neatly arranged for maximum wood production. Thus old growth is becoming increasingly rare, as private woods and more and more of the national forests are being intensively managed for timber. This development portends bad news for the spotted owl, which spends its entire life in the junglelike forests of the Pacific Northwest, nesting in the tops of old-growth firs that have been deformed by centuries of harsh weather. Wind snaps off the treetop and decay creeps into the core, creating a protected hollow more than a hundred feet in the air. The spotted owls nest in these hollows, where they are sheltered from predators and inclement weather. Over many generations, spoted owls have adapted to the old growth. Their main food sources—flying squirrels and tree voles—live only in the high canopies of old growth trees. The squirrels and voles eat lichen and other slow-growing vegetation that does not survive in woods put into timber management. Inexorably, as the old-growth trees are logged the spotted owl population plummets. The spotted owl discoveries led to other old-growth research in national forests around the country. In Alaska, biologists discovered that old-growth hemlock and spruce are critical to populations of Sitka black-tail deer, whose numbers are also declining. The old growth provides “thermal cover” for the deer—the full, high canopy catches the snow in winter, so the grass below is exposed for the deer to eat. Old growth in Montana and Idaho also provides thermal cover for large mammals there, and it is considered critical habitat for grizzly bears and the endangered woodland caribou. Dozens of animals have been linked to old growth, including goshawks, martens, woodpeckers, and other birds. And research is barely beginning. Recognizing, albeit belatedly, the need for old-growth habitat, the Forest Service has come up with computerized “prescriptions" for small units of old growth to be left, spaced throughout each forest. But since these units total no more than 5 or 10 percent of the forest outside of wilderness areas, they are expected to shrink or disappear as the old trees die off. So researchers are exploring ways to create old-growth habitat for the forests of the future, to replace what will ■be lost. One experiment shows just how far the Forest Service is willing to go to control the ecosystem. It centers on “snags"— large dead trees that are still standing primarily in virgin old-growth. From the earliest human management of the forests, snags were the first trees to be cut down. They were useless to the lumbermen, taking up space where new trees could be growing; they made good firewood; and decay made them dangerously unstable. So the snags were methodically removed like blemishes treated in a suburban skin clinic. But when biologists found that snags rot out from the core—providing nesting sites for squirrels and woodpeckers, sapsuckers, flickers, and the rest of a loose family known as “cavity-nesting birds"— the Forest Service land-doctors reversed their policy, and began to prescribe a certain number of snags for each of its management units, as well as creating snags where none had existed. Their tactic was simple: they would kill mature trees to create snags. First they tried girdling trees—stripping away the bark around the trunk to stop the flow of nutrients. Then they tried injecting poisons into the trees. But these techniques were too slow and unreliable. Finally, they hit upon a seemingly foolproof method—blowing the treetops off with dynamite: decay begins inside the core and the tree soon dies, becoming a cozy habitat for cavity-nesters and squirrels. So now explosions are cracking away in research areas in many forests. Once the killing method is refined, it will be applied to certain units of old growth: as one snag rots away and falls over, a living tree will be dynamited and brought onto line. The goal is to provide a steady, centrally controlled supply of snags, forever. Only the natural forest ecosystem, with its interplay of wind and fire and growth, could do it any better. To the Reagan Administration, however, these ecological issues are of much less concern than placating the private sector. In satisfying this purpose the President could hardly have made a better choice of Forest Service head than John Crowell. The commodities-savvy Crowell was a top lumber industry attorney, representing Georgia Pacific, the nation's third largest timber company, from 1959 to 1972, when he became general counsel at Louisiana Pacific— one of the largest customers for Forest Service timber. The customers will be rushing after federal timber if Crowell gets his way. He scoffs at concern that the national forests The Citizen Forester ■By Talbot Bidefeldt Randal OToole is an environmentalist. A staff member of the Oregon Natural Resources Council characterizes his ideas as “radical.’' I lis (ios-length curly hair and aggressive manner support the image. Rather than facing off with loggers and Forest Service rangers on mountain roads, however. OToole has chosen to plug the Forest Service ar its own game. When O’Toole graduated in forestry from Oregon State University in 1974. he was already convinced that traditional forest management (which he describes as “the maximum amount of wood, no matter what the cost") did not make environmental or economic sense. Ruling out the usual forestry careers in industry or the Forest Service, O’Toole started his own business. Cascade Holistic Economic Consultants (CHEC) in Eugene. Armed with a programmable calculator, he offered the service of wading into oceans of computer data produced by Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) forestry plans, in order to fish out questionable forestry practices and statistics. By 1981 O'Toole had enough work from environmental groups and state agencies to install his own computer. He had also begun to publish Forest Planning. “The Citizen's Forestry Magazine.” The newsprint monthly, typed on the office computer printer, offers a mix of Forest Service news, editorials, and howto articles (“You Can Understand Linear Programming") on the government planning process. Although the magazine is aimed at the environmental activist, one third of its subscriptions go to Forest Service personnel. O'Toole is still, by his own reckoning, the only forester in the country working fo; environmental groups on forest planning. Much of his work now consists of analyzing the National Forest plans being prepared under the 1976 National Forest Management Act. At the heart of the planning process is FORPLAN, a computer program that takes in values for timber harvest goals, growth rates, timber prices and other information, and puts out suggestions of how to schedule logging and allocate land. O'Toole contends that FORPLAN is a “shortsighted" program. It eagerly allocates poor land to timber production to maximize present net value,” he says. According to O’Toole, Forest Service data typically underestimates the cost of reforesting logged off land, and overestimates the amount of wood that can be produced by second growth. O'Toole says he has reviewed FORPLAN runs that recommend cutting an entire forest in a decade—an action both environare being cut too heavily and says production should eventually be tripled. This year, as part of the national planning process, he has ordered the Forest Service to at least consider doubling the harvest within forty-five years. And he is accelerating timber-cutting schedules formulated by the agency in a pre-Reagan 1980 national plan. While Crowell is not out of line with the historical dedication of the Forest Service mentally disastrous and illegal. National Forests are supposed to be managed,for long-term timber production, with receipts going to the Treasury. If a forest plan is too costly or too damaging to the timber base, it may have to be redone. “On most plans I can find violations of Forest Service policy," O'Toole claims. If the public only offered its most productive lands for logging, leaving the rest for watershed, wildlife, recreation and other uses, O'Toole believes private timber companies would be compelled to better manage their own forests. “The timber companies would no longer be subsidized by the Forest Service,” he says. O’Toole concedes that a reduced timber harvest would increase lumber prices, but he also maintains that the effect on the consumer would be negligible. A 1980 Congressional Budget Office study found that even large increases in the timber harvest would have little impact on the price of new housing. Rick Ullrich, forest economist for Oregon’s Willamette National Forest, says that pressure to log public lands comes from the timber industry, which—partly due to overcutting in the past—forsees a shortage of timber on its own forests. Ullrich disputes some of CHEC’s interpretations of FORPLAN data, but says, “My impression is that a lot of what O’Toole says makes sense. He’s probably made us do a better job.’’ The National Forest Management Act calls for 118 National Forest draft plans to be completed by next year. President Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. John Crowell, issued new regulