were settled before the Appeal Court made a
decision, the Appeal Court decided to side anyway. .. Even though it’s been
settled we’re going to decide because .. there’s a broad issue here and the
Supreme Court said no you can’t just, .. there has to be a case in controversy.
There has to be an actual dispute about an actual set of facts. And there are some
exceptions. That appeal court wasn’t completely .. making it up. There is an
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exception where certain issues that are subject to repetition can be decided even if
there’s not a case in controversy and that reports (unclear) can do that. So anyway
it wasn’t really, the Supreme Court didn’t uphold that CE which basically said
that the lower court had decided it wrong. And it’s .. a legal technicality.
JM: So do you think that that decision about the CE do you think that will find its
way to the Supreme Court in a different case?
DH: I think it will be decided by another court. I don’t think it will go to the
Supreme Court again. I think it will be, I think it will find its way up and be
decided by another court and probably get them changed .. in a different way.
JM: I see. Do you think that they will take away the categorical exclusion for
timber sales under 250 or?
DH: If I had to guess, my guess would be yeah. See there was a before they had
this current acreage limitation there used to be a board foot limitation. So for
green trees it was 250,000 board feet and for salvage sales it was a million board
feet. And that was determined to be arbitrary by a court that says well just he
volume of the trees doesn’t matter. It really matters how ecologically significant
they are. Where are they located? How big are they? What’s the habitat? Those
are the questions that need to be answered. And the agency responded to having
that rule thrown out and they came up with a new thing based on acres but it’s just
it’s arbitrary. So and in a way it’s far more liberal than the old rule, which was
found to be arbitrarily less. I’m looking at it at (unclear) right now up on the
McKenzie district of the Willamette National Forest where they want to log 60
acres of mature timber that’s great elk habitat under that categorical exclusion.
And so the old limit was a quarter of a million board feet but this is one unit that
this is one unit that’s like 4 million board feet. And so they’re doing 18 times the
old limit under the new acreage limitations. And so anyway I just .. think that that
will probably be overturned someday. But we have to wait for the right set of
facts to .. percolate up through the court system.
JM: I see. That’s interesting. And that’s not what you were just talking about.
That’s not a salvage sale.
DH: No that was a green tree.
JM: Just trying to do it for elk habitat.

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DH: Yeah and it’s funny. I looked at aerial photos and all around the unit they’re
going to log growth habitat is elk habitat. .. it’s like a whole bunch of old clear
cuts and shelter wood harvests. So I don’t know where they get the idea that there
is a need for elk habitat in that area (?).
JM: That’s interesting. Are there any specific salvage logging cases that you’ve
worked on that you can tell me about?
DH: Oh man I’ve had some big fire areas so we’ve been involved in most of the
big salvage sales .. around Oregon for the last ten years. Obviously the Biscuit is
big with all the timbered rock fire on BLM which is one of the few times that the
salvage sale got to the 9th circuit and they said that it was inappropriate to salvage
log in a late successional reserve, one of the protected areas under the Northwest
Forest Plan. So that was a big win. We’ve been involved in .. the Davis Fire, the
Eyerly (?) Fire, the B&B (?) Fire, the Winter Rim was a big, couple of big salvage
sales on the Freemont Forest that we’ve been involved in. And so we’ve been
involved in (unclear – trailing off)…
JM: You talked about the Biscuit Fire a little bit. For my thesis I’ll probably be
using that as a case study actually.
DH: Yeah it would be good because that whole Donato scenario provides a good
contacts for your interests yeah. Well what do you want to know about it? I mean
you probably know a lot already.
JM: Well I guess maybe your role in it and your group’s role in it and if there was
any example that you were personally involved with like a group involved with of
trying to get ecological knowledge brought up there in terms of the salvage sales.
DH: Okay. Well yeah here’s one interesting example. The whole idea of salvage
logging in spotted owl habitat or .. salvage logging large trees, whether they are
alive or dead, that could become part of spotted owl habitat in the future, is a
really big issue. And so when they wrote, when they were writing early drafts of
the Northwest Forest Plan they basically seemed to think that salvage logging
would not be beneficial to spotted owls because even if you have a big black ..
thousands of acres that wouldn’t seem suitable for spotted owls, if you remove all
of that large wood, then you’re not going to be able to replace that for 100 years
or more. And that structurally complex large wood becomes then .. carried
through to the next stand and becomes, it makes the future stand more complex
and more higher quality habitat for spotted owls. So anyway they .. started with
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that assumption. And then you could see through the process of revising the
Northwest Forest Plan from draft to final to decision. .., it got weaker and weaker
and weaker. And so they, .., made bigger and bigger loopholes for logging those
large trees out of what should be spotted owl habitat. And so that was one of the
things I tried to do is I tried to point out .. what the original scientific intent of the
Northwest Forest Plan is X and then it got… .., so please explain in your NEPA
document why X is not a good idea. And so that’s one of the key things I did. And
I really try to get the agencies to think .. that their approach to salvage logging is
well as long as we leave two big trees per acre, we’re meeting the forest plan’s
standard. Therefore everything’s good. And I point out well okay if you meet that
two trees per acre right after your salvage sale, that’s the last two large snags that
stand is going to see for the next 100 years. So how are you going to meet the two
trees per acre for 100 years unless those two trees never fall over? And so I’m
trying to get them to think about the overall process of creating and recruiting
large trees over time. And I use the concept of the ‘snag gap.’ And so say you
have a stand of trees that burn heavily and you start having this huge pulse of
dead trees and then they slowly fall over time but they don’t all fall like
clockwork. They don’t all fall at the same time. You’ve got 10% would fall this
decade, 20% will fall the next decade, 30% maybe the next decade. And you end
up with a .. wave of mortality, a wave of snag fall rates but at some point out in
the future about 30 years, you actually have a .. depression. That your original
pulse of snags is gone, mostly gone, and you have a real decline in a level of dead
wood, but your new stand of trees is still fairly small. So they’re not recruiting big
trees yet. And so there’s a gap between the loss of the fire generated pulse and the
accumulation of the future in future foresting, and that gap is .. a key thing to
think about. And if you look at salvage logging you can only make that worse.
They claim to be making it better because they’re moving the future stand
forward in time a little bit because they’re going to aggressively salvage and then
aggressively replant and move this forward an inch. But in fact they’re pushing
the, they’re moving the .. front end of the gap by a couple of decades, .. because
it’s really and you have that .. that snag gap has started right away instead of way
out in time. So anyway that’s one of my main .. methodological scientific
understanding that the long term flow of snags across the landscape. And it’s been
an uphill battle because .. there’s the famous quote that basically people cannot be
made to understand something they’re paid to ignore, something. .. it’s so
contrary to their objectives that they basically cannot see the forest through the
trees. But I can share the materials I’ve prepared about salvage logging which .. ..
illustrate those things.
JM: That would be great.
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DH: Another big one is this, there’s a paper that came out by Rose in 2001 or
2002, which .. was a great treatise on all the different roles, that dead wood plays
in the forest. .. it’s not just habitat for woodpeckers but it provides hydrologic
things. It provides snow fences. It captures sediment that’s running down the
slopes and there’s just all these different functions for deadwood in the forest. So
it .. .. all that stuff together and then it looked at the way the agencies track snags
and deadwood in the forest and what their management standards require. And it
basically said that these methods are really not scientifically credible. They are
not retaining to enough snags and their whole approach to it doesn’t account for
the way the critters really use the habitat over time. So anyway, that, once you
have a scientific paper that says that the government standards are inadequate
you’d think that agencies would respond to that and correct themselves. But that’s
been sitting up there since 2001 and they haven’t done a thing about it. So I’m
constantly bringing this to their attention, and trying to get them to use .. better
methods. And they do have this new thing out there called DecAID. Have you
heard about the DecAID advisor?
JM: I don’t think so, no.
DH: It’s pretty interesting. It’s a web based…
JM: Decade advisor?
DH: Yeah, DecAID. Decadence advisor or something like that. Well anyway
Decayed Wood advisor. It’s not a new forest plan standard. It’s not a new set of
rules. But it’s this new set of information to .. bring to bear on these decisions.
And they keep using this thing. Well even if our old standards are inadequate,
we’re used to the best available science. But we need new standards. .., we need
to know what are the new bare minimums that you should be doing because
you’re still .. making all the decisions based on old standards that are inadequate
and you have some new information you’re .. using but you’re not using it in a
way that makes you do anything more. Adding .. this next (unclear). So anyway
that’s another big a big pet peeve of mine and I’m trying to bring that into the
agency’s decision making.
JM: How do you get an agency to recognize that it’s not using up to date scientific
knowledge? Is that an, that’s an individual battle I guess.

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DH: Yeah, yeah. You can .. win at one project or get one district ranger, one
biologist and one forest to .. figure it out and understand and agree with you and
start writing things differently. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it transfers
to the next forest or the next project. And so I’ve got a handful of analyses that I
agree with that are useful and then I .. copy those and say see how your neighbors
have done it, see how your colleagues have done it on the Cottage Grove District
on the Umpqua. And that’s been .. useful but it’s still funny. .. with thinning sales
it’s another big deadwood issue. Thinning they say benefits dead wood because it
grows big trees faster. And they’re exactly half true about that. Thinning grows
big trees faster but it grows fewer big trees faster. And when you don’t thin it
doesn’t mean that the trees stop growing. It just means that they grow slower. And
so what they’re trying to say is that by thinning we win the race to produce the
first large tree but they lose the race to produce the most large trees over time.
And so they’re counting thinning in the benefit column when you think about
dead wood in the stream or dead wood for woodpeckers or dead wood on the
forest floor for fungi or salamanders. So every time they thin they say its benefit,
benefit, benefit. But really they need to count that as a detriment. And I’m not
saying they shouldn’t thin. I just mean they need to think about it and put it in the
right column. It’s a benefit or a detriment.
JM: Yeah. What’s your opinion about in the agencies Forest Service that for those
people that move in the agency it benefits them to move around and the whatever
the rangers and whoever’s involved with the timber sale, administrators and those
folks. Not everybody moves around obviously but I think that there’s a lot of
people in the Forest Service who do move around a lot. Do you think that that
helps or hinders the process of educating those people or?
DH: .. it’s really double edged. In some ways there’s .. a culture within the agency
that moving around is better because you don’t develop inappropriate
relationships between local managers and the local power structure. So that you
don’t end up having the timber industry or the school board or the county
commissioners or whatever really calling the shots through their buddies who’ve
they’ve known since high school and happens to be the district ranger. And so
you have a moving, they’re shuffling the managers around and they’re .. keeping
them insulated from the local power structure. But in reality that doesn’t work all
that well. And you’re losing the connection of actual knowledge of the landscape.
So if you had managers who were there a long time that have actually become
familiar with .. where are the key resources. I mean you wouldn’t just start
throwing timber sales on the landscape in ignorance of what is going on out there.
So it .. goes from both sides. I don’t know which is right and which is wrong. ..
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An interesting person to ask that question would be Andy Stall at Forest Service
Employees for Environmental Ethics. Because .. this issue is debated within the
agency too. It’s .. (unclear – trailing off) an interesting question.
JM: When you’re talking a little bit earlier about the snag gap and about how the
cutting produces that snag gap and you were talking about how it’s hard to get
people to you know see something if they’re getting paid not to see it then I guess
for me what that kind of points to is that this whole thing of having fires or natural
disturbances creates this matrix of land out there that’s changing. And so you
know burl (?) naturally you have a fire go through and you’ll have a lot of snags
and through time that’ll go down and the species that live there will that need
those snags will prosper or whatever in that area at that time and then as time goes
on and that they start to fall more and there’s a fire someplace else it moves
somewhere else. So there’s this organic shifting mosaic yeah that goes on that
which is very much a part of the forest or whatever. And the Northwest Forest
Plan was one of the first times that a great expansive land was to be under this
umbrella of management that you would think would take something like that into
account. But I think what you’re saying is that the agencies, even though they’re
kind of more driven now by a biodiversity goal as opposed to a timber production.
You know there’s supposed to be more biodiversity protective now. It’s sort of in
a way it seems like they haven’t really made that switch over to that that they’re
still based in…
DH: Right. There is a new mission for how the lands are supposed to manage but
there hasn’t been a new, the agency hasn’t developed new tools and Congress
hasn’t given them a new budget structure to really facilitate that. They’re still
being paid by Congress to go do timber sales. They’re just doing those in a
smaller fraction of the landscape. So all the Northwest Forest Plan really did is it
didn’t really say biodiversity is king. It just says do your timber sales but only in
the matrix. So they’re still .. doing business as usual and using the same old tools
because the hammer is the only thing they know and everything looks like a nail.
.., that’s .. the problem. People say the real solution would be if Congress funded
them in a completely different way and I don’t know exactly what that would look
like but it probably wouldn’t be timber sales. It would be stewardship contracts
that are .. just different.
JM: Right. So do you think that that is kind of tied up with that KV fund?
DH: Yeah. There’s a whole group of slush funds. KV is .. one of the more well
known. But yeah that’s another thing. The agency doesn’t get all their money
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from Congress. They get their money from .. cycling, churning on those projects
that they’re working on. And so if they stop doing timber sales then there’s less
money to skim off. So there’s internal incentives not to change the budget
structure and not to shake things up too much.
JM: Which kind of points to the institutionalized nature of some of these things.
Let’s see. What’s your opinion of civil disobedience in this thing of getting
ecological knowledge into policies?
DH: I guess I’m not really sure. I’ve never thought about it in a science context
very much. Although there was a group .. of kids that was doing tree sitting about
the same time that the survey management program was being debated. And they
started .. merging those two things with their tree sitting skills or their tree
climbing skills. They would go find red tree voles and protect that acre of ground.
And in a way it brought the .. .. radical fringe that projected the process and just
they just waited until the very end to jump into the trees. Well now they had an
incentive to actually be drawn in earlier and actually engage in the administrative
process, my factual input into the decision making process and if it had an
immediate payoff in terms of protecting acres they were drawn to. So in a way it
was a real .. benefit to .. early resolution of problems instead of .. waiting until the
very end and having it (unclear – trailing off) in a civil disobedience setting. So
anyway that’s just one real observation. .. our group doesn’t do civil disobedience.
.., its just .. part of the democratic process. .. it .. takes all stripes but it’s not our
role. And generally they’re not that .. they’re not doing .. they’re not citing papers
when they’re up in the trees. They’re .. they’re spouting slogans and (unclear) just
have a different role usually except for this exception with surveying… Do you
know what ‘survey and manage’ is? It was part of the Northwest Forest Plan that
basically said…
JM: Survey and manage?
DH: Yeah, survey and manage. When they did the Northwest Forest Plan .. they
set aside these reserves for spotted owls and if the reserve was full of clear cuts
already because the Northwest Forest Plan came along in 1994 after they’d
already logged the crap out of the forests. You couldn’t find .. intact old growth
areas of that scale. And so they just flopped the reserves on fragmented
landscapes. And so .. during the healing process while those big reserves were
actually re-growing to become healthy intact blocks of the forest, they were still
going to be clear cutting old forest in the matrix in between the reserves. And so
they decided to mitigate for that by asking the agencies to survey for a list of rare
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species. It’s a big list. I mean you might only have five species that could
potentially exist in any given acre of ground because of the .. range of the species
was limited or the habitat of the species was limited and it’s not like they all could
potentially .. out of the 400 species they couldn’t all potentially exist everywhere.
So they had a short list of the species they had to look for before they could log.
It’s just .. ‘intelligent tinkering’ ‘look before you leap.’ And then if you found the
species you had to put a buffer around it, a subset of a species. Most of the buffers
were a tenth of an acre or two tenths of an acre. The red tree vole got a full ten
acres. And there was one fungus that got 600 acres because there was only three
instances of it in the world or something like that. So generally the red tree vole is
.. the focus of a lot of attention because it actually did get more than a postage
stamp buffer and the kids could find it up in the trees. It’s really hard to find from
the ground. You have to climb a tree to really find it very well. So anyway these
tree climbing kids were finding them left and right and well saving forests .. .. a
pock mark of forests but if .. we found enough of them they would basically cause
a unit to be dropped or cause them to give up on a certain area that they wanted to
log.
JM: How would they document, I mean, what would keep them from just
climbing and saying you know I found…?
DH: There were, the red tree vole is a unique interesting species that has, that
builds its, it mainly eats Douglas fir needles and it eats it with these specialized
hands that are extremely articulate and they .. .. eat the good parts of the needle
and throw out the bad parts. You didn’t even know that there was two parts but
the red tree vole knows. And so it would discard as resin ducts, which are the bad
part, and it would make its nest out of them. And you get enough of these resin
ducts in one place and it’s just an absolutely indistinguishable feature of the red
tree vole (unclear). There’s no other thing. So basically they would collect a
sample of the nest and flag the tree and GPS it or take a picture and then the
agency would have to follow up later and corroborate it.
JM: I see. That’s interesting. (unclear) I’m just going to look at some of my notes
here. What, in your view what’s the most significant mechanism of you know the
sense that I’ve been using it to get the ecological knowledge into policy?
DH: Well it’s hard to pick one thing because it’s .. an ‘all of the above’ approach
that has to work but for me it’s .. writing the NEPA comments that go into the
administrative record and the ultimate backdrop is litigation. .., you never get an
independent third party review of the situation until you get into federal court.
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Even when you do an administrative appeal, it’s just being handled by the boss of
the guy who made the decision. And the boss isn’t going to overrule his .. his
hired gun except in limited circumstances. But you can’t do a lawsuit without the
administrative record that we built in the lower levels. So those .. two things
together are a pretty powerful tool and we have a lot of examples where we ..
we’ve been able to affect policy and get them to improve the way they do things.
JM: And that’s really interesting but it just seems like that there should be some
kind of safeguard. Like say if you go to court and you’re trying to do something
and say some new information comes about that sheds light on it that wasn’t
known during that you know setting that ground work there. Is there no way to
add anything to the administrative process?
DH: Actually there is. It’s .. a limited exception but there’s a clause in NEPA that
says, it’s a requirement for the agencies to basically constantly be on the lookout
for new information. And if new information arises that significantly changes
their analysis or undermines their analysis, or if they change their decision in a
way that substantially changes the analysis, either of those two things trigger, you
have to do a new EIS..
JM: I see. So it would just start the whole thing over again.
DH: Yeah. And we have used that at times, usually not in the middle of litigation
but it is a way .. of bringing in new information. Sometimes NEPA documents
can be .. seven or ten years old and they’re still… .. we had a timber sale outside
Eugene called the Fall Creek timber sale, or no it was called the Clark timber
sales in the Fall Creek watershed. And I think we first appealed it administratively
in 1992 and we were still in court on it in 2006. So .. a lot of things happened over
all those years. And there was a fire nearby, a survey manage program came in,
the Northwest Forest Plan came in, .. just all these different twists. And oh the
tree sitters found a bunch of red tree voles that the agency didn’t know about. ..
and so that was successful.
JM: Yeah, it almost seems like if there’s a, if those things went over a certain time
then it would almost be like automatic because of…
DH: There’s .. a general rule that after five years a NEPA document is stale and
needs to be redone. But in actual fact it doesn’t seem to work that way. It has to
be about ten years old before you can really use that as a lever. And often we
don’t always have to litigate. Sometimes it’s the threat of litigation that allows us
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to get the agencies to do something better. So they have an incentive to avoid
litigation and it saves them time and trouble. They don’t have to tell their bosses
that hey I’m getting sued. So sometimes we can get into a good settlement or
good conversation about changed practices .. with .. the threat of litigation
hanging over them.
JM: That like in this time of, I guess I’m speaking about like climate changes you
know finally being accepted as actually happening by the government and what
not. And then it seems pretty clear that actual, the rate is a little bit quicker than
what the IPCC was saying originally. Do you think that this will lead to
significant changes in the institutional struggle in regards to salvage logging? I
mean do you think that we’re in for a big change here in how things are done?
DH: I’d like to think so but I’m not super optimistic yet. I mean I think the
science lines up very well for us. But when I read the Forest Service climate
change document, there’s some of the very most obvious things they should be
doing differently don’t show up in the recommendations ... So it’s .. depressing.
And salvage logging .. .. to me is definitely would be much better to store carbon
in the large unmolested tree boles. Even if they’re dead it would be better than
processing them and turning them into wood products and sawdust and slash fires.
But there’s some even more obvious things they should be doing and they’re not
even doing those. So they’re not going to get to salvage logging until they’ve
figured out just logging green old growth let alone dead old growth.
JM: Do you have any examples on the top of your head of what they’re not
putting in their reports? Are any reports on the climate change issue that you were
just talking about that would be worth looking at or?
DH: Well the obvious thing is they’re not saying we should be staying out of
roadless areas, which would be staying out of old growth. I mean old growth
should just be permanently and forever off limits. .. just don’t touch it anymore. I
mean there’s absolutely no reason to log old growth…
JM: Is that because there’s so little of it left from what there was?
DH: No, mainly because of its carbon value. And you can only make the carbon
situation worse if you log it. I mean I guess there’s one exception to that. It is if
you really, really carefully remove small fuel from classic ponderosa pine old
growth .. that was actually stressed by drought and was suffering .. then you might
do it not because you’re reducing fire hazard but just because you are
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perpetuating .. trees that are drought stressed. So I guess east side old growth, dry
old growth, you may not draw a line around the stand but you may draw the line
around the biggest oldest trees. But on the west side you’d draw a line around the
stand and just say do not cut. But anyway those are just really obvious things.
Roadless areas are another one. .. we don’t have a road system in there. They’re
functioning ecological islands. .., let’s just leave them alone. And that would be a
great thing. And I’m thinking mainly from a carbon storage perspective but in
addition there is just the .. biodiversity and climate mitigation (unclear). Old trees
are in general more resilient and more resistant to climate stress. It’s a really well
established and deep root systems, thick bark, high crowns .. all these things make
them more resilient in the face of stress disturbances.
JM: Yeah. And then I guess well hmmm. You know I know that the salvage
timber sales have been over the sense of the Northwest Forest Plan. They’ve been
taking up a greater and greater percentage of the timber harvest. So that there’s
been more of them happening. Do you see this as a continuing trend?
DH: Not really because fire is so variable. .. I think part of the reason for that
trend is that there was some bad fire years and I think that fire is probably on an
increasing trend but it’s not a linear one. It’s going to have lots of ups and downs.
And there’s going to be periods with not .. not very much fire. And I think that
we’re slowly getting the agencies to focus on a smaller and smaller subset of the
area that burned. You could be doing dumb things or dumb things on a smaller
subset of the landscape. So in a way that .. that’s going to help alleviate that trend
I hope. And politics also plays .. under Bush every fire had to be salvage. I mean
it seemed to be a policy that they couldn’t leave a fire alone. But under Obama I
think that will probably change. I’m not saying that salvage is going to go away
but the pressure’s going to be (unclear – trailing off).
JM: I see. What’s your opinion of that size, the scale issue with 250 acres?
They’re saying that they’re getting smaller and smaller. In terms of an ecosystem
or a watershed. I mean I guess obviously it depends on the whole size. But can
you say how much of an impact the 250 acres has? I mean is it significant? Is it, I
mean obviously it depends on the area…
DH: Yeah it depends on the setting and in the Northwest Forest Plan there’s a
thing that says that disturbance is natural and in LSR if you have a disturbance
less than ten acres, just leave it alone. But under that same logic .. why wouldn’t
you say larger disturbances are also natural and also add to the diversity so you
should leave those alone as well. So it’s .. an arbitrary limit there. .. at 250 acres,
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that’s an arbitrary line and I don’t think that that would stand. I mean any salvage
sale in the wrong place at the wrong time could have significant impact. And
really .. patches of dead trees where complex early seral forests, complex young
forests, those are a very rare thing on the landscape. They’re probably more rare
than old growth. And a young complex forest maybe as diverse or more diverse
than old growth. And so I think there’s slowly .. that scientific realization is
slowly sinking in and hopefully .. they’ll realize that salvage logging is in no way
beneficial. It’s a negative and a big negative and they should stop, especially
(unclear).
JM: Has there been a scientific paper that’s been focused on that point about the
diversity and the rarity of the young forest?
DH: Yeah, actually there’s a couple. God, I can’t remember the name of the paper
but there’s .. a famous paper that says .. young forests indeed are one of the rarest
forests. I believe it was the Jerry Franklin thing. But there’s another one that
comes to mind which is, a grad student at OSU named Etsuku Nonoka (?) who
worked with Tom Spies (?) and they did some really interesting modeling of the
coast range. And they have pretty good information for the coast range on the
severity of past fires and the size of past fires. And so they ran some simulations
across the coast range province. .. like a 3000 year simulation which they ran
1000 times .. hundreds of times to try to get .. the average outcomes. And they
figured out .. what was the, what were typical proportions of different forest
types. .. old forests with lots of dead material, young forests with lots of dead
material, middle aged forests with not very much dead material. .. all those ..
different combinations of features were portrayed and young forests without
structure like a clear cut is extremely common now and is extremely rare
historically. Young forests with lots of structure were much more common
historically and are very uncommon now. .. and then old forests obviously with
lots of live and dead biomass were very common historically and are very rare
now. So anyway through this grid box you can .. see where we’re overrepresented
and where we’re underrepresented. To me that’s a perfect little model. Okay what
do we do with our restoration? We take the areas that are overrepresented, try to
nudge them toward .. the areas that are underrepresented. I can share that with
you. I’ve got that .. stuff.
JM: That’d be great. That’d be fantastic, yeah. Have you gotten that into litigation
as of yet?

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DH: No I can’t think of an example of what (unclear) in litigation. I’ve been using
it in my comments quite a bit.
JM: So that’s in one of the first steps of the NEPA process.
DH: Yeah. And it’s interesting ... Part of my job is actually to lobby our lawyers.
And I need .. I need to educate not only the agencies. I need to educate our
lawyers so they know what the key issues are and what needs to be litigated. And
salvage logging is one of the things that’s .. hard to sell the attorneys on because
they get up in front of a judge and they’re talking about dead trees and the judge ..
needs education too. He doesn’t know that .. how important ecologically valuable
dead trees are. And so it’s a whole sequence of educational steps that are still not
as far along as I wish they were.
JM: Do you guys use the same lawyers? Do you have lawyers on your staff or do
you contract out to certain lawyers or?
DH: Yeah we have mostly outside lawyers. .. I have a law degree but I’m not a
practicing lawyer. And but we work with the Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund
(?) in Seattle mostly but some of their other offices. Western Environmental Law
Center, which is here in Eugene and a handful of other lawyers, Pacific
Environmental Advocacy Center and Cascade Resource Advocacy Center, both in
Portland. There’s a bunch of non-profit law firms out there that work on this ..
stuff. Ralph Bloehmers (?), he just did a big salvage sale litigation of forests in the
Umatilla…
JM: Bloombers?
DH: Yeah Bloehmers, it’s Bloehmers or something like that. Now I can’t
remember. The h I know is on the other side of the m. But he’s with, if you look
up CRAG.org, that’s his law firm. Cascade Resource Advocacy Group is CRAG,
but I think it’s CRAG.org. And he just did this big litigation of course on the
School Fire, which was in extreme southeastern Washington.
JM: The which fire?
DH: The School fire. Yeah he might be an interesting one to talk to because he
involved expert witnesses ... You can submit affidavits to the court and stuff like
that. That’s .. an exception to my point about .. we’re limited to the administrative
record. Sometimes you can get expert declarations submitted to the court, which
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don’t really, aren’t supposed to add to the record but they can .. enhance the
record. It’s .. an odd little loophole. And sometimes .. people fight over whether
or not they’re admissible or not and how much a judge can rely on them. But he
got some experts to talk about issues. One of the big issues there was the Forest
Service was logging trees that are dying, not dead yet but dying, which allowed
them to use an exception to cut the biggest trees. If the trees are alive you can’t
cut them if they’re over 21 inches and in certain circumstances. And so they
wanted to cut trees that were not yet dead but were over 21 inches. So they were
trying to say well they’re dying. They’re not really alive but then and the court
says, “Dying means not dead.” (chuckles)
JM: That’s interesting. That would be interesting to talk to a lawyer too about this
for sure. What’s your opinion, I think this is probably about the last question here.
What’s your opinion about this process of bringing these things you know into
bear on things? Do you think it’s a good system that we have in this country you
know for deciding these salvage logging type deals or ecological knowledge in
general? Or do you think that it needs to be overhauled or changed or completely
scrapped or?
DH: I mean I can certainly think of ways to improve the process to make science
.. a more, to make it a more robust process of including science in the decision
making process. But right now the trend seems to be .. going against us where
there are really .. a lot of people complaining about ‘analysis paralysis’ or the
‘process predicament.’ .. if the agencies study it for too long and don’t get to
action soon enough. So people like.. (unclear on name) who want to streamline
the process. He has a bill out there right now. It’s not introduced but it’s on his
website. They’re creating categorical exclusions up to 20,000 acres, potentially up
to 50,000 acres.
JM: Who’s Ron Wyden?
DH: Ron Wyden? Wyden. A US senator from Oregon. .. restoration is in the eye
of the beholder and obviously there’s nothing guaranteeing that (unclear) were
going to do wonderful things for our forests.
JM: Yeah well that’s true. I mean how it gets framed seems to be an extremely
you know like the most important issue in a way. I mean and I’m thinking of the
Biscuit Fire, Sessions and that whole thing. I mean what the models he was using
seemed a little out of context. You know to say the least or whatever. So say if

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you had the power to be able to change the system, what would you do to make it
better?
DH: Well I’d get rid of categorical exclusions .. for one. And .. maybe there
should be some .. like a scientific ombudsman process or some way to so that
when the environmentalists bring scientific issues to the agency, .., we can’t see
because they’re paid to ignore it ... .. it would be nice if there was somebody we
could appeal to and say can you help us bring this information to the agency in a
way that .. forces them to have it sink in better. So a scientific ombudsman is one
idea. And another one is, yeah I guess I’m .. stuck thinking strictly about salvage.
JM: Is there other changes you’d make that maybe don’t have to do with salvage?
DH: There’s a lot of tweaks that we would do .. to make the public process work
better. Like .. right now the agency publishes notice of their decisions and obscure
newspapers in rural Oregon. .. why don’t we put this on the web? .. they don’t put
decent maps out, they don’t have decent internet communication and it took a lot
of years to get involved (?) kind of crap.
JM: The map things is one of the things that’s specifically called for in the laws
too that you know as the public process of there be a map so they’re not good
maps.
DH: Yeah there often are maps but .. if the maps don’t have section lines .. you
can’t really locate where you’re at. Or they’ll have the units on one thing and the
roads are being 15 pages later and you can’t tell which roads go to which units ...
Just .. that using new technology like Google Earth, they could so easily make it
totally, .. for the very first time this month they’ll ever see a Google Earth .. file
from the Forest Service which had roads, streams, units, .., a key, everything and
you could just click on the different layers you want to see and it’s overlaid
perfectly right over .. this amazing high res aerial photos on Google Earth. So but
that’s the first time in all these years. And that guy for all I know gets fired for
doing that ... He was doing it on his own. He wasn’t necessarily really instructed
to do it (laughs).
JM: Well I just, I know that those agencies can get into trouble for using that stuff
even though you can download like Google Earth on your personal computer that
if you use it for the agency’s business would they’re losing money. The Google is
because if the agencies are using it they should pay a bunch of money for that
whole thing. So probably what you’ve got was the guy doing it on his own. I’ve
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heard that before, they’re not supposed to do that. So better incorporation of the
public to get their involvement, more transparent process I guess. Anything else?
DH: That’s all I can think of right now.
JM: Would you say overall it’s a pretty good system?
DH: Oh yeah I can definitely answer that question. I mean I think it’s better than
most other countries that I’ve seen. .. it just it seems good in many ways but it’s
far from perfect. So .. the fact that we have .. individuals can get standing to
defend a piece of ground. You can’t get that in Canada. Their legal system does
not support that process. So I can’t imagine .. our system without that. It would be
a really scary prospect. So in a way I have to defend .. what we’ve got is pretty
cool but it could certainly be better. And now .. everything we’ve been saying for
the last 20 years it’s just come (unclear – trailing off). .. if we could only get
resolution of these things 20 years faster than we are currently it would be so
much better. Right now we know that .. climate change is a huge issue. We know
what we need to do to stop it. We need to have .. stop logging old growth
wilderness areas, longer rotations everywhere else, .., restore the plantations, do
all these wonderful things. And we probably it won’t kick in for about 15 or 20
years even though .. we knew yesterday what was going to happen. So anyway its
.. frustrating that it’s not more efficient but it’s just .. you have to accept .. the
messiness of the democratic process. And everything is ultimately .. politics.
There is a layer of politics in everybody and even NEPA is not just pure .. pure
science and analysis. And even the courts .. the courts are very political. Gordon
Smith who was the other senator from Oregon until recently, his brother is a judge
on the 9th circuit court of appeals. And his opinions are always pro timber, antiprocess. So .. it shouldn’t be a lottery depending on what judge you get but it
totally is a lot in what judge you get.
JM: Interesting. Is there anything else you can add to this?
DH: I can’t think of anything right now but I do have quite a collection of ..
salvage related .. comments and science I’ve tried to bring into the process.
JM: That would be great. That would probably be…
DH: It would explain that whole snag gap thing and…
JM: That’s great. Do you have like an electric file of it?
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DH: Yeah.
JM: Yeah. Could you send it to me or?
DH: Yeah.
JM: Okay. Yeah that sounds great. Well…
DH: What did you do before you got to Evergreen?
JM: Well let’s see. I was working for the Forest Service as a firefighter and I used
to live in California but I got offered a job up on the Olympics, was how I ended
up in Washington about five or six years ago. It’s not a permanent job. Then I left
the Forest Service last year and started working for DNR just before the big
budget cuts happened. So this year I’m actually going back to the Forest Service
for summer employment. I really hope to get a job with the nature conservancy is
what I’d like to do. They have a lot of fire related positions.
DH: Well they just had massive layoffs though (unclear). I think it will bounce
back.
JM: I think so. And I think just everything is in a dip right now before it comes
up.
DH: Yeah and it’s just interesting ... You picked an issue that is important to you
and me and .. 90% of the people in this room have never even heard the word or
wouldn’t know what you were talking about (unclear) salvage. So .. climate
change .. means something, old growth .. means something, .., fire is still a big
bad thing for them. .. and salvage logging is .. so far down the list. .. the idea of
making huge progress on that is a little depressing to think about. .. it’s going to
be slow I guess. That’s .. what I’m expecting.
JM: Because it’s just so far back.
DH: Yeah. It’s just .. back there. And I think that the other side exploits that. They
know that it’s far back and they know that they can .. continue to be paid not to
know the truth and get away with it for a while.

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JM: I see. So that really points to the importance of public education or it’s
almost, I hesitate to say advertising but almost an advertising campaign.
DH: Possibly, but also maybe the fact that some of these mechanisms like using
the courts can actually .. leap frog the public. .. even though we have to educate
our lawyers and ultimately educate judges on the importance of this thing, .. it
might be possible to get some progress on that front or using science. I mean this
may (unclear) the courts. But just .. if you had a big public conference and had
enough players from the Forest Service and enough players in the scientific
community that really knew their shit then you would .. get a transformational
Obama flavored .. salvage policy quicker than if you waited for the advertising
campaign to kick in. Or if you waited until .. educated (unclear) judge. I don’t
know. I’m just .. thinking out loud. It’s a complicated process. I don’t know how
it’s going to happen but it needs to. So why don’t you give me your email
address? You might have given it to me earlier. And I’ll give you my card. So
what are the predictions? Is this going to be a big fire year?
JM: I think so. I think so. I haven’t been keeping up on the fuel moistures and
everything like that. But California is certainly in the third year of a drought and
probably realistically it’s longer than that. Yeah I think that it’ll probably be a
good fire year or a bad fire year you know depending on your point of view.
DH: (laughing) It depends on how it burns (laughing).
JM: Yeah that’s true. And well and you know the thing is you know with the
intensity of the fire. You know the Biscuit Fire was sold as a high severity fire
and that it really needed to be rehabilitated by Sessions. But really the truth of the
matter is, is that there was a lot of spots inside the fire that had seed trees left
there and really there wasn’t, there shouldn’t have been a problem with having,
getting it reseeded. That’s interesting.
DH: Yeah there were certainly a few big days where it went on big runs and took
out some areas. But there’s a lot of nice mixed severity and low severity in there.
The recent FIA reports that came out for Oregon and California recently,
Washington hasn’t come out yet, but for Oregon and California there is a little
analysis of fire severity trends. And they say that there’s not an observable trend
yet of increasing severity. But the only problem with the analysis is it lumps ..
forest rangeland and grass land. So if you pulled out the forest, .. might it be
different, they didn’t show that analysis. Maybe there’s not enough data for it or
something. But it’s .. interesting. If we’re just having a bunch of mixed severity
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fire like we did historically, what’s the problem? .. we’re having a big fire deficit.
So let the correction occur.
JM: Well I think that would be a really complicated issue to resolve you know
because of the ecology of place or whatever. But you know these west side forests
and certainly up in Washington, you know they’re historically stand replacing
fires which you know happens when there’s a whole cascade of events to where
it’s ready to burn and there’s a wind and it happens. So I’m not sure if when that
happens because eventually it will happen, that all of a sudden you know that, the
whatever, the gauge will move, will jump quite a bit when that happens.
DH: But as you say those are not uncharacteristic. So hopefully whatever
methodology you have will account for that. It’s really I guess the .. more dry
forests and mixed severity forests that you would see that signal and see it change.
I’m sure that there’s been, I can see the argument from both sides. Well I’d better
get back to work. Nice to meet you.
JM: I sure appreciate it. I’ll send you an email. I have your email address and just
I’ll remind you about that group of whatever. That sounds really interesting to me.
And with this interview I will send you an email or whatever about what I might
want to use from it and get your permission.
DH: Okay that’d be great, that’d be great.
JM: …you know before putting your name down or anything like that. Does that
sound good?
DH: Sure.
JM: I really appreciate it. It’s been very interesting.
DH: Yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t .. had to cross wires and almost miss it.

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Appendix E
This interview of Josh Laughiln appears in it entirety. It was conducted in Eugene
Oregon on May 19, 2009. Josh was employed by Cascadia Wildlands Project at
the time of this interview.
JM (Jothan Mcgaughey): And well I guess I’ll just say the same thing I just said
(chuckles). You know I’m writing this paper about how ecological knowledge
gets incorporated into policies, specifically with salvage logging. I kind of think
with you know with climate change and those sorts of issues that it’s going to
become more important as time goes on to speed up the process at least you
know. And so I was wondering, Josh, if you could tell me a little bit about the
organization you work for and maybe your position and what you do and then we
can start talking about this.
J (Josh): Yeah, absolutely. Well you know I work with the Cascadia Wildlands
Project. We’re a non-profit conservation organization based here in Eugene. And
I have a field office up in Cordova, Alaska, the northern reaches the Cascadia Bio
Region where the temperate rain forests peter out. And yeah we’ve been around
for about ten years and yep celebrated our ten-year anniversary this year. And
ultimately working to permanently protect remaining old growth forests in the
region, share in species recovery and you know one thing that dovetails into that
is you know how best to manage post fire landscapes. So it’s quite relevant to you
know the questions you’re asking in the paper so. And I work as the conservation
director for the organization. You know overseeing their conservation campaigns
and work with Dan. He’s our staff attorney. And you know our staff up in Alaska
is a conservation staff as well.
JM: I see. And so you have an attorney on staff then for the litigation and filing
things?
J: Yeah, exactly, yep. One of the first cases that Dan actually brought on behalf of
the Cascadia Wildlands Project and some other plaintiffs were specifically around
post fire logging a couple of years ago. The aftermath of the, oh boy, I’ve got so
many things in my brain right now. Dan, post fire case that you brought that we
settled…
Dan: Black Crater.

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J: Black Crater. Thank you. Up in the Deschutes National Forest on the eastern
flank of the Cascade Crest up by the Three Sisters. There’s a fire that burned up
there. And the typical response forever by agencies after a wildfire is you know
by golly log it. Otherwise it’s you know going to go to waste when we can be
clear cutting it and generating profits for you know private industry. And that’s
one of the things that we really have taken on as a challenge and have embraced
the need to really challenge that type of thinking that you know post fire
landscapes are a lot more than just standing dead trees waiting to be clear cut.
And you know we follow the best available science that’s come out over the years
and which talks about the you know the need for these unique landscapes for a
host of different species notably up in the Cascades. There’s a handful of
woodpecker species that thrive in post fire environments. A lot like for example
the northern spotted owls thrive in you know dense old growth forests. And post
fire landscapes have historically been clear-cut in the aftermath of the fire. And
consequently they’re one of the more rare types of ecosystems out there, affecting
species like black back and three toed woodpeckers.
JM: Nice. The reason why I jumped on the lawyer is I was just talking to Doug
and he was saying that part of the issues that he’s dealing with is to actually
educate the lawyers who are bringing the litigation so that they know the issues.
So it seems like in a way you short-circuited that by actually having a lawyer
who’s specifically focused on this.
J: Yeah. You know a lot of the lawyers in the conservation community aren’t as
knee deep in the issues. But say for example the conservation staff on a day-today basis they more know the statutes and the law of the land. That’s the beauty
of having an in house attorney like Dan who’s you know not just working on
behalf of the clients but works on you know behalf of the staff and the
organization and is in the field often times doing a lot of you know frankly the
conservation work that gets done in the office. So Dan you know really wears a
number of hats and it’s not just the staff attorney hat. We tag team a lot in
conservation work and policy.
JM: Yeah. And going back to some of the first things you were just saying here
talking about how we sort of from ground zero or whatever that salvage has been
looked on by the agencies as what you do you know not to support waste or
whatever, to allow this to go to waste. Do you think that that points to like an
institutionalized state of salvage logging? Like that it’s just so accepted that…?

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J: Well yeah. I think that’s you know to a great degree the problem. I mean for
almost 100 years now Smokey the Bear has been telling us that wildfire is bad,
snuff it out on the heels of that is you know let’s clear cut the forest after to clean
them up. And you know the word and the concept of salvage is you know it’s a
really good thing. We all like to salvage things to keep you going from the dump
you know to reuse things. It’s a good word in you know for decades that word’s
been bastardized in the context of logging and that salvage logging is supposed to
be put forth as a good concept because it’s salvaging something. Yeah it’s
salvaging logs and providing wood volume to communities and profits to the
private industry but you know the big questions aren’t asked. What’s the
ramifications or implications for you know the post fire ecosystems and species
that rely on them. So I mean it’s a real uphill battle for us you know taking on this
you know almost century old mindset that salvage logging is good, that you know
wildfires are bad and we’re still decades behind where we currently are with the
need to permanently protect green old growth forests. You know there’s been
many more decades of advocacy work done there and just really over the last you
know ten years there’s been a real change in mindset and new science emerging, a
lot more grants being administered to the science community to frankly go out
and just conduct the science. Like what you know there’s a lot of emerging
science. You know for example like down in the Biscuit area after you know in an
area the Biscuit area is down in southwest Oregon. I don’t know if you heard
about that at all.
JM: Yeah, certainly.
J: A large series of fires burned together into one fire later dubbed the Biscuit Fire
in 2002. But some of the science that was done after that is they looked at an area
that was salvage logged years prior to the Biscuit Fire in the Silver Fire complex
and replanted with you know dense even aged saplings. And they looked at areas
that burned in the Silver Fire that weren’t salvage logged after the Silver Fire.
And you know just the juxtaposition of how the forests responded. I mean the
plantations just got torched in the subsequent Biscuit Fire not lending to a real fire
resilient landscape. I mean there’s plantations, once the dead trees are clear cut
and replanted with homogenous saplings they just they roast, often times setting
things back. And you know we’ve just been spending a lot of time just trying to
do just real basic education because you know the issues can be confusing but we
just like to you know describe and portray you know these post fire landscapes. I
mean all forests you know whether it’s east coast or west coast or the Midwest
have evolved with fire. I mean that’s a basic tenant of forest ecology that a lot of
people just don’t know that wildfire is actually a good, healthy natural dynamic
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element for species, for vegetation communities and that we just really need to
start from scratch really and reframe the issue and break 100 years of myths that
wildfire is bad, that salvage logging is good and start to get you know the
American public to think a little differently about post fire landscapes and their
role in the ecological balance of you know life on Earth really.
JM: Yeah totally. Do you think that part of that is kind of a function of how much
people have learned in recent decades? I mean it’s kind of like the rate of
knowledge about things has really kind of expanded. I mean you have the whole
spotted owl thing that came about because of a graduate student. And so I guess
what I’m getting at is that you know some of these things weren’t known or
certainly weren’t known on a broad scale. Do you see that as playing a part in
this?
J: Yeah. Well I just think there’s you know especially over the last ten years.
Really the catalyst you know for change in this particular issue kind of how the
public looks at post fire landscapes is this issue around the Warner Creek fire.
Does that come up in any of your research?
JM: Yeah.
J: When I spoke with you on the phone I suggested one other person to talk to,
Tim Ingalsbee. I don’t know if you got a hold of him at all. He’s a good person to
talk to.
JM: I haven’t. That’s the FUSEE?
J: Yeah, the FUSEE. He’s kind of my go to expert about Warner Creek but to
make a really long story short, there was an area that was set aside as an owl
conservation support area, spotted owl support area up in the Cascades, you know
kind of during the height of the spotted owl wars in the late 1980s. And if you can
believe it, criminals went in there with gas jugs and burned the forest down you
know in an act of arson in protest of the area getting designated as an owl support
area. And coincidentally or incidentally I should say, after that intentional arson
happened, the Forest Service plan, the clear cutting project in the owl support
area. Even though it wasn’t a you know lightening ignited wildfire it was you
know human caused fire. It you know once the fire got going it certainly showed
the effects of a fire cutting through a forest. And it really turned into this research
laboratory up there. And a hotbed of protest because the agency wanted to go in
and clear-cut this area after it was intentionally torched. And like I mentioned it
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kind of captivated an audience and there was a lot of education done in the
community and ultimately the area wasn’t clear-cut. There was a long ridge
history of civil disobedience that happened up there for about two years. And
really put the issue of post fire clear cutting on the map. This was, the arson was
1991 and the clear cutting proposal surfaced in 1995, 1994 or 1995. And you
know so for at least the past ten years, 12 years, it’s become an issue where now
when there’s a wildfire that burns in the forest or an arson fire that’s set in the
forest, the agencies don’t just propose clear cutting projects because they know
it’s maybe not A and easy sell to the public anymore but also that there’s a lot of
science that’s surfaced that really opposes you know just reckless clear cutting in
terms of impacts on landscapes and species. So yeah, really the last you know 1015 years it’s really come to the surface. For example you know in the Northwest
Forest Plan area, which is a 24 million acre area in western Oregon and
Washington and northern California. Are you familiar with the Northwest Forest
Plan?
JM: Yes.
J: You know it was a system that was set up to recover the owl from going extinct
with reserve allocations in areas you can clear cut and so forth. One of the big
things that we’ve been at the forefront of is well what happens when the reserves
burn, you know the green reserves that were set up and designed for owls. And
that became a hotbed of controversy. In the Biscuit Fire area a number of post fire
clear cutting projects that surfaced on the Willamette and the Deschutes National
Forests when these what are called late successional reserves and they burned, the
agencies are like alright we’re going to clear cut them in there. We’re going to
clear cut in there and replant as quick as we can. That’s going to be the best thing
for the owls to get green healthy forests growing again. And what we’ve brought
again to the forefront is opposing scientific studies by real prominent owl
scientists that’s just surfacing the last couple of years that basically say you know
burned forests aren’t necessarily bad for owls and they use you know the
telemetry studies they’re doing. You know they put these little devices on owls
now where they can track their movements and there is a lot of research going on
in post fire environments and owls are coming back into them. You know they’re
not necessarily nesting and they burned Douglas fir trees but they’ll forage and
roost and so forth. So yeah that the whole tenor and the whole climate around post
fire clear cutting is changing and we have actually litigated to basically stop the
agency from clear cutting in reserves because there’s a lot of science that says you
know burned forests aren’t necessarily bad for owls especially you know low and
mixed severity fires. You know you’ve got low, mixed and high severity fires,
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high severity meaning stand replacing which owls typically won’t use for nesting,
roosting or foraging. But the low and mixed severity you know they’re finding
owls back in old historic territories. So we’ve really I’d say you know changed
the way the agencies think about managing post fire landscapes especially in the
reserves in the Northwest Forest Plan. For example there’s a fire up in an area
called the GW Fire Area. The east side of the Cascade Crest is called the GW
Timber Sale. Is that for George W Bush, Dan? Is that why it was called GW Fire?
Dan: I think it’s on this side of Washington…
JM: I think its George Washington.
J: Okay. I was like why do they call that the GW Fire? Okay, yes. It was on the
eastern flank of Mount Washington on the Deschutes. And they opted after you
know Dan on our behalf settled the Black Crater Fire, which kept them out of the
reserves. They decided not to, the following year when the GW Fire happened
they decided not to pursue clear cutting in the reserve but only in the what’s
called the matrix, a logging based area. And that decision is a direct result of you
know the litigation that we brought prior in the changing stance.
JM: Now is that the same forest? Or was it an adjoining forest?
J: Same national forest, the Deschutes National Forest, which is just on the east
side of the Cascade Crest, kind of eastern range of the spotted owl.
JM: Do you, I’m sorry to interrupt you. You’re on a good role. Do you think that
the different administrative units as you know the different forests that that sort of
puts in a block to, would that have happened on a different forest do you think?
J: Good question. Ideally yes but realistically no you know because for, what’s
the best way to put it, for knowledge, legal knowledge to transfer from one
administrative unit to another let alone one agency to another like Forest Service
to BLM isn’t as quick as it travels say from our office to Oregon Wild’s office.
But you know ultimately you know if it ends up in court the Department of
Justice is the one that’s going to represent the Forest Service and you know they
follow the case law and that would get settled. And what the law of the land is. So
I think slowly it ripples down you know it all, every all the forest planning that
happens out of here happens out of a place of what’s called Region 6 up in
Portland. It’s for all the national forests in the Pacific Northwest and theoretically
there would be direction coming out of there to all the national forests in Region 6
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that would basically say post fire clear cutting in late successional reserves is
probably not a good thing anymore. I’d be surprised if that document wasn’t
circulated after you know the Black Crater Fire, possibly it was settled. I never
saw anything like that but I’d be surprised.
JM: Another thing that you had brought up earlier was the issue of grants in
producing knowledge I guess. Do you know who’s giving those grants I mean…?
J: Yeah. The federal government is actually the one that’s been doling them out
especially on a lot of the post fire issues. For example a lot of the research that’s
being done out of Oregon State University they call them joint fire science
dollars. It gets money administered through the Department of Agriculture. I
could be wrong. You might want to double-check that. But its money that’s doled
out from the federal agencies to you know the schools to implement the joint fire
sciences research. So ironically a lot of the conclusions that are coming out of
some of these papers directly contradict a lot of the policy. For example that
Oregon State University’s been advocating for or the agencies themselves have
been advocating for. So it’s created a little bit of a conundrum. Yeah. But it’s very
much so. Actually it’d be best to talk to people within the joint fire sciences to
you know get the inside scoop on it all but it’s federal money. It’s not you know
private foundation money with strings attached.
JM: Yeah that’s interesting. Well you were talking about, just talking about
Corvallis, yeah. That I mean I have you know looked into the Biscuit Fire and
into Dan Donato’s paper and then the Sessions’ report. Really kind of you know
extremes right, or maybe not extremes but definitely a difference.
J: Yeah, one was a science paper and one was a recommendation, yeah.
JM: The Sessions was a recommendation you’d say?
J: Yeah, yeah. I mean it was basically how do they came up with a board foot
target for Biscuit and funded by the Douglas County commissioners. You know
its clearly orchestrated operation. You know I think they called for I think the
initial Biscuit recommendation was 90 million board feet. I think this called for
like, correct me if I’m wrong, like 500 million board feet after the Sessions report.
Is that what it was Dan?
Dan: 2 billion.

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J: Oh 2 billion. Yeah, was the Sessions Report. And I think the final
environmental impact statement was like 372 or something.
JM: I’m not sure of the numbers but yeah it was quite a bit less.
J: The initial recommendation by the Biscuit planning team was 90 million board
feet. Then the Sessions report came out calling for 2 billion board feet. Then the
supervisor flew back to Washington DC to talk with Mark Ray and then came up
with this you know happy medium of 372. So it all gets, it was a very politicized
issue and that was I mean that whole Biscuit and Oregon State University. I don’t
know to what extent you followed Oregon State University’s role in how the
Donato study was being dealt with in the media? Did you follow that at all? Hal
Salwasser the dean of the forestry school, yeah.
JM: I little bit. I mean I know that there was a lot of well I know that Dan Donato
got called back before Congress and had sort of a rough time in the questioning
and…
J: Actually I was at that hearing and it wasn’t a rough time. No, he held his own
and looked like an A scholar who really came off looking a little whacko as one
of the democratic congressmen from Washington. Brian Baird, he was one of the
ones they called for the hearing. He was a House national resources
subcommittee. It’s ended up being a field hearing down in Medford. And Donato
did an absolutely amazing job defending his fieldwork and his methodologies and
so forth. So yeah it was interesting. But to jump back to my point a second ago,
when his study came out it was right around the same time that congressman
Walden from Oregon’s Fifth Congressional District down in southern Oregon and
eastern Oregon where a lot of the wildfires are occurring. He was calling for his
bill that he was working to introduce into Congress at the time was called an
acronym Farrah Forest Emergency Ecosystem Recovery Act or something.
Basically, it was a piece of legislation that would mandate and streamline clear
cutting after not just post fire events but all natural disturbance events. So you
know South Sister explodes in the volcanic you know lava happens. You know all
the dead trees would get clear-cut under that bill when the bug outbreak
happened. It was basically a piece of legislation that would take you know it
wouldn’t let the natural world function as it’s supposed to. If you looked at the
language of it, it was pretty flabbergasting. So he was introducing that bill. It
actually got introduced, Senator Smith was introducing a companion bill in the
Senate at the time called the Forest For Future Generations Act basically saying
similar to bill. And then Donato’s paper came out which just really took the wind
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out of their sails and basically I don’t know if you remember the conclusions of
the Donato paper but it cast a lot of doubt on the and contradicted a lot of you
know what the post fire clear cutting advocates were suggesting. And Oregon
State University got really involved because the sciences coming out of OSU,
Donato was a student up there, and Hal Salwasser the dean of the forestry school
up there was subsequently found to be coaching a lot of the timber industry on
how to respond to Donato’s paper and trying to basically spin it in the media and
kind of downplay the importance of the Donato study and the effects on this forest
legislation that was happening in Congress. And that all got leaked to the Eugene
Weekly actually. And they did a public records request. And I’d encourage you to
do a search on the Eugene Weekly’s archive for some feature articles that
appeared. We worked fairly closely with them on those about the what was
coming out of OSU at the time. If you just yeah do a search for Donato or State
School of Forestry or Hal Salwasser I’m sure the articles will come up. There
were a couple of cover stories they did. So yeah Biscuit kind of you know there
was a silver lining in it. A lot of the Biscuit Fire area got logged including some
inventoried roadless areas down there including late successional reserves for
clear-cut. But the silver lining in it was you know the public education effort that
accompanied the whole debacle really. People learned as another opportunity to
teach people and we’ve led dozens of hikes down into the Biscuit Fire area
explaining the not just the role of wildfire but the need for wildfire on the
landscape especially down there where a lot of the species down there rely on
wildfire to exist.
JM: Is that with like students or the general public or?
J: Yeah the general public, students. We did some hikes for the University of
Oregon (unclear) outdoor program. We have public hike series that we do here.
We do campouts down there, shipple (?) off the world renowned resource, the
Klamath-Siskiyou ecoregion and we led a couple of film crews down the Illinois
River through there. There’s a film documentary made of the Biscuit Fire. So it
was a great organizing tool to be honest with you. And those bills never, they died
on the vine. They never made it through Congress and I don’t foresee a place on
the committee agendas anytime soon for bills like that. There’s just not popular
support for them or scientific support.
JM: I see. How important do you think that public knowledge and support for
issues is?

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J: Oh I think it’s of paramount importance. It’s, I think that’s what catalyzes
change you know when the public is demanding change. I think that’s the only
thing that’s really or one of the greatest things that’s contributed to real change in
the past. You know if we could turn out you know as many people to a forest rally
about the importance of post fire landscapes, as we could to a you know Oregon
Ducks baseball game. We’d be making some noise and we’d be making some
change. You know, unfortunately we’re not quite at that place yet where it’s that
relevant of an issue for people. But the more people that are weighing in on the
issue you know the fact that it you know when those cover stories in the Eugene
Weekly were coming out they were covering Biscuit. It kind of became a regional
story. If it was news up in Olympia and The Seattle Times at all. But you know
the more people that hear about it and demand change, that’s going to affect
policy change and affect the ways Congress critters (?) vote. You know it’s those
kind of bills. Like I said don’t really have a place right now because there’s not
support in Congress for that kind of thing or scientific support to back it up. So
you know if enough of the public is out there you know calling for something, I
think that’s going to make that change happen.
JM: When you say enough, do you think that that’s like, well say if we’re talking
about a senator, is that going to be like enough people that would affect the
election? So it would be you know somewhere like you’d look at percentages of
the votes they got before and how many people are undecided and try to figure
out how many people you need to educate to swing a vote or?
J: Yeah that’s a really interesting calculus. You know right now it’s just sitting
down over at lunch with Dan. Senator Wyden’s currently talking about
comprehensive forest legislation for the state of Oregon you know theoretically to
protect old growth and expedite you know thinning that would theoretically
enhance forest conditions. And you know we’re trying to figure out ultimately
you know what his intentions are with the bill, if it’s to truly pass legislation or if
it’s to you know just neutralize criticism. You know, he’s got enough people
saying protect the old growth Senator Wyden or enough of the industry saying
you know we need to speed up you know thinning the forest. And I guess to
ultimately answer your question; I’m not quite sure what the answer is. I think it
really depends on the politician. Yeah.
JM: All right. Yeah that certainly makes sense. You were talking about the civil
disobedience on the Warner Creek fire and I think you were basically saying that
that made a huge impact? Or was that, you said that it educated people about that
issue I guess. Did it, was that a significant role I guess?
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J: Yeah. You mean the role of the civil disobedience at Warner Creek played on
the greater mindset of the American public or communities around the importance
of post fire landscapes?
JM: I would say on a national scale I guess.
J: Yeah, I mean there were articles in National Geographic, articles in The New
York Times; it was front-page news in The Register Guard for a long time. So it
got out there. And you know when an article gets out there to National
Geographic we know that the circulation is you know and there’s a story about a
committed community of people that are willing to basically spend a year and a
half like on a logging road talking about this issue of post fire clear cutting and
logging without laws. This is during the salvage rider when Congress suspended
environmental laws and the Warner Creek logging project was the first timber
sale that the salvage rider, that was authorized under the salvage rider. So it was
you know not just educating about post fire landscapes but also this concept of
logging without laws up there. I think it you know educated tens of thousands of
people about that issue that otherwise have just you know taken you know what
Smokey the Bear has said for years.
JM: Do you think that those people’s purpose, do you think you could put it in
light of trying to educate and trying to get ecological values recognized? Or was it
maybe, or was it different in that it was an issue about old growth? Or is that kind
of the same thing maybe? I mean, I guess what I’m getting at, when they were
blocking roads or, I don’t think they were spiking trees there but tree sitting or
whatever else might have gone on. Was it for the purpose of just stopping it there?
Or was it an actual attempt to change the process?
J: Now my observation was you know it was an experiment that just evolved into
you know what it became. I don’t think there was a real hatched you know plan of
action. I think it just evolved into a national story. There was you know a number
of you know really just kind of looking at it and reflecting a lot of the stars kind of
aligned in a number of different ways there. You know you’ve got issues of
endangered northern spotted owls. You’ve got an owl reserve, you’ve got arson,
you’ve got the agencies rewarding arson with clear cutting, you’ve got the salvage
rider, and you’ve got a community in Eugene that was real ripe for stopping what
they saw was a real gross injustice to the comments. You know to this place that
was all of a sudden threatened and logging was proposed without laws. So I think
the stars really aligned and it became what it did.
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JM: Yeah I think you’re totally right. In your opinion what mechanisms do you
see for incorporating ecological knowledge into policies? And out of those, which
would you, say in your opinion is the most important?
J: And clarify for me when you say ecological knowledge just so I have a, make
sure I understand what you’re talking about.
JM: Well that’s a good question (laughs). I would say just as you know as
knowledge gets brought into the literature about ecological issues and
environments.
J: And so I’m sorry was your question, what role does that play?
JM: No. What I asked was, in your organization and in your position here, what
mechanisms do you use to try to get that knowledge into the policies?
J: Right. One of the most powerful tools, there’s a couple of real powerful tools
that we utilize and that’s you know just the power of you know just our grass
roots advocacy in getting humans out to these threatened areas and to you know
once we build a demand for the support of a place and that demand is leveraged,
that’s when we see policy change happen. You know when Joe Six-pack can relay
his story from hiking down to the proposed Devil’s Staircase Wilderness to you
know a politician that’s on the fence and can relay to why it’s important that X
senator cast his or her vote to protect this place. It’s just powerful.
JM: Do you see that as the grass roots advocacy do you see that as confined to
support of a place of Joe Six-pack and his favorite fishing hole? Or do you see
that eventually like you know reaching a critical mass point to where it becomes a
blanket thing for the whole country? Do you have any thoughts on that?
J: I’m sorry. Say that again one more time.
JM: Well when you are able to do advocacy for a certain place, do you think that
there’s, does it stay confined to that issue or place to that locale? Or do you think
that at some point there’s some sort of, what is it, not the monkey effect but there
is critical mass point type deal?

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J: Yeah, boy, you know if we’d had that one, if we could figure that one out I
think we could solve a lot of the world’s problems (laughs). You know as far as
the whole multiplying effect and you know bringing about you know real change.
JM: Because it seems like if it’s by a place, if it’s by a locale it kind of seems like
that it’s going to be a continuing process that you’re going to have to advocate at
each location that it’s going to continue on. Is that, do you find yourself doing that
now?
J: Yeah let me give you an example. So for years since our inception you know
for the last ten years we’ve been knocking on Defazio and Wyden’s doors
basically saying here’s another old growth timber sale that the agencies are
preparing. We need your help to stop it. You know, here’s 2000 petition
signatures of you know community members that live in your district that don’t
want to see this happen. So you know they’ve engaged a few times, written some
letters. We’ve got some degree timber sales cancelled in part due to their
participation. But that gets old you know. That gets tiring for them; it gets tiring
for us to try and nip this timber sale here and that one there and so forth. And
that’s I think partially why both of them have really put forth concepts to pass
legislation that wouldn’t just protect this area or that area but it would take old
growth off the table. So I don’t know if that specifically, it kind of gets at what
you’re talking about?
JM: I think so.
J: Yeah it’s a little more, you know it’s yeah it’s a little bit more of a strategic
way of looking at a really good way of utilizing our time rather than trying to stop
this sale and that sale and that sale.
JM: I imagine that there is some risk involved with as an organization accepting
some like making a deal and accepting some sort of legislation like that because
you know a lot of this stuff comes down to fine print and lawyers you know to,
and it gets litigate goes, you know there’s an injunction and it goes into court. So I
imagine that that would be an issue, like that you’d want to be really careful about
whatever you signed up for.
J: Absolutely. You know and that’s why we’re following it so closely. Dan just
wrote us a real detailed comments on Wyden’s most recent draft legislation that’s
out and we’ve provided feedback to Defazio’s in the past and Wyden’s earlier on.
Yeah if we’re going to put our name on something and support it, you know we’re
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going to have a reason why. You know that said, you know I’ll be the first one to
say I don’t want fear of the unknown to prohibit us from getting something done.
I’m tired of trying to stop individual timber sales. I’ve been doing it for ten years
and it frankly just gets old in… It’s just a tired strategy that we use to engage
politicians, engage the public. And you know I’m ready to pass comprehensive
forest legislation that’s going to take old growth off the table and if there’s going
to be a you know an alleged bone in it for the timber industry in which you know
there more than likely would be you know we’re going to figure out what that is
and figure out if it’s something that you know we can live with. If it’s going to be
at the end of the day a lot better than the status quo. Does that make sense?
JM: Yeah, yeah it does. So it sounds like that you are in the process of trying to
step out of individual sales into…
J: Absolutely. Yeah, yep. And yeah, Wyden and Defazio, if both… Defazio’s
introduced bills in a number of congressional sessions in the past. Wyden’s been
trying to do something for the last five years. Now he’s got a bill that would cover
the entire state of Oregon, dividing it into more sites and dry sites and different
civil cultural prescriptions for the different sites so…
JM: And now when, during this process that’s going on now, do you send
suggestions to the senator? What are kind of your actions? Because it sounds like
it’s a critical point if they’re putting the legislation together, do you start
marshalling your members to write letters?
J: That’s a really good point. You know we’re absolutely making sure we provide
the member or the senator feedback you know, what we think is right with the
bill, what we think is wrong with it, how it can be improved. You know we don’t
want to just write it off and say this is bad. He wants to do something so we’re
going to engage and try and make it better, try and make it into something that we
can support. There’s a lot of (unclear) that’s out there that have basically written it
off and they’re not going to work on it at all. But basically missed the train and
the opportunity to engage if that’s the position we take so we’ve decided to
engage. So yeah, getting membership, you know putting out an action alerts kind
of thing, getting community members to weigh in, generating media pieces
(unclear)’s editorials, by you know The Register Guard and so forth. It’s typically
the sweet of tactics that gets unrolled once an issue needs addressing.
JM: Okay. If I can direct it back to kind of that question about which mechanisms
you use. You were talking about grass roots advocacy.
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J: Yeah, a thing that comes to mind is just the power of the picture whether it’s
video or still photos, digital images. You know we’re talking about people that sit
in ivory towers all day. You know these politicians don’t you know come out to
the forests very often. They just, they’re responding because their constituents are
telling them things and they want something done. For a decade you know people
have been telling Senator Wyden they want the old growth protected. That’s what
we’ve been telling our base to tell Senator Wyden. So you know he writes
legislation for example and hypothetically we’ll send him pictures and say listen
your bill doesn’t go far enough. These types of forests from this you know forest
that we were just in would currently be threatened under your bill. You know
because we’re the eyes and the ears of either the district or the congressperson or
you know the senator for the state. So we have just you know a massive library of
photos anytime we’re out in the field. Like if we’re looking at a Bureau of Land
Management timber sale or (unclear) timber sale that we’re trying to oppose,
snapping pictures and put them on the website and sending them back to DC,
basically saying listen, this is what’s being authorized out here. Are you going to
you know get off your duff and do something while they’re clear-cutting the
public’s heritage forests or not? So the camera’s been a real powerful tool for us.
JM: Is there a question between quality versus quantity? Do you guys have a
lawyer on staff? Do you have like a public relations or an advertising person?
J: If we had the budget for it, it’s probably something we’d you know hire. We
don’t so it’s just something that we all take on. You know writing press releases
or generating media, that kind of thing. It’s all self generated. You know some of
our colleague organizations that are a lot bigger and more well healed than our
organization. You know they have specific what do they call them you know just
media people that deal specifically with that kind of thing, public relations people.
So it’s you know we’re all kind of Jack-of-all-trades in here and fill the niches
that need to be filled. So…
JM: I see. I was just kind of thinking you know the lumber companies or what
not, they have a lot of money and they’ve definitely put time and energy into
campaigns to change public opinion. I was just curious if you find yourself out
gunned in that area?
J: I think there’s always the underdog effect that’s going on. But you know when
you’ve got the truth and passion behind you; I think that’s oftentimes a lot more
powerful than dollars. Yeah, I mean I’ve witnessed that with, I don’t know if
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you’ve been following the deal on this western Oregon plan revision, the WOPR.
You know we’ve all but defeated that. At this point it’s in court right now and
there’s not public support for it and you know the industry and county
commissioners that have pulled out all the stops to that are really get the cut out
and try to build support for the WOPR. And occasionally you know when we
work with colleagues and pool resources and you know we do some of our own
poling and trying to figure out what the American public’s thinking about these
issues. And you know and we find stuff that you know resonates with what we’re
trying to advance in poling conclusions. You know we’ll get that out there and
generate media on that. Yeah, we’re kind of our own little media machine.
JM: I see. Do you find that phrases like the WOPR type of stuff that those are
useful in conveying ideas kind of like an advertising snapshot to bring an issue
down to something really…?
J: Yeah, WOPR couldn’t have worked out any better. Generally we try and steer
clear of acronyms and things that don’t make sense to the American public but
yeah the WOPR we just you know we couldn’t help but seize the opportunity
there. So yeah we did some fun stuff with that. Even with the Biscuit, you know
it’s too fun not to do some fun organizing and grass roots actions to involve
biscuits. And so yeah, try and make it fun.
JM: Okay, yeah because I hadn’t heard the WOPR before. I mean I saw the
acronym and actually looked at part of the plan. Kind of, correct me if I’m wrong
but wasn’t the BLM kind of getting out ahead of the game, overstepping
themselves because the Fish and Wildlife Service is doing a review of the spotted
owl plan?
J: Well yeah, there’s a couple of things going on there. So yeah, Fish and Wildlife
Service under the previous administration put out a new spotted owl recovery plan
and in order for WOPR to proceed in what WOPR was or is, it basically, forgive
me if you’re familiar with all of this stuff, but it basically divorces the BLM from
the Northwest Forest Plan’s reserve strategy. You know that the plan in ’94 when
it came about was you know Forest Service and BLM work within a 24 million
acre framework, design a reserve strategy amongst you know the agencies to you
know keep the species from going extinct. And WOPR you know is a settlement
agreement that the industry sued years ago. They actually sued a couple times on
this. And most recently the Bush administration’s like, okay we’ll settle this. You
know we don’t even; we’re not going to go defend a step back. The industry sued
and said these BLM should have never been part of the Northwest Forest Plan
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reserve strategy. They should only be managed under the 1937 ONC Act and the
Bush administration said, let’s settle out of court you know. Let’s find something
that works for you. And you know they born this thing called WOPR, Western
Oregon Plan Revision, that you know by December 31st ’08 they’d come up with
a decision which considered removing or greatly reducing the reserve strategy on
BLM lands to ramp up the cut. And so the only way that could legally happen is if
there was an owl recovery plan put forth that was really weak. So the Fish and
Wildlife Service also within the Department of the Interior worked on putting
together a recovery plan from ’06 to ’08 and got caught up in all the Beltway
politics in DC. There’s a lot of media generated on it about how Julie McDonald,
if that name rings a bell?
JM: Not offhand.
J: One of the head figures in the Department of the Interior, her fingerprints were
all over it. She was part of the oversight committee and basically trying to water it
down and make it put more emphasis on bard owl as a threat to the spotted owl
and less emphasis on habitat loss as an issue, basically weakened it as much as
she possibly could. And it came out under a GAO or an inspector general’s report
that she was implicated in meddling with like I don’t know 15 or 20 different
endangered species recovery plans.
JM: I remember this now, yeah.
J: So we sued over this and a coalition of ten or 12 plaintiffs, sued the owl
recovery plan saying it was illegal for X, Y and Z reasons, one of the reasons
being it was based on recovering a species that you know had Julie McDonald’s
fingerprints on it. The Obama administration has decided not to defend that in
court because frankly they’re going to lose. You know Julie McDonald you know
erred on you know an illegal, what she did to the endangered species recovery
plans. So it wouldn’t work for them in front of a judge. So what are the
implications then for the WOPR if the owl recovery plan is not going to proceed?
So we’re in pretty heated legal discussions right now. WOPR is being litigated;
the owl plan is being litigated. And just yesterday, Dan’s talking to our other
attorney now, the government just asked for another 60 days to respond to our
WOPR complaint. They’re trying to figure out how to deal with in a legal owl
recovery plan. It’s looking like they’re probably going to do it over. To what
extent or how much they’re going to do over is up in the air and part of a legal
discussion. But that clearly has implications for the WOPR. So a lot’s still

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unknown right now but it looks really good for or a lot better than it did for
imperiled species. So…
JM: Okay. Any other sorts of strategies, mechanisms? You’ve got the advocacy
and …
J: Yeah, I think I mentioned just getting the public out there. You know until
people become engaged and see threatened areas firsthand, it’s really hard to
advocate for them. That’s what I’ve found. So we really placed a lot of emphasis
over the years on getting people out to threatened forests and recognizing they are
theirs. You know the national forests, the comments and I think once people make
that connections realize that national forest lands beyond districts are their federal
lands and they have a say in how they’re managed. It’s pretty empowering for
people. So you know most weekends we’re found leading hikes to threatened
areas or areas where we’re working to currently protect.
JM: Do you think that being there in person, getting the people there in person,
works better than say a video of a place?
J: Absolutely, yeah. And you can’t always get a politician down there. We’ve
gotten Defasio and his staff down to this place called the Devil’s Staircase that
we’re working to protect as a wilderness. But you know you’re not going to get
all the politicians in suits you know with a pair of cork boots on and you know a
flannel on to go hiking eight miles down into a roadless area. So you know we do
what’s most effective for the particular person. And for the general public you
know we try and get as many people into those areas if you know they’re not able
or they’re elderly, host presentations for example. We’ve got a presentation on the
Devil’s Staircase area in town in early June. Try and turn out 60 or 70 people.
JM: I wonder what would be a good term for that. It’s almost like a personal
witness or something like that you know that makes it stronger than a video image
or whatever.
J: Yeah, definitely, yeah. When you’ve been somewhere and you can feel it, you
can smell it, you can taste it. It’s different than watching it on a computer screen.
So that personal experience is really impacting, can really embrace that.
JM: Do you have any specific examples of your organization’s involvement with
salvage logging and the process that you went through to, I’m hoping for like
some sort of ecological knowledge to get brought into it. But maybe just the
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process of opposing it and what may have happened. Were you involved in the
Biscuit Fire?
J: Yeah.
JM: Could you talk about those?
J: Sure. Well like I was saying, boy that’s a good example because there is a multi
year campaign. We worked a lot with other colleagues, Klamath-Siskiyou Wild
Land Center and the Siskiyou project a bid (?) and others to just draw attention to
what was going on down there you know. Just to backtrack a little bit, this whole
area, are you familiar with the County Opis (?) in southwest Oregon?
JM: No.
J: Yeah it’s been recommended, as a global heritage site by Unesco and it’s an
ecological hotspot by these different global outfits. It’s just got rare types of soils
that are called serpentine soils that only certain species grow in, endemic just to
the Siskiyou’s. And there’s within the Klamath-Siskiyou there’s about a 200,000
acre wilderness called the County Opis (?).
Dan: I’ve got this meeting. I’ve got to run.
J: Cool, Dan. We’ll see you later. There’s a wilderness area down there in that
around it is a lot of inventoried roadless forest that’s unprotected. And the fire
burned in the heart of the wilderness and spread out and you know all told it was
about a 500,000 acre complex, really large. And sure enough you know big
proposals, not just the logging the matrix but in late successional reserves and the
inventoried roadless areas there had been proposed to become future wilderness.
So yeah we just you know pulled out all the stops, had rallies trying to get
Congress involved, getting Wyden’s office involved. We had a real colorful
demonstration at his office one day. We called it a Biscuit’s breakfast. We
showed up with fresh baked biscuits and had fun with it and dragged the media
over there and it was just kind of a lighthearted event trying to get him engaged.
He engaged a little bit. Post fire is a tough issue for politicians to engage in
because you know it’s easy for them to get behind old growth protection because
the public’s there. You know, publics not totally there on post fire. You know like
I said we’re decades behind. So and that’s reflected by the way Congress acts you
know. Typically Congress you know responds to what their constituency is
saying. I can tell you right now the majority of Oregonians aren’t going to tell you
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that post fire logging is a bad thing. So we still have a lot of work to do there. So
yeah we had colorful demonstrations down at the forest supervisor’s headquarters
in Medford down at the Green Bridge which is the site into the contested logging
area, had letter writing campaigns, pretty much just pulled out all the you know
tactics that we do as an organization to draw awareness you know brought a lot of
media down there, hiked them through threatened areas. There’s a spread in Time
Magazine about it. So it got some news, brought those issues to the forefront.
JM: Yeah, right. Well also Bush kind of used it as a platform for his healthy forest
initiative. Yeah so there I mean there was a lot of whatever about it going on too.
J: Yeah, yep, yeah. It was a real political lightening rod. Politicians were using it
to advance legislation. You know the fear of fire and the forest burning down. We
need Forests for Future Generations Act legislation and we need to fireproof the
forest. We need to just stop a wildfire from happening. You know this is keep in
mind this is an area that historically burns often for since time immemorial it’s
been burning often. I mean the Siskiyou’s were born in fire and all the old growth
hardwoods you see down there are a direct result of you know high intensity
wildfire. Just you know spreading back up from their bases after they burn. Yeah
that’s truly a unique landscape if you have the opportunity to go down there.
JM: Yeah. I’m interested in this the publicizing of the Biscuit. You know Bush
was there trying to do his healthy forests which was thinning to make the forest
more fire safe apparently but it kind of called for a lot of cutting and on the other
side there were groups opposed to the salvage logging and stuff. Do you think that
the publicity behind this thing skewed it or changed how people perceived it?
Like the actual real ecological issues were sort of not as important because it
became more of a media event to some extent?
J: Yeah it’s really hard to completely engage that. You know I wish there was a
way to you know take a temperature of you know the public’s reaction you know
before during and after and kind of their thought process. Yeah, yeah. I don’t
know what the answer is to that. You know I’d like to think that you know they
understood it. I know all the people that were led out into the field and took hikes
through the area recognized it. But the broader public, I don’t know. It’s a little bit
hard to really answer that.
JM: Yeah because it seems like the people who would be I guess physically able
to go on your hikes and then willing to that you’re going to be preaching to your
choir in a sense and that you know the Bush healthy initiative type of thing is
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peoples whose grandparents grew up logging out here. It may have just
polemicized (?) I guess is the word at issue.
J: Yeah you know and the post fire issue especially you know. You know the ones
you know the demographic that you know ideally we’re trying to outreach to is
you know the ones that are on the fence. I mean otherwise people have their
minds made up. You know it’s either a good thing or a bad thing. So again it’s a
little hard to gauge but you know it’s my hope that you know we change minds
and you know open people’s way of thinking about it up.
JM: Yeah I certainly hope so. Do you guys, you mentioned poles earlier to find
out people’s perceptions I guess about things. Do you guys rely on that a lot and
do results of…? Do you ever put out any of your own poles or?
J: No. 2002, we were part of a consortium of conservation organizations called
the Northwest Old Growth Campaign. It’s had a number of different names and
iterations. It’s for the most part not defunct now but just you know it’s not
operating under Warren Moniker (?). But there was some poling that took place
that year, Davis and Hibbits (?) up in Portland, pretty renowned, you know, non
partisan poling firm that dems and republicans and their own uses (?). And we
commissioned, the campaign commissioned them to pole Oregonians and
Washingtonians on the issue of old growth logging. And we got some good
numbers out of that and we use those and we did some media around it and just
talking points for advocacy. We found seven out of ten wanted to see old growth
forests protected. Not really mind shattering numbers but…
JM: Pretty good though.
J: Pretty good. And it was not you know just urban areas. It was you know across
states, party lines and so forth.
JM: I see. Do you think that like the image that can be brought to an issue like
with old growth you know obviously you can have these big majestic trees and it
kind of lends itself to a picture you were talking about earlier and you know the
spotted, the Northwest Forest Plan had at its heart you know the owl which can be
personified I guess. You know they’re very interesting creatures or what not. Do
you think that that sort of image of an issue will help define its process or where it
goes or how people bond to it maybe?

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J: Yeah. You know I wonder about that sometimes you know. The owl, you
know, became kind of the focal point of the old growth struggle. And you know
it’s not really about the, I mean it is about the owl in the sense that you know it
continues to decline at nearly 4% a year across its range. But you know there’s a
larger issue of you know what do we do with the remaining old growth and you
know where is a place in this world for remaining old growth? You know I
wonder about that in terms of you know an effort to bring about more attention to
post fire landscapes and you know species associated with those. And you know
do you find a poster child critter to you know throw on your outreach materials
and you know put to the forefront you know and you know figure out the trends in
populations and so forth if that makes sense. I don’t know. I don’t know if, yeah. I
don’t know what the answer is. I’ve gone back and forth about that a couple of
times.
JM: Yeah you know I mean I wonder if it was like no disrespect to slugs or
whatever but some creature that’s not whatever or maybe some yeah some
microscopic thing. I mean where’s this line going to get drawn on endangered
species. You know, I don’t know. But just down in California where I’m from
there’s my girlfriend’s grandfather who you know I really appreciate as a person
or whatever but politically it’s just been kind of out in nowhere land in my
opinion. You know there’s this kangaroo rat or something that stopped these
developments down there and they guy is just always you know complaining
about the damn rat (laughs) you know.
J: Right. Yeah rats, that’s a tough one to have as your mascot, yeah.
JM: There was something I read a while ago and I wish I had the actual quote but
it had to do with Confucius. One of the things he said was that the image or the
language that’s used to frame an issue or an idea is what ultimately is going to
determine its outcome, that if you can control that issue of how it’s framed or
whatever that you’ve already won or lost that issue. It was something; it was
really an excellent little piece of wisdom.
J: I’d like to read that if you had it.
JM: If I find it I’ll email it to you, yeah. It was pretty nice. I think, oh one thing I
do, another thing I want to ask you is if you could do anything you wanted in this
realm here, would you change our system of policy making to make it more
streamlined or maybe make it better so that ecological knowledge could get there?

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Are there any problems with it that you see or do you think it’s pretty good or?
Where do you stand on…?
J: You mean as far as creating laws?
JM: Well yeah creating laws that then create policies. Or any way of getting that
knowledge recognized and into policy because I think I talked to you about this
when I first came in about the energy thing and we pretty much knew that there
was this problem coming and they never you know the cars are still getting under
20 miles to the… I mean you can still buy a car that gets whatever gas mileage.
There’s that issue and there’s other ones where there’s this knowledge about what
would be better is there but it doesn’t get used. Is there, if you could do, is there
some way that you would change the system or?
J: Yeah. I mean I think you know one thing where you kind of overlook every day
or at least I do and almost take for granted is you know how the internet has really
been able to facilitate that knowledge transfer. You know it wasn’t ten years ago
that we were you know sending faxes on a regular basis to you know back and
forth across the country as a way to transfer messages, photos, whatever. You
know like it or not it’s here. I think it’s been a pretty powerful tool in terms of, I
mean I can you know go out to a forest, take some pictures, download them on
my computer and send them to Washington DC in you know a matter of a couple
hours. You know before it would take weeks, throw them in the mail and mail
them off. Just the ability to you know all these little networking capacities,
capabilities now to communicate your messages whether it’s email or these chat
things that are going on, blogs and so forth. It’s just a pretty powerful tool that
we’ve got at our fingertips now that a great deal of the population is using you
know across you know class lines. I mean I think you know the majority of people
now are you know and schools and so forth have access to the Internet for
knowledge and transferring you know thoughts, communications and so forth. So
you know what would I do differently? Yeah, I haven’t really, you know I feel
like we you know if the internet never came around and email never came around
and we were where we are today you know I think we’d probably be having this
conversation saying I wish there was a way to you know communicate quicker
without having to mail something to someone. So I think that, that was solved in
one sense. It’s you know the internet has revolutionized our ability to activate our
base whether it’s if we need a volunteer in the office or we need people to you
know call Senator Wyden’s office or tow (?) the deal on the timber sale stanks (?)
or what. It’s just quick at our fingertips. So…yeah.

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JM: Okay. Do you have any thoughts on the phrase of the best available science?
I think that’s something in the NEPA laws that the agencies are supposed to use
best available science. Is there, do you have any, is there any sort of conflict
between what somebody is using as the best available science and what someone
else might think is the best available science?
J: Yeah, like you know you brought up the issue of the Donato paper and the
Sessions report earlier. I mean that’s what that was. One was you know peer
reviewed literature and one was a colleagues report is you know how I saw that
and I think how Sessions would relay you know as a recommendation. So yeah I
never got the sense that they were trying to you know push that off as science
because it wasn’t science. It was just you know as a recommendation how much
they could log based on acreage and how much was burned and so forth. Yeah I
mean, yes. Science is an interesting thing. You know I’m not a scientist. I read, as
much as I can that’s relevant to issues that we work on just to try and stay
engaged and so forth. You know theoretically scientists are you know objective
and unbiased and you know I think it’s good for them to, what am I trying to
say… I think there’s a, I think it’s important that you know if you’re going to call
something best available science it goes through the peer review process I guess
first and foremost and it’s you know peer reviewed by scientific colleagues you
know to directly respond. You know the notion that scientists are you know
objective and nonbiased, you know frankly I think Dan Donato personally doesn’t
like post fire clear cutting. That would be my hunch. I don’t know him personally.
And figured out how to create a science experiment that had objective results that
worked in his favor you know. That was my read of that. You know I don’t think
anyone except Brian Baird and Greg Walden criticized his approach and his
methodologies. You know it was two politicians ironically enough that were
criticizing him. But he had the backing of the scientific community other than his
you know the head of the school of forestry that you know underground he was
coaching the industry and others about that piece of published literature. So yeah
science is an interesting thing. So I you know I think it’s just you know my job is
to read it when it comes out and digest it and see how it’s relevant and you know
we pick and choose what we put out there. We’re not going to put something out
there when we’re talking about a timber sale that’s going to not work in our favor.
You know we’re going to cherry pick the science that works for us. So…
JM: Well yeah. From what I’ve been learning about this subject is that it seems
like it seems like you know we do have a pretty good system. I mean the whole
thing of public standing to even be to be allowed to make comments on the

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process of logging and salvage logging is fairly new you know the last 50 years or
whenever it was, the 70s I guess was when that happened as far as I know.
J: NEPA yeah.
JM: Yeah, that you know that it is a pretty good system, that it allows that voice
in there.
J: Yeah I think so too. I think you know the essence of the NEPA process is
engaging the public you know as the statute says, rigorously exploring
alternatives in the process and you know analyzing the best available science to
you know really come up with a worthwhile project.
JM: It’s kind of, it’s sort of a cost benefit thing I mean in that you have the
different alternatives and then you know it’s given to whoever makes the decision
to choose from those alternatives. And so they weigh the different consequences
of it as opposed to the most ecologically sound or the most economic benefit of
something that’s kind of you know this range or whatever that’s handed over.
Yeah. I think that’s probably about it…
J: Well I hope that I was able to answer some of the questions you had and you
got what you’re looking for.
JM: Yeah, yeah I think so. And then if what I’ll do is if I, I’ll go back over this
interview and if I use any parts of this or want to quote you I will write to you
first and ask your permission if that’s alright.
J: Sure. Absolutely.
JM: And I may you know it’s very quite possible that I’ll listen to this and think
oh I you know that I meant to ask you that or…
J: Yeah give me a call or an email or whatever.
JM: Okay.
J: Yeah, you have our number here if you have any…?
JM: I do, yeah I do.

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J: Yeah it should be at the bottom of my email signature as well.
JM: Okay.
J: Great, well….
JM: Well, Josh, I really appreciate it.
J: Yeah. Thanks for coming by. Yeah I’d love to read your finished product too.
JM: Okay I can definitely do that. I can definitely send…
J: That’s a nifty little device you got. It’s a little digital recorder?
JM: You know yeah I just got this. It’s an mp3 player but it records too. It was
$70 and it has better quality than…
(End of recording.)

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Appendix F
This interview with Chad Hanson appears in it entirety. It was conducted by
phone on May 28, 2009. Mr. Hanson founded the John Muir Project in 1996 and
has a Ph.D. in ecology.
JM (Jothan Mcgaughey): Just to let you know I’m going to go ahead and record
this and as I am writing my paper if I use anything that you have said or anything
I’ll ask your permission again if that’s alright?
C (Chad): Sure.
JM: Okay. Yeah, I’m, just to get started here, I’m writing a paper, my thesis, on
how ecological knowledge gets incorporated into policies, specifically about
salvage logging. So…
C: Let me ask you, are you, where are you at?
JM: Oh at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.
C: Oh sure, yeah. And you’re a grad student?
JM: That’s correct, yeah, and a Master’s of Environmental Studies.
C: Ok, got it.
JM: Yeah, Chad, just to start off I was wondering if you could talk about the
group that you’re working for and you know what you people do and maybe the
length of time that the group has been involved in this sort of thing.
C: Well the group is a (unclear) year project. We are a project of Earth Island
Institute, which is based in San Francisco. We are based in Cedar Ridge,
California, which is in the western slope of the northern tier of Nevada. And
projects of Earth Island Institute basically function like independent
organizations. They raise their own funds, they have their own staff, they have
their own policy direction. But they do not have their own 501C3 independent tax
cuts. They’re not an independent corporation, a for profit corporation. The Earth
Island Institute is sort of like an umbrella for smaller organizations that don’t have
their own corporate status. And so they do bookkeeping, they take a certain
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percentage of the funds we raise for to do that sort of management activity. So
that’s how we operate. I founded the John Muir Project in 1996 and for the first
several years mostly we were public education in our focus. I went back to
graduate school in 19… I’m sorry, 2003, and got my Ph.D. in ecology from the
University of California at Davis in 2007. And I published some studies on the
issue of fire ecology in forest ecosystems, well, before I graduated and since I’ve
graduated, and that’s really the focus of my research is the fire ecology of forest
ecosystems. And I’ve definitely dealt with post fire salvage logging and its
impacts. In fact, one of my studies in part of my dissertation directly dealt with
that. So that’s, oh and John Muir project basically at this point in time what the
John Muir project does is basically three things. One is scientific research and
obviously I’m the one that does that but I have some people who work with me at
various points in time on a various basis. And two, well I guess two is sort of
related to one which is basically, well no, the first one is basically just
independent, the scientific research. But basically what I do is I focus on
questions that where there’s an independent, well actually let me say it this way, I
focus on questions where there’s a high relevance to forest management decisions
so it’s not just an abstraction. And where management decisions are being based
upon an assumption that hasn’t really been empirically tested. So that’s really
where I focus.
JM: Okay, so you’re testing assumptions.
C: Yeah, exactly. I’m testing assumptions, typically kind of long held
assumptions about fire and forest ecosystems, assumptions that generally seem to
make intuitive sense and in fact they seem so reasonable that no one ever bothered
to test them.
JM: I see. So that would be somewhat similar to what Donato did, testing the…
C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. There’s definitely a lot of overlap. And he’s done
some stuff since then that’s very much in line with the sort of things that I do.
And that’s really what interests me the most. And I think that’s it’s also what’s
important from my view because then the findings are relevant to management
decisions. But what’s interesting to me probably above all is that the answers in
fire ecology tend strongly to be counterintuitive. And so what I consistently find
is that the assumptions that managers have made and often times scientists have
made over the past decade are generally either only part of the truth or completely
opposite of the truth once we actually get data.

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JM: I see. Could you give an example of that?
C: Well there are a bunch of them but let me just kind of give you a list. This is in
no particular order of priority. Well one is that where you had frequent low
severity fire in the past which has been documented by fire scar records or scar
dendrochronology data, that you would not have had any significant or
meaningful occurrence of less frequent high severity fire. That was the
assumption. And it made intuitive sense because if you have frequent low severity
fire then the thinking went you would basically never be able to accumulate
enough surface fuel or understory vegetation to facilitate high severity fire
because the low severity fire would keep that surface fuel and the understory
foliar fuel to very, very low levels and would basically preclude high severity fire.
Well we’ve since found out that’s not true at all, that there was, these two things
operated on two different special and temporal scales. So basically what you have,
it’s sort of like, well to kind of put a technical term, you’ve got basically frequent
low severity fire spatial temporally nested within infrequent high severity fire. But
basically both things are occurring on the landscape simultaneously but at
different temporal scales but one doesn’t preclude the other at all. And so the
thinking was that you know the first precluded the second but the problem was
you can’t directly test, well you can’t test at all the extent of high severity fire and
historic extent with fire scar records because there aren’t any fire scar records.
That’s the whole point of high severity fires. You’ve got you know most of all the
trees were killed. You can’t do it that way. You’ve got to figure out other ways to
do it. And it’s much more difficult. Well it can be more difficult but whatever the
case, people just really didn’t do it and there’s been a kind of surge of research on
that question in the past several years and it turns out that these areas that have
had frequent low severity fire in the past and where that’s been documented prior
to fire suppression, it turns out there was quite a bit of less frequent high severity
fire. In fact, what we’re now coming to understand is that we have a massive fire
deficit currently relative to the pre suppression extent of fire at all levels of
severity, not just low severity fire. We also have less high severity fire than we
had previously. And that has major implications for wildlife, especially the
wildlife species that are associated with burn forest habitat when you add
especially the exacerbating impact of post fire salvage logging. Okay so that’s one
big one. Another big one is where you do have high severity patches, no I’m
sorry. Let me go into one other one that’s really quick first. Another one, this one
was repeated for years. It’s amazing how much this was repeated. No one
bothered to actually check. People assumed that currently because of fire
suppression that in recent years fires are predominantly high severity. It turns out
that’s not even remotely true. And it’s a really easy thing to test now because
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there’s decent satellite imagery that’s gathered every year by government
agencies and it’s even available online. You can download this into a JS analysis
and actually check it out but people didn’t bother to do that. And it turns out that
current fires are mostly low to moderate severity. In fact, very heavily low and
moderate severity. In California, Oregon and Washington, according to the United
States Geological Survey’s report over the past 25 years, actually it was 1984
through 2005. There’s always a lag time with the satellite imagery in processing
it. But basically we’re generally left to quarter of a century. In the Pacific
Northwest, high severity sects were generally on average per year in the 10-12%
range out of the total area burned per year, and in California generally in the 1215% range. So again, very heavily dominated by low and moderate severity fire
but that’s very contrary to you know a lot of popular conceptions. People turn on
their TV news in the evening during the summer and they see the typical footage
of the 100-foot flames and they just think that that’s all that happens out there.
And it turns out that’s just what you know is a very arresting image and so it
would end up getting on the TV news and also on the front page of the newspaper
and but it doesn’t reflect the norm.
JM: Right. And just to kind of I guess maybe jump a little bit here, that’s sort of,
it seems like the healthy forest initiative by Bush was kind of taking advantage of
that in a way.
C: Very much so, very much so, as has some other statues and regulatory things.
We can get into more of that later but yeah, very, very much so. And let’s see,
another one is where you do have a patch of high severity fire because these
things always happen in mosaics. You know, even where you get high severity
fires it’s not like this particular fire is a high severity fire. It’s generally some
percentage of high severity. But where you do have a high severity patch the
assumption in the past was that basically an ecologically damaged or destroyed
portion of the landscape that supports very little wildlife habitat or plant species
diversity and basically you know the terminology that’s been used you know
destroyed, damaged, ravaged, you know these things I’m sure you’ve heard of
before. This is not just in the popular media. This is also just by policy makers.
This is also by people, land managers and even a lot of scientists bought into this
years ago. But now we’re coming to understand that these areas are actually
biodiversity treasures. They are extraordinarily high in data biodiversity and
higher plants and wildlife species and invertebrates. They support a considerable
number of species that are largely restricted to that habitat type. And by and large
these species, rare endemic species, are in trouble from a conservation biology
standpoint, a viability standpoint. They are by and large in trouble. Either they are
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declining or the populations are so low that we can’t even detect their population
trend, which is an even bigger concern. Of course the response of the land
management agency is they say, well, we don’t know if the population is
declining so we might as well keep salvage logging and suppressing fire which is
scientifically a very inappropriate response but that has been the response so far.
So that’s another one. And of course the one that you alluded to before which is if
you do have a high severity fire patch there won’t be natural conifer generation.
Of course that’s turning out to be wildly incorrect. Sure, there are always going to
be patches you can find here and there where Mantage Deperelle (?) will come in
after a high severity patch and will persist for some decades even more than a
century which is actually a really important thing ecologically because that’s
extremely important habitat for wildlife and it has declined fairly dramatically
since the 19th century because of fire suppression and post fire salvage logging
and plantation establishment which eliminates the chaparral. But even so that is
actually very much the exception to the norm has been high severity patches for
natural conifer generation to come in very vigorously. And so you know on and
on. There are a number of them but those are just a few examples. Oh here’s one
more I should mention just because it just really contradicts so much, some very
deeply held assumptions. You know in fire suppressed forests, forests that have
missed the most fire returnables (?), the assumption that these are the areas that
will burn most severely and that they will burn almost exclusively at a high
severity. It turns out that’s not true at all where we’ve gathered data. There’s three
different studies on this. And all in California, it’s possible it would function
differently somewhere else but I don’t see any reason why it would, but the
bottom line is, is that the areas that missed the most fire returnables still burned
overwhelmingly at low and moderate severity. In fact if anything the high severity
of percentages or proportions were a little bit lower than the areas that had missed
fewer fire returnables. Again, totally counterintuitive. We think we’ve figured out
why this is. And basically as the stands mature since the last significant fire event,
they get more big trees, the canopy closes more, there’s less sunlight reaching the
forest floor and this has a number of implications. The crown base side of the
forest increases. It’s higher above the ground because the big trees are selfpruning their lower branches because they’re not getting enough sunlight. So
they’re an energy drain on the trees. And the small trees are self-thinning because
some are dying off because of competition for increasingly scarce sunlight and the
surface fuels on the forest floor are staying more moist later into the fire season
because of the cooling state of the forest canopy. And on top of that you’ve got
more large tree bowls which decreases mid play (?) wind speeds when a fire does
come through. That’s a fire physics issue but all of these things combined
basically create a tendency, it doesn’t always work this way by any means, but a
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tendency for mature and old growth canopy forests to burn at relatively lower
severity or to have relatively lower rates of high severity fire. And of course it’s
important that some mature an old growth closed canopy forest does burn at high
severity periodically because there are some species that actually really, really
need dense mature forest that burns at high severity. That’s their habitat, like the
black beak woodpecker. It can’t be just any habitat. It has to be a very narrow
type of habitat. So anyway, and the other thing the John Muir project does public
education still basically primarily related to fire ecology and forests, trying to get
out into the public some of these notions to sort of, in hopes of getting a public
speaking to be more in line with the current state of scientific knowledge on these
issues.
JM: Right. And where do you, how do you try to focus that or how do you try to
bring that into practice? Do you focus in at young people at schools hoping for
this…?
C: All of the above. I mean you name it, all of the above. And honestly most of
the time it’s people contacting me. It takes a lot of different forms. But before I
lose my train of thought, the last one is forest legal defense work. Basically,
where we see a project on National Forest land and typically they’re post fire
logging projects but once in a while they’re also green tree mechanical thinning
projects where there would be significant environmental damage in our view,
particularly to wildlife habitat and where the Forest Service has misrepresented in
a fairly substantial way the scientific data. Then we sometimes will go to court
basically to stand up for science and management decisions because the law is
basically one of the basic principles is the government is not supposed to lie to the
public about the impact of decisions. It’s not supposed to misrepresent or
fabricate scientific data. And so if that happens we are prepared to do that. We on
average probably file one or two lawsuits a year, always along those lines, always
really fundamentally about the application of science in management decisions or
to challenge the misapplication of science.
JM: Now when you get into the courts on those, is that mostly in the NEPA realm
of things?
C: Yes, exactly. Failure to maintain scientific accuracy or integrity of
environmental analysis documents, generally by you know when an agency
misrepresents the findings of a scientific study in order to justify logging,
misrepresents its own data in order to justify more intensive logging than
otherwise would be prescribed, various things along those lines. Failure to divulge
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the hard data or the methodology used to make key conclusions. So sometimes the
agency will say well we need to do this for X, Y and Z reasons but we’re not
going to tell you why or what the scientific basis of that is. You’re just going to
have to trust us. Well the law doesn’t allow them just to do that, doesn’t allow a
kind of a black box process. So that’s basically it. As far as public education with
the form that takes, I get invitations to do guest lectures at universities, various
interest groups. I’ve spoken in front of the Society of American Foresters and I’ve
spoken to the Sierra Club a number of times. I usually go out, I was actually
involved with the Sierra Club. I was on the national board of directors for a little
while. I take reporters out into the woods. Sometimes I call them, sometimes they
call me. And I write opinion editorial articles periodically. I used to write a lot
more. I haven’t written as many mostly because when I went back to graduate
school I was just so focused on that and I’ve been kind of dealing with other
things especially research and stuff but I think I’ll probably do more of that in the
coming year and beyond again. Let’s see, just general news stories. Typically
when I am involved in a news story it’s not, I don’t send out press releases and
I’m generally not just available for a comment, the one sentence quotes. I mean
I’ll do that if someone recalls me but typically what I like to do and what I spend
my energy on is, a reporter will call me or I’ll call a reporter and they’ll be
interested in the larger more thoughtful story that will require several months to
prepare and usually one or more sites if it’s out in the field. And I require them to
you know peruse lots of different technical documents and things like that. That’s
much more meaningful coverage. I work on things like that now and again.
Again, the little sound bytes thing just doesn’t work that well. But again if a
reporter calls me and wants a comment on something I’m happy to do that but I
don’t go out of my way to do that kind of public education work.
JM: I see. So do you feel that it’s the quality/quantity question that it’s more
important for quality?
C: Yes, absolutely, quality/quantity. And honestly it’s not all about transforming
of the public’s misperceptions about fire in our forests and things like that. Some
of it’s purely selfish. It’s also just a quality of life thing. It’s just, I like doing it
that way better. I just don’t like doing reactive media work. Reporters get quotes
wrong, they’re on a deadline. It’s just a pain in the neck most of the time and so I
just don’t do it.
JM: I see. Okay, well that you know that’s interesting to me that you know how
the media’s structure kind of dictates in a way how this ecological knowledge

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comes across. And they seem to be like you say much more interested in the quick
headline, the quick…
C: They typically are. I think that it may even get, I hope it’s not going to get
worse but it may get worse because the papers are in such trouble economically.
And so my fear is that the journalists who are the best and brightest and most
experienced and who are the ones who are typically assigned to or given the
latitude to pursue larger more proactive more thoughtful in depth pieces that those
people will be reassigned to reactive media shorter pieces, the quick sound byte
type of media or that they’ll be, that they’ll lose their jobs. I mean this is my
concern. But so far you know some of the best of them are still out there. So we’ll
see. But there is certainly a lot of potential to get these issues into the public
dialogue through shorter pieces and more reactive media as well. It’s just I don’t
really do as much of that. Maybe I should but I don’t. If at some point I find
myself with extra time and energy on my hands then maybe I will but it hasn’t
happened so far.
JM: Okay. In your opinion I mean you’re doing a few things through the group,
the public education and then the research and then also the bringing of that to
bear through lawsuits.
C: Right. Those, by the way, those also get some media attention. So sometimes
we serve a public education purpose through that as well.
JM: So a little overlap.
C: Yes.
JM: Would you, is there one of those three that you feel is most important or most
effective? Or do you think that they’re all necessary?
C: All absolutely essential, all absolutely essential. I mean if I’m not out there
doing the scientific research, I can’t count on someone else to investigate these
uninvestigated questions. And eventually that would make the public education
less meaningful and in fact it would make the legal defense work less meaningful
because basically you know there would be resolution one way or another about
the misapplication of previous questions but if the new questions are not
investigated then you’re basically not advancing scientific knowledge and
basically there might still be a whole host of management assumptions that

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haven’t been tested and have been applied in maybe in some very destructive
ways.
JM: Yes, yeah definitely. Do you have enough resources to cover all three as
much as you like?
C: No, never, never, but we do the best we can.
JM: Do you, what’s your decision process on where to maybe focus your energy?
I mean it sounds like that it might change depending on circumstances obviously
but…
C: Sure, it always does. I mean certainly if there’s a deadline coming up, that
necessarily commands my time and attention. If I’ve got a paper revision that is
due of a scientific manuscript a study I’m working on to a particular peer
reviewed journal and they said they need the revision by X date, then that
basically is going to dominate my time and energy until I get it submitted. Same
thing on a lawsuit for example. You know my role in a lawsuit is basically to
write an expert declaration for the scientist and also to do some on the ground
field monitoring to see if what’s on the ground matches the representations of the
documents. If there’s a deadline coming up there that would command my time
and attention for that period of time until it’s done. So sometimes it’s basically
determined for me and I’m not really making decisions about what needs to be
done exactly at a given point in time. In a broader sense, if we step back a little bit
and look at it over the context of a given year or a couple of years. Yeah I
basically kind of read the landscape and determine what I think is going to be
most effective at a particular point in time. I have to say there are larger political
factors that are at issue here and they do have an influence on my decisions. For
example under the Bush administration that was an extraordinarily hostile
administration in terms of environmental policy, particularly forest policy, very
aggressive. There was an active interest in ignoring new science particularly if it
didn’t advance logging interests or misrepresenting science in order to justify
increased logging thought of with respect to fire in particular. And so it was
certainly a context in which there was a need for a responsive public education
work to respond to the administration but I think the greater need was really in a
way to basically prevent the administration from just going in and cutting down a
lot of the remaining old growth stands or clear cutting you know post fire areas
based upon these you know really, really aggressive notions about forest
management and science. And so I think a lot of people were in sort of a reactive
mode, dispersive mode, almost by necessity. I think that there is a difference now.
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It’s not to say that the Obama administration is going to be perfect. I know it’s not
and will not be. But I think that there is a sense that there’s a greater opportunity
to actually have and honest conversation with government about science and
about the application of science in management decisions. I think that we can get
more traction there now than, it was just pointless in the last eight years, there was
just no point because the response was, well that’s what your science says. We
have other notions. What are those notions based on? Well we think we know the
answers and that’s it.
JM: And who was saying this? I mean how, yeah, who had the power to say that?
I mean did it, obviously…
C: Well, that’s a larger question. I honestly, you could almost write a thesis on
that question alone, how these things get translated in actual terms to down the
ranks to the people on the ground so that they are actually parroting these things
and implementing management in a certain way that reflects that policy of the
executive branch. It’s a larger conversation but in a very, very narrow sense. I
mean it obviously started with the president and the vice president and the
influence I think of campaign contributions. My understanding was the timber
industry was second only behind the oil industry in campaign contributions to the
Bush administration. Certainly I think that had a fairly profound influence. And
we saw that influence in George W. Bush’s pick for under secretary of
agriculture, which is the person who is in charge of overseeing and managing the
United States Forest Service, the person who is over the chief of the Forest
Service. And that person was Mark Ray who was a veteran timber industry
lobbyist, the most veteran and prominent timber industry lobbyist. And so things
were fairly predictable from that point forward.
JM: Right, right. Do you know who the under secretary is now by any chance?
C: Well it’s in transition. The acting under secretary is I believe her name is Ann
Bartuska.
JM: Okay. And she was put in by Obama?
C: Yes. Or (unclear), whatever the case. And honestly I have to tell you, the, most
of the time the influence under the Bush administration, the influence of this,
there wasn’t just Mark Ray obviously because there were a lot of other
appointments and smaller hires that were made that sort of stepped this direction
in a more structured way that allowed people like Mark Ray to sort of implement
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their influence in management decisions. But most of the time it was sort of the
elephant in the room. You’d try to have a conversation with agency managers
with the district ranger or forest supervisor about the way in which science is
being misrepresented and they would just keep stating the misrepresentation over
and over and over again. And after a while it became clear that there was
something else going on. And then again it was like the elephant in the room that
no one wanted to talk about. Once in a while, an agency person would be candid
enough to take me aside and say, “Just so you know, I don’t have any choice here.
Mark Ray and people are calling all the time and breathing down our necks. If any
of us basically are seen as embracing some of this new science that contradicts the
management’s direction of the administration, our jobs are at risk.” I mean I had a
number of people tell me that. And it was always of course confidential and off
the record but and I’m not the only one who had conversations like that with
agency people. In fact, once in a while I got out into the mainstream press when
someone would become a whistle blower and say hey, you know, the
administration completely redacted my documents and took out the main
conclusions and in some cases had changed verbiage and that kind of thing
happened all the time. So there was a sense of malaise and almost despair among,
particularly scientists in the administration the past eight years and also among
land managers on the ground who wanted to manage in a more scientifically
responsible way.
JM: Yeah I think I’ve read a bit about Chris Maser who worked for the BLM and
had quite a bit of trouble getting some of his work published. It was put off for a
number of years before it finally came out. Yeah…
C: There was a story by the way, actually two stories, written by Scott Sonner a
few years back and this was right in the middle of the Bush administration. And I
think this was 2005 if I recall correctly. And I could get you an exact date but the
bottom line is, there was a pair of stories. They mostly ran in California papers
because it dealt with the Sierra Nevada forest plan amendment, also known as the
Sierra Nevada framework. And the bottom line was that one of the main
justifications used to throw out the 2001 framework which was from the ClintonGore era, and was actually a pretty progressive regional forest plan, the main
reason to throw that out was the supposed threat of wild land fire, especially high
severity fire. The Bush administration really capitalized on the public’s
misunderstanding of mixed severity fire in these forest ecosystems. And they
represented that spotted owl nest sites, territories, often called PACs, protective
activity centers, are being quote “lost” to high severity fire at this massive rate
and they said that this rate is accelerating dramatically and all of these owl sites
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are being lost and therefore we need to throw out the old plan and do much more
aggressive logging supposedly to reduce fire risk. Science doesn’t support that
logging big trees reduces fire either but that was their story. Well it turns out that
they completely fabricated this. They actually couldn’t identify any territories
where the owls were actually lost due to the fire. In some cases they were salvage
logged and the owls were going after the logging but they were there before the
logging after the fire. And in other cases they never even bothered to go back and
check if the owls were there or not. They simply assumed that if a certain portion
burned at moderate or high severity that the owls couldn’t use anymore. And it’s
another one of those assumptions that is turning out to be untrue. It turns out that
the spotted owls actually benefit tremendously from and probably depend upon a
certain amount of high severity patches in their territories, as long as they’re not
salvage logged. Because those patches create habitat conditions, its (?) favor their
prey species, especially like dusky footed wood rat and other small mammal
species, mountain chaparral patches, pockets of dense natural conifer
regeneration, large snag cavities, large down logs, so cat face structures. You
know these sorts of things are extremely important for the owl’s prey species and
it creates a pulse of their prey species. But it turns out in order to have enough
forage the owls actually benefit from this and probably depend upon it and we’ve
even got some radio telemetry data that’s out there now and in the scientific
literature that shows that they actively forage in these areas although they still
nest and roost selectively in the more closed canopy unburned or low severity
areas. But it turns out what they really need is a mix of this. Okay so anyway,
Scott Sonner from the Associated Press wrote a couple of stories on this. Actually
it was August 1st 2004. And if you look in the Contra Costa Times, it’s actually
called The Sunday Times but it’s, The Sunday Times, which is the Sunday paper
of the Contra Costa Times. It’s ContraCostaTimes.com. I don’t know if it’s case
sensitive. It’s capital C for Contra, capital C for Costa and capital T for Times.
But it’s August 1st 2004, two stories by Scott Sonner both ran in that paper the
same day. It ran in a number of other papers too but this is the one that I have a
photocopy of. And basically we went out with the Forest Service and he’s got
quotes from them saying, “We don’t know where those conclusions came from.
No one ever called us because we know the owls were still there after the fire.”
(laughs) In fact, he even got a quote from a guy who was the head wildlife guy for
the Forest Service in this region who wrote into the wildlife analysis section of the
2004 version of the framework forest plan. With the framework is the forest plan
that governs the entire Sierra Nevada National Forest System. That wildlife fire is
not a threat to spotted owls. And they took it out without consulting him in the
final version. He’s got a quote from that guy saying that. Anyway so that’s just an
example of that sort of thing.
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JM: Yeah, excellent. When this salvage logging is done they do have some
prescription for leaving snags… I’m not sure exactly what it is. I think it changes
from you know under what plan the forest is operating on. Do you think that, well
how do you think that compares with just straight clear cutting? I mean, is it still
clear-cutting in a way or?
C: Yes it is. It’s very close to clear cutting. It’s not quite clear cutting but it’s
very, very close. And the damage caused by it is very similar to clear cutting.
Now if, where the Forest Service leaves three or four large snags per acre, which
is a pretty common prescription. In some places it’s only one and a half or two
large snags per acre. I think that’s the case in most of the Pacific Northwest
forests and in the Northwest Forest Plan, like the Sierra Nevada. Well right now
in the 2004 framework they don’t have to leave any. In the ’01 framework they
were required to leave at least four per acre, large snags. Under the 2004 it’s more
of a suggestion. (laughs) They can take it or leave it. They usually leave it.
JM: Now is that what people are operating under right now or?
C: Yes. Yeah, although it’s under litigation by one of the groups here in the Sierra
Nevada. We’re not part of the litigation but it’s working its way through the
courts so we’ll see what happens. But the answer to your question is basically the
more large snags per acre that are left, the less the damage is. There are some
species that will use these areas to some extent, even if it’s salvage logged, but
they won’t use it nearly as much. And there is certainly no indication they’ll be
able to maintain viable populations in there. There is probably not enough food.
Can you hold on a second? I’ll be right back. Actually, can you call me back in
about ten minutes?
JM: Okay, sounds good.
(End of recording 1. Start of recording 2.)
C: We have a couple of horses and one of them was trying to hassle me to get me
to come out and give him a snack. He could see me through the window of the
office. And he got his foot stuck in one of the panels of the round pen. He’s all
right.
JM: Good, good. Well I think you know we were just talking about some of the
forest plans I think and that kind of brings up a point. I mean we were talking
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about Mark Ray and his impacts. It seems to me that the national forest plans are
supposed to be redone for the different forests every 15 years…
C: Or so, yes.
JM: And they have some leeway I guess. But the National Forest Management
Act under which that comes is, I believe that they are redoing it. Do you know
anything about that?
C: Well I don’t know that they’re redoing the act itself. I haven’t heard anything
about that. Certainly every couple of years one administration or another proposes
new rules to implement the National Forest Management Act. There were, the
first one was under the Reagan administration, the 1982 rules. And then the
Clinton administration proposed new rules under 2000 and then the Bush
administration proposed a series of new rules to eliminate the Clinton rules and
the 1982 rules. Those are all litigation in one form or another. The latest one was
the 2008 rules which basically says forest managers can do anything they want at
any time and they have ultimate and absolute discretion.
JM: And now is that what they’re operating under now?
C: Essentially, yeah. Yeah but one of the reasons you can still sue a forest plan is
if the forest plan still exists. As long as it still exists, if the language in a forest
plan is enforceable, if it’s stated in a mandatory way. The Forest Service shall not
cut a live tree over 30 inches in diameter in these areas, you know something like
that. So I mean it’s quantitative and clear and it’s still enforceable under the
statutes. But the attention of this Bush administration rule at the very tail end of
the Bush administration, what they basically say okay when the Forest Service
revised these forest plans they come up with new forest plans, not only do they
not have to do environmental impact statements or any environmental analysis,
but the new forest plan basically all you have to do is apply the best available
science or something to that effect which you know they can interpret any way
they want. And basically it’s like complete discretionary management. They don’t
really have to you know be restricted by anything. And so though obviously
NEPA would still apply, although there’s been a tax on NEPA as well, but so
there would still have to be some kind of environmental analysis in most cases.
Although you know they’ve increasingly tried to use categorical exclusions to do
both thinning projects and post fire salvage logging and clear cutting so that they
don’t have to do any environmental analysis or really involve the public in
decisions or allow administrator appeals or even in some cases notify the public in
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the first place. Some of these projects they do what they call internal scoping
which means you know one forest service guy in his cubical yells down the hall at
another forest service person, “What do you think about his project?” “Sounds
good to me. Thumbs up.” All right, internal scoping done. And they go ahead
with the project. There’s no notice there’s no comment there’s no appeal there’s
no anything. The public doesn’t even know about it unless you happen to stumble
across the clear cut. So it’s gotten that bad in some places. But it’s basically the
whole planning rule thing, the regulations implementing the National Forest
Management Act, it’s just a legal (unclear) and you know I haven’t gotten up to
speed on it myself.
JM: Yeah. Well I think that that’s you know obviously pretty important.
C: Well sure. It’s critical.
JM: Yeah, I’m curious as to how that turns out and what not of course. Well do
you have your train of thought of what you were saying earlier?
C: No. Not even slightly. But do you have any questions that we haven’t gotten to
so far?
JM: Let me see here. Well, kind of along following up on that, do you have any, if
you could do whatever you wanted to, is there anything that you would put into
law or the process that would make it easier or better for scientific ecological
knowledge to get incorporated into policies?
C: Well, I mean are you asking me what basically how I would have the public
lands managed if it was in my power to write policy?
JM: Yeah and specifically how a vehicle I guess, what would be the best conduit
for…
C: Oh I see, I see. Well I think that well okay. I mean there’s really two different
questions you’re asking. One is you know how do I think policy is best changed.
How do I think ecological knowledge and new ecological knowledge is best
incorporated into policy decisions? And the answer to that, me being who I am in
the world we have, the answer to that question I think has got several tiers to it. I
mean one is like I said public education, forest legal defense work. It’s critically
important. Otherwise you know new scientific information means nothing if it’s
misrepresented in management decisions without any accountability or
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repercussions. So I think that’s essential. I think really scientists have an
obligation to be involved in things like that, writing declarations or assisting
where science is misrepresented, assisting those who are challenging those
misrepresentations. I think that educating policy makers is absolutely essential
directly. I’ve done quite a bit of that in my career as well and continue to. And
then all of this basically creates a context hopefully that is more conducive to
actual implementation of new policies. And you know I guess my answer is, it’s
multifaceted. Some of it should probably occur through regulations. Some of it
should occur through statutes and it can be even a multifaceted approach when
you’re talking about statutes or regulations as well. Some could be through the
appropriations process. Here’s one example of that. A lot of the appropriations
line items that’s the fund of the Forest Service are directly and explicitly tied to
commercial timber sales. So in other words the given agency manager on the
ground, the district ranger, can tap into those funds unless he or she is actually
planning a timber sale that’s removing you know large trees, large fire resistant
trees. Large trees are important for wildlife. They can’t do that obviously if
they’re just removing small trees. It’s not a commercially viable timber sale. And
if most of the money that’s available to do appropriations is actually, at least in
their interpretation directly tied to and extricably linked to timber commodity
production and logging. So they have their hands tied by that. So that’s just one
thing. Even if you didn’t have a substantive statute to primarily change
management, there are things that can be done through appropriations that would
sort of untie the hands of managers, at least the good ones who would like to
implement science more faithfully. So they feel they have the flexibility to do
that. So but now the other question I think you were asking is, is if I actually had
the authority somehow to do that. What do I think needs to be done on public
lands? Well in my view ultimately a statute is usually passed to legislation
through Congress, signed by the President, that would end the commercial timber
sales program on federal public lands, National Forest, Bureau of Land
Management lands, National Wildlife Refuges, they even do some on National
Park lands, a little bit. They’re not supposed to but they do. And basically it
would ban that and the reason I say that and I say this in particular as a scientist is
that yeah I’ve been working on these issues for about 20 years now, only as a
scientist in the last several. But you know science has always been really my
driving consideration in these issues. And what I’ve come to understand over the
past two decades working on these issues on national forests and forest
management is that the application of ecological science in actual management
decisions will always be undermined as long as there is a timber sales program,
always. And this is consistently true. You know we see science misrepresented or
ignored in order to justify taking more trees or bigger trees and the reason for that
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is very obvious. There’s a series of very strong perverse incentives that drive
agency managers to cut more trees and big trees and sell them to the timber
industry. I mean the Forest Service keeps most of the timber sales receipts and
they actually fund much of their operations that way. So it’s a system where only
a portion of their money comes from congressional appropriations. The rest of it
comes from timber sales receipts.
JM: And that’s the KV account?
C: Well no. KV, no not as much KV. KV is actually a little bit different. I mean
you know it’s sort of a portion of timber sales receipts go into the KV fund. Now
and then they can use that for certain things in parts of I think replanting under
clear cutting and things like that. But that system is very complex too and there’s
also the National Forest Fund and various others. The salvage sale fund. The
salvage sale fund, 100% of the timber sales receipts from most of our logging
projects go into the salvage sale fund so they get to keep every dime there. So you
know naturally when budgets are tight which they always are from the agency
perspective, they have an incentive to design and implement projects that
maximize timber production and timber commodity distraction and the generation
of timber receipts or sales receipts. And of course you know in this kind of a
context how does science stand a chance? It’s not easy. In fact the only way that
science really stands a chance is through the basic you know checks and balances
that are sort of inherent in our system. And we’ve got the first amendment in the
Constitution so we can actually go to the press and say hey, the government is
lying about the dating here so they can justify doing these logging projects to pad
its budget. Well that’s you know a certain form of accountability and checks and
balances. And we can also go to court and we can also petition government for a
change in regulations or statutes. So you know we have a number of things we
could do. Of course it’s always swimming upstream because you know like I said
we’ve got this sentiment campaign finance reforming that I mean since it was
campaign financing you know that has largely been unreformed fundamentally
and puts the public at large at a disadvantage. But still, we can always try and
we’ve made a lot of progress. So that’s what I would say. I mean ultimately the
logging program on public lands simply needs to end. And that doesn’t mean
forest management ends. It simply means that timber sales wouldn’t be part of it.
JM: Right. Well you know I know that the Sierra Club is endorsing that.
C: Yeah, and I was actually instrumental in that, the Sierra Club. I was the one
who was in charge of the Orr Initiative back in 1996 that put that issue to the
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voters, all the members of the Sierra Club. And the members of course passed that
overwhelmingly. And after that I ran for the National Board of Directors and was
elected in 1997 and I served two terms through 2003. So yeah I have my history
with the Sierra Club as well.
JM: Yes, yeah. How likely, do you think that will ever come about or do you
think it will be, is it something that’s within reach fairly recently do you think or?
C: Well I think it’s an important question and I don’t think it’s that simple. And
I’ve always said this; I’ve said this since I started working on this issue. I mean I
started, I realized that the logging program needed to be ended on national forests
back in 1989 when I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail with my older brother from
Mexico to Canada. And I saw the devastation of logging operations on national
forests, especially in the Northern Sierra Nevada and The Cascades. So I’ve been
talking about this for a long time. And what I’ve always said is this. The passage
of the bill to end logging on national forests is basically going to come as an
afterthought. It’s going to come as the logical conclusion, an inevitable
conclusion, of a multifaceted effort by activists, by scientists, by people in
government to in many different ways reform and change the way that forests are
managed on public lands. And I think that’s already happening. I mean we’ve
already seen a lot of change there. And if you just look for example at the logging
levels on national forests, they let’s see, well in the late 1980s and early 1990s
before anyone really started talking about fundamentally changing the way
national forests are managed and specifically ending logging on national forests.
You know there was about 12 billion board feet cut annually on national forests
every year. And now it’s somewhere around two or three. So I don’t see
personally a return to 12 billion board feet or even eight or six billion board feet.
And then the reason I say that is that the arguments, the justifications, the pretext
used to promote a return to aggressive logging, in particular logging of larger
trees. Because that’s the only way you can generate that kind of timber volume is
logging big trees. Those arguments have one by one been shown to be fallacious
and baseless scientifically. So yeah we talked about some of that but the notion
that you have to cut big trees in order to reduce fire risk you know to the extent of
that is an appropriate goal in a certain location like for example next to home
because you obviously want to reduce fire severity next to homes to protect the
homes. It’s not about ecology. It’s about public health and safety. But the
government for years has said well we need to cut bigger trees and more cutting is
better and better fire risk reduction. Well it turns out that that’s not true, that
science shows it’s the opposite. You know if you removed the large fire resistant
trees, it tends to increase fire severity. So when it comes to thinning, less is
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actually more and you can effectively reduce fire severity by only cutting trees up
to eight or ten inches in diameter. And arguably that’s really the only effective
way to do it is only removing the small trees. So you know things like that. Post
fire salvage logging, I mean we need to cut all the trees down because the fire
destroyed the area and we can’t replant, it’s the only way to replant and the forest
won’t regenerate unless we do it. You know that was the argument that was used.
It turns out that’s completely wrong. So you know it’s going to be difficult to, for
the Forest Service and for the timber industry to sue policy makers to push the
Forest Service to return to the logging practices of the past because people know
better now and people want more from their national forests. They don’t just want
it to be a timber reserve. Whereas I think you know in the 60s and 70s and even
into the early 1980s, you know that kind of mentality, management mentality, was
unquestioned except by a small number of people. I mean the first significant
forest litigation really occurred in the late 1970s, early 1980s and then things
started changing a little bit after that and people started getting wise to the clear
cutting and realizing we’re actually losing our remaining mature and old growth
forests pretty fast. And there was a lot of alarm and scientists started getting
involved. But you know so it changed quite a bit by the early 1990s and they’ve
changed even more between then and now. But you know there are still very
major threats. I mean like I said the timber industry keeps pushing and the Bush
administration’s National Forest Management Act regulations, the 2008 rule, is
still in place and the Obama administration has not rescinded it. I mean it
certainly should have. It’s a massive threat to all forest ecosystems on public
lands, which is of course, is where most of our remaining old growth forests are.
And you know it’s basically, it’s still out there. I mean it’s being challenged in
court but you know who knows what the chances are with that. It depends on
basically who appointed the judge most of the time. So there are still efforts by
various members of Congress and not just Republicans. Some of the Democrats
are some of the biggest threats to pass legislation to massively restrict public
participation to create huge exemptions from the National Environmental Policy
Act, to restrict access to the courts and to basically shield the Forest Service when
they are cutting you know mature trees. There are various legislative proposals,
some of them dealing with thinning or logging that goes under the guise of
thinning and some of them propose fire salvage logging. I mean every year there
is at least one or two that come up and are a significant threat. So there is always
that threat but I do think in a larger sense I do not predict that we will return to
those logging levels simply because it’s not what the public wants and a scientific
community knows better now. And I think the press is wiser now than it was 1015 years ago on these issues.

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JM: Do you have any knowledge of civil disobedience that took place in regards
to salvage logging? I guess you know I mean there doesn’t seem to be as much of
that going on as there was maybe when the salvage rider took effect.
C: No, not nearly. And you know I mean that was for pretty understandable
reasons back then because basically all public access, basically (unclear) outdoors
were shut on the public and the Forest Service could clear cut ancient forests with
total impunity. And so a lot of people felt that that was their only option, the only
option left to them. A lot of that, most of that took place up in the Pacific
Northwest. There were some really dramatic examples of it. I wasn’t involved in
that but I know some of the people who could probably give you information if
you wanted more information about that.
JM: That, you know, I have had some trouble finding people who were involved
in that.
C: Okay. Well I would say you’re starting point should probably be Tim
Ingalsbee and Ingalsbee is spelled Ingalsbee. And he’s a former smoke jumper,
firefighter turned environmental activist, forest protection guy. He basically was
involved in the road blockade that stopped the Warner Creek post fire salvage
logging project from occurring. The longest blockade on a federal road in US
history to my knowledge it was written up in The New York Times, I think in
Time Magazine also. This is back in the mid 1990s this was happening. It was
definitely occurring during the salvage logging rider era. And it’s really a very
compelling story in my view. And Tim also knows quite a bit about fire ecology
as well. And he went back after that and got his Ph.D. in environmental sociology
from the University of Oregon. He’s the guy to talk to, really, really nice guy,
very smart. Where is Tim’s number? I’m looking at my board here. I’ve got a
million different little scraps of paper with phone numbers on it and his was
handy and I think I’ve covered it up. Shoot. Give me a moment. I’ll find it.
Anyway, his current organization is called FUSEE. And that stands for
Firefighters United for Science, Environment and Ethics. I forget what it is but
it’s sort of a play on words. FUSEE is a firefighter’s tool. Anyway you could look
on the web under FUSEE…
JM: And he’s in Eugene isn’t he?
C: Yes.
JM: Okay. You know I have heard of FUSEE before and so yeah that’s good.
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C: Yeah, for some reason I’m not finding his number. I know I have it on my wall
here. But if you have some trouble finding his contact information on the web,
you should be able to find it on his website for FUSEE. But if you have trouble
just give me a call back and I’ll track down his number.
JM: Okay, I appreciate that. So I guess on…
C: By the way, he wrote his doctoral dissertation if I recall correctly basically on
this issue of civil disobedience.
JM: Okay, okay fantastic. Well maybe I won’t ask you about civil disobedience
and…
C: Yeah, he’d be a much better person to ask.
JM: Okay, all right. That sounds great. Well, we’ve certainly covered a lot of stuff
here. Yeah I think, you know I can’t really think of anything to ask at this point.
C: Right. Yeah I’ll tell you what. If you have follow up questions or you don’t
think you do now but you realize you do later, just feel free to give me a call back.
Especially with a follow up question, we don’t have to schedule as much. You
know it’s like a five or ten minute thing and you just have a quick question just
give me a call and we’ll you know see if we can deal with it.
JM: Okay, all right. I sure appreciate that. And thank you very much. It’s been a
good talk you’ve given.
C: Well no problem. My pleasure and the best of luck to you.
JM: Okay, thank you.
C: Bye-bye.
JM: Bye.

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Appendix G
This interview with Professor Agee took place at The Evergreen State College in
Olympia Washington on May 8, 2009. It has been modified by the interviewee
although it original content and meaning remain intact. Professor Agee is a
Professor of Forest Ecology of the College of Forest Resources at the University
of Washington. He was the Regional Forest Ecologist of the Western Region for
the National Park service.
A (Agee): In an average year they probably think well some money is better spent
on the east side than it is over here where…
JM (Jothan Mcgaughey): Yeah, I think that’s true. You know I worked for the
Forest Service for a lot of years. And so going to DNR was a big change in terms
of their qualifications like for engine boss and stuff because they don’t actually
have to be engine boss qualified. And I really appreciated my boss. And we had
quite a few discussions about it and we both felt that it was probably just a matter
of time until something happened to DNR employees where that would change
and what not yeah. Well thanks a lot for agreeing to do this interview with me.
And what I’m trying to investigate is how ecological knowledge gets incorporated
into policy and the process by which that happens. And it seems like there’s a lot
of different ways that happens and I know you’ve been involved with a lot of fire
research and salvage. Like you just were coauthor on a Forest Service paper that
came out real recently. And so I was wondering if you, could you generally talk
about that to get started? And then maybe I could try to ask you some…
A: Yeah well because I’m not on the policy end of things, I’m kind of on the other
side, it’s rather opaque in a way to someone like me, how that gets incorporated
because most of the, the standard arguments for salvage are economic in nature.
And the policies as they’ve generally been in the past are that the short- term
economic gain exceeds the short-term ecological cost. And that the landscape’s
already been insulted and a little bit more isn’t going to make it any worse. But
probably in the last 10-15 years, I think there’s been a shift particularly by the
federal people, I can’t really speak too much for the state, to salvage less than
they historically did. And there’s a whole variety of reasons for that primarily
driven by lawsuits. And so rather than taking 50% of the landscape, you know,
they cut it down to 15 just as a way to hopefully move it through to make it look
like it’s not as a big of a deal as it has been. The other thing that they’ve done is
they’ve moved away from complete salvage to partial salvage. So within the units
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that they do salvage they don’t come out looking like a moonscape. You know so
primarily for bird issues, they’ll leave some areas unsalvaged and that favors
certain birds and then they partially salvage other areas, which favor some other
species of birds. And so it provides a little bit more of a complex mosaic. Nobody
to my understanding has ever tried to stretch out and look at the longer-term
consequences until very, very recently. And some of the work that’s been done in
I guess it was in the Blue Mountains in eastern Oregon. Have you seen that paper
by Makeber (?) and Ocmar (?)? (McIver and Ottmar Forest Ecology and Mgt 238:
268-279)
JM: I think so. I think so.
A: The idea was that they had these units set up and they selected one or two of
them for salvage and the other as a kind of just like a control. Then I think they
did kind of like a, they did two different techniques. Maybe the intensity of the
salvage was the same but the methods were different. And then they measured
some of the fine fuel attributes after the salvage had occurred. And then they took
those data at year two or whatever it was and then they extended them out over
time I think over about a 25-year period to see what the difference would be. And
it turned out that by about year 15 to 20 the fuel levels on the unsalvaged area
were about equivalent to the ones on the salvaged area. And then after that the
fuel levels on the unsalvaged area were higher which makes sense. I mean if you
put things into a temporal context you know you would expect that if you’re
going to remove biomass from the site you know and eventually the biomass on
the unsalvaged stuff eventually falls down. But that’s going to cross somewhere.
And that’s probably going to depend on where you are in the landscape you know
whether you are in a wetter or a colder or drier landscape. So it wasn’t that you
could take results like that and apply them everywhere but I think what that
particular study did was it put a little bit more into context the Donato et al results
down from the Biscuit Fire where they looked at salvage logging in terms of
regeneration and also fuel. And what they found is not surprisingly is that on the
salvaged areas because there were branch material left over from the broken tops
that’s left when they felled the trees that you would see more on the salvaged side
than you would on the unsalvaged side. But what they didn’t do is they didn’t put
it into any kind of a temporal context. It’s kind of like okay let’s go back 10 years
later and let’s hypothesize you know at least in the discussion you know and think
about pulling in some longer term consequences. So most of the, and I haven’t, I
don’t know if I’ve ever read an EIS on salvage logging. I don’t know who would
even have them. I think a lot of times they push them through on short term
emergency environmental assessments or something like that, that its almost
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always short term economic gain versus short term ecological loss. And I think in
the last few years we’re beginning to see literature emerging that talks about some
of the longer-term consequences. So that paper that Phil Monsanto and I did, I
think I sent you a…
JM: Yeah I think I have it right here.
A: It talked about some of the longer-term consequences in a dry forest where the
risk of fire is much higher than in wet forests. And you know you get 20-30 years
out, the new trees are big enough that you can under burn them and you probably
want to begin to do a little thinning perhaps of those either by fire or by some sort
of pre commercial thinning. And then send a prescribed fire through to kind of
clean things up and begin to fragment you know these huge blocks of stand
replacement young growth that were put into place by these large wildfires of the
past. And so what we were trying to do is to say what are some of the longer-term
consequences in terms of forest management of this. And in that context it looked
like you know there was a significantly higher amount of the landscape that pretty
much got soil torched if you will, trying to use prescribed fire in these
regenerating forests compared to the areas that have been salvage logged. And in
those areas again not all of the trees were taken off. It wasn’t the kind of salvage
logging that you see on private industrial land. And I don’t know, you know, I
really haven’t seen too much salvage logging on DNR land primarily because a
lot of the larger blocks of DNR land on the west side haven’t burned. And most as
far as I know most of their land on the east side is like a section here, section
there, and just driving through it’s kind of hard to identify you know what’s theirs
and what’s not. And the same is true for a lot of the east side industrial properties.
They’re a lot more fragmented. And so you can go in and you can say well this
clearly is federal land right here you know. It’s obviously some private owner
who tried to get maximum economic value and it doesn’t leave very much behind
but you can clearly pick up the federal stuff that’s been salvaged because there’s
always a lot of snags left. Not always the biggest trees but probably a density at
least in recent salvage logging operations that I’ve seen maybe a density of 50
trees per acre or something like that.
JM: And how do you think that came about, that increase in what was left? I mean
was there any specific reports or anything that are policies about…?
A: I think the work done by Richard Hutto from University of Montana, he’s a
bird guy, and he’s done a fair amount of work in the Rocky Mountains with birds.
And what he was finding was that particularly for black backed woodpeckers;
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they really require dead snag patches. And the reason that they lived in the
northern Rocky Mountains is because dead snag patches were historically always
there because of these highs everity fires in subalpine fir forests that was kind of
the historic fire regime.
JM: Was that with the bug kill would happen and then the fires come through?
A: Well it could either be a bug kill followed by fire or it could just be a fire
blowing under extreme conditions, extreme weather conditions. But you’d end up
with these dead snag patches and so this was and black backed woodpeckers only
exist in that habitat. They don’t exist in you know the mature forest or young
growth forest or partially snagged forests. So I think part of the reason that they’re
leaving more snags was in part because of that research so don’t salvage
everything and what you do salvage leave some snags because there are some
woodpecker species that like more open snag patches. Lewis’s woodpecker in
particular and western bluebirds which isn’t a woodpecker but they tend to
increase. You find them in higher densities in partially logged, partially salvaged
forests than you do in unsalvaged. But the argument that you should have no
salvage in low elevation forests because of the black backed woodpecker doesn’t
resonate well with me because historically it was probably never there because
they didn’t have those kinds of fires in the low elevation. They were confined
with high elevation areas. So what we’ve done is we’ve transferred the higher
elevation fire regime down to low elevation, with that one of the species that
depends on the high severity fire regime. So if you completely salvage all low
elevation forests you’d never get rid of black backs because they’re still going to
be present in the high elevation areas. And when you look at their range you know
if you look at a map of North America it’s just that high latitude boreal forest that
you find, you know there’s kind of a tongue that comes down the Rocky
Mountains and a tongue that comes down The Cascades. So we’ve kind of created
habitat for black backs. But I think more than any other thing it’s probably been
bird issues, wildlife issues in general but it’s primarily the bird component of
things. And then the erosion concerns. And the way that the Forest Service has
dealt with the erosion concerns more than anything else is to do two things. They
beefed up their BAER plans their burned area emergency rehab and they’ve
tended to focus more on things like helicopter yarding rather than ground based
systems. So they’re not pushing new roads in where roads weren’t existent before.
And in many cases by the time they get done with all that their costs are so high
that it kind of negates the economic argument that you’re trying to make. But
nevertheless you know the mills that process the wood and hire people so there’s
a multiplier effect but the source issue of economic value to the government tends
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to be my guess is probably a wash. By the time they go through the planning and
the execution with the various things that they’ve got in place and you know they
may end up also doing additional rehab after the salvage. And then you’ve got the
planning cost but those are going to be there whether you salvage or not. Except
that I just read a paper out of the Klamath Mountains, which is fairly, a high
productivity area and they found that a lot of areas that even with no planning
you’ve still got a lot of regen (regeneration), I mean a lot. But there are areas
particularly where a lot of grass seeding has been done in forested areas where
you put in a lot of grass that pretty much kills most of the natural regen because
it’s growing so well that first year. And you know you’ve got that little teeny
seedling that comes up about like this and maybe in May, I mean you already
have grass this tall around it and it’s sucking all the soil moisture out of it. So it
really reduces not only the tree component but also plants like ceanothus, which
are nitrogen fixer, which can put some of, the nitrogen lost by the fire back into
the soil. But a lot of the emergency rehab is essentially done as a maneuver to
avoid legal issues. So if somebody downstream ends up getting flooded out or
gets damaged from erosion or excess water from the fire. And their argument has
been on tort claims. The feds could have done something about this but they
chose not to. And so they made the impacts of a natural event assuming that this
wildfire was a natural event worse than it should have been. And they’ve lost
claims on that. So most of the time they will go in and they will do some sort of
rehab on large wildfires. It’s rare that they’ll do nothing.
JM: And I think basically what your point on that is, is that to not beget held
liable for damage after wildfire for the erosion that basically a lot of what is done
is putting out this grass seed, which actually slows down the regeneration of the
forest. And it’s far from what would you call it private pressure I guess or
something? Yeah.
A: Back in the 90s when I wrote my fire ecology book, people thought that
contour felling of logs on a slope was basically a waste of time. It was expensive.
It was hard to do. What they tried to do is they tried to take fairly small to
medium sized not big trees and fall them so that they would at least be close to
one another so they could kind of be jockeyed into alignment as essentially a
block. And then they’d go in and they’d fill in all the holes and terrain you know
where the water could concentrate and go under the log. And the conventional
wisdom at that time was that it doesn’t work. More recently in 2000, Pete
Robichaud who is a I guess he’s a geologist or a hydrologist out of the Rocky
Mountain station of the Forest Service along with some other people published a
general technical report on rehabilitation and things have kind of turned around by
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them. And now it looks like contour felling is the most popular technique. And
grass seeding and mulching come not too far behind. Grass seeding is preferable
because it’s really easy and it’s cheap. And mulching doesn’t have the
environmental impact that grass seeding does. But it’s much more expensive and
it’s harder to distribute.
JM: Now and that would be like those brush shredders or whatever that you
might…?
A: You could do that or just you know take bark chips and spread them out. Hay,
you know dried hay, they’ll spread that for example along fire line trails. And but
the problem is that you have to have pretty good access. And if it’s a fire line trail,
you’ve got access because the trail was created and it’s usually wide enough that
you can get a vehicle down there to spread the mulch. But outside of those areas
it’s more difficult. What they can do sometimes is they’ll haul in bails of hay by
helicopter then drop them out of the helicopter. And then the crews hike in, grab
the bails, cut them open and then spread the stuff out there. But it’s a lot more
expensive than grass seeding. You can do grass seeding for about well like my
figures are out of date but I would say probably in the neighborhood of $60-$70
an acre, including seed.
JM: Right and you can use planes or helicopters for that, right.
A: Helicopters, yeah. And mulching is probably $600-$800 dollars an acre so
about ten times as much. And contour felling is probably $500-$600 per acre.
JM: So that’s in between the two or?
A: Yeah, it’s probably a little bit in between. Mulching is very expensive. That’s
about the most expensive thing you can do. And then there’s other stuff you know
like in the BAER teams for example sometimes they’ll go in and they’ll kind of
reengineer roads. So they’ll resize the culverts or they’ll take culverts out and put
in dips rather than having the culvert there because they know it’s going to get
clogged and it’s going to wash the whole road prism out. And those are kind of
it’s hard to say what an average is on that because it’s such a linear feature and
it’s not done on an area basis necessarily. But those things are also typically part
of the BAER process. And the advantage that the feds have there is that that
money comes out of some sort of emergency pot. So they have to apply for it and
but the team itself the BAER team has essentially justified the action by the
reporting that they’ve done and they’re on the fire working before it’s even out.
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So on the area of that first burn, they’ll be in there already you know checking
things out. Like that Santa Barbara fire that’s going right now, there’s got to be a
bear team down there and they’re in the areas that have already burned saying this
is what we ought to do. So they produce what they call a fire severity map and
they go in and they map all of the vegetation. And if it’s still green it’s an
unburned to low. It it’s totally scorched so that the trees are dead but the tops
were not consumed, that’s kind of a moderate. And then if it’s a crown fire that’s
high. So it’s different than what you get from satellite pictures. And so the kind of
fire severity you have to find by satellite usually if you had total crown scorch
that’s considered high severity. And so it’s a slightly different system but the
reason that they’re doing that is because from a soils standpoint, if you have all
the canopy leaves browned, they’re going to fall off and are essentially acting as a
mulch. And so you don’t need as much attention in one of those areas than you do
when there’s essentially no fine fuel left at all (for soil cover). It’s all been
consumed. And so then they you know they developed a whole series of
techniques. They used a lot of heavy equipment surprisingly because a lot of the
problems that they defined were created by heavy equipment. Things like
undersized culverts but you can’t have guys like picking and shoveling. When I
was working for the Park Service back in the 70s, there was a big expansion at
Redwood National Park down in northern California. And we had about 33
million dollars to spend and at first we thought okay we’re going to bring in all
these hippie crews and they’re going to be running along putting in willow
waddles and you know whatever. And it turned out that that was actually pretty
ineffective and that what was really needed was heavy equipment. And so those
heavy equipment operators went in there and they cleaned out the stream channel
fills and recontoured things and then they recontoured the slopes where the roads
had been but were not going to be needed now that it was on a National Park. And
it was pretty expensive but it was much more effective than trying to use hand
crews.
JM: Because they just can’t move the earth.
A: They couldn’t move it and the kinds of things that they were able to do weren’t
as stable as you could do with the heavier equipment. And it was impossible like
to tear out big fills with hand crews. You know pick and shovel, it just wasn’t
working.
JM: It seems like they would be better for like planning or something.

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A: Yeah. Well they did some of that. You know and for some of the seeding stuff
like that. So they didn’t have a component there but it ended up being a much
smaller proportion of the total work effort than had been initially planned. And
the heavy equipment, which essentially hadn’t been scheduled at all, ended up
being the biggest part of it.
JM: And that stuff’s really expensive too.
A: Yeah. So you know the same bulldozers that helped build the roads and yarded
the trees out were now being used to restore the landscape.
JM: Well that makes sense in a way doesn’t it, yeah.
A: They use a lot of shovel loaders, you know those bucket things.
JM: Yeah the excavators?
A: Yeah. And those apparently had been applied a lot in BAER stream
stabilization too because they can sit on the edge of something and get that bucket
way down into a stream channel and pull stuff out if it’s necessary to do so.
JM: Right, yeah. And I guess they’re fairly stable too. I mean out of that
equipment they’re pretty versatile I understand. Or they’re able to work on slopes
too because of that arm to support themselves as they go down or something like
that yeah. Yeah. And let’s see…
A: And the BAER teams never deal with salvage. All they’re doing is what are we
going to do with the medial effects of the wildfire and then the salvage and any
efforts to rehab after salvage come out of a different account. And so I think they
come out of the stumpage value that they get for the timber. Unless they have
unprogrammed funds around which hardly anybody ever does. So I think that’s
how they end up paying for the planting and any rehab after the salvage.
JM: Well I guess a certain amount of it from my understanding a certain amount
of when they get the stumpage fees or whatever go into the KV fund and that that
fund is supposed to be for reforestation although it gets used for a lot of other
things too but everything’s supposed to be directed towards the reforestation. And
I can’t remember what it is, but 30% or something like that, 25 maybe, 20.

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A: There’s been a lot of controversy over that stuff on how they’re used because
some people have said well okay we’ve got this 30,000 acre fire here and we’re
going to salvage let’s say half of it. And some people interpret the use of the KV
funds as only applying to the half that was salvaged and not being able to be used
at all on the other half of the wildfire that wasn’t salvaged. Even though the
salvaged units may have been located such that they minimized the long-term
effect of the unsalvaged areas in terms of future firing hazards and such. So I
think over the last few years that’s been clarified. If you have a salvage operation
within a wildfire that the whole context of the wildfire can be used in terms of the
KV funds.
JM: That’s good. I mean that makes sense.
A: Yeah because we got involved in it about 15 years ago. We were evaluating a
wildfire over in the Blue Mountains of Oregon and we suggested that they take
some of their KV money and plant hardwoods along the riparian corridor. So we
can’t do that because we’re not salvaging the creek areas. It’s like, so what? And
so they actually end up actually getting a clarification and said yeah you can do
that.
JM: Interesting. What’s your opinion or what do you know about the forest plans
that are supposed to come out? I think they’re supposed to come out every 15
years for a particular forest and then from what I understand is that not all the
forests are on schedule with that, that there’s some that are behind that even
though they’re…
A: Yeah, they just get delayed again and again. One of the reasons is that the kind
of, the whole idea about the National Forest Management Act was that it was a
bottom up process back in 1976 when it was passed. It was a bottom up process
where there would be plans produced for each national forest independent of all
the other national forests. And that it would prescribe the you know what was
actually going to occur over that next planning period. Typically it would be like
a 10-year period. And you know everybody was real rosy and excited about it
when they began to talk about it. But the first generation of plans that came out
were heavily influenced by this linear programming technique and it was called a
FORPLAN for forest planning. And you threw in all the inputs and constraints
that you had and you popped out this plan that says okay we’re going to be
producing you know a 100 million board feet per year off this forest and we’ll be
producing X number of recreation days, X number of grazing days. And
everything was kind of specified but it was…
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JM: So the computer program that they used?
A: Yeah. But it was specified in a non-spatial context. So you had all these tables
but it was just incomprehensible. If you tried to say well okay if we utilize this
plan, what is our forest going to look like? All it dealt with were outputs. And so
there was no attention to what was left behind or how the rest was being managed
other than the fact that the assumption was that this was a sustainable process. So
you could have these outputs going on forever. So the public didn’t buy into them
very well. And then we began to get these more regional issues like goshawk
protection, northern spotted owls. And so at just about the time that the first
generation of plans were being revamped to go into a second generation…
JM: Would that be the 80s?
A: Late 80s, yeah. Then the, because they, the first plans came out probably about
1980 because it took about two years after the act to get the planning regulations
in order. And then it took another two to three years to get the very first
FORPLANS all that output out there and then actually to reproduce the plans. So
it was like late 80s early 90s when the second generation came into play except by
then you had these issues that obviously overlapped one forest like the northern
spotted owl. And when it became endangered, not endangered, threatened, then
the ball pretty much got pulled out of the Forest Service’s hand in terms of
planning. And it went to the Fish and Wildlife Service because they manage the
Endangered Species Act. And so the Fish and Wildlife Service published a
recovery plan for the owl and it largely went along with what the Forest Service
and the other federal agencies had put together previous to that. There was a
whole series of different plans. One was called the ISC, Interagency Scientific
Committee plan. And once that one was done, all of the others were slight
variants of that one. And that one was shared by Jack Thomas who later became
chief of the Forest Service. And so by ’93 I guess the owl issue was, its impacts
were pretty well known but there was basically a lot of the timber production off
of all the forests that had owls was going to be way cut back. And as it turned out
it was cut back even further because of some other issues. But then the issue in
Congress became, okay so if we implement this plan for owls are we done with all
these Northwest forests? And somebody said well no because we’ve got fish
issues and we’ve got old growth forests you know spiritual value and we have you
know all of these other things. So a couple more short-term interim-planning
efforts went on and eventually after Clinton came into office that’s when the
FEMAT process came into play which was the basis for the Northwest Forest
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Plan. Some extra bells and whistles got added like for species that they didn’t
know very much about. They were going to be required to survey for those
species and provide kind of a local management plan that they found in HIPA (?)
[not sure what was meant here]. And so that became very costly and it slowed
down almost everything because in order to survey for some species it ended up
taking like two years because you had to do surveys in the spring and the fall and
the spring and the fall to make sure that they weren’t there. In other cases where
they found them, let’s say you might have a you know one of these surveymanaged snails mid slope. Well if there had been a prescribed fire plan for that
whole slope there was no way that you were going to protect this little circle in
the middle of a slope. So I was like okay well we’re not going to do a fire here
then. So it pretty much froze everything. And outside of the northern spotted owl
range you had other issues as well. You know in the northern Rockies you had
grizzly bears, in the southwest you have the Mexican spotted owl, the Sierra
Nevada had the California spotted owl. So and then there’s these wider ranging
things like fishers and wolverines. You know so each one of these things kind of
became what I call a fine filter focus. So how do you adapt a plan over many
national forest to make sure that this particular species’ needs are taken care of.
And yet you still have a sustainable outcome on the whole end of the process. So
all of these plans began to get more and more linked together and I think the
agencies are still under the legislation that talked about individual forest plans
back in the mid 70s but that’s not the way they actually do the planning. But it’s
all been pushed by administrative fiat and essentially has been pushed by
legislation and in a lot of cases by lawsuits. So they tried to do something that was
innovative perhaps but it didn’t meet the kind of the sniff test in court. And so it’s
like well you guys aren’t going to get that plan through you know. So they’d have
to start from scratch again. And of course as we go further on it time we find more
and more things to be worried about. And particularly in the dry forest types you
know. What I worry about is by the time we finally get our act together we’re not
going to have much habitat left because it’s going up incredibly fast.
JM: In terms of fires?
A: In terms of wildfire, yeah. I mean you look at the wildfire acreage in the west
and from about 1930 up until the present it goes wooooosh, like that. So we’re
burning more than when we weren’t even doing much fire suppression or at least
it wasn’t very as effective because we didn’t have helicopters and airplanes and
smoke jumpers didn’t come into play until about then. And the use of a lot of
heavy equipment really didn’t come into play until World War II. A lot of that
technology was pretty much perfected. And now even with all that sort of stuff
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it’s not helping us you know. We’re way up here. And a lot of this is dry forest.
And I think it’s just going to get worse. I mean already we’ve got that Santa
Barbara fire occurring and that’s in May. And this is with; you know that brush
down there is just leafing out. Usually it becomes relatively nonflammable for at
least a couple of months when the new foliage comes up. Yeah the fuel moistures
are going up and at least from what I saw on the TV that was having no impact on
that fire behavior And you see these mansions on tops of these hills just
surrounded by brush and it’s like you know just last year you know 200 homes
were lost like just a mile away from here and you don’t seem to sense that there’s
a connect between your house being surrounded by brush. And a lot of these
homes that I saw burning on TV were on fire before the wild land around them
was on fire. So it was ember driven and so the embers were blowing across. They
were hitting the brush but not setting it on fire but hitting the house and setting it
on fire. So that’s you know from the standpoint of salvage logging that’s neither
here nor there but…
JM: Well it just adds to the amount of area that could be salvaged you know for
burning more. And then with the climate change I guess is kind of what you’re
getting at with that. You know that…
A: Yeah you know you look at particularly this period of rapidly increasing area
here and there’s a clear climate signal in there as well. It’s not just fuel built up.
Probably the big three here are number one a more conservative suppression
effort because of safety concerns. I mean you get you know in the last several
years there has been several people who were line commanders who had been
taken into court for criminal misconduct because firefighters go trapped or killed.
And that’s kind of been a first and nobody wants to be the next one in that line.
It’s always like well let’s just back off, back off. We’ll give up acres but we’ll do
good point protection of structures and we won’t worry as much. And there’s this
kind of a disturbing trend that I see too in that well more fire is good on the
landscape. We’ve got to get fire back into the landscape but for the most part it’s
the wrong kind of fire. And I sense that that’s I think this summer that’s going to
really be a big political issue because you’re going to see a lot of acreage burning
and they’re burning with the wrong severity. They’re not the historical low
severity fires. But yeah the acres are burning but they’re burning with high
severity. And I think some people in the political end of things already have a feel
that this is what’s going on and it’s not good stewardship of the land. It may be
cheaper in the short run for the agencies but in the long run I don’t think it’s a
good thing. And then you’ve got this climate shift and Tony Westerling and some
other folks did a paper on nature or science in 2006 and they looked at the period
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from 1970 to 2003 or 4 probably and what they found was that in fact we’ve had a
period of drier weather in this time and that’s been associated with earlier snow
melt in the spring and the extended longevity of fire seasons. And it’s a pretty
good correlation with increasing fire size, increasing area burned. The one thing
they didn’t look at was increasing severity as well. But my sense is that some of
that is occurring at least in certain areas. The place I’m most familiar with is
northern California and I was there last October 500,000 acres burned there last
summer. And it didn’t look to me like the fires were exceptionally severe but
when I talked to people in town they said oh well we’ve been out to point A or
point B or point C. And it’s just a moonscape you know. All the way along this
highway you know along this river and I went down there and it’s like well yeah I
can see this area burned but I mean it’s definitely not a moonscape. And probably
by this year with most of the scorch gone most people who drive along that road
won’t even know there was a fire there. So areas like that I’m not so sure. But if
you get in the Sierra Nevada like all of the forests on the other side of I-5,
different kind of terrain, you know. Much longer stretches where wind can really
blow these fires and you get these long cigar shaped stand replacement burns.
And historically those fires probably did burn like that but they didn’t kill nearly
as many trees as they are now. And those areas also have better access than in the
Trinities and the Klamath Mountains on the west side of I-5, pretty difficult to
salvage without a helicopter. You haven’t got roads in there. You can’t, you have
to build expensive roads to get into some of these spots. There’s just no other way
about it. Otherwise you can’t get there. And so if they’re going to do salvage they
have to helicopter it whereas on that more gentle land to the east of I-5, you
wouldn’t even need a road. You just kind of take your harvester forwarder in
there and pull the stuff out and you’d probably you know you wouldn’t even have
to grade a road for some of the trucks to get in there. It’s fairly, much, much
flatter and easier to manage land. So that’s going to I think have a big play in
terms of where salvage is going to continue to be an issue. It’s like in areas where
you already have pretty good access.
JM: Yeah it will continue and keep the cost down and everything. What’s your
opinion of like public pressure in terms of the policies or the actions that get
taken? I mean how big of an affect do you think the public has on what happens?
A: Not much. I don’t think so, at least in the areas that I’ve seen where the local
public said geez you know we’ve got all of this federal land right next to town
that just burned in a stand replacement fire. We ought to salvage it. You know
we’ve got this industrial firm that had a square mile of land burn right next door.
They got in there, they got the wood out and their chances of a re-burn are lower
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than on the federal land. Do something. And the feds just can’t get it together.
And part of it is the legal situation that they find themselves in, that the private
landowners don’t have that hammer hanging over them like the feds do. And so
they tend to be pretty risk adverse when it comes to salvage logging because it’s
just, for the most part the further up you go in the food chain up to the
Washington DC level, the more that the environmental groups consolidate their
power. And at that level they’re pretty much dead set against salvage. And so
there’s really nothing that the Washington office guys gain by saying yeah we’ll
do a lot of salvage because it’ll make these local people happy. So there’s not a
lot of support for the local managers as they move up the ladder for salvage
operations even though you know it might make them look good at the local level.
Not that everybody at the local level wants to salvage log but generally more do
than don’t because many of these areas are areas where the timber industry has
pretty much been knocked out due to other constraints. So here we’ve got some
wood, it’s dead, not all of it is going to serve a needed ecological function on the
landscape if it’s a dry forest. If it’s a high elevation forest, you know you could
make the argument (against salvage) just for black backed woodpeckers alone that
would be useful. And lynx seem to like that as well because the snowshoe hares
like those young burned areas. And so the more young burned area you have the
more hares and therefore the more lynx. But in the lower 48, lynx is kind of a I
don’t know what you’d call it, maybe a red herring because it seems like the lynx
populations are very much a function of what goes on in Canada. When you have
high lynx populations because the snowshoe hare cycles in the North Country. It
doesn’t cycle pretty much in the lower 48 but it does in Canada on up. And so it’s
about a 10-year cycle. And what you see is the lynx populations follow that with a
lag of about two years. And so the lynx populations go up. Well if you look at
lynx hunting and trapping records in the US, they pretty much follow that
snowshoe hare cycle with a lag. And so lynx populations go up when the hare
population in Canada goes up and then they start to emigrate down to the US. And
then things turn around, the snowshoe hare populations crash and the lynx
population moves back up into Canada because it’s, the snowshoe hare
populations down here are generally equivalent to about the population lows in
Canada. They never have this huge cycle out. And so it’s pretty marginal habitat
for them. But you know lynx is again one of those species of concern and
regardless of whether it’s dependent upon immigration from Canada or not, the
federal agencies pretty much are constrained to deal with it as if it’s a native
species that has always done well here. And so trying to do more for probably
high elevation is I would say no real ecological need for salvage and the lower
down the slope you go I think the better the case can be made that at least partial
salvage can be justified in part on ecological grounds like these you know long
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term coarse woody debris issues. Because when you look at the historic forest and
you try and model snag dynamics in the historic forest, you probably had a fairly
constant, when they deal with snags they usually do it per 100 acres so that you
know it’s a much more of an average thing because not every acre has the same
number of snags. But for most of the bird species that rely on coarse woody
debris, standing coarse woody debris, because you have 200 to 250 snags per 100
acres. You pretty much maxed out at 100% of capacity. So that’s only two per
acre, two to two and a half per acre. Well all of a sudden you have a wildfire and
you’ve got like hundreds per acre. And per 100 acres you’ve got tens of thousands
of them. There’s many more than are required for ecological function. And so
taking some of them out down there you know I think that you could make an
ecological argument for that. To my knowledge no one has yet done that, has tried
to do that. And I think that that you know most of the federal land managers,
maybe I’m wrong about this but you know my sense is that that they think in very
unimaginative terms about their forests. They don’t recognize that the forest
functions differently depending upon what forest type it is. And the role of fire is
different depending upon forest type. And so I think when they see a fire let’s say
that burned from low to high elevation and includes all the forest types, they don’t
see that as a segmented problem that maybe what you do at point A should be
different than at point B. It’s just like now we’re going to do 15% of this. There
will be 15% on each forest type all the way to the top or you know something
silly like that. And you know many of the forest managers don’t have degrees in
natural resources anymore. You know it used to be all foresters, which was not
necessarily a good thing because they had a lot of their own biases. For example
we know what’s best and we’re the professionals, blah blah blah and public be
damned. But you know when you get somebody who’s an archaeologist or a
social scientist, they need to have good information and at least from the staff that
work for them. And they need to know how to answer the right questions. And a
lot of them are pretty timid and they’re pretty risk adverse. Nobody’s willing to
go out on a limb because they know that most of those limbs are pretty rotten
(laughs). They’re going to get broken off and that’s going to affect their career
advancement. It’s not a good thing. You know I think the federal agencies and the
Forest Service is not alone in this. The Park Service is the same way. And I used
to work for, I worked for the Park Service for 17 years and I have recently kind of
gone back to work for them as kind of a contracting employee. And back when I
worked for them they were about product, about getting things done and now it’s
almost all about process, making it look like you’re busy and going to meetings
and going to training. But whether you get your plans done and get them operable
is much less important. And so I think that’s to some extent true with the Forest
Service as well.
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JM: What would you say the cause of that is? Why do you think it’s changing that
way?
A: The typical ranger who moved up to superintendent and regional director and
went to director of the Park Service. Historically it had been people who have
avoided putting their foot in doo-doo. And the way you avoid putting your foot in
doo-doo is just don’t do anything. And particularly in the higher levels of the
agency they would move a lot. So you’d see a superintendent. He’d be in a spot
three years. And so you could just see him. They were saying okay nine more
months and I’m probably going to be moving on. So if I don’t make a decision
about this, I’m going to leave it for the next guy to deal with. And the next guy
would come in with the same attitude. You know, three more years and I’ll be
onto something else. Maybe we ought to start a new planning effort here and
revisit the assumptions that we had about this thing and we know that we won’t
get through that in three years. So I’ll be someplace else. And almost all the high
level managers who have made it were of that ilk. There were a few that weren’t
but I would say three quarters of them were. And that was really at that time it
was really in contrast with the Forest Service. And with the Forest Service the
guys who went out on a limb and did things and got things done and produced
outputs were the ones who moved up the ladder. But they have adopted much
more of a Park Service like attitude in the last you know 20 years and now it’s
more of a group grope kind of thing. You know everybody’d get together and
talk. And it’s also been very frustrating for you know a lot of people who were
movers and shakers left the agency because they couldn’t stand not getting things
done. It’s like we’re not moving here. And you know I’m wasting my time, we’re
wasting taxpayer money. I’m just out of here. And I’m sure the same is true for
BLM. So it’s unfortunate you know. I don’t think it’s really a good thing for the
land. I mean for 17-18 almost 20 years I’ve been arguing that in these dry forest
types that we ought to take a large landscape, one large landscape and do what we
think is necessary to make it a resilient forest to wildfire and have the wildlife
guys out there monitoring spotted owls the whole time and see what happens.
Everybody says, “Well if you do this, you open up that forest all the spotted owls
are going to disappear.” Well, I’ve never seen an instance where anybody has
proved that to me. And yet what we do see going on is we see you know like I
said while the Northwest Forest Plan was being put together, you know I said
what’s going to happen with these dry forests? I said you’re going to start losing
large chunks of the landscape at the same time. I mean fires are like 100,000 acres
or more if we continue on with this strategy. And at that time, no one had seen a
fire that big anywhere in Oregon and Washington. And they said, well, where’s it
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going to start? And I said, well you look at the lightening frequency. I said
probably the areas with the highest lightening frequency are where you are going
to see it first. And so I pointed to a spot on the map, which was the Entiat River
drainage in eastern Washington here. Three weeks later a fire started there and
burned 120,000 acres. It was the biggest fire that they actually had recorded acres
on in Washington state history. The Yacolt burn was probably bigger but it
burned at the turn of the century and they weren’t really sure exactly where it
went. You know then we had the Biscuit fire. We’ve had these multiple 100,000
acre fires in California. Eastern Washington and eastern Oregon where people
used to laugh at me when I’d go down and talk to them because they would say
well we just don’t have that big fire history. It’s not part, it hasn’t happened here
so we’re not going to do anything about it. Well now it’s on top of them. You
know they’re 20 years out from making a dent in the backlog of the stuff that they
would have to do. So it’s just unfortunate and I you know I don’t see it getting
much better in the short term.
JM: You say they’re 20 years out from being able to get started on it? Or to be
able to make a…?
A: To make a dent. Yeah. Some simulations of landscapes looking at fire risk
issues have suggested that if you could manage about 20% of your landscape per
decade, it doesn’t mean that the first decade you do 20% and the second decade
you do a second different 20%. It could be the same 20% both times not
necessarily. But if you look at strategically where the worst problems are, and
those change over time, probably there’s going to be a little overlap but it’s
mostly going to be different acres. So what that would mean is that after about 20
years you might have about 30% of your landscape fire safe. But it’s every year
it’s kind of…
JM: And that’s prescribed fire thinning or some combination thereof.
A: Right. So at that point you begin to really fragment the ability of wildfires to
move across the landscape because they keep hitting these treated areas. They
don’t go out but their intensity declines to the point where they’re capable of
control and treating higher proportions of the landscape than that don’t seem to be
all that much more effective. So to me, that’s a real, if I were a manager I would
say wow you know I think I could go out and sell this to the public. And they may
not like any kind of equipment in the woods. You know it blows up dust and it’s
noisy and they may not know much about prescribed fire but 2% of this forest
area per year is not a tremendous amount. And it’s going to be divvied up over the
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landscape so it’s not all going to occur in one area. I think you ought to be able to
sell something like that, particularly because the kinds of treatments that are being
done are pretty economically marginal because you’re leaving a lot of the big
trees. But most people when they look at these dry forest areas, back in the 80s
they did a lot of studies on visual resource management in the Forest Service
because that was part of the National Forest Management Act. And so the
question was, well what do people like to see? Well in these pine forests, what
they like to see, they like to see big trees in a non-uniform spacing. They like to
see green grass on the forest floor. They don’t like to see downed material.
JM: So it’s like a park like setting that…
A: Yeah, and they don’t like all of these little understory trees. That’s exactly the
results of what one of these manipulations should do and it’s going to create a fire
resilient forest. So the pieces are there. They just, and there’s been a lot of what
do you call it, synthesis of this kind of material that’s available for forest
managers but it might just be, there’s so many issues it might just be too
overwhelming for them. But I haven’t seen kind of a consistent movement by any
of these forests in the area of the Northwest Forest Plan for example that has
really began to move in that direction at the scale that is needed.
JM: And so you were saying that maybe it’s a function of the managers having
too much on their plate? Or do you think it’s kind of like the public wouldn’t
agree with it? Or what do you…?
A: It’s some of both, some of both. I think the people who are against plans like
that are obviously the most vocal. And they have support; a lot of monetary
support from further up the line. So you know a lot of these like local Sierra Club
you know. I mean the National Sierra Club policy for national forests is no
commercial harvest. So I mean a forest manager, forest supervisor cannot cut a
tree and sell it without getting the Sierra Club on their back.
JM: Well it almost seems like…
A: I had an editorial once in the Portland Oregonian and I said, you know, I said,
“Things like the Sierra Club’s policy against commercial tree cutting,” I said, “is
just crazy.” I said, “If it’s done right it can really be a big help.” And so I got all
these calls from the Sierra Club people and they say, “Well we’re not against tree
cutting.” You know and I said, “Well what do you mean you’re not against tree
cutting?” I said, “That’s the policy, you know. No commercial…” And they says,
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“Well, we’re only upset if they sell it. They can cut all they want. They just can’t
sell it.” And I said, “Well once its cut,” I said, “from the standpoint of ecological
you know status of the forest, the deed is done. What happens to the log once it’s
moved out of the woods whether it’s sold or not sold is immaterial.” I said, “You
guys, you know, that’s just ethically dishonest.”
JM: Yeah. And you know it does seem like that those groups that if they
understood that it was for you know for to so that the burns wouldn’t be out of the
ordinary, because those are out of the ordinary for the most part and stand
replacement where the history of those east side drier forests is more of coming
through and making this park like setting, that it seems like that they would be
supportive of that kind of treatment of cutting and prescribed fire…
A: Some of the environmental groups are defenders of wildlife, at least in the
Northwest here. They’ve been very supportive of restoration of tree cutting,
restoration of forestry. Let me just call it that, okay, rather than getting involved
in thinning and burning every time. The nature conservancy is actually a hands on
partner with the Forest Service both in terms of managing its adjacent lands
directly and providing staff people to help the Forest Service plan and implement
these things. So and you know they’re a big well-funded outfit. But you still have
other national groups, the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council,
Center for Biological Diversity, that’s out of Arizona. They’re pretty much just
you know against everything. They don’t say they are but in fact when push
comes to shove they’re in there harassing the Forest Service like well okay if you
do this you’re going to end up with all these you know alien species coming in.
So therefore you can’t do it. But we really think that you ought to be doing it but
you can’t do it because of this. And some groups have actually changed their
stance over time. There’s a group up in Bellingham that used to be called
Northwest Ecosystems something or other. They changed their name. But they’ve
become much more of a partner than an adversary because they’d been saying the
Forest Service in limited ways has been doing things right. And so they say that
there’s a good faith effort to try and do the right thing. But it took you know ten
years for that to turn around. That’s a pretty long time. And the industry is so
fragmented and you know they’ve essentially lost a lot of their political clout. It
used to be you had like a lot of big forest industry in this state, Crown Zellerbach,
Scott Paper Company, Georgia Pacific, Weyerhaeuser of course. And now most
of those lands are gone and managed like for insurance companies like John
Hancock. John Hancock bought almost all of Crown Zellerbach’s land. So rather
than being local forest managers you know they’re managed out of Massachusetts
or something and they hire these timber management consulting groups like
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Campbell Scientific Consulting I think it’s called. And they do all of the forest
management and they do all of the planning and operations but they’re not
involved in the political process in Olympia like these other guys used to be. And
the bottom’s out of the market right now. So there’s you know they’re not really
clamoring for a lot of logs because they can’t even cut them. So all of the political
pressure just comes from one side when it comes. So you don’t get, the local
communities, they’re pretty confused. There’s a guy who several years ago wrote
this book called, his name is Richard Louv, it was called Nature Deficit Disorder
(actually called “Last Child in the Woods”). And he was saying that young kids
now you know they don’t get out as much as they used to for a whole variety of
reasons. They’re losing their touch to begin to understand what nature is about.
And I would say that’s probably true for most people under the age of 50 that it’s
not just confined to children. So when you try and deal with these complex issues
of even the fact that there’s different forest types and that fire historically
interacted differently among them. You know you just get this blank look because
they don’t even know the difference between a pine tree and a fir tree. And
logging to them is what the Sierra Club shows on all its brochures you know. It’s
just this huge clear-cut moonscape and it could be nothing other than that. So you
know it’s kind of surprising. I’ve been on a couple of trips where people who
were very adamant against any kind of active management you know came away
at the end of the day with their mouths kind of hanging open saying wow I didn’t
realize it could be like this. So but to get it on a broad scale like that I mean
there’s got to be a hook to get people in and nobody has discovered what that
hook is.
JM: Yeah well I guess it sounds like you know part of it might be education or
some kind of you know these like you mentioned a tour or something where these
people were impressed with what was going on, that it almost seems like maybe
the agencies should try to interact more with either the public or these
organizations and then actually invite them into treatment programs or something
like that.
A: They do at times you know when they have places that are fairly easy to
access. But the problem goes clear back to the school. Most of the biology that’s
taught now is cellular and below, scale and below (?). And ecology as a discipline
is not taught because it’s not tested. So when you look at the way you go through
the various qualifying exams for college, organism and up stuff just isn’t there.
And one of the main reasons is, is that it’s because ecology is really a science of
place. It’s very difficult to put a curriculum together that just talks about ecology
so generally. Like you can talk about a cell for example or a molecule.
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JM: You said science of place.
A: The science of place. Yeah and that’s what makes it so difficult to bring across
because it has to be adapted depending upon where you are. You know on the east
coast it would be different on the west coast. So there have been some curricula
put together particularly for the role of fire in landscapes but it hasn’t been, as far
as I can see, it hasn’t been well adopted. There’s not a lot of interest even by high
school teachers. When I was working at the university I would get a hold of high
school teachers and volunteer to come out and talk to kids. Not interested.
JM: Wow that’s really too bad.
A: Yeah.
JM: Well so if you take this idea of ecology as science of a place and that you
know that obviously comes over into the management of these different areas,
that it needs to take into account this ecology that is separate for different places.
A: And salvage.
JM: And salvage. That that would obviously, or you think that that would have a
lot to do with the policies that get put into place for those different places. Do you
think that that is standing in the way? That because it’s not a uniform easy thing
to put everywhere that it’s slowing down the process of this science of place
getting into policy or?
A: Well to some extent yes because you know if you look at the Northwest Forest
Plan for example, it had exactly the same management prescription for the
northern end of the range down to San Francisco. And the same policy was
applied to the western Olympics which are very, very wet and the area around
Wenatchee which is very, very dry. And in the last year, the management plan for
spotted owls has been up for amendment again. And the Bush administration put
out a plan probably about gosh I want to say three or four years ago. I was going
to say two years but I think it’s been longer than that. And I didn’t think it was
such a bad plan but the environmental groups just went nuts over it.
JM: Is that the healthy forest initiative or?

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A: No. It was specifically an amendment to the recovery plan for spotted owls
that’s put out by Fish and Wildlife. And so they came down and you know
obviously in an environmental sense it wasn’t a friendly administration. But they
came down and said no this isn’t working you know we’ve got fire losses blah
blah blah. So we’re going to do this. But it made it look and it probably was that
the scientist kind of got shut out and the policy guy said no this is good science.
This is what you’re going to do. So it ended up kind of getting held up. And so
they said okay we’re going to have a science review of this thing. And so they
contracted out this review to a group called The Sustainable Ecosystems Institute
that’s out of Idaho but the office that did it was in Portland. And they are a very
good group. So they got a whole bunch of people together and they had people
like me come in and talk to them. And eventually they developed a new plan. It
was still in the Bush administration. A new plan that took into consideration the
fire issues on the east side. So rather than just having these large blocks around a
nest where you couldn’t do any manipulation at all, they said okay we’ll have a
smaller area where nothing is done and then we can do some of this forest
restoration work so that when fires come in we have a better chance of stopping
them before it blows right through the owl nest area. And so they said for the
western Cascades, this approach isn’t needed. For the eastern Cascades, we think
that this approach is definitely needed. And for the Klamath and you know that
region there wasn’t enough consensus by the group that they could change what
was existing. So they said well we understand their concerns down there but as a
science group we don’t have enough consensus that we can move ahead and
recommend anything very specifically. So that was a very good recognition of the
fire issue being an ecology of place. And so the science community gets it by
getting it to the point where you can apply it on a management scale because of
very a political issue. Because the environmental groups do not want to have the
east side strategy, then if it’s successful then say well okay then we’re going to do
it on the west side. Because you know science says it’s not needed as much on the
west side. But their concern is well if we allow them to start cutting around these
owl nests, then you know the industry is going to get all excited and on these
higher productivity west side sites, then they’re going to be pushing for that. It
makes our life more difficult. And there’s other reasons. I mean there’s just a
hatred between forest industry and some of the environmental community that is
just ingrained. And so to do something that’s right but would make the other guy
look good or help the other guy, is just not within some of their ways that they
think.
JM: Yeah that’s too bad. What was the name of that group again?

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A: Sustainable Ecosystems Institute. And if you just Google that it’ll get you to
their website. And then they have a series of reports and so you can go to their
report key button and the spotted owl one will be on there. Now they actually
have two spotted owl reports that they’ve done. They did one about 2004 and this
most recent one is, it would be 2008 or 2009. And I haven’t seen that one. But
they may be holding it up because it too was somewhat controversial.
JM: And now this, these reports are being used to figure out policies?
A: They go to Fish and Wildlife Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service uses
those as a template to produce a new recovery plan. And then once that recovery
plan goes through, then that provides guidance to the national forests to alter their
forest plan. So it’s a convoluted thing and that’s one of the reasons that the Forest
Service is much better served keeping species off of the endangered species list,
threatened or endangered, because they lose control of the planning.
JM: I see. It switches over to…
A: It switches over. And as long as Fish and Wildlife Service is diddling around
with something they can’t move forward. And so the existing plan, the 1994 plan,
everybody agreed to. And so until they come up with something new that’s in
place, the ’94 plan is the operable plan. So none of these forests within the
Northwest Forest Plan area can finish a forest plan until they know what’s going
on with the spotted owl.
JM: I get it. Okay, okay.
A: And so what the new deal is on spotted owls. And you know in the meantime
other things have come in. Fishers are not yet listed but they go from the Sierra
Nevada all the way up into the Olympics so and on the east side too. So if they go
on the threatened list then that’s a whole new set of issues. Lynx is already there.
So but it affects very few forests. I think the Okanogan, Wenatchee and the
Colville in Washington are the only ones that are affected, maybe the GiffordPinchot. But it’s essentially a north, central and eastern Washington issue and it
doesn’t occur on the west side. Grizzlies are an issue for the Colville. Not yet a
big issue in the North Cascades because the recovery plan said we’re just going to
let a sleeping dog lie here. You know if they get here fine and if they don’t that’s
okay too. So it doesn’t affect the planning process. Wolves are an issue but so far
I guess the Fish and Wildlife Service hasn’t, they’ve taken them off of the
endangered list in the Yellowstone, Northern Rockies areas but they haven’t made
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it an issue in Washington and Oregon yet. So we don’t know what’s going to
happen with wolves yet.
JM: Yeah what’s your opinion of the Northwest Forest Plan as…? Well I guess it
kind of marks a time from being worried about timber production to marking a
time where it was more about biodiversity specifically the owl that it was pretty
clear that they were more concerned with ecosystems at that point. And then also
as you said it was you know it was a plan from the Olympics down to northern
California, kind of putting everything under an umbrella which is in my mind
sounds really good but it’s the first time they’re going to manage this amount of
land you know in terms of the owl or not. But you pointed out a good point about
how the landscape is different in there. What do you feel about that and do you
think that parts of the other country will start adopting these larger scale land… I
guess it’s beyond landscape, eco…?
A: There’s already some in place. In fact there was a book put out about 2000
something like that edited by Norm Johnson out of Oregon State University. The
title was something like Bioregional Planning. And so they talked about the
Northwest Forest Plan, they talked about the interior Columbia Basin plan, which
has a lot of the same issues but also had a lot of big fish issues. And they ended up
spending a lot of money on that one. And there’s some that have been done on the
southwestern plateau region. I’m trying to think of what the, I can get to the title
of that. But you know that’s nine years old now. And it was probably I think the
conference was held in about ’98 so…
JM: Biodiversity Planning?
A: It was called Bioregional, yeah Bioregional Planning. And the idea was well
okay then how do you do this? It doesn’t necessarily all have to be a formal
planning process but it can, by recognizing the links between place A and place B,
that then gets the local people who are doing the planning or context on what they
ought to be doing and how they ought to be kind of sharing things. So the concept
I think is pretty good because you do have a lot of things that are crawling across
the borders of these various areas and they don’t necessarily operate totally
independently of one another. But I think another aspect of this that has become
very much important is that we’re not just looking at what comes out of the forest
anymore but we’re looking at the state of the forest that we leave behind. And I
think that’s a real key difference from when the National Forest Management Act
and the first forest plans came into play until now. Because back then it was nonspatial planning and we have the ability to do spatial planning now. And we’ve
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got the computing power, that we can actually visually simulate landscapes over
time. And if you’re going to sell the public on a plan to say okay here’s what we
want to do on this forest for the next 25 years, I think people would be really
interested to see what the forest looks like 25 years from now. And you have the
capability now that you could just take a computer, an airplane and have yourself
in the cockpit looking out and you could fly over any part of the forest and you
could look and see what’s going on. And there’d be a little bit of randomness
associated with it but if you said okay you know we’re going to for example
we’re going to do this restoration of forestry on 2% a year, you could take your
2%, randomly put it in there and simulate what the canopy cover is going to look
like and how it changes over time. I mean it’s being done already. So it’s possible
to do it. But I don’t think it’s been implemented anywhere yet. But the whole idea
of treating the land so that you sustain this biodiversity and the way you do that is
not by what’s coming off but by what you leave behind. If that’s your main
objective, you still have outputs but the outputs aren’t driving the forest. The
forest is driving the outputs. And that’s the big difference between the way that
they’re looking at it now and the way they did 25 or 30 years ago. And to me it’s
much more sustainable that way. But you still have these big surprises you know
like big fires that come in and with global warming it looks, there’s a new paper
just coming out in Ecological Applications by Littell et al. He’s from UW and
he’s estimating that I think by 2050 we’ll have like two and a half as much
wildfire acreage per year in Washington state than we do now. You know the…
JM: What publication was that?
A: It’s called Ecological Applications. It’s a journal of the Ecological Society of
America. And if you’re in the library here you can get online access and probably
get it without charge. So it would be, it may not even be out yet but it would be
you know some 2009, definitely not 2008. So if it’s out it’s in the very most
recent journal.
JM: Okay. Yeah I know with global warming you know and it’s not just you
know that the temperature is rising and that there’s more fire danger from that but
you know the bark beetle is you know not going to sleep in the winters especially
up in British Columbia and this. That’s almost an exponential problem the way
it’s growing.
A: I’ve seen some color maps of the spread of that thing and it’s really
frightening. You know it just goes, it’s like one of these things that kind of you
know every five seconds it refreshes itself with a new year. So it goes you know
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1996 there’s not much, ’97 not much, ’98 a little bit more, ’99 a little bit more,
2000 more and then all of a sudden 2001 different spots start to link together and
in 2002 and 2003 and it’s just it’s going everywhere.
JM: It’s like a cancer. And the other thing too is that there’s you know the
windstorms and stuff like that are getting more intense and more frequent. So
there’s more blow down. Washington DNR actually they had a big salvage deal
last year of you know the process of getting salvage out from blow down that they
went and did. So its kind of it’s on a few different fronts or whatever.
A: Yeah, yeah. Well that big, I guess it was a January 2007 storm was the one.
And it probably took them about a year to get through the planning process to pull
that stuff out. But we get one of those about every 30 years. So I’m not sold on
the fact that’s a global warming issue. A lot of people have suggested that
hurricane frequencies will increase with global warming. But there, it makes a
little more sense because those are warm season phenomena down in the
Caribbean. You know these kind of cyclonic kind of storms that hit us in the
wintertime. It would seem to me like with global warming that that frequency
might even decline. So again that might be kind of an issue of place. Tornado
frequencies in theory would go up. But it’s not as clear to me what’s going on
with those things but I think we’ve clearly seen a warming, not only this century
but particularly out here in the west in the last 30 years, no doubt about it. And
we’ve had some droughts that seemed to be longer than normal but we also had
droughts at the beginning of the 20th century and then the 1930s era as well. But
it’s a big unknown out there. And but I think you know if you take all of these
things into account, to me expanding the scope of restoration forestry can only be
a good thing. And not every species is going to be a winner in that. If you look at
the kinds of bird species that live in the denser forest on the east side, things like
mountain bluebirds, not mountain bluebirds, mount chickadees, red breasted
nuthatches. When you open up forests they tend to decline. Maybe spotted owls
will. We don’t know. But I think spotted owls have got a bigger problem not only
just fires but it’s got the barred owl which is across its whole range. Fires are only
a big issue maybe across half or two thirds of its range. But the barred owl is just
kicking its ass everywhere it goes. And one of the possible solutions that came out
of this SEI thing was that they go in and shoot barred owls. They hired
government hunters to go in and blast them.
JM: Do you, if you were able to do any sort of overhaul on the system here of
getting policy done, is there anything that you would do? I mean I guess one thing
I’m thinking about is that you know the national policy, the forest plan I guess the
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National Forest Plan of 1976, do you think that the period of time that it takes for
a new forest plan to come about, should that be streamlined? Or are there any
recommendations you would make for incorporating science into policy in a
better way or?
A: We put together a report. And it turns out that the act of 1976 required what
they called a committee of scientists to advise the Forest Service on planning
regulations. And the first committee of scientists that was appointed in 1978 took
several years. I think it was 1982 before they came out with a reg… But they
actually wrote the planning regulations themselves. And one of the things that
they put into the regulations, which came back to kind of bite the Forest Service,
was one of their wildlife recommendations. And what they said was that the
Forest Service shall provide viable populations of every vertebrate across the
entire region their range. And that’s a more stringent criterion than in the
Endangered Species Act, which simply says that the species has to survive. They
don’t say everywhere. They just say in critical habitat (unclear) to survive. So
that’s actually what got the Forest Service in hot water with the spotted owl. It
wasn’t the Endangered Species Act that got them. It was the regulations under the
National Forest Management Act. So not because of that but towards the end of
the Clinton administration they decided that they needed an updated view of how
the National Forest Management Act planning regulations should be done. And so
among other people I was put on the new committee of scientists. And so we
worked on it about two years and we submitted our final draft in oh it must have
been like the summer of 2000 I guess, right at the end of the Clinton
administration. And they took it and they fiddled with it a little bit and by about
Thanksgiving they had it published in the Federal Register. And then it went
through 30 days of review and before Clinton went out of office he signed it into
regulation as the official new planning regulations. And then the first day of the
Bush administration they cancelled it. So 30 days later it was dead in the water.
So all that work went fornaught. But we talked about things like the idea about
you know what’s left behind is as important as what is taken out. So it changed
the focus from output to the state of the ecosystem. It talked about rather than
trying to monitor every vertebrate species what we call focal species ones that we
knew would be telling us more than perhaps some other species were and monitor
those. Take into account the fact that ecological disturbances are part of these
systems and you can’t do the plan without thinking about incorporating those.
Otherwise you get thrown off you know. That in these ecosystems really the only
constant is change and whether you’re doing active management or not
ecosystems change. And it just depends on how many change agents that you
have going at any one time. So you have to take all of these into account. And but
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as it turned out because of the politics of the situation when the conservatives
came in they just they tossed all that out. And they thought no we’re not going to
do that. And they left the planning regs pretty much I guess as they were because
I don’t think anything happened during the Bush administration other than the fact
that they zapped on our regulations. I actually got invited back to Bush’s second
inauguration. I got this letter in the mail. I don’t know why or how I got it. And at
first I thought well this is a joke you know. And but it was a real invitation. Now
why he picked me I don’t know because I’ve never done anything for him. So I
trashed it and said no I’m not going to do that. Another time I got this letter
inviting me to do a fire history workshop on the isle of Crete and at that time I
was going through some job changes and I pulled a couple of really good jokes on
some of my friends. And so I thought this has got to be a joke. And so and it was I
mean I was listed in the brochures as you know this is the guy who’s going to do
the fire history stuff. I thought well they never even contacted me, or asked me if I
was interested. So it’s got to be a joke. So I there was a fax number on there. So I
faxed you know my letter over to Crete and said you know is this a joke or is this
for real? And they said no we’re going to put you up in the original letter it said
we’re going to put you up for ten days on the isle of Crete and we’re paying you
like $1000 dollar honorarium and all your expenses are paid over and back. And
so I you now I could have gone on and toured Europe and you know my wife and
I could have run around. But I was sure it was a joke. And it wasn’t until about a
week before the workshop. At that time I was convinced it was a joke. I finally
get this fax back from the guy. And this had been like two months later I guess
saying no this was a real offer. But you know I’d been out traveling and blah blah
blah so you know I didn’t get around to responding. And I thought you know
what a…

JM: Was it too late for you to go…?
A: It was too late at that point yeah.
JM: Oh that’s too bad.
A: Yeah so I didn’t go. So I can send you, let me send you, we published a little
article that some of the ecologists on the committee of scientists. You know we
had like forest consultants kind of like forest manager guys. We have wildlife
biologist, forest ecologists, social scientists, mostly university related. There were
a few feds in there but none of them, there were no Forest Service people per se
on that committee. And we talked about some of the principles of ecological
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sustainability that ought to come into play here that you know. When you look at
sustainability you’ve got kind of ecological, social and economic, but the social
and economic are essentially dependent upon ecological sustainability. If you
can’t sustain ecologically you’re not going to get the social economic benefits. So
I can send you that as well. Do I have your email?
JM: You should. I mean we’ve exchanged a few emails…
A: Oh that’s right, that’s right, sure. Yeah, yeah okay.
JM: Yeah if you’d like I could send you an email just to make sure it’s not…
A: No I’ve got it, I’ve got it.
JM: Okay.
A: It was kind of a green committee. You know it was during the Clinton
administration. So they set it up as a greener committee than occurred, the 1978
group which I think probably wasn’t as politically oriented as ours was. The
political framework around establishing the committee and who was on it was not
as politically visible back in that period of time. Because everybody thought oh
this National Forest Management Act is really great. It’s going to work in you
know some eggheads from academia who were going to do the planning regs and
they didn’t think too much about it. But by the 1990s it was like oh man you
know it’s like if it’s a republican group or a democratically appointed group you
know they’re going to go very green or very brown. And there was a brief
newspaper article I saw in the it was either The Seattle PI or The Times and they
listed most of the people who were part of the committee. And I knew most of
them. I didn’t know much about who had actually been appointed until I saw the
newspaper article. And they said something about me and it’s like I was the most
industry friendly guy on the whole committee. And I thought, if that’s me, the rest
of these guys must be you know incredibly green because I don’t know where
they got that. But I’ve worked for industry as a consultant and I’ve worked for
environmental groups as a consultant. So but I don’t think that I’ve pigeon holed
myself as a guy who’s just green or just brown. But it’s the way that people
perceive the role of fire and active management. So if they’re kind of against
active management then they perceive me as a brown guy. And if the industry
looks at me they think I’m too green because I like to leave big trees and unless
they know what the value is. We can’t do this without the values. So that’s almost

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every time I talk to them that’s kind of what I get back from those guys. You’re
too brown, you’re too brown. So…
JM: What’s your opinion about under the Northwest Forest Plan they have the
adaptive management areas….
A: Yeah that was a big failure. I wasn’t terribly excited by the idea when I first
saw it but it kind of grew on me. And then it turned out that there were two things
that happened that caused it to kind of fall apart. The first was that because these
were areas where innovative things could be tried, the manager said well this is
really research related and the research arm of the Forest Service ought to be
paying for this. And the research people said no we’re here to help you and we’ll
do these things in these adaptive management areas but this is your game. It’s not
our game. This is national forest administration arm stuff and so you have to fund
it. Well as it turned out neither one of them ended up funding it at the level that it
needed to be done. So that was the first thing that happened with adaptive
management areas. The second thing was that the enviros took them to court and
said no all of these adaptive management areas are within the Northwest Forest
Plan. Therefore all of the constraints of the Northwest Forest Plan have to be
applied in the AMAs just like in any other place on the landscape. Even though I
think in the AMAs there wasn’t any late successional reserve. But in terms of like
surveying for unknown critters and all that sort of stuff and I think all of the
normal environmental review EIS kinds of things had to be in place. So the
planning and implementation became very much more complicated than it was
intended to become by the group that proposed it. And so within let’s see within
about five years they were dead I think. It was just you couldn’t do anything
innovative. So…
JM: And but they’re still designated right, but it’s just that they haven’t been
utilized I guess?
A: Yeah. At one point they all had a single Forest Service coordinator that was
assigned to each of the AMAs. But that is no longer. So they’re just sitting out
there and they’re just like any other piece of the matrix that’s essentially
undesignated for other values. You know it’s not a (unclear) zone; it’s not a late
successional reserve. It’s not wilderness. And it doesn’t have any other special
qualifications associated with it. So it was a good idea I think but the practical
difficulties of it weren’t thought out enough. And things like who’s supposed to
take the lead in terms of funding probably should have been in the Northwest
Forest Plan itself rather than left to be negotiated between the scientists and the
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managers. And it was a last minute thing. It was put in at the very end of process
by I think it was a negotiated thing between Jack Thomas and Jerry Franklin and
they said yeah it would be good to do this. And so I mean where would we do it?
So I think they had about ten of these AMAs I’m not exactly sure.
JM: That sounds about right I think something like that.
A: And the biggest one was down in California. It was the Hayfork adaptive
management area. And you know most of it’s burned up by now. It had two or
three cycles of really big fires. They lost 200,000 acres last year just in Trinity
County alone. And a lot of that was in the Hayfork area. So plus you know
because of that topography down there they have a lot of inversions and the fires
tend to be much spottier than the terrain east of I-5. So a lot of it was mixed
severity burning.
JM: Because of the inversions it kind of lowers the fire activity I guess in that…?
A: Yeah. It keeps the wind speeds down. Smoke keeps the solar radiation from
preheating the fuels as much and so they just kind of sputter around until late in
the afternoon. And then they typically the inversion lifts and there’s enough heat
from the fire that they can pierce through whatever’s left of the inversion and then
they burn pretty well for a few hours and then they drop down and by the next
morning everything’s all sogged in again. So an interesting phenomenon. I
haven’t seen fire act like that anyplace else. And it doesn’t always act like that in
the Klamath’s but under those conditions where inversions are likely it will. Then
you have other situations that are really wind driven, typically you know behind
fronts and stuff like that where you get much more severe burning. But those fires
you know for the most part, people said well you know we’ve got spots on the
landscape where you can look as far as you can in any direction and not see a live
tree. And I said well show me. Well you know it was, they couldn’t get anywhere.
But I sure didn’t see anything like that.
JM: Yeah. For like the Biscuit burned area or?
A: Yeah you know that there was a lot of pretty intense and severe burning of the
Biscuit on the southern end. But a lot of that terrain that burned pretty hot was
serpentine country and so it’s got a pretty sparse tree canopy already and it was
mostly brush that burned. And then the scorch from the brush or the heat from the
brush scorched the crowns of the conifers. So it was pretty well stand replacement
across a lot of that. But in a lot of areas where you had pretty dense canopy cover
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of mature trees that are under burned. And so I started to review this paper that
was matter of fact and they said that only 10% of the area was stand replacement
in terms having most of the you know the 90 to 100% of the canopy scorched.
And about a third of it was 25% or less and the other 40% or 50% was somewhere
in between the low and the high. So interesting mosaic there, kind of similar to
what Carl Skinner and Alan Taylor have shown in the past. The main difference
was that in the Biscuit it didn’t seem like it was as topographically driven as what
Taylor and Skinner have seen further down into the California Klamath’s. So it ‘s
an interesting phenomenon.
JM: The Biscuit became a big deal in terms of salvage logging. There was Bush’s
healthy forest kind of came right at that time or he used that as an example or he
used that as a stage to sort of set that off.
A: I was invited down to show him around. I said I can’t make it. I wasn’t going
to get caught in that one.
JM: Right. And then well you know what’s your opinion of like the Sessions
report that got used to legitimize the amount of salvage they tried to do down
there but it later got cut back…
A: Well the problem was that most of the areas that were severely burned were
you would say okay maybe here salvage is maybe more justified than other areas
were the areas of lowest productivity. And a lot of the serpentine stuff. And it was
also the areas where there was the least volume. So it was a like a lot of stuff that
John does. I’ve worked with him on projects before. It was not well thought out
and it didn’t have a very good sense of place. (note: potentially slanderous, needs
to be excised). I’m sure that in order to get that timber out that you would have
had to cover a tremendous amount of landscape because in many areas you’d
have to be taken out of trees that for example were in areas that only burned for
maybe zero to 25% severity. And you had to get in there and snake out that one
big dead tree or something like that rather than areas that were really stand
replacement burning. But most of the stand replacement burning were in the
lowest productivity sites. There wasn’t that much timber out there. There’s a
study that was done in 2004 by the Forest Service by a guy named David Azuma
and he didn’t make the case as eloquently but if you read the report you can see
where the volume is and it’s all in these very low productivity areas. So it’s an
interesting offset. But you know there was so much kind of bullshit emotion
between the people at Oregon State that were working on this. You know
Sessions group on the one side and the Donato’s group on the other side. And I
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just decided early on to stay out the middle of that one because I didn’t have any
money toward down there. Dave Peterson who’s a Forest Service scientist staged
at the university, he was able to get a little bit of money to work down there. So
he did but I didn’t and I just you know I thought well if I was involved in research
I’d love to do that down there. But I don’t want to be sitting there as a policy
advocate one-way or the other. So both sides wanted me to jump in and be on
their side you know relative to the other. And I told them that I wouldn’t do it. I
said I’ll sit here on the phone and I’ll give you guys advice but I’m not going to
you know end up kind of throwing my weight behind one side or the other.
JM: Yeah well I know that the you know the amount of timber they were
originally going to take got cut back just tremendously right? To about half of… ?
Or was it even more than that?
A: Yeah I think it was cut back more from at least from Sessions because
Sessions had you know basically hey everywhere we can take it we’re going to
take it because he did that as a consulting report for the local counties who rely on
BLM and Forest Service monies in order to, and I’m not exactly sure how that
works because all of that was within the Northwest Forest Plan and I thought that
they had changed the formula after Northwest Forest Plan and they I think what
they are getting now they’re getting an average of the top three years of timber
output between 1980 and 1994 and you take those top three years and average
those and you get 25% of that amount. That’s on the Forest Service. The BLM
you get 35%. So anyway the counties were hot to trot on that. But now that I’m
thinking about it, they should have been able to use that rationale because no
matter whether nothing was cut or every stick of timber on the Biscuit fire was cut
it shouldn’t make any difference because they were under a different funding
formula. But maybe you know maybe they were just dealing with the issue of if
we get this timber off of here it’ll provide dollars to mills and it will provide you
know working dollars for people both in the woods and in the mill industry. So
my guess is it was probably more about that than getting the proportion of the
revenues, the proportion of the stumpage. Because they were off that formula by
then. But yeah I you know I read the Sessions report not very carefully because it
was a big report. Yeah but it was basically you know let’s get everything we can
out of this and it’s not going to they kind of poo-pooed you know any
environmental concerns without I mean to me it was just a little bit on the shoddy
side. But…
JM: Because a lot of that area was roadless, right? They were wanting to cut those
and late successional reserves. I mean it was kind of older growth back in there.
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A: Yeah and I’m not sure if they confined their cutting just to dead trees either.
But…
JM: I looked at some of the timber sales that they kind of rowed up after that and
part of them were contained as hazard tree removals along roadways getting there.
And in fact I think that that was actually a large portion of what actually got taken
in the end.
A: I wouldn’t be surprised because that’s the stuff with the easiest access.
JM: Right, yeah.
A: Fall the tree, it’s right there at the road, stick it on the truck and you’re out of
there.
JM: And then there was civil disobedience going on too up there wasn’t here
wasn’t there with like Earth First! people stopping timber sales?
A: There was a little bit but I think it wasn’t as much as it’s been elsewhere. And I
think one of the issues was that it was you know kind of out in the middle of
nowhere. So it was hard to get people back in there. And they were taken to court
on almost all of them but I think they won every time. I don’t think they had a
single sale that got axed in the end. But it did slow things down. And I think it
took time and energy to fight those lawsuits and so probably without the lawsuits
there would have been more logging. And so the environmental groups thought
well okay we’re losing these but on the other hand we’re slowing these guys
down. And…
JM: Right, because of the decline of economic value on those logs is pretty quick
right?
A: They need to get them out within about three years. And so by 2005 that was
pretty much the last year that they were going to be able to harvest anything. You
know they couldn’t do it then but I mean they could still use the stuff but it really
gets degraded in value. The heartwood is still good but the sapwood generally is
useless by then. And so if they get it within the first two years other than the fact
that it is burned which takes down its value automatically because when it’s
burned like that it tells the log buyer that this was a dead tree. But it doesn’t tell
the log buyer when it died. Now if it’s a fresh tree, green tree, the log buyer can
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see yeah this was a green tree a few days ago or a month ago and it doesn’t have
any char on it. So it’s a full value tree. So it gets scaled down in value if it’s got
char on it at all. And if it’s got a lot of sap wood rot then essentially in cutting it
they’ve got all this waste that they’ve got to cut off before they can get to the
heartwood and unless the log is a pretty good sized log, the proportion of
sapwood to hardwood is high enough that it’s almost not worth doing. And you
know there’s very few mills in Washington or Oregon that can take a log bigger
than about three feet now because there’s been so few of them available. And so
the mills that can take those big old logs were the most inefficient because they
were the oldest mills. And over the last 30 years most of the mills that have been
built are these smaller log mills. So if all they can take is small logs, and small
logs have a higher proportion of sapwood then this issue of delaying harvest
becomes a you know really important because they can’t clean everything up in
the first three years, they might as well just leave it. But I know down in the in
California some of the, there was a big wind throw wind storm event down there
in the mid 90s and they wanted to the Forest Service wanted to get in and say you
know we need to clean some of this stuff up because it’s going to be a big fire
hazard for the remaining trees. And they got a little bit of stuff done but not nearly
as much as they wanted to. And then in 1999, wildfire came into this area and
pretty much blew through it you know it just wasted the rest of the trees. So now
they had this big salvage problem. And so then the environmental community
took them to court on salvage issues. And they were successful enough that the
forest supervisor, I don’t know if it was a he or a her, finally whoever it was threw
up their arms and just said no you know we’re giving up that it’s been too long
and it’s not worth the emotional and financial effort to continue to move this thing
through the courts. So we’re just not going to salvage it. And it had the same
problem. A lot of it was in wilderness which they wouldn’t salvage anyway but a
lot of the rest of it was it wasn’t necessarily in a recognized roadless area but it
was in areas where you didn’t have easy access by conventional yarding to do
anything unless you built more roads, unless you heliocoptered it which again
becomes a pretty expensive…
JM: Yeah real quick yeah. Well that’s you know it’s kind of amazing that these
environmental groups are able to delay these things so effectively in court. I mean
I guess I’m naïve. They must have a lot of money to be able to do that or a lot of
support somehow to be able to file all of this I mean especially if it’s for the
Forest Service. It becomes such a drain in their government agency that they’re
going to…

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A: Yeah and you know I’ve never followed one of those lawsuits very carefully
but my guess is that probably moves through kind of the same story every time.
So once one of these environmental law firms has done four or five of them my
guess is it probably becomes cheaper because they already know okay we’re
going to hit them on fisher habitat and we’re going to hit them on black backed
woodpecker and we’re going to hit them on erosion concerns and they’ve got the
same set of witnesses that will come in and alter their previous report to make it
fit the current situation. So it becomes kind of I mean it’s a definitely it’s a
burgeoning business and some people must make a pretty good living at it. But I
don’t think they have to start from scratch every time.
JM: Right, yeah, I bet you’re right.
A: They have to adapt it to the place. But there’s you know there’s always a lot of
the kind of similar concerns in each one of these. You know erosion and wildlife
issues and they know just how long it takes to put these things together. You see it
takes probably about six months for the Forest Service because they have to start
from scratch, the Forest Service to put the assessment together or the EIS or
whatever it is. And then once they’ve got that together then they have to send it
out for review for a month. And then if the local environmental not the law people
but the let’s say the local Sierra Club says gee you know we need a little bit more
time here maybe you know if we could stretch this out another month, they often
times do stretch that out. And then they you know finally produce their record of
decision. Well then the local Sierra Club says well you know we disagree with
this and we appeal it. Well see that goes through a whole appeal process.
Meanwhile the stuff is out there beginning to decay on the landscape and that
continues on and then if they can’t come to an agreement a stipulated agreement
of some sort and very often they do. So they say okay we’re going to take 20% of
this unit here of this big fire of salvage and how about if we knock it to 15.
Sometimes the local environmental group will say okay if you know if your 15 is
there, there and there. The Forest Service says okay that’s better than nothing.
And so a lot of those end up not getting taken to court but sometimes they do and
by the time they are in court the stuff has been sitting out there probably a year or
a year and a half and so if they can just stretch it out with appeals and stuff like
that. And then the Forest Service has to go through a bidding process. One
they’ve approved it all, then they have to send it out for a bid and they have to get
somebody to bid on it. Well that takes time. So you know it’s a long and, even if
nobody’s upset about it, it’s a long process. And so if the environmental law guys
can put enough road blocks in there, it doesn’t take too many of them before it

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finally get s to the point where it’s not worth salvaging anymore. So it’s an
interesting process and there’s a real art to it.
JM: Well you know I know there’s…
A: And the guys who do this are very smart. I know a couple of them and they’re
very smart and they know what they’re doing because they’ve been doing it for a
long time. Not just salvage but a lot of like regular timber sales or endangered
species issues like you know plans for a recovery plan for something like this for
you know the lynx or fisher or something like that. So they focus primarily on
forest conservation issues. And so they’re pretty skookum, they’re really smart
people. And you know their hearts kind of in the right place. But and they think
they’re doing well but I don’t think all the time that they are.
JM: Well I know that you know there’s they started using the categorical
exclusions for 250 acres and less where you know so the Forest Service was able
to do timber sales less than that without going through the court process I guess is
one way they’re getting around it. And there was just recently a Supreme Court
decision that upheld that. It was a case down in California where an
environmental group was contesting that again I guess and it you know it’s been
going on for some amount of time. I’m not exactly sure how long. But for just
anything less than 250 acres I think and it finally bumped up to the Supreme
Court this year and the Supreme Court upheld the Forest Service side of it.
A: So if you had a let’s say a 10,000 acre fire could you put one 250 acre salvage
in there or could you put in a whole bunch…?
JM: I think that you can put a whole bunch and I think that’s why the
environmental groups are upset about that decision.
A: I wonder if you still have to do an environmental assessment though.
JM: You don’t because it’s a categorical exclusion. At least I’m almost positive
about that.
A: Yeah there’s something like that. I know on the Fisher Fire over by Wenatchee
in 2004 that was one of the study units that we had around soil heating study.
They didn’t salvage a lot of it but the term categorical exclusion came in. But they
still had a plan. They just didn’t have to go through environmental documentation
on it but they had to say okay here’s what we’re going to do and we’re going to
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take you know they were, they did the functional equivalent of an assessment.
They brought their wildlife bios you know. We’re going to leave this many trees
and we’re going to open up the snags here and leave them there. And so it wasn’t
totally without environmental input but it avoided the legal end of that. And so
they were in there the next spring cutting. And so that was pretty rampant, yeah
and that’s how they did that was to go through that exclusion.
JM: Yeah I think it had something to do with you know I think Bush, I’m going to
need to get this all straight but I think that Bush you know enacted something that
allowed this to happen and that it’s been going for a while and it finally made it
up through the…
A: Yeah well categorical exclusions have been around for a while. They weren’t
new but as applied to wildfire salvage it probably was new.
JM: Yeah, because they had, it had to go through a few steps to say that it was
okay to be a CE or whatever you know. I mean it had to somehow document and
fit these criteria and stuff. And I think that Bush opened that up and said, made it
a size issue. Anything under 250 without worrying about these other
considerations. I think…
A: Oh okay. So it would probably apply then to anywhere?
JM: I think so, yeah.
A: Yeah that’s probably how they did that. Okay well that does make sense. And
the way they did it is they probably published it in the Federal Register and the
environmental groups challenged the decision that was proposed in the Federal
Register because they would have had to go through a public comment. And they
said okay we’re going to put this into place and then the environmental groups
sued. And it probably wasn’t a specific case. It was probably the general case in
the Federal Register. That would be my guess.
JM: Yeah well the court case it was a specific timber sale. I believe it was on the
Sequoia forest.
A: Yeah it was probably the McNally Fire. Because that would have occurred in
roughly about that time. It was a big one down there. And I know that there was a
lot of angst on both sides about that because there were Forest Service people in

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there doing research studies and some guy is pretty much at the forefront of all of
these. (potentially slanderous).
JM: I see. All one sided yeah.
A: So he says you know I’ve seen a tree that was 100% scorched and the next
year it came back green. Therefore 100% scorch on all trees means that they’ll all
come back green, that kind of stuff. And so not very objective.
JM: Right. I guess that happens with redwoods where they’ll come back.
A: Yeah redwoods sprout like crazy.
JM: Doug firs don’t right?
A: No, no. The, sometimes ponderosa pines will. It depends on the tree species
and the size of the bud and how much heat actually goes through. So you can
have the heat go through let’s say a really late season fire. It can go through and
could scorch all the needles on a ponderosa but the bud on a ponderosa is about
that big. And so it takes a lot more heat to scorch it. Well if there’s just enough to
scorch the needles but not enough to scorch the bud, next year, even if it’s 100%
scorched it will green out. Now it’s got to be stressed because it doesn’t have a lot
of leaves to photosynthesize with. So it’s going to be put on a narrow ring,
probably a higher risk for insect attack but insects won’t necessarily get it. But
usually over about 80% scorch and they’re history. And for a Doug fir, its bud
isn’t much bigger than the needle. And so if you’ve got a scorched crown usually
all the buds are killed as well. And of course you know on those both ponderosa
pine and Doug fir they’re exposed but with redwood it has dormant buds under
the bark. And so you can have the crown scorched and then as soon as those
branches stop producing hormones that are running down the branch then the bud
says well okay it’s time for me to go. And so the next year it will look like this
huge green telephone pole and then you know 5-10 years later you’ve got a whole
new crown. Pretty amazing. They can put in a new root system if it gets flooded
and buried which is also real unusual for conifers. And yeah it’s an amazing tree,
thick bark; it’s got a good surface fire protection.
JM: Do the Sequoia redwoods are they the same as coast redwoods in that
respect? Do they…?
A: They’ve got thick bark but they normally do not re sprout. So, and you can kill
a coast redwood if you burn it hot enough or at least kill it down to the ground
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because then it will root sprout. But and I’ve seen some trees like that. They’re
you know I don’t know when they got killed but if you drive along 101 you can
see some old charred redwood stems that have been as far as, as long as I’ve been
through that country they’ve been standing there. And so you know they can
survive a lot time as snags. But yeah that’s one of the few species that will do
that. And for most trees you know you get up to 50% and above in scorch and you
begin to at least increase mortality. And I reviewed a paper about three months
ago for a journal, can’t remember where it was and they showed that there was
actually two different kinds of regressional lines that you could put together on
one… We look at mortality on this axis and scorch on this axis and for I can’t
remember whether it was for a variety of species or just different stance but
essentially they showed that up to about 80% mortality here that you had one kind
of a relationship between scorch and mortality and then past that point it really
shot up to 100%, that there was something going on here that this nick point has
some special regression technique that I’d never heard of before but it was kind of
interesting. It was showing that in fact this wasn’t a nice linear process. But you
know you also probably could have modeled it as a curvilinear thing as well and
done it that way. Normally these things are often times a model as a just a logistic
regression. You know it kind of looks like that. But for the scorch thing I imagine
that you wouldn’t get a very good fit because most of these things went pretty
much linear for a while and then linear in a different direction. And of course
that’s another one of the issues in salvage is like how do you know that this tree
that’s been 90% scorched is going to die? You know you’ve gone in and you’ve
gotten your plan approved. You sent your timber markers out there and then the
local environmental group comes in and says hey this isn’t a dead tree. This tree is
alive, at least at the time that it was marked. How do you know it was going to
die? And so one of the things that this Hansen guy and some other guy down there
at UC Davis he works with was doing more work on percentage of crown scorch
and whether the trees died or not. And I can’t, I don’t, at the time that this other
guy whose name I can’t remember was talking to us about it, he didn’t have an
awful lot of data. But basically he was saying okay just because it looks pretty
well totally scorched doesn’t mean it’s dead. And I wouldn’t disagree with that.
But the question is well if 95 times out of 100 it’s going to die then as a candidate
for removal I wouldn’t be all that upset about it as long as they met the standards
for residual snags. What I would say is that that would be a really good one to use
even if it wasn’t dead as a residual snag because if it didn’t die then you’ve got
another live tree there. And if it did die then you know it serves as one of those
residual snags. But I don’t think I’ve ever been approached to deal with the
salvage issue. I’ve been asked a lot of questions about it but nobody’s ever gotten
in touch with me on a lawsuit or some sort of an administrative thing. Most of the
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time I’m asked for advice is for the restoration things, you know the stands that
haven’t already burned.
JM: Well that’s really interesting that thing you brought up earlier about the 20%
of the landscape you know that if you do that within how many number of years
that it really helps with the large fires. I mean that’s very interesting to me and
that landscape of looking at things and what I think would be a really cool thing to
do would be to go out and figure out where those areas should be, you know
where the fire’s going to travel in the river valley or that sort of thing.
A: I’ll send you another paper that Mark Finney of the Missoula lab did. And I
helped him with it but I wasn’t involved in the modeling aspect of it. But there’s a
paper that came up with the 2%...
JM: The 2% per year, yeah.
A: Yeah, and so he shows the difference between like doing nothing 1% per year,
2%, 3%, 4%, 5% per year. So essentially you know in one decade at 5% you’d be
at 50% of your landscape. And what the model showed was that above about 20%
in terms of reduction of wildfire size, you don’t gain all that much. And to me if I
were a manager that’s something I would run with as a policy consideration. I’d
say okay we don’t have all the facts in here but based on what we do know it
looks as if we can fragment that landscape at least in part. You know to me any
reasonable environmentalist would say well 20-30% of this dry forest landscape is
really not all that much. And we know that it’s probably the more of that we do if
a wildfire does burn through the restored area, it’s probably going to leave a lot of
residual trees. And we know that in the areas where we’re not doing this, we’re
losing essentially all the habitat that we’re interested in keeping. So you know
back in the it must have been about 1990 because the spotted owl wars were
going big time and they were all on the west side at that time. Nobody was talking
about the east side. And I thought you know eventually this conversation is going
to move over to the east side. And I’m like on the west side here where it’s so
heated and everybody’s so upset. You know on the east side it’s going to be a big
win-win situation because by doing all of this restoration of forestry the enviros
are going to be happy because we’re going to restore the more natural fire regime
and we’ll keep the big trees and the industry will be happy. They’re not going to
get all the big trees they want but there’s going to be stuff coming off the
landscape. It’s a win-win situation and it turned out to be just the opposite. It was
just the same as on the west side. It wasn’t any better. Now it’s a little bit better
now. But it depends on where you are. In the Sierra forests, it really hasn’t
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changed a bit. In eastern Oregon there are some people who are willing to come
around and they kind of hang out with people who are a little bit less flexible but I
think are slowly coming around. And in the eastern Washington Cascades, the
Forest Service people over there have done a lot of outreach and they’re pretty
likable guys, the local guys over there. And I think they brought a lot of the local
environmental community along with them. (potentially slanderous)
JM: And that’s the John Muir…
(Jothan, the stuff directly below here is OK by me)
A: John Muir Institute, yeah. And so I know he was involved in that Sequoia
National Forest fire. I don’t know if he was one of the people involved in the
lawsuit but I wouldn’t be surprised. And so he’s been essentially pushing against
a lot of things that the Forest Service wants to do there. It’s been, I don’t know
whether it’s him or whether it’s other people but they’ve been pretty effective I
think at just kind of keeping much from happening. But you know that’s always
the way it’s been in California. When I was a federal employee down there, the
federal agencies really didn’t talk to one another at all. It’s like you walk into the
Forest Service office and it’s like oh you’re a Park Service guy? You know, get
your life together dude. You know it’d be something like that. And I worked; I
was the primary ecologist that worked on the expansion of Redwood National
Park. So I did a lot of commuting between San Francisco and the Redwoods of
San Francisco and Washington DC. And people at the Forest Service people in
Washington DC would almost spit on you as you walked down the hall. I mean it
was just really bad. The local guys in Region 5 weren’t as friendly as they were
up in Region 6, Oregon and Washington, but they were okay guys to work with.
And the closer you got to the national forest level the better it was. But as you
moved up to the regional office and back to DC… I remember once I was going
over, I went all the way back to get some data to use for the Secretary of the
Interior. At that point I was working directly with Cecil Anders (?) on a day-byday basis. And so I talked with the guys in San Francisco and they said yeah this
guy in DC has it. Give him a call when you get back there and he’ll have it for
you. So I called him up and he says well I’ve got it but I’m not going to give it to
you. And I said well I said you know I hate to tell you buddy but I said I’m
working directly here for Cecil Andrus and I said you might know that he’s the
Secretary of the Interior. So I said if I have to hang up the phone here and make a
call, I said you’re going to get a call in about ten minutes and then you’ll be
calling me back at this number. Let me give it to you. And you’ll invite me over
to pick it up. And he says you’re so full of shit your hair stinks. And so he hangs
up the phone. And so I make my call and sit there by the phone. About five
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minutes later the phone rings he says, “I’ve got your data.” But I mean it was just
that kind of uncooperativeness. And so when I left California and moved up to
Washington I became more of a fire guy again. And I started getting calls from
Forest Service people. Come on down and talk to us, you know. We’re in the
regional office here in Portland. We’d love to talk to you. We’ve got this little
workshop going on. Would you come down and give us a talk? And stuff like this
and I’m going, the first couple of times it’s like okay, so they’re out here to
sandbag me somehow. You know I was really untrusting. And it just wasn’t that
way at all. And that’s the way it’s always been. I mean anybody who has worked
in Washington and Oregon in the federal agencies and then has gone down to
California has found that California is just a much more difficult political animal
to work with not only within the federal agencies but the environmental groups
are more rampant, the industry is more rampant whereas I had a very difficult
time ever talking with industrial people down there where up in Oregon and
Washington they were like real people you know. And I didn’t always agree with
them on things but there was just there was more of a conversation going on
between the sides. You know when the industry and the enviros got into it over
spotted owls up in Oregon and Washington that wasn’t very pretty to watch but I
wasn’t involved directly in any of that but I know it was pretty painful.
JM: Yeah sure. Well geez that’s very interesting. You know I don’t think I really
have, I don’t think I have any other questions.
A: Well you can get in touch with me over email if you do.
JM: Yeah that would be great. I was just going to ask you that.
A: Or if you need any refs you know that you said oh I heard about this but I’m
not exactly sure what it is, I might be able to think about what it is.
JM: Well I really appreciate that. That’s great and I really appreciate you
spending this time with me and answering…
A: Yeah well it wasn’t really much out of my way so because I had just made
arrangements to come down here on this Friday and then I got your email saying
geez you know could we meet sometime in May. And I thought perfect you know.
And then it almost cancelled out and came back again so I’m glad it did because
I’m taking off for California in another week or so. I’m going to be down there
until through Memorial Day goofing off.

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JM: Nice. Good for you. Yeah I’m actually, I have to head down to California…
(rustling). These things are great I just got one and…
(End of recording.)

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Appendix H
This interview of Rich Fairbank was conducted in Medford Oregon on May 16,
2009. It has been modified by the interviewee although its original content and
meaning remain intact. Mr. Fairbanks was employed by the Forest service for 32
years and was the ID. Team leader for the Biscuit Fire Recovery Project. He is
currently employed by the Wilderness Society to advocate for science-based fire
management.
JM (Jothan Mcgaughey): Anything that you say I’ll ask your permission by name
or whatever. Then otherwise I may use what you say but not put a name to it.
RF (Rich Fairbanks): That’s fine. Either way is fine. Glad to hear that you’re
going to, yeah, especially if it’s something particularly caustic because now I
work for a nice moderate environmental group. And when the Republicans are in
they keep cranking out wilderness bills and they do that by being real polite. So
and then we need more wilderness. I mean you worked in the woods. You know
what a mess they’ve been making out there and so…
JM: Yeah, yeah. Okay well, Rich Fairbanks, my topic for this thesis is how
ecological or scientific knowledge gets incorporated into policies and I’m looking
at it through salvage logging specifically. And so I guess I know that you’ve had
some experience with the Biscuit Fire and that I think that I may actually have a
section of my paper on the Biscuit Fire. I’m looking forward to talking to Dan
Donato and I would like to talk to Sessions as well. That’s to get you know to get
a balance…
RF:
JM: I won’t use that either.
RF: Yeah, have you looked at Warner Creek at all?
JM: I’ve come across it in the literature. I mean I’ve read everything from
newspaper accounts. A woman in Eugene wrote a whole book. I can’t remember
her name but it just went through the whole timber wars.
RF: Yeah, I know that book. Yeah, yeah.

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JM: And I’ve come across Warner Creek in other places but I think they even
made a movie about it that I’ve looked at too.
(JM and RF ordering food at a restaurant. Both are talking to the waitress.)
RF: Anyway, just a thought. Tim Ingalsbee, who is now the director of
Firefighters United for Safety, Ecology and Ethics was the whole spearhead of
that. And they had a whole alternative proposal to the salvage that we were doing.
I was in the Forest Service still obviously. In fact I was a division supervisor on
the fire itself and after they mopped it up they said, “Do you want to be on the ID
team?” And sure, okay. But it was a real turning point because the
environmentalists (?) were arguing that there was really no science that said
salvage was a good idea. And everybody in the Forest Service and in the industry
said, “What? We always salvage. Are you crazy?” ‘The forest cannot recover
without salvage.’ ‘White people got here just in time.’ You know, there was a
whole mindset there you know. I mean these are forests that have been
regenerating after high severity fires for, 20-30 million years. But these guys were
saying, “No it won’t come back unless we help it,” you know. It’s a very
interesting situation. Anyway, anyway go ahead. Okay so…
JM: Well yeah. I definitely plan to get a hold of that person too. He’s in Eugene. I
might try to get a hold of him tomorrow but Eugene is…
RF: Do you want his phone number?
JM: Um, sure, yeah.
RF: Oh no, don’t call him… I’m still getting the hang of modern technology
(chuckles).
JM: Well that’s the way to go.
RF: I don’t want to call him. I just want his number. Let’s see, it should be, here
we go. Yeah it’s, sorry, area code 541-338-7671.
JM: Okay and like is this his personal telephone or something like that?
RF: It’s FUSEE, Firefighters United for Safety and Ecology. He teaches at the
University of Oregon. Or, maybe he’s now at LCC. But anyway he teaches. He’s
got a Ph.D. in Sociology but he was a firefighter for many years and he started
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this group because a lot of firefighters are looking at the policies and saying this is
horse shit, time for a change. Anyway, okay. So you’re exploring that, how
science gets incorporated into things through the lens of salvage. Okay.
JM: Well, (eating food) excuse me, maybe we could start off with the giving a
little history of yourself and working for the Forest Service and then the group
that needs started I take it or that you’re involved with.
RF: You mean FSEE, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics? No,
no. I was around near the beginning of that. There was another guy, Jeff Debonis
(?) who started it. And frankly I was on the board for several years, so was my
wife, but we’re not really involved with them anymore. They got into kind of a
libertarian bag. And I’m more of a commie, frankly, yeah. Well, social democrat
anyway. You know I just, that business about all government is bad, I don’t think
so.
JM: Well I mean we all enjoy the roads of you know…
RF: Exactly, yeah.
JM: Yeah so maybe if you could give a little history of yourself and if that
organization pertains to this discussion maybe a little bit about that.
RF: You got it. Okay. I worked 32 years for the Forest Service. The first 20 I
worked in fire. I worked 12 years on BD crews and hotshot crews, basically fire
crews and another eight years as a division supervisor and other kinds of
miscellaneous overhead on fires. And after 20 years of doing that I started
branching out into planning. I got certified as a silviculturist and did more
planning but by the late 80s there were so many fires that I was just getting
sucked back into fire as a fire planner, either pre fire, fire management plans that
kind of thing, or post fire, either salvage or post-burn typing, going out and
assessing how many of the trees were dead and how many were alive and how
many were you know likely to die and so forth. And in the early 90s, late 80s, we
kind of came into open revolt in the Forest Service and I was one of the founding
uncles of FSEE, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics just briefly
involved with that for two or three years. And my last job for the Forest Service, I
was ID team leader for the Biscuit Fire recovery project, which was a half a
million-acre fire here in Southern Oregon that was very controversial. The EIS
was prepared in an election year. There was a great deal of disagreement about
how much volume there was that could be salvaged. The ID team recommended
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100 million board feet. A college professor named John Sessions said there was
2.5 billion board feet out there.
JM: It went from a million to a billion.
RF: No, from 100 million to 2.5 billion. It has too many zeros. So it was an
assertion by the industry lead by John Sessions who of course was paid by
Douglas County, which was basically getting paid by the mills to come down
here. He was not invited. He came down and said that there was this much
salvage out there available. Of course when you look at the tables in the back of
his report you found out he was counting dead tan oak. There’s very little market
for live tan oak, none for dead tan oak. What was he talking about? Dead tan oak
was part of the his 2.5 billion board feet. It was nonsense. But anyway, I don’t
want to get off on a tangent there. So it was really a very bogus process. At one
point the, I said to the forest supervisor, who is the deciding authority, I said,
“Scott, you don’t really believe there’s 2.5 billion out there do you?” He said,
“Yeah but you’re going to act like there is.” So that was the attitude. It was that
Republican idea of creating your own reality. Anyway, I had taken the job
because the Forest Service promised me that the day it went to the printer, the EIS
that I was the leader preparing, the day it went to the printer they would surplus
me and since I would be over 50 at that time and have 32 years in, I would get a
pension. So okay I’ll do it under those conditions and those conditions only
because I don’t want to work for you people anymore. And they said, “Yeah we
don’t want you working here.” Anyway, so I left the Forest Service, started a
contracting business, a consulting business, Fairbanks Forest Management,
actually I started it before I left. Got that all set up. Had a great time for about a
year and a half. I did a fire plan for a tribal government in the southwest for one
of the drainages on their beautiful reservation. And I did a bunch of plots around
here for Jackson and Josephine Counties they’re called firemon plots. They
assess, it’s a way of measuring the flammability of the vegetation. I had a good
time. It was fun. But anyway then this conservation group offered me a job. They
said all we want you to do is advocate for science based fire management. Well I
can’t think of anything more interesting and I’ve been doing that ever since. So
there’s my biography.
JM: Nice. Well maybe if I can ask you about you’re leading the EIS team for that
Biscuit Fire. And so your group had originally said that there’s a 100 million
board feet that could be salvaged and then…

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RF: Right, with a minimum of pain and a minimum of disruption of natural
ecosystems and watershed values and so forth. You can get about 100 million.
JM: And was that like along, because I know a large part of that area was most of
what you were saying in roaded (?) areas? All of it, I see.
RF: Yes because we said look, number one you’re kicking a bee’s nest in terms of
politics. Of course they wanted to kick a bee’s nest. It’s an election year and that’s
how the Republicans have been winning elections lately, getting everybody
stirred up about the gays are going to steal your property rights or whatever. You
know what I mean. I mean they’ve got these crazy tropes that they’re running.
And one of them is that not salvage logging is wasting jobs, wasting wood and the
environmentalists are locking everything up and so forth. So where were we…
JM: On the assessment at 100 million board feet…
RF: Oh yeah, well anyway, okay. So we’re saying number one you’re kicking a
bee’s nest politically. Number two, salvage wood in a place like that you’ve got to
use helicopters. You don’t have time to build roads. You have a helicopter log it;
it’s often not going to pay. The rule of thumb when I was doing the planning for
helicopter logging was if it’s more than a mile and a half distance and it isn’t
downhill, you’re probably not going to make money. Or you should really doublecheck your numbers because you’re probably not going to make money. And this
was like way out there where they were going to fly these logs. It was totally
bogus.
(Talking to the waitress.)
RF: So basically it was this insanely optimistic prediction that Sessions was
making and the Forest Service went along with it. The forest supervisor, his final
decision was to cut 380 million board feet or something like that. And then of
course you could then say he was being real moderate because Sessions had set
him up by saying there was 2.5 billion out there, right? So it was supposed to
make him look moderate. Of course they never found that much wood, the first
time presale came to a meeting that’s the people who actually go out and look for
the wood. They were like laughing the project leader out of the office. They were
saying, where do you think all this wood is? It wasn’t there. Okay what they
wound up getting was about 90 million board feet that they actually cut which
was very close to what the ID team tried to tell them in the first place. So it was a
very interesting exercise in magical realism.
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JM: Now did they, did the actual areas that got logged, did that change from what
the original…?
RF: Yes. They logged a sale in Fiddler’s Gulch, which is in a Roadless Area. The
reason they did that was to again, it was an election year, a poke in the eye to the
environmental community because the Republicans felt they could turn out the
base. And there was all this sort of semi-crooked… John Sessions was in the
forest engineering department of OSU. The helicopter logging was the main way
they yarded this wood out. The widow of the founder of the helicopter company
down here gave the OSU’s forestry engineering department a 1 million dollar gift
to endow a chair in forest engineering. Oh you knew all of this…
JM: I’ve heard that but it’s good to hear it from you.
RF: It’s true, yep. It’s true. And I was…
JM: And that was right after his report came out.
RF: So in addition to the money he got from Douglas County, taxpayers’ money,
Douglas County, because Douglas County and the two, the main mills in Douglas
County are indistinguishable. You can’t tell the county commissioners from the
executives of the timber company there. They’re one and the same. They gave
him money.
JM: Well so that’s really kind of the case of the scientific knowledge basically got
logged or disregarded.
RF: Right because it’s very interesting that Shatford and Hibbs I think had just
been published. Very important paper. You need to get a hold of Shatford and
Hibbs.
JM: How do you spell that?
RF: Shatford and Hibbs, Northern California study on forest regeneration after
fire. And they studied this dry mixed conifer and mixed evergreen, same type as
we’ve got on this side of the line, 16 fires over 30 years, something like that, a
mass of data. And what they found was, wait for it, after a forest fire, trees grow
back. And they do it all by themselves, without any help from people.
Fascinating. Who knew, you know? I mean it just blows me away. And then of
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course the Donato paper said the same thing. Myself and Rich Nawa (?) of the
Siskiyou Project, when they criticize Donato’s paper because they said he used a
lot of involved complicated statistics. Rich Nawa who’s a fish biologist for the
Siskiyou Project and I went down and did what’s called a survival exam which is
a standard Forest Service way of counting seedlings on a clear cut or a burn or
whatever. It just means counting the seedlings that have survived the first growing
season, you know that kind of thing, and it’s incredibly simple descriptive
statistics that nobody can refute and say yeah we did transects every so many feet,
we took a 100 acre plot, we counted you know the following way. It’s like
nobody could refute it on the basis that it was too complicated. And also it’s a
standard Forest Service way of doing things. But we found thousands of tree
seedlings out there and they were doug fir and sugar pine, all the commercial
species. So it was just like you guys totally made this up. Well there’s a quote in
the Sessions report that says it will be decades if not centuries before conifers
return to the Biscuit burn which is total nonsense but it was accepted conventional
wisdom that this was a scientific truth. So it was interesting.
JM: I’ve heard recently that there’s some controversy over when places are going
to get salvaged that you know they’re usually supposed to take dead trees but
some live trees get taken. But there seems to be controversy over what they’re
calling dead because in some cases they’re saying well these trees will die. And
so they end up taking them.
RF: There’s a number of units in the Warner Creek (?) burn where they used a
method developed on the Shady Beach fire to assess whether a tree was going to
die or not. And according to that scheme we marked a bunch of trees that were
going to die. In fact the silviculturists said they’re dead they just don’t know it.
Because of litigation none of those trees was ever cut. Most of them are still alive
and throwing out seed that’s well adapted to that microclimate and so forth. And
it was nonsense. I worked with another one in the late 90s over in the Malheur
country. It was a scheme for predicting mortality. And I would say that one was
not much better than a coin flip. Nobody has figured this out yet. You can use
crown (?) scorch (?), depth of char on the bole and blah blah and yakity yak and
species and height and diameter but nobody has made that work. Some of them
die and some of them don’t. Maybe they’re depressed and they die. I don’t know
but still… Yeah, anyway, so yeah there is some controversy about that because
really what they ought to do is take the ones that are dead. All the needles are red.
Okay, take it. Or the needles are burnt off you know.

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JM: Pretty clear. Well let’s see. You talked about the Fiddler sale on that one and
that that was on the Biscuit burn (?) area, must have been old growth or at least
late succession. A lot of this area has not been logged, correct? Because it’s so
inaccessible…
RF: Right. Huge trees back there. And still a lot of them lived too. It’s a
wonderful place if you get a chance to go. It’s awesome. Some of the under burns
out there are just beautiful. They under burned in the silver fire and then when
Biscuit come through they under burned again. And now they’re like cathedrals,
you know, with hardly any underbrush and stuff. Well anyway, go ahead.
JM: Yeah, now did the Fiddler, did it get logged eventually?
RF: Yes.
JM: Okay. And was that, so I think I’ve heard about this one too. Was it a spotted
owl habitat out there?
RF: Oh yes. Yeah, a lot of it was. I don’t know how many owls there were at
Fiddler’s Gulch or anything but yeah it was great big trees in parts of it. Parts of it
were just scattered old growth but I’m pretty sure there’s at least one pair in there.
JM: And now did it get salvaged though a categorical exclusion clause or?
RF: The first 20 million board feet, almost as soon as we formed the team, we did
categorical exclusion (?) for all the roadside salvage and that amounted to 20
million board feet. That was good wood in a sense that it was right near the road
so you don’t have to drag the stuff or make the taxpayer pay for a helicopter ride.
It was cut right away so it was still fresh. It wasn’t rotten. And in that roadside
area there’s already kind of a compromised ecosystem. So I mean if you’re going
to salvage there’s worse things you could do. So in the pantheon of dumb moves I
would say that one wasn’t too dumb. Personally I’d just as soon they left it all
alone but you know that’s not an option a lot of times. So yeah.
(Talking to the waitress.)
JM: So I guess I’m curious as to how there is an okay to salvage, I mean, how it
got okayed and I guess a lot of it had to do with the Sessions report, that there
were, got into that business of that reserved land from the spotted owl but there’s
a couple pairs right there.
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RF: Well (unclear) (chewing food) a hot fire like that and it pretty much toast in
much of the Fiddler’s Gulch. The punch of the (unclear) long was because the
owls are gone. They don’t seem to like a hot fire. Just look around. If it’s an under
burn, the trees are still alive. The owls will hunt in the snag patch.. They can
forage but they don’t seem to nest in completely burned timber.
JM: So that was the argument that they were gone.
RF: When I left the team There were 38 pairs of owls unaccounted for on that
fire. That fire killed a lot of critters.
JM: So it actually it killed them or…
RF: Last I heard they think most of them flew away to the second growth on the
west side but then they may have died because they dont do well in second
growth. Great horned owl predation, various things happened to them but they
don’t do well in second growth. But remember I’m not a biologist. (long pause)
JM: We had a really amazing thunderstorm. I just came up from visiting my mom
in Fresno, California. It was a really hot day yesterday and then as it cooled that
allowed the clouds to get the height to them. And they put out a storm warning
and there was quarter inch to half inch hail coming down and strong 60 mile an
hour winds and everything. It was really quite something, quite a lightening show.
RF: They’re awesome yeah. Yeah I’ve been on a fire when those thunderhead
winds hit it. Pretty impressive. Aint nature grand? Anyway yeah so they got 90
million board feet of salvage. They got to enter one of the smaller roadless (?)
areas of the ones that are in play. Partial victory for them I guess.
JM: I feel like I should give you a chance to eat instead of keep asking you
questions.
RF: I’ll take a bite and ask a question. I’ll take a bite and answer a question. But
no, anyway, we’re cool.
JM: Okay. Well you know I’ve heard different, timber amounts of how much old
growth is left in I guess the Pacific Northwest.
RF: Yep.

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JM: What’s your opinion on that? What are the historical standards I guess…
RF: I don’t know in terms of purely in terms of acres but I can tell you that when I
was a kid there was a hell of a lot more, number one. Number two, just because I
travel around the west coast a lot, I think the two biggest things that humans have
done to these forests is we dramatically reduced the average diameter of the trees
by converting so much land to plantations and high grading in the south where
you can’t really clear cut you know in California and places like that, east of
Fresno, places like that in the Sierra by high grading out all the big trees and
leaving the busted up mistletoe, dog hair small trees or whatever. Really very
destructive practices. And then the second thing is we put out all the fires. So not
only do we take the big trees but we put out all the fires that might thin out the
little trees. So now we’ve got massive quantities of little skinny trees in a whole
lot of places. And in some places that’s perfectly natural but in a hell of a lot of
places it’s a big problem. So once again timber, the big business gets subsidy and
taxpayers get left holding the mine tailings or the overgrazed land or the cut over
flammable plantations.
JM: I was talking to somebody recently and they were putting out the figure of
5% and but I think what I heard more people say is about like 10% is left, yeah.
RF: …Is left. Yeah it’s an interesting set of discussions and I hope someday they
do quantify it.
JM: Well I know that people have been trying to but you know that it’s that whole
thing with knowing really what the actual historic conditions were and there is
just no way to really know that. And but…
RF: A couple of the local papers, local scientific papers of local, somebody did
one for the coast range for example. They kind of figured out how much they
think old growth there was of old growth in the coast range before European
settlement. They did a pretty good job. I don’t remember his name right now. I’m
sorry. They had to make some assumptions but they were good assumptions.
JM: Well yeah I think they figure they come in with a certain amount of error on
either side or whatever. I was wondering if we could talk about advocacy a little
bit of what it means to you and important aspects of it. I was talking to a guy the
other day with John Muir Institute I think it’s called? And he kind of broke it
down into three subjects of what’s his goals I guess. He was saying education,

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research and then litigation. You know, bringing up lawsuits. Would you mind
talking a little bit about the advocacy, what you know about it?
RF: Well the conservation group I work for, they basically have said what we
want is science based fire management. And they’d be willing to go along with
what I propose as long as it’s solid science based fire management. And so I think
that’s probably the first order of business for me as an advocate is that I have the
facts on my side. And so that’s kind of how I perceive it.
JM: So does that mean if you don’t have all the facts then you do research to get
those facts?
RF: And I will often hold off on recommending, if there’s uncertainty about the
science I will a lot of times say look I don’t think we should appeal this project or
whatever. It seems like we are so stretched in terms of capacity, even a big quoteunquote “wealthy” organization like the Sierra Club, you’d be amazed how thin
we are spread when it comes to you know it’s usually me versus like 20 or 30
silviculturists and fire people and stuff like that you know what I mean. They’re
preparing these plans and then it’s just me trying to knock holes in their plan or
get them to change it or whatever. I’m not saying poor pitiful us. I’m just saying,
we’ve got to be really careful of how to pick our battles.
JM: So does that, this is kind of I think what you’re saying but a lot depends on
the importance of you not bringing frivolous lawsuits but having an outstanding
reputation and not (unclear) that as…
RF: Yes. It is very important to the organization I work for that I never lose my
temper or make outrageous claims or even make claims that are not you know
footnoted, literally you know.
JM: So you can’t be calling people Fascists and…

JM: Are there any circumstances under which salvage can be done where it will
do some ecological good maybe on eastside forest where there’s a build up of…?
RF: I think the post fire salvage on private land is very reasonable. Those people
have had economic disasters. You know it wouldn’t matter how fast they cut it.
It’s lost probably 40% of its value. Start with the private individual. They can

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salvage enough to plant, which is usually all they’re going to get. More power to
them.
JM: Is there any benefit to planting when you get natural regeneration?
RF: Okay, there are a few situations where, I’ll give you an example. Sugar pine,
there’s these big sugar pines in the Biscuit, most of which now are dead because
of the fire. A lot of it died before the fire from white pine blister rust. White pine
blister rust was brought in by Europeans. We know exactly when it was brought
to the west coast, 1918, Port of Vancouver, British Columbia, on nursery stock
(?). It’s killed millions of white pines. So do we as a society have an obligation to
go into a drainage where we know there’s a bunch of rust-killed white pine before
the fire and therefore there weren’t very many seed trees that survived the fire as
there normally would. You know, some of them would always make it through
the fire. Do we have a moral obligation to go out there and plant some blister rust
resistant sugar pines? Because we now have rust resistant sugar pines. We’ve bred
them. One in about 10,000 were naturally resistant. We got seed from that, pollen
from this other one that was naturally resistant got them together, grew out the
you know, et cetera. So I guess I’m saying why not use that science to try to
restore what we know was a drainage with a lot of sugar pine in it.
Port Orford cedar disease, yeah. (unclear) There’s a lot of that in the Biscuit. And
I think we should replant it. Then again I think if we have resistant stock and
they’re just developing resistant stock, we’d plant it because we sure logged the
snot out of that species. Even before the disease came in it was really good for
boat making and pencils or arrow shafts and stuff like that. So it commanded a
high price. Port Orford cedar got logged a lot, yeah.. So anyway I guess I’m just
saying, yeah. Yeah, I think there’s times when you could plant… And sometimes
there will be a place like, a lot of these fires now are burning much hotter than
they ever would before White people got here and did all this damage that we’ve
been talking about. Well, so if the whole drainage blows out and there’s not one
live tree in the whole drainage, should we go in there and stick in a few trees?
Now, planting the whole drainage, 12 by 12 doug fir to an identical genetic
seedling, that is not such a good idea. Even on private land I think that’s a
mistake.
JM: In light of climate change and things like that. So to kind of get back to that
question about if there’s a good time to salvage logs anywhere, it seemed like that
that was, the salvage part of it would be for the economic gain. Does it help to
salvage to be able to re-plant I guess? You know…

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RF: (unclear) (eating food) I’ll tell you a good story. I took microclimatology
when I was in grad school and when I was out in this clear cut on the Warner (?)
burn after we pretty much mopped it up. We were just walking around trying to
figure out what the hell are we going to do with this now. Me and this
silviculturist, were walking through this clear cut. It’s like 85 degrees even though
it’s like late October. Yeah, it was a warm fall. And we come into a stand of dead
old growth, four foot, five foot diameter, not gigantic but big old growth fir.
Within about 100 feet, Bailey says to me, “It’s like 10 degrees cooler.” It hit me
like a stack of bricks. Those dead black douglas firs were absorbing short wave
radiation all day, short waves that would have hit the ground, turned to sensible
heat and made us as hot as we were in the clear cut, 85 degrees. And probably 120
at the soil surface where the seedlings are or where they would be in the following
years. So they absorb that short wave all day but because they’re black they
would absorb a lot of it. But because they’re huge pieces of wood, they have this
huge thermal capacity. That’s why they put wooden handles on frying pans right?
It never heats up, right. So they’d absorb this all day and then at night they’d reradiate long wave radiation. So not only, so I’m talking to the silviculturist. He
plants trees for a living or he tells other people which trees to plant and where. He
says, “Well wait a minute. If it’s making it cooler for a seedling, at night it’s
making it warmer and spring time frost kill, which is very common, won’t be as
much of a problem.” And I’m saying, and we’re standing there on the hillside
going, do we even need to replant this? I mean is this, are these conditions like
sort of ideal nursery conditions for these seedlings that are going to come in? And
you’ve got to remember this was a late fall fire, so a lot of these trees that aren’t
black and dead, their cones still opened up and the seeds, because that’s a little
mechanical mechanism that opens the cone. It doesn’t matter if the tree’s alive or
dead. And so there were seeds all over the place. And indeed you go up there
now, go up to Warner Creek and it’s so thick you can’t walk through it with doug
fir. So anyway, so, what the hell was the point of that story? Oh yeah, planting.
Just leave it alone. It’ll come back in most, 99% of the cases it will come back.
And if we can trust the Forest Service to go out and identify the 1% where it was
just it burned too hot, too big of an area with no seed trees, then I’d say yeah, well
let’s do it, but we can’t trust that. So the sort of the default answer is no, don’t
salvage. And then let them prove that there’s, that’s my approach.
JM: I see. In your opinion, why do you think that they can’t be trusted? Does it
have to do with like the KV funds? And I understand there’s another sort of
account where from the timber sales that the money doesn’t go to the general
fund, it goes straight into the forest so….

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RF: Right, right. There’s perverse incentives for the Forest Service to salvage.
And you’re absolutely right. KV and SSF, Salvage Sale Fund, are funds they
don’t have to give to the general treasury. And there’s another one called the BD
fund, which is for brush disposal (unclear), flash (?) clean up.
JM: So there’s three all together?
RF: Yes, but I think an even stronger thing is the culture, the culture of both the
Forest Service and the land grant colleges that support forestry schools. (Eating
food) But that culture has become captured in the sense that political scientists use
the term cap track (?). You’ve heard of the captured thesis, right?
JM: Remind me.
RF: Any of the regulatory agencies over time tend to get captured by the people
they are supposed to regulate. And the more money involved, the faster it usually
happens. So something like timber where it’s old growth federal timber is worth a
lot of money. And you can get it cheap under certain circumstances. So the
regulators got captured very, very quickly.
JM: Now would, what’s that guy’s name, is it Mike Rey who was appointed by
Bush as the under secretary of (unclear)?
RF: Mark Rey.
JM: Mark Rey. He was a timber lobbyist. So that’s kind of what you’re talking
about?
RF: Right. The fact that they put him in as under secretary sent a loud message to
everybody who was still, I was still working for the Forest Service. I was like,
okay, you know, if you don’t like timber sales, shut up (unclear). But the fact that,
I don’t know. Have you seen the emails between the dean of the school of forestry
and John Sessions?
JM: No I haven’t. Is that public record somewhere?
RF: Oh yeah. And they embarrassed the hell out of the dean of the forestry
school. Hal Salwasser, email, the state senator’s name was Charlie Ringo who
requested the emails because Salwasser didn’t realize they were public record
because he’d been a Forest Service employee and he was not familiar with
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Oregon’s open records law. So you’ll see some embarrassing, some juicy material
in those emails. Yeah they thought they were at war with the environmentalists
and that it was okay to lie to the public basically.
JM: Well that’s very interesting. So would you, now, I guess those funds, that
pertains to both salvage and regular timber sales? Or I guess the salvage fund
is…?
RF: The salvage bill fund, I think you could collect, on a burn you can collect
money for a salvage sale point. I can’t remember if you can also use KV in
meeting (?) (unclear). I can’t remember. You’ll have to look that up, sorry.
JM: Okay, that’s fine. Do you know what, if like you know, what the percentages
of money that out of you know $100, how much that goes to those funds out of
that? Is it different depending on what forest it might be in?
RF: I’m pretty sure.
JM: And then how much they save?
RF: Yes, (unclear). You’re going to have to, at scootle (?) KV, start digging, yeah.
Or you may find somebody who can tell you. If I think of it I’ll… If I think of a
name, I’ll let you know.
JM: Well I think the KV fund itself is 25% of the sales I think. Does that sound
too (unclear)…?
RF: I’m sorry.
JM: I was reading about that recently and I thought that number sticks in my…
RF: No. Sorry, that’s information I no longer have. That brain cell has died.
JM: Okay, well good. That’s probably a good thing.
RF: Yeah it is, it is.
JM: So now you’re talking about the culture of the Forest Service and how the
people that they’re supposed to be regulating and getting the positions of power
through appointment and the public thing. Would you say...?
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RF: Very powerful mechanism. Very powerful cultural mechanism. You will not
get promoted unless you have a certain level of loyalty to the organization
regardless of how hard you work or how intelligent you are or how many
problems you solve. Loyalty is incredibly important to the agency.
JM: I see. And that’s based mostly on silviculture, culture? I mean that’s…
RF: Timber and engineering is kind of the dominant paradigm here, yeah.
JM: Even though, isn’t it about 50% of the Forest Service budget going towards
fire at this point? So is fire becoming dominant too or is it just people in
silviculture work for fire and sellers?
RF: It’ll be interesting to see what happens with that because that’s fairly recent
for fire to be such a preponderant part of the thing. And the fire shop is really;
they’re not interdisciplinary at all. The mentality is, our main job is to fight fire. If
there’s time and money in the off-season we treat fuels, but that’s what we do.
And we don’t like NEPA, we don’t like to do any of that stuff and we really wish
the hydrologist would go away, you know that kind of approach. A lot of the fire
shop is like that. Now there’s some very progressive people in fire and fuels .
Some people are really trying to turn the corner and keep the basic… The basic
fact is at its most primitive breakdown, the most reductionist you can get, of an
ecosystem, it’s composed of structure and function. And out on the west coast,
function is fire, you know? Different kinds of fire, different intensities, different
periodicities, but its fire. And there’s a little bit of fluvial, you know a little bit of
flood action, some weather related things, bugs, blah blah. The basic disturbance
agent is fire. So if you want the structure, ultimately you ought to have the
function. And a lot of fire people realize that and they realize that trying to put
every one of them out is incredibly stupid. But it benefits the timber industry in
many ways so we’re probably going to keep doing it for a while. Any benefits to
developers and a host of other malefactors of great wealth, as Roosevelt used to
say.
JM: No, no. That’s great, that’s great. Would you say that all of what we’ve just
been talking about points to saying that salvage is an institutionalized practice?
RF: Oh yes, yes it is.
(Talking to the waitress.)
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RF: Oh yes, institutionalized, yes, definitely. And it’s really interesting to me that
in a very short space of time, Shatford and Hibbs, Donato and two or three other
papers have just undercut the scientific rationale for salvage. It is no longer there.
So if you hear about salvage, you say all right, if it’s private land, hey it’s your
land, go ahead, you know. If it’s public land, if it’s near a road, whatever, they say
oh yeah it’ll make money. Okay, well maybe. But as far as, oh you have to do it
for the little baby trees or oh, it’s going to re-burn… It’s bunk.
JM: So you said not only for the re-planting but also for the re-burn…?
RF: Yes, yeah. We saw that on the Biscuit Fire burned through the footprint of the
Silver Fire. The Silver Fire was about 90,000 acres, something like that, 13 years
prior to the Biscuit. You’re familiar, okay. The amount of difficulty, resistance to
control and the rate of spread was the same in the salvage and the unsalvaged.
You know, they salvaged Silver, right, because they didn’t salvage the little
skinny ones. They didn’t salvage hardwoods. So there was enough snag still,
snags are always a pain in the ass for firefighters, so that pain in the ass was still
there. The stuff grew back real thick and dense like it always does whether it’s
salvage or not salvage. It doesn’t matter if it’s doug fir sapling or a Manzanita
bush, its still going to burn you know when the re-burn comes. And it’s just
nonsense, it’s just nonsense that you can demonstrate, in some situation you can
demonstrate a slight increase in severity. If you got a lot of rotten logs like if it’s
30 years later when it burns and everything’s really rotten and funky, fine. It can
cook around the roots of the trees and maybe kill a few more of them but it’s like
nyeh… It’s just…its pseudo-science chasing profit you know. If we justify the
profit, figure out some pseudo-science, hire some bastard (?) who is willing to
rent out his Ph.D. I’m sorry, I’m a little cynical about this but I’ve watched this go
on for too long. Anyway, go ahead.
JM: Well I was just going to say some of what I’ve been reading is they’re
starting to really look at the logs, the legacies, after the snags fall down, is like
these water reservoirs. They’re really sucking up the water. And then so in terms
of like changing climate or whatever that they may you know become even more
important as time goes on…
RF: Oh yeah. Well listen, I used to, because I was on hand crews for so many
years, I cut up a lot of rotten logs. You know, when you go to the fire line you’ve
got to get down to mineral soil, right? And the networks of roots in those big
rotten logs, especially toward the bottom It’s like in August when everything else
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is dry as a bone, that root can still suck a little bit of water out of that big
log…You know, we call them 1000 hour fuels okay because it takes 1000 hours
for that thing to dry to two thirds of the way to balance moisture content with the
atmosphere. So they’re very slow sponges, very slow to dry out in the spring, very
slow to get all saturated in the fall. They’re kind of; they’re like a break in those
changes. So any little salamander that needs a little more water than some other
critter, he’s going to hang out under that log. So yeah, they’re vital, of course,
yeah.
JM: And I mean that just kind of goes along with what you were talking about
when you were walking through the Warner Burn I think you said where when
they provide shade and they soak up the heat and let it out. So it’s almost like I
guess a lot of well at least in arid areas I know that it’s considered a full
functioning ecosystem when it has that blanket effect of the canopy that will keep
the heat out during the day but will hold the heat in when it’s there at night.
RF: Right, right. Yeah, yeah, that’s the thing about forests, even dead forests, is
they act as this damping, they dampen extremes. And any critter that you know
and habitat by definition almost, if you can find a place that doesn’t have a lot of
extremes, you don’t have to expend a lot of calories if you’re an elk staying cool
or keeping warm or whatever, you know. Yeah, it’s, I don’t know, it’s like forests,
I’ve been fascinated with forests most of my life. When I see people coming at it
with this very reductionist mechanistic view, you know oh we’ll control the inputs
and we’ll control the outputs thereby. You know, we’ll cut it, we’ll plant it with
our trees, our genetics and our fertilizer, and everything will be cool. Well it
hasn’t worked. In Western Washington and Western Oregon where it’s really,
really mild, low elevation, lots of rainfall, yeah. That European kind of style of
forestry does kind of work if you like plantations. But it doesn’t work in Southern
Oregon. You know we’ve got big square brush fields and a lot of these clear cuts
are big square brush fields. It hasn’t been all that effective.
JM: Could you talk about the economics of it at all? I mean it seems that, well I
know with the Biscuit Fire that EcoNorthwest put out a report that talked about
the Forest Service that really underestimating its overhead cost and also
overestimating the price they were getting. I mean there’s a glut on the market
when there’s that much wood. And plus they were talking about prices that were I
think green wood prices as opposed to burnt prices.
RF: What’s fascinating is Eco Northwest is sort of you know I mean they’re kind
of a hired gun for the environment. But you know they’re perceived that way,
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perhaps unfairly, I don’t know. But I called a guy at the experiment station, the
Forest Service experiment station in Atlanta, Georgia, happened to know the guy,
had read his stuff, liked it. And I said hey I’ve got a really interesting problem for
you, you know. Listen to this. I’m on the ID team for Biscuit and I want to know,
you know, if we dump this much wood on the market… Remember they were
talking 2 billion board feet. They had us prepare an alternative that had a billion
board feeding (?). It was ridiculous. But the point is, this guy did an analysis and
it said the more you cut the more the taxpayer is going to lose. And our own
economist on the team at the well in the back of the, go look into the deep bowels
of the appendices, you’ll see what he said, basically, the more you cut the more
the taxpayer loses. This is a bad sale from the economic standpoint. He hastened
to point out that there were other values to consider like planting trees back you
know. Where was I? Yeah, the economics of Biscuit were ridiculous. The whole
thing was ridiculous. They probably only got George Bush a few thousand votes
and that was the whole, all the pain and suffering, all the division and bitterness in
the community, all the threats to people’s.
JM: Who’s Scott Conroy?
RF: The forest supervisor. And I was his team leader. We shouldn’t have had to
go through that. We should have had a cordial you know, relationship … So it
was just a lot of bitterness and divisiveness for a few thousand extra Republican
votes. I’m pretty sure that’s why they went through all that.
JM: Right. Maybe from a Pinko perspective, could you talk about what, how the
powers of be are making money from it? Because obviously there’s some sort of
cause that it gets done. I mean maybe it’s just all cultural and misguidedness
but…
RF: Right, okay. Obviously, John Sessions gets money, right? He gets a chair
endowed at the university. He gets $25,000 grand or whatever it was for a paper
that he probably whipped out in about four days. I mean this was not a scholarly
work. The Sessions Report, you read it and you tell me what you think.
JM: Yeah, I have looked at it, yeah.
RF: It’s just not well footnoted or anything. And the helicopter company, which
does the yarding, gets the wood from the woods to the truck. They make money
because they bid you know they bid a certain amount and the mill that wants the
wood knows that helicopter logging’s the most expensive way to get a log to the
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truck. So the helicopter company makes money. The timber company makes
money because they bid so low and what they’ll a lot of times, well several of the
sales on Biscuit didn’t sell the first time. They had to re-advertise them at a lower
rate. And they got the rate so low that the companies who would bid on it, at
which point you can feel the hand reaching into your wallet because the taxpayers
paid for most of the planting and to re-habit the roads and a lot of stuff because it
was deficit sales, yeah. But the first 20 million of that roadside stuff, that made
money. That was a profitable venture that 20 million. The rest of it, the other 80
million, 70 million, whatever it was, I doubt if it made money. I doubt if it made
money. I can’t prove it though because of the way they do their accounting is
byzantine. But overall I think even most partisans will admit that most of the
Forest Service’s timber sale program loses money and salvage is the place where
it almost always loses money. Just, stuff’s lost so much of its value the day of the
fire and it loses so much of its value.
JM: Do you have anything that you think would make this process better for
incorporating the ecological knowledge into policy? I mean it seems like with
NEPA and everything it’s a fairly, it sounds like a good system you know but
obviously somehow it gets shorted out.
RF: I’ll tell you, I really do think that we already kind of have a mechanism in
place to keep the Forest Service honest. And it’s the courts, and it’s the nonprofits. I’ll tell you a joke. Everywhere I went in the forests was when I was in
fire. There’s some variation on this joke. The employees tell each other this joke.
What’s the difference between the Forest Service and the Boy Scouts? The Boy
Scouts have adult supervision. The non-profits and the courts provide adult
supervision to the Forest Service. When they get too insane, we step in. And we
weren’t able to stop with Biscuit because of the momentum of that 2004 election
and because of a variety of factors. Just the horror of a half a million acres. I mean
there was, a lot of people used to go out there. A lot of the, it threatened a couple
of towns, you know. Everybody was kind of ewww, freaked out, you know? So
we were unable to stop that one but we’ve stopped a hell of a lot of others man. In
fact, we stopped people from automatically salvaging. That in itself is I think a
huge step forward. Even on private land there’s people going, gee, you know,
maybe I should just take a few of these and leave the rest. You know, maybe it’s
good for the land. My little 20 acres, I think if I had a fire on it I’d think twice
about salvaging. I do. And I’m not opposed I mean, my land’s been cut over
twice. You know, it’s not virgin old growth.
JM: Do you know much about that National Forest Management Act?
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RF: A little bit.
JM: And like what’s, I mean I think that right now they’re trying to revise it a
certain way. Do you know anything about what’s happening with it?
RF: Yes, okay. Briefly, the 1982 regulations for the National Forest
Management… you got it?
JM: Yep, still I just wanted to check. It’s still going.
RF: Oh now recording, okay. The National Forest Management Act, all the forest
plans in the western United States were built under the 1982 regulations stamp at
the end of if it may (?) (unclear). Those regulations basically dictated allocation
and scheduling. They said you’re going to allocate every acre of land. You’re
going to zone the National Forest. This over here is a special interest area. This
over here is the timber emphasis (unclear). This over here is a wild and scenic
river. All that has to be zoned once and for all and then you revise it from time to
time. Well all the revisions are coming out now. And in 2008, the Bush
administration came out with the 2008 regs that are vague, that are aspirational.
The “strive to endeavor” language as we used to call it when I was a union rep.
And that’s exactly what the language of the 2008 regs is. It is aspirational. It
makes no promises, which means you could drive a log truck through the plans.
So that’s basically what’s going on in a nutshell. Now everybody and their brother
is litigating that. And so the 2008 regs may get overturned, in which case they’d
go back to the ’82 regs, which is not necessarily great because they’re 30 years
old and I’d like to see new ones that are halfway progressive and that recognize
global warming and all this wonderful science that’s come out. I mean that’s one
thing man. Forest biology has come a long way; fire ecology has come light years
in my career. They really started throwing money at some of these problems,
partly because we’ve got so many subdivisions out in the woods but they really
did. And we’re starting to really solve some problems. We’re starting to answer
some questions. But the ’08 regs are Bush administration nonsense. That’s what
they are.
JM: Yeah. And he had tried in 2004 but those were struck down.
RF: I don’t know the case law. I’m only now just now engaging on the new regs. I
just went to a meeting on Friday at the regional forester’s office in Sacramento
about this. So I’m just getting up to speed. Because I worked on the old
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generation of forest plans and they had their problems but they did they zoned the
forests and they told everybody that you can’t log here. Maybe you can log over
here.
JM: Yeah. But the new ones are doing away with that zoning…
RF: They’re trying.
JM: …and also the EIS’s and…
RF: Well yeah, they said, right, right. They’ve decided not to, that you don’t need
an Environmental Impact Statement to go along with the forest plan because it’s
aspirational. And at the time to do EIS’s and EA’s is at the project level of
individual timber sales, and individual hills project, whatever.
JM: What’s the problem with that as opposed to…?
RF: Well for one thing, the capacity of the environmental groups, we can’t fight
300 projects a year in Region 5 rather than 11 forest plans. It’s just way more
heavy lifting than we can do, number one. Number two, the National Forest
Management Act was a response to a bunch of abuses, major clear cutting right
above Missoula, Montana, cut into some really bad stuff (unclear). If you let them
off their leash, they’ll find some new way to screw up. They or the (unclear) and
those forest plans are adult supervision. This is, you know, this is a renegade
agency we’re talking about here. Forest Service does not play by the rules. They
really don’t. They’ve got their own constituency. When they decide something’s
going to hurt their constituency they’re willing to get pulled into court and yelled
at by a judge and stuff. You know…
JM: Well you know I read the old law of the Northwest, not the Northwest, the
management act and within there, there is just specific language that excludes
salvage from a lot of those rules that you know were put in place.
RF: Oh yeah, yeah, because it was assumed that salvage was always a good thing,
right? Yeah, yeah it’s amazing how long… But you know it’s myths, myths
persist.
JM: How long do you think they will persist for? I mean I guess that’s a hard
question that has to do with the forest stuff.

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RF: They, even with the market totally in the toilet now, you can’t sell a two by
four to save your life, they still were thinking about these Northern California
fires. They did notices of intent and so forth. Now we’ve talked them out of most
of them but there’s still some that they’re planning to do. So yeah salvage is alive
and sort of well. Sort of well, I mean, you can’t, when you look at Shatford and
Hibbs you’ll see what I mean. There’s like the hey we’ve got to replant excuse is
gone. It really is. And there’s places where yeah you’re right, you know. You
killed out all the seed stocks with your dumbass management practices. So yeah
we’ve got a plan. Again, I don’t know why we should reward them but that’s
another (unclear). Anyway, but essentially between Shatford and Hibbs and
Donato, that excuse is gone. I think eventually we’re going to prove that most of
the time salvage doesn’t do shit to subsequent fire behavior. It does not help that
much. Unless you’ve got everything you can take it (?), which is really bad for the
residual health of the forest soils and everything else, so…
JM: Right. Well didn’t you have an aid (?) stamp as well?
RF: Right, and there’s an old firefighter’s saying, surface fires beget surface fires,
crown fires beget crown fires. So if you have a crown fire and it comes back to all
this really uniform doug fir, you’re really likely to get a crown fire the next time
there’s a fire. If you have a surface fire and it just poofing around and kills some
trees but leaves some big trees growing shade and all that, the next fire’s going to
poof around and kill a few trees and leave some. Yeah, yeah, just rule of thumb. It
doesn’t always work that way but it’s a good rule of thumb.
JM: On the, you know there’s this new Supreme Court judge being put up there
by Obama…
RF: Yeah, Sotomayor.
JM: Yeah, and old Rush Limbaugh right away is playing that clip of her saying
that policy is made in the appeal courts. And it doesn’t play the whole thing where
she says she doesn’t think that’s right or whatever. I think that’s what she said.
But the point is, is that she as a supreme court justice is going there and she’s
saying this to a law school, that that’s what actually happens. Do you agree with
that?
RF: To some extent, and I don’t see anything wrong with it. I think policy is
interpreted by the courts and I think that the, very often Congress writes a law,
NEPA certainly is an example, that does too good of a job of whatever they
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thought they were doing. And then somebody’s ox get gored, some congressional
cronies ox gets gored and they say, oh, we need to streamline NEPA or we need
to suspend NEPA for this one situation. And it’s horseshit, NEPA works fine and
the courts are interpreting it as it was written. I’ve read it and I’ve been
thoroughly familiar with that law and the regs that implement it and it’s a good
logical law. That’s what’s pissing me off about NEPA is you got to look at what
you’re doing and let everybody else look at what you’re doing and if what you’re
doing is stupid, the courts are going to say, hey, we think you’re stupid. Where’s
the problem here, you know? I mean that’s the thing. It’s a solution looking for a
problem. This whole idea that the courts shouldn’t interpret the law, Alito and
Scalia mean these guys are total stone hypocrites. Scalia has been an activist
judge, follow his career and these guys, well all these judges are bad. Well then
get them out of there. Most of them are right-wingers. I’m sorry, I… Yeah, yeah.
JM: That’s fine. Have you got to get going?
RF: No, I’ll tell you what. Let me just, I’m going to just listen to a recording
while we’re talking here.
JM: I think we’re getting pretty close though.
RF: It may not have rained (?). In which case I can sit here and drink beer all
night if you want. (long pause – noisy restaurant background). Go ahead.
JM: The next thing I guess I wanted to ask you about is what’s your opinion of
public education and within that kind of a perception that people have of the
issues and also the third thing is the importance of images in getting messages
across? Like, with the spotted owl, you know, there’s this cute and fuzzy creature.
Would it, you know, would it have been the same if it was a slug or something?
RF: Yeah, I agree with the idea that a lot of the environmental stuff is marketing.
You know, the polar bear was a stroke of genius. You know what I mean, to put
that up as the icon for global warming.
JM: That got shot down though.
RF: Yeah, but whoever thought of it, it was brilliant from the point of view of
getting the public to think about, you know. Your SUV is killing this cute little
bear cub. He’ll drown and his mommy too. It was brilliant. I’ve got no problem

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with that. You know, I mean that’s marketing. Everybody does that. You know,
look at Limbaugh and those guys.
JM: Well it almost seems like that if that wasn’t a strategy then the
environmentalists would just be beaten back with, we’d have nothing to stand on.
RF: Yeah, and when, okay. When it comes down to an actual project or an actual
policy, if it’s not science then I’m not interested. So that whole marketing thing at
some point you’ve got to say wait a minute, you know. Don’t be telling the public
a bunch of lies. It’s okay to market, it’s okay to say look at this cute polar bear but
only if he’s really going to drown. You can’t cross that line. In fact, the
organizations that do have died, you know what I mean. The ones that just started
making it up, they don’t last. That’s my opinion.
JM: Well now I think I already asked you about the CE’s categorical exclusions.
And then I just wanted to get your opinion of civil disobedience as a mechanism
and then I am going to try to talk to Tim…
RF: Yeah he’s really a good one to talk to about it, if he’s willing to talk because
he really got burned. But I think it’s a totally legitimate tool. I think it’s mostly
useful when they’ve slammed the door to the courts. One of the reasons why
whenever they say you know let’s suspend NEPA for this one situation or
condition or something like that I say, all you’re going to do is cause civil
disobedience. You know you may have a bunch of young people getting locked
up. It’s a stupid waste of everybody’s time and money. Let them take you to
court. You know, the judge will throw all that out as stupid. But I mean those are
the two choices, right?
JM: We talked a little bit about Ken Van B over the phone and he was telling me
this story of when, and I’m not sure where it was, you may know, but he had got
this assignment to watch a gate at an area where there was some civil
disobedience going on. And there were some people, like they were all right on
this side of the gate. He was at the gate. They’re not supposed to go past it. So
he’s out there and I think you could probably picture this. Ken Van B sitting there
at a fire, right, staying warm because they were cold. Well these people come up
and he starts talking to them. Ken’s a good story teller and is able to talk with
anybody. Yeah so he gets them going and they’re sitting there hedging and getting
warm and stuff. And then (laughing) he goes, well this old growth wood sure
burns good (laughing).

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RF: (Laughing).
JM: Oh I love Ken Van B. He was something else.
RF: Oh yeah, yeah. I guess I’ve got to tell you one quick story.
JM: I’d love any stories on Van B.

JM: Yeah he was the type three I.C. on the Bear Gulch 2 second fire that was…
RF: Bear Gulch burned again?
JM: It did, yeah. Just two years ago.
RF: (laughing) That’s funny. He was on the first one.
JM: Yes he was and he remembers that rock coming down.
RF: Oh yeah, the big as a garbage can (?) (unclear), yeah, yeah. Well it probably
now is as big as a house, right? Retelling it.
JM: Yeah. So yeah, he was, I was liking up to be able to sort of tail him around
for a few days. And that fire burned quite a bit from them.
RF: Yeah, Bear Gulch is pretty steep ground.
JM: Well, I kind of lost my train of thought in regards to this but I think you’ve
covered everything I want to…
RF: You can call me. You can call me.
JM: Okay.
RF: It’s quit raining.
JM: All right sounds good. Thank you very much.
RF: No problem. I wish you luck. It’s an interesting subject.

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JM: I think so… (End of recording.)

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Appendix I
This interview was conducted in Olympia Washington on May 6, 2011. The
interviewee will remain anonymous. The interviewee took part in direct action to
stop the Warner Creek salvage sales.
D. A: I may repeat stuff that I wrote, you know.
JM (Jothan McGaughey): Okay, yeah that’s fine. So just as a quick introduction.
This is for Jothan McGaughey’s thesis, which is looking at how ecological
knowledge gets incorporated into policies and specifically looking at under the
lens of salvage logging. And I’m interviewing R. B., how do you say your last
name?
R. B: Just R. B.
JM: Just R. B., okay, who is involved with Earth First and will remain anonymous
I think for the thesis. And it’s, we’re conducting the interview at the Evergreen
Library on the May 6, 2011. Well thanks for doing this, R. B.
R. B: Absolutely.
JM: I guess if we could start off with how you got involved with civil
disobedience and kind of what brought you to decide that this was an acceptable
course of action and probably you know a little introduction about what group
you joined and what issues you guys were using civil disobedience for.
R. B: I was, I grew up overseas and came back for high school in the states and
kind of saw, I was kind of affronted by just the system in the United States and
going you know starting off in high school learning about civics and government
and kind of opened my eyes to how corporations really do control a lot of the
policies you know and resource extraction in the country. When I first, throughout
high school I just I got involved in letter writing campaigns, petitions, some little
peaceful protests. I lived near Washington DC.
JM: And this was mostly concerning forestry issues? Or was it kind of broader
than that?

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R. B: It was broad. I was in Washington DC so there was everything involved. I
mean I went to everything from anti-Ku Klux Klan rallies to Green Peace you
know assemblies to human rights actions.
JM: Well it sounds like you had a good high school education you know. Was
your, let me ask you this real quick, was your family an influence in your
activism? Did you come from…?
R. B: They were very I guess socially responsible. They were both, my father was
an anthropologist and my mom was an archaeologist. So we, I was born in the
Middle East and lived in Africa for about seven years. And in the Middle East in
particular my father worked with the Palestinians and I remember I was a small
kid just being told about the importance of equal rights, respect for all ethnic
groups and how you know some are you know at a loss of their rights. So I guess
that was kind of imprinted in me. So I was pretty involved with Amnesty
International and Green Peace as my environmental interest groups. Fast-forward
to college and moving out to the west coast here, I saw firsthand like
environmental issues like in the clear cuts, the dams and the salmon issue. And I
think my first action out here was with the longshoreman’s union and Earth First!
It was a kind of combined action against Alcoa aluminum company and we shut
down the Port of Tacoma for a couple of weeks, had some people living in the
cranes you know in kind of hammocks, bringing up food to them, taking down
waste, bringing up food. And I was very impressed by the organization and the
effectiveness that that had in opening up the public’s eyes to the issues. I then got
more interested in forest issues here and there was a suspicious timber sale that
went through after a suspicious fire in the auspices of salvage logging. And…
JM: And that was Warner Creek or…?
R. B: That was Warner Creek, yeah. God it was a while ago. I was involved with
several forest actions. It was down in Oregon so that was the main one. Although
I went down there several other times to kind of smaller issues but Warner Creek
was the main thing. And yeah I’ve, back to your question, I guess in the course of
my activism I’ve worked in several states and been arrested in all of them. Other
than here in the Northwest, it was an issue on the Navaho Nation in northeast
Arizona where Peabody Coal Company has been in the process of relocating
Navahos to get to the coal through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And I worked on
that in the late 90s, ’97 to 2000. While I was there our group was well organized
and well outfitted. So we got called to other actions in the southwest, one of them
being in San Luis, Colorado, where these wealthy brothers who had a logging
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company bought up all the timber surrounding this fertile valley that has been, I
believe it was one of the oldest, where the oldest continuously farmed areas in the
United States. Ancestral Mexicans or Central American Indians had farmed it all
this time and they had a very complex network of canals and irrigation. The
brothers started the logging and clearly went against basic regulations of not
logging timber that’s above a certain grade, you know.
JM: These are NEPA considerations.
R. B: Yeah. So silt just washed down immediately and clogged up irrigation
canals. Somehow that community contacted us and…
JM: Was that Earth First?
R. B: No that was through RAN, Rainforest Action Network. So we got called
there and it was very well organized whereby the Ruckus Society specializes in
training activists or peaceful civil disobedience, put us through a three day
workshop forming affinity groups working on different skills like media,
documentation during the events, jail supporter…
JM: Was that training for the Ruckus Society, was that sort of necessary for that
group before they would let people partake? Was it kind of like training?
R. B: It was because we were all coming from different areas. I mean the nature
of these groups is that if you know the individual well is very well represented. So
I guess if somebody didn’t want to they didn’t have to but then they wouldn’t be
in an affinity group and they probably wouldn’t be given you know some of the
expensive lockdown gear and so forth. No one’s forced into doing anything. I
guess they’re more encouraged to. So that event went off very well. I did media
support with a video camera that I had logged hundreds of hours on in Arizona
and actually my footage of being arrested wrongfully was seen by the DA and we
were all let out of jail but while we were in this really old school jail where you
could you know hang your arms outside of the bars and talk to people on the
street, the locals were very supportive and brought us levos (?) francheras (?) in
the morning, enchiladas…
JM: Handed them through the bars huh.
R. B: The jailers were very supportive and thankful we were there so…

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JM: Let me ask you something about an issue you just brought up, the video
camera and you know its use as evidence I guess. And one of the things I’m
interested in is like the power of images, like it’s one thing to write a letter and
describe something. What’s your feeling about images as their weight as opposed
to just words and what not?
R. B: Huge, huge. And it’s on two fronts, images of the issue that you’re focusing
on presented to the public say of clear cuts and the damage from that or the
activists you know locked you know locked down to the logging gate with
kryptonite locks around their necks. On the other hand, the power of images also
comes in our defense, as activists in protecting you know our rights because
where well-organized civil disobedient action is legal or it’s peaceful. And all too
often you’re charged with erroneous charges so that’s also the power of the image
is to protect…
JM: Yeah I’ve heard stories of you know people down in Oregon out of Eugene
doing civil disobedience and like getting pepper strayed you know directly
sprayed in their eyes and what not. And when it comes to court issues you know
the authorities, their word is weighted more because they’re official agents you
know of the law or whatever as opposed to public citizens. So their word has a
greater weight if it comes down to word against word that it’s usually the officials
that will win that battle in court. But I can definitely see that images and
documenting it in that way would provide solid proof.
R. B: In what is known by us as the anti-insurgency authority being police forces
that are geared to putting down protests, direct action, have noted that. And the
media documentation person is often the first one to be arrested and the camera
confiscated as well as all too often the medics that are designated to care for
pepper spray incidences and so forth. So they recognize the power of image too.
Twice my footage actually has let me go, absolved me in this.
JM: Is there any, are these groups would you say, since the authorities are kind of
changing their tactics and going for that documentation first off before other
action is taken as it sounds like what you’re saying, are the groups trying to you
know have multiple cameras there? Or you know so that in case the main one
goes that there’s still able to, yeah…
R. B: Exactly. We have remote, you want a remote one from the window of a
bathroom, an office building above or something that can catch the whole scene
and you want that to be still and constant and catching everything. And then
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divide up who is you know who’s covering which main action component. Like in
Arizona we had, there were three women locked down to the axles of the logging
trucks in town you know and with and big cardboard signs were put on the truck
windows saying you have a human locked to your axle and this is why they’re
there. We will not disrupt your equipment. This is a protest. So you have people
covering different elements in the action.
JM: Right. Yeah I you know I know that somebody has died in logging operations
because a tree went ahead and was cut even though they were aware that
somebody was there or whatever.
R. B: Yep, and on the same note though, some you know innocent workers in the
lumber industry have died too through the early stages of forest actions such as
spiking trees to screw up log mills you know and that’s just as wrong.
JM: Sure. And that stopped fairly quickly I think.
R. B: It did.
JM: After there was a big uproar.
R. B: Yeah, as soon as they realized the consequences of that, they thought they
were just going to screw up you know the saw blades, the band saws both.
JM: Well, maybe you covered this a little bit but just to make sure let me ask you
again. What brought you personally to decide that civil disobedience is an
acceptable course of action? I mean I guess you talked about your education.
R. B: Yeah, but then as I started, as I moved out here and started taking courses in
environmental policy…
JM: And that was [Redacted]?
T: [Redacted], I learned of the real institutionalized obstacles for like true
democracy in resource use and so forth whereas the power of the dollar is you
know is king. So it transformed from kind of a naïve thinking that just writing a
letter would do it to realizing that sometimes you need to bring the issue to the
public’s greater attention. And then let the public voice really what they feel
because in a way it’s mainly doing that it’s letting the public simply know about
issues that are otherwise hidden and let them express how they feel.
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JM: To the elected representatives.
R. B: Yeah. So I saw how that, how effective it is. You know you see one, do one
action, which took part in closing down a Shell gas station, and that night it was
on the you know 6 o’clock news on NBC. And that really made it clear to me how
effective it is.
JM: How powerful that is. Let me ask you, you just mentioned the
institutionalized structure like that writing letters weren’t effective within that
structure that’s been erected around economics I believe is what you’re getting at.
R. B: It does have a really important part. You know I mean that’s what I think
makes, drives a lot of change. But the masses need to be aware of the issue before
they write the letter you know. They’re not going to express their opinions as a
constituent to their representative unless they know about the issue. So it’s more
so initiating that legal means.
JM: I got you. In terms of like timeframes, if we’re talking about climate change
and maybe the institutionalized structure of the oil and gas industry and like you
know there’s been this cutoff of 350 parts per billion of carbon in the atmosphere
and we’re over that at the moment I believe and so that’s why they’re wanting big
reductions. But there’s a real time issue involved right, like the longer, if the
change is gradual like if the writing of letters happens and people understand that
it has to happen but yet you know it’s like turning a big boat around or whatever.
R. B: That’s a leading question but I totally agree (laughs).
JM: Yeah it is a leading question.
R. B: I totally agree. That’s a good point that you should mention though because
we’re running out of time.
JM: Yeah and so does that how should I say, raise the necessity of civil
disobedience to bring, it does…
R. B: Oh incredibly. Because I mean the reason why activists put themselves out
there, their safety, their security, their time and their resources is because they feel
that oftentimes they feel the pain of the injury, of the larger injury that’s being

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done. And it’s also for a matter of self-preservation, of survival for their family.
You know and yeah, we’re at the 11th hour, 59th minute.
JM: Do you think that that sort of same issue about time and stuff was a part of
the Earth First civil disobedience that you were a part of down in Oregon I guess
at Warner Creek and maybe others? Could you speak about that? Was there a
feeling about you know the old growth? There’s only so much left and the time is
now to stop that.
R. B: That’s it. I mean once you take down a tree you can’t replant it. And
majestic old growth were being taken down very rapidly at that time. There were
political incentives and lax regulations to allow them to do so. And in terms of the
suspicious salvage operation, the damage had already been done but unless people
were made aware of that in that it may happen again you know it would happen
again so…
JM: And you’re speaking about that it was arson…
R. B: Yes, yeah. I don’t’ recall if that was Warner Creek?
JM: I believe it was. I think I was just looking at that the other day and I’m almost
positive that it was Warner Creek. In the research I’ve been doing for this paper,
you know it turns out you said that the damage was already done by the fire. A lot
of what I’ve learned is that you know the remaining trees that are there after a fire
are extremely important ecologically.
R. B: For regeneration, yeah.
JM: For regeneration, hydrological issues, nesting, animals, there are certain
species that rely on that, mostly woodpeckers…
R. B: I’m studying fungus a lot nowadays you know and you need that biomass to
kind of reestablish the biota.
JM: So one of the things, the reason why I chose this paper was because the
subject ecological evidence is so clear and yet salvage logging is still continuing
to be practiced on national forests. I’m not talking about state lands or whatever.
And the reasons have changed you know from fire protection, fire hazard
reduction type stuff and then to economics and stuff. And each one of those kind
of in order has been disproved. So it’s very interesting to me especially when you
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talk about the institutionalized structure because I make a case in my paper that
it’s an institutionalized practice, salvage logging, and a fairly strong case I
believe. But kind of a related question for me is when you guys are, when the
group was doing civil disobedience in terms of the Warner Creek fire or anyone
and you said the majestic old growth and also the damage had already been done.
Was the, I’m trying to get at whether the point of the civil disobedience was like a
you know an emotional thing, a love for the old forest and the trees and what not,
or if there was a like a conscious effort or knowledge by the group that it was
scientifically ecologically harmful and if that was the reason or if it was more of a
romantic type reason or if it was some combination thereof?
R. B: I think that action of trying to illuminate the practice of arson for a you
know for a salvage logging operation is pretty unique. Because generally actions
are done, you can see the beauty of what you’re protecting. In this case, we had to
kind of more abstractly realize in retrospect that these trees had been burnt and
most likely to order for a cash cow to come out of them. So without having that
visual of what you’re protecting, we did think science did come into play, the
whole policy thing and we kind of put pieces together. Because we had, well I
shouldn’t say I was involved in the early talks because Warner Creek started out
of primarily EF!’s headquarters in Eugene before I even got there. I just, I got
there later on. But they came together and spoke about, okay, this has happened
and this is likely the cause of it and they’re going to be benefiting from it and if
we don’t do something it’ll happen again. And then there, this was well discussed
in the Earth First journal, which is a main communication mode for EF, or it was.
JM: Is it not published anymore?
R. B: It’s kind of on and off now. They’re moving the print machines again so
they stay on the move. But there was discussion about you know for every action
you do, if you’re putting yourself out there you want to know that it’s worth it,
that there’s a chance for, that when the public hears about it and digs deeper that
you still have truth on your side. So there’s a discussion about the ecological
effects of removing burned timber you know and the benefits of keeping it there.
And even early back then in the 90s it was realized that you know it should stay
you know.
JM: Yeah so that, you know that makes a lot of sense that there’s a lot of thought
that goes into the issues picked because there’s such a, the input of resources and
effort and personal time. You guys aren’t getting paid for this obviously.

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R. B: No. And more so nowadays, science comes into play. You know activists go
to quite extremes to gather information. The work I did in Arizona, part of that
was on the uranium tailings and I did a lot of research on the effects of the
uranium mines on the reservation. Because it’s hard enough to get the public’s
attention and concern so you need to have all of your i’s dotted and t’s crossed
and take you seriously.
JM: In those groups are there education workshops about the issues involved?
Like you said that like you know for that one group that there’s a training and
non-violence. Is there training in terms of the ecological issues?
R. B: No. I mean there may be in other issues I’m not involved in now and
activism has really matured since you know for various reasons I focus more on
education now as my form of activism and not in the trenches or in the camps but
EF! has like their big gathering every summer at a state park and there are
workshops there about the issues. And they try to gleam scientific data to support
them and you know give an overview of the atmosphere of this and the
temperament of the DA in this county where an action is planned and everything.
I think it’s still a little informal but so is organized activism. It’s just because of
the legalities of it.
JM: Yeah it seems like that there would be you know if not formal sort of
trainings that it would be a very informal you know as you’re in a place doing an
action that obviously there’s going to be conversation and it seems like that would
be kind of a main topic.
R. B: From one of the issues I’ve jumped into or waded into carefully, I have
considered all of those issues before I put myself on the line because I don’t want
to you know, what if the burnt timber was just a fire hazard and had no ecological
benefit and more trees would sprout from the space they’re taking up? You know,
what if that was the case? You know to hell if I want to spend a couple of weeks
in jail pushed around for the wrong reason. So I think most people will look into
that and make their own decision. It could be better dissemination of scientific
data to support those issues. But I mean with the damn printing machines having
to relocate every year or two, you know it’s hard enough to just get the word out.
JM: You know I’m interested in that, that print machines are on the move or
whatever. Is that, what’s the reason for that? I mean are the authorities looking for
those? Would they be confiscated if they were found or?

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R. B: Yeah I don’t know what legal grounds they would have to confiscate it
because I mean freedom of the press is in the constitution, the Bill of Rights, but
maybe you know there’s many other ways that authorities could hinder those
efforts of organizing if they knew where that was disseminating from. Our office
in Flagstaff with the reservation issue got raided and drugs were planted there
which was totally not ours. So they’ll do what they need to just to slow down the
organizing.
JM: I also find it kind of interesting, I mean I like you know to read a book as
opposed to look at something on the computer for sure and it’s nice having
something real. But you know in this day and age it seems like Earth First! or
other groups and they must but it seems like they would really benefit from the
use of the internet and having a website you know that they can put that stuff in
there because you don’t, you’re not tied down to a printing press I guess is what
I’m saying. Computers are everywhere. You can have access and put things up.
R. B: Have you seen if they have a website now?
JM: No I have not and it’s been a while but I believe that about a year ago that
there was a website.
R. B: Okay. Yeah I’m not surprised. Yeah I think some people are just afraid to
login and get their URL recorded on a site. But others aren’t. You know, with
Earth rendezvous this summer you really can’t you can’t just logon and find
where. You need to know somebody who is going and they will tell you, you
know, ear to mouth. It’s interesting you know I haven’t logged in to see if there’s
a site or not.
JM: Yeah I’ll probably do that just out of curiosity. So you know that kind of, the
next question here was how did you join the group? Was it easily accessible? And
it sounds like that it’s very much a word of mouth thing of knowing somebody to
be able to gain access.
R. B: There was, it depends on the urgency of the situation and how many people
are already involved. But when the longshoreman’s union wanted us to join them
against Alcoa there was actually an informational meeting here in Olympia with
posters around town for it. There were a couple of obvious you know agents,
undercover cops who were there which was just pretty obvious to all of us. So we,
somebody got people’s phone numbers, first name or whatever and called up
select people from the meeting. It’s a lot by intuition and then we had another
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meeting and then kind of got to know each other and then had another meeting of
more select people from that. So it’s not just everybody and anybody. You know
as an organizer you have to be really cognizant of the threats out there. I mean
undercover cops aren’t going to knock you off in the parking lot but they will
disrupt it to make it less efficient, effective. It wasn’t, I wasn’t really accepted
into the Warner Creek campaign until I actually drove down to Eugene, picked up
a lot of supplies, bought some other supplies and drove it up the mountain to their
road blockade you know. And so you kind of have to prove you know your
interests, yeah.
JM: Yeah, you know I’ve seen over the years different things where undercover
people have joined these different organizations and it seems like what they really
try to do is well I guess they’re gathering information for one thing but the other
thing is they seem like the big thing is to try to push the organization into either
violent acts or things that will get people into trouble, that they try to steer it or
whatever.
R. B: Exactly. And people you know you’ve got to keep aware of that you know
for like somebody’s just way (unclear) you’re like no that’s not cool.
JM: And they’re probably not at the next meeting or whatever.
R. B: Right, yeah. I mean you can’t blame them. That’s they’re job, they’re
getting paid to do it, that’s what they’re trained to do. I mean you know we try to
infiltrate you know the other side. My sister lived in Atlanta and had a boyfriend
who worked for NBC and she got me the apparel which I donned and walked into,
had a meeting with a BIA agent and got quite a bit of truth in my hidden camera
and recorder you know. I mean we all do it for our own purposes.
JM: Very interesting. So that kind of leads into another question here. What sort
of structure did it have? How was it organized? I mean it almost, well are there
cells to it? Is there somebody at the top? I mean is Tim Engleesby, he founded
Earth First1 is that correct or?
R. B: Yeah but he made it clear that he wasn’t the leader and he wasn’t setting the
agenda, that this was an autonomous group. Everybody spoke for themselves,
made their own decisions but there was a unity for the cause in defense of the
earth I believe is pretty much the slogan. But there is a lot of organizing that has
to go into it and decisions are often made by the elders in the group and there are
meetings amongst them to entertain new campaign ideas that generally younger
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people have brought to the floor with a lot of passion and they will look into
them, consider the pros and cons and that’s sometimes how decisions are made.
Other times it’s just a group that’s passionate and gets their shit together in time
to do a direct action and throw together a campaign.
JM: So it almost sounds like there’s a at least at some of the times there’s like a
governing council or…
R. B: Yeah, I’d say that there’s a lot of respect for you know for traditional
knowledge that people who have lived longer have. You know, they’re given
understanding and intuition that they have. There’s a lot of also a great deal of
respect just for underprivileged segments of society underrepresented and a great
desire to bring in more women and people of color into the movement. But I think
it still remains the majority white male and activist campaigns…
JM: Younger white males?
R. B: Younger white males, mostly, although it’s very, very welcoming to
everybody. I just think that’s how you can probably analyze that in a whole
another paper.
JM: Could you give like just a ballpark percentage that’s made up of white males
under 30, 20 to 30?
R. B: 60%. And then 35, say 30% women and other we have what 10% left,
people of color. And I mean I think it has to do with privilege and the ability for
people to put the time needed into organized activism because when you’re in the
throws of it you don’t have time to work much. I would work day labor when I
needed gas money for the truck and otherwise live in my storage unit in Flagstaff
or on the reservation or in my truck.
JM: That doesn’t sound too privileged though.
R. B: Yeah but you know okay, maybe that instance isn’t because I did, I worked
my tail off to do what I was doing but okay the majority of activists who show up
at a campaign are college students who are not working to put bread on the table.
So it’s a mix. I mean yeah you know I would say the majority of the people who
show up for a protest are you know college students yet the majority of people
who are organizing, they’re not privileged. I would say they’re you know really
well below the poverty line in order to do what they’re doing.
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JM: And it seems to me that they probably have a different lifestyle than the
mainstream American needing to go to work you know at some job 40 hours a
week and what not, like that they’ve maybe carved out some alternative lifestyle
way to make a living or you know I don’t know not a commune or whatever but
you know…
R. B: Lived with less you know, not worried about you know retirement, building
towards that and so forth. That is an interesting issue though. You could do a
whole paper on that you know.
JM: Yeah well it does, yeah you know it has big implications.
R. B: Because you’re not, you know, well I’ll just speak for myself, particularly
with a few years in Arizona then working against the logging operation in
Colorado and then for Buffalo Nations in Montana for the remaining wild buffalo.
Of those were, it took a lot of hard work just to keep doing that because you
needed to eat and you needed gas money. You know you certainly didn’t have
health insurance, you know, you didn’t have many comforts but when it comes
down to what’s important to you, there’s really no choice. When you see an
injustice, you know that you’ve got some basic skills to do something effective
about it. It may not stop it but you know how to bring public attention to the
matter.
JM: Let’s see, could you talk about some of your direct experiences in
participating in civil disobedience? You have a little bit so far but specifically
about salvage logging, any of the salvage logging that you took part in?
R. B: Well you know we tried; you’ve got to make a clear differentiation between
who you’re battling in your issue. It’s not necessarily the workers in the field or
the truck drivers. They’re just doing what they know how to do and making a
buck. So your actions, but they are generally the ones you know that you can…
JM: Come into contact with…
R. B: Yeah, contact and I mean we’ve tried to get into corporate headquarters to
no avail and even when you do a pretty remarkable action, they seem to have
enough pull to keep it off the news. If you’re an (unclear) in the field and you
know you can submit your own video as we have to networks, they may run it as
an interest piece or they may or you can coordinate with them in advance for them
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to actually be there to film it themselves. Sometimes you do that and if you don’t
have a real trusted contact there you also invite you know the police there too. But
yeah you have to really be considerate about your action and make it clear to
those you come in contact with that it’s not about them but it’s about this larger
issue and sometimes with a good action will educate you know those working for
the company for instance about the issue and they’ll be like what the fuck I had no
idea, you know. Alcoa’s doing this around the world or you know doing that to
the unions, and doing this to you know the environment.
JM: On that Warner Creek thing the action that was taken was to block the access
road right, the forest service road. So you just set up a blockade and manned it for
as long, a long time huh.
R. B: Lived there. People lived there for months and it was a pretty remarkable
blockade, a fortress made out of boulders and some of the downed timber. You
know there were watchtowers (laughs) and tripods. Tripods were I think that was
right in the front, which is, do you know what those…?
JM: No I don’t think so.
R. B: You take like three lodge poles or whatever as long as you can and make a
tripod in the road. It’s a special lashing you do up top, get it good and secure, and
then where the three sticks poles come out at the top you can create a nest up
there in which you could pretty comfortably stay for quite a while and there’s no
safe way to get you down. They will, they’ve tried to just you know cut a couple
of feet off each leg at a time and drop it down gradually but there’s no safe way to
do it so and it’s an easy way to close down a road. And then there’s kryptonite
bike locks, the U locks, fit right around your neck but don’t come up over your
head. So those also work well for gates. Or we did go to a forest serviced office
and we all just kind of walked in milling around like we were trying to get some
Forest Service maps and we all had them under our jackets and kind of quickly
formed a circle in the middle facing out, pulled the locks out and locked them to
each other and then sat down and then laid down. So we effectively made like a
big octopus with our necks locked together.
JM: And that was for salvage logging?
R. B: Yes, it was for salvage logging. Another for salvage logging was when you
get these; weld these lock boxes which are like big V’s. They’re solid metal cuffs
that go over your arms and you can throw it over the axle of the truck and then put
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your two arms in it with the Carabineer bracelets on each arm and then clip your
hands together at the top. And you know they will either use pressure points to get
you to unlock which you can do voluntarily or you know take a saw and cut the
tip off to unlock the Carabineer and clip it but that obviously has the potential of
cutting your hands. I was actually filming that in San Luis in Colorado when they
arrested me because they were afraid that if they cut one of the girl’s hands I
would have it on video. And there are other techniques. I took more prior
preparation like sleeping dragons, big 50 gallon barrels set in the ground to
ground level and again kind of like a cuff that as long as your forearm that goes
down in the middle to ground level with a pin through the bottom and the bottom
capped. Anyways that’s in the middle of the barrel halfway down and then the
rest is filled up with concrete and rebar so the actual barrel can’t be moved but
you can as needed just flip off whatever coffee lid you put to cover the top of that
tube and put your arm in there and with another Carabineer bracelet clip onto the
pin at the bottom.
JM: So you’re in the middle of the…
R. B: Yeah so your arm is effectively buried. Actually we do that full arm length
all the way up to your armpit. So without that they can only get you undone with
pain pressure points. You really have to voluntarily unlock in that case.
JM: Well so in your experience can you talk about, do you believe that it was
successful these tactics that you used and how was it successful if it was
successful?
R. B: It’s pretty easy to know when an action wasn’t successful. That’s when you
know your affinity partner’s been arrested, you’ve lost gear and nobody else
knows about it except for the DA or the jury. You know if your actions didn’t
broaden the public’s knowledge then you’ve failed. So unless it is something
more direct say a sabotage of equipment…
JM: Where you’re in and out or something.
R. B: Where you’re in and out. But or even if you get caught. You know the
lasting effect was you destroyed that piece of destructive machinery from
Kudimar (?) or such you know. I’m not advocating that of course but in cases, but
generally if it’s well planned it is effective.

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JM: It sounds like that there’s a real need to connect with so that other people
know where you are so that if you come up missing or whatever that there’s some
recourse that can be taken or…
R. B: Oh that’s a huge part of it is the legal support you know you set up. Your
affinity partner will be you know somebody you stick with through the action to
protect each other and also to make sure neither of you gets too heated up and
does something stupid. But then the legal support for after the action you know to
make sure you know you get make sure the authorities know that somebody’s
keeping as an interest of their well being and you know make sure that they’re not
just being abused or disappear for you know for a period of time and to help them
through the legal procedure.
JM: And then along with that’s one part of it and then the other part of it sounds
like it would be the publicity so that the action is known about and has an impact.
So I guess a question that arises is, is that actual public education involvement
more important than the individual action itself?
R. B: Generally, yes. Generally the goal is to bring this to the larger stage.
Sometimes you have well meaning politicians and corporate stakeholders and so
forth don’t even know of what’s going on and the effects of say their mining
operation or logging operation. They didn’t know that arson was likely the cause
of this timber sale that they’re profiting from. You know I think people are
generally good and won’t stand for it if they know the truth. Money speaks
volumes though you know and that’s most often used to just squelch that
knowledge you know. But back to your question I would say most actions I have
been involved in have been successful because they’ve been well planned.
They’ve adhered to non-violence and we’ve done a lot of organization before to
make sure that what we do gets you know shared with the public.
JM: Can you talk about the repercussions from participating in civil disobedience
for you and the group possibly or other group members?
R. B: There’s quite a litany of repercussions. I would say you’re giving up a lot to
partake in civil disobedience, not only say a career and money if you’re in this in
the organizing stages. But if you just show up for that day you’re also you know
giving up a clean record you know and possibly hurting your job prospects in the
future.

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JM: Yeah you said that you weren’t, suffered some of that like didn’t get hired for
a job…
R. B: Yeah, yeah it showed up on the record. So after that I actually requested my
FBI file, which I always thought was, oh you can’t get your FBI file and I
probably don’t have one. I’m not like some crazy maniac but sure enough I got
one that was five and a half pages with a lot blacked out. So I saw just about
everywhere I had been that they had recorded my presence, some places which
were very surprising.
JM: So somehow they’re definitely monitoring the actions.
R. B: Yeah and I think…
JM: Do you think that was from somebody undercover inside the group or do you
think they’re satellite pictures or…?
R. B: You know, I think they do a lot at actions to; just they take pictures like we
do. I don’t know if they had face recognition back in the late 90s but throughout
the 90s but probably you know if we can get it now on a keypad system then
probably it was available to government you know decades before. So and then
also I’ve been pretty just been pretty outspoken about my beliefs.
JM: Did that help, did those experiences help you to become more outspoken in
general about things?
R. B: They did. You know you’ve got to give props for Evergreen. They’ve got a
social contract that’s part of being a student here that as an undergrad really made
me kind of value standing behind your word and your convictions.
JM: So you think it made you a better citizen overall?
R. B: I do. I think being a good citizen is and I guess you could call it a patriot is
making the hard decisions for what’s needed. You know it’s certainly not sitting
on your ass watching TV. Somebody saw a cartoon recently of a guy telling his
wife he’s watching Meet the Press or something and he’s like, well I’m just
enduring a show of these guys arguing makes me feel like I’m doing something
about it. (Laughs.) It’s kind of, unfortunately that’s the extent that some people
go. You know it’s like oh well at least I know the issues. If that’s all, if you just
sit on that knowledge and civil disobedience and what activists have gone through
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to bring it to you have been for nothing. So it’s kind of where the public has to
take it or run with it.
JM: Were there physical, I mean were you ever beat or know anybody who was
beat by the authorities?
R. B: I wasn’t beat. I was put in pain holds, pressure points. There’s a terrible one
under your jawbone and they’ll stick their finger in a couple of inches and just
tickle this nerve and you’re first response is you throw up and it just hurts so
much. It takes a lot of kind of you know mental fortitude to stay locked on in
those cases. I was you know I’ve been shackled and pushed around in the booking
office you know a few times. They don’t much care for activists. And just really
drawn out through the process to kind of taking more of my money in the legal
process. Not never, as I said physically beat but I my affinity partner that was
with me, she had a nose ring and she had a pretty big bull ring in it that day in
Ohio and she was actually pulled around the police station with that ring. I mean
that’s really nothing compared to what does happen to activists in China you
know trying to stop the dams and indigenous Indians in Brazil doing the same you
know they’re being slaughtered in the road.
JM: Yeah people end up dead. Were there any outstanding philosophies espoused
by the group besides the ones that we’ve talked about so far?
R. B: Non-violence is number one. Standing up for that which doesn’t have a
voice is another, be it the earth, the trees in particular or you know human rights
issues. What number is that?
JM: That’s 8.
R. B: Yeah I guess another tenant is self-autonomy. And that’s why I think these
people are willing to do these actions also have real strong will or real strong
character too and they wouldn’t fit into perhaps the Green Peace rally you know.
They want to do something dramatic, courageous and are willing to do it.
JM: Well Green Peace does some pretty hectic type things on the high seas.
R. B: Yeah they sure do. I take that back. They’re badass.

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JM: I think I know what you mean though as opposed to just getting together in a
big group and walking down where the parade route has been approved by the
authorities
R. B: Right, right. It’s a frustration that builds up and a sense of urgency that
you’ve got to do something. You know and it really is a sense of satisfaction
when you have pulled it off and you’re locked down to the axle of that logging
truck and it’s not moving and the news vans are showing up you’re like, okay,
you know, the trucker can drag me over a mountain now but it’s worth it. The
word is out you know.
JM: How about lessons learned for you? And I guess this might be like life
lessons or maybe it doesn’t have to go that big but anything you can say that
you’ve learned from your experience?
R. B: That sometimes it’s okay to break the law for the greater good. I think
there’s I mean there’s a legal defense about that but something for the common
good you know. Because I was brought up you know to abide by the law and but
also that you know you can’t stand by to injustices. I think if I look back the first
time I was like to hell with that. I can’t believe that happened. If I was there I
wouldn’t have let that happen. I would give my life to stop that from happening. I
was like 8 or so, and I learned about the Holocaust and saw a movie that I
probably shouldn’t have at that age but I was just trembling that humans did that
but that was the past. And then I remember hearing how many millions were
killed and then I asked like my brother and sister how much was a million and
they couldn’t tell me. And I asked a teacher and she actually broke it down. She
was like ten dots, and she was like times ten times ten times ten times ten you
know. So oh my God that many people murdered because of you know some
Fascists you know some ideology. So I remember promising to myself if I could
ever do something to stop an injustice, if I was able to contribute I would and I
just happened to you know be here in the Northwest and the Southwest and I
guess Ohio for that matter when things were happening that needed some
manpower behind it you know and I guess other lessons is that you know truth
speaks louder than anything. If you don’t have that behind you and if you’re not
communicating it well then you really have nothing else to bank on but and when
you have truth on your side you know you should have the courage to do what
you need to.
JM: That sounded very Gandhi in there.

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R. B: And then you need to articulate your message you know well and be
peaceful and organized in your action you know or you’ll be discredited. And you
know education is I guess education and truth go along you know you’re
educating people about the truth and it’s not like some holy truth. It’s just like
facts, you know (laughs), what’s happening. And such as salvage logging, you
need to get out those ecological understandings now about the value of you know
downed timber in the woods. If you can’t articulate that there’s really no sense in
putting yourself in harm’s way to do any action because the public well they’re
going to be skeptical anyways and some dirty hippie or crazy activist now known
as a terrorist.
JM: And just to let people know you don’t look like a crazy hippie at all. I mean
you’ve got a beard but it’s well trimmed and you’ve got a nice shirt on and
whatever so just as an image.
R. B: As a visual huh?
JM: As a visual, yeah.
R. B: I do have my dog at my feet though. I am sort of hippie-ish.
JM: That’s all right.
R. B: I know one of your questions is what do you think of society today? And I
think that…
JM: What does it say about society I guess?
R. B: Yeah. Well first of all I mean you can look at the complacency in the
country overall as really discouraging about the future of the United States and
you know totally contradicts what America was founded on you know of from the
Native Americans to the immigrants you know and to couch potatoes. But it’s still
the roots of concern and compassion are still here. I’m afraid the media and the
conveniences of modern life have really dulled people’s feelings but if you can
kind of bring to light what is happening in the importance of making right
decisions with a mixture of science and your brain and your heart you know such
as salvage logging, really just know what the facts are, and then you can ignite
this passion that I think has made this country what it is you know. And it’s
happening you know. It’s not just in the future. It’s happening. It needs as many

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people on the frontline as possible though because you know we get tired,
drained, depleted, and/or confined.
JM: Yeah I imagine that it does take its toll. Before I forget on this subject about
what it says about our society, I guess an important question for me again is the
timeline sort of thing. So again I guess I asked this earlier but to reiterate it you
know it kind of seems like the civil disobedience is necessary because of the time
constraints, that there’s not time to allow for this evolutionary path to get to where
you know either you know we decide that salvage logging is not the right thing to
do and should it be done for ecological reasons or fire reduction or whatever, that
if you’re going to do it, it’s because it’s next to a road and it’s economically
viable and it’s a safety concern, something like that. Or going back to the issue of
climate change, that you know there really is no time left you know for a slow,
gradual process like really you know the crux of it is now and that in a way the
necessity of civil disobedience is saying that our society is not capable of making
those type of decisions in a timely fashion if left to its own structural decision
making process.
R. B: Yeah. Wording the issue makes all the difference I’ve found such as with
the climate change issue. You can’t say you know the planet’s warming up and
we’re all going to boil you know within 50 years or be under a rising ocean you
know because people are skeptical enough about that and it gets people really
heated when you just interject climate change, global warming. But the way that I
word that even to friends you know back in the Midwest you know, hunting
buddies for instance you know, we’re talking about environmental issues. I won’t
use those words. I’ll say you know basically is it right that we are releasing
mercury into the water and air and all these poisonous contaminants and denuding
the forests and you know just trashing the rivers and what not you know. Talk
about like the particular actions that are happening not the supposed
consequences.
JM: So it kind of seems to me like you’re saying you’re focusing in on the human
level a one to one or a group of people that you’re connecting with on a smaller
level as opposed to talking about it in a grander sort of sense like that that seems
to be more efficient or effective?
R. B: No I don’t think it’s necessarily more on an individual level. Well it’s how I
talk individually to people yes. But I think that the urgency of these campaigns
and the ability of direct action to play a part you know rests on our
communication about the issues and how you know we need the public to be
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receptive in order for them to listen. And just wording the issues is important.
Having science behind it and it doesn’t hurt to understate the issue a little bit. You
know it gets, you throw in a bunch of adjectives and passionate you know words
and people are going to be like okay crazy. They’ll be like did you know we put
in a you know four billion tons of this or that you know has gone into the oceans
already and increasing by this and the effect on the animals and you know instead
of saying talking about the loss of ecosystem services. You talk about dude; did
you know this waterway used to provide the filtration capacity of half a dozen
water treatment plants? Which is millions of dollars. What are we going to do
now when we can’t drink the water, maybe restoring the natural functions or
whatever. You know but you need the science behind it and you need to allow
people to connect with the issue and see why it’s important to them and not make
it political, not make it, not let it be politically charged to drive people away at
first.
JM: I get what you’re saying for sure. I think a lot more effective that way then,
yeah. Well, this has been really good for me. I guess the last question that we
haven’t really gotten to, is the climate today different than when you participated
in civil disobedience? And I guess what I’m trying to get at is, we had talked last
week or something about how certain, they’re calling it environmental terrorism
and the consequences of participating in civil disobedience under if you’re found
to be a terrorist, I think the consequences are much more extreme than they were
back in the Warner Creek time.
R. B: Yeah, a lot of it since 9-11 you know and the Patriot Act. You can easily be
labeled as a terrorist. But again you know your, the way you frame your argument
makes a big difference, you know. Just proving how patriotic your act is in
defending our country’s forests. Hence, ecosystems services you know our lifeline
and sustainable jobs, sustainable resources, you know. It depends on how you
frame it you know. It doesn’t matter so much to the DA in that case sometimes
but just generally reframing the activist movement. And we have so many
resources on hand now to really jumpstart you know activism from the Internet
for networking, seeing the role of social media and the revolution in Egypt was
just amazing. At the same time seeing the censorship in China against
environmental activists there is just as mind blowing. But we just have a lot more
networks. We also have a lot of tools we can use. We kind of put together a very
ad hoc remote or live video recording device on the reservation. It involved you
know one of these old like eight pound laptop computers with a battery that lasted
like 40 minutes, a cell phone bag, what we call bag phones. They’re a precursor to
today’s cell phones. They actually had like a battery in a bag and it was a car
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phone. And that didn’t work so well so we got one of the newer cell phones.
Anyway, we had a little digital camera, a digital video camera that we would slow
down the frames and send them through the cell phone and the laptop.
JM: So it was a live…?
R. B: It was a very choppy live feed but it was enough to scare the BIA agents
who came out to impound livestock and horses form the Navaho elders who were
resisting relocation you know imposed by Peabody Coal Company in Arizona. It
was enough to stop them not to unload the bulldozer from their trailer intended to
knock down the ceremonial Hogan, another way to just weaken the resistance of
the Dineh elders. Needless did they say it was kind of unlikely that much of an
image would get out but you know we were trying and we could get some things
out. But nowadays I mean you’ve got all of that in your palm and many people
do. You know they can be recorded from all angles and you know just the
knowledge of your rights and access to scientific information about your issue and
salvage logging you know. I think the greatest need there you know I’m not
involved in that now but is to share with the public that it’s a hoax that we need to
remove those trees. It’s just a financial gain and sure people will make their
decision on that. Maybe it’s worth it. Maybe we want to go ahead and it’s easy
pickings. But you’ve got to spread the truth about that and let them decide.
JM: I guess a real quick question. I was looking and you were talking about the
Alcoa Tacoma port shutdown, and then I was wondering if you know comparing
that to maybe the Warner Creek roadblock, was the, do you think the Tacoma port
thing was more successful because of its economic importance? I mean shutting
down a port for two weeks or however long you said, that’s a huge economic like
wakeup call for some people. Do you think that that made that a more successful
type operation than the Warner’s Creek or?
R. B: Yeah, for many reasons, not just the economic impact on the port and on
Alcoa but the alliance between environmentalists and the unions.
JM: Yeah that struck me too, that they actually asked Earth First to join them in
that. That seems like a bold move for a union to do.
R. B: You know the trendy brotherhood bar downtown here in Olympia? It used
to be a you know proper union bar and we’d go there for organizational meetings
and you should have seen our rag tag crew with the longshoremen you know and

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their yellow slickers just like hashing out what we were going to do. It was a
pretty neat alliance.
JM: I bet. Yeah that sounds pretty cool. Well listen, Tim, is there anything that
you want to add to this?
R. B: Just if you could loosen up these handcuffs a little bit I’d be more
comfortable. (Laughs.)
JM: Okay, yeah sure.
R. B: No this is good revisiting this and recognizing how it has turned me to
where I am in graduate school now and I’m focusing on collaborative
conservation and conflict resolution with environmental and social issues. So it’s
kind of neat once in a while to stop and think about what brought you here.
JM: Yeah well it’s a real piece of history I think you know.
R. B: Yeah. Good luck with the paper. I look forward to reading it.
JM: Yeah thanks. It’s coming along.
R. B: All right.
JM: I’ll shut this thing down.

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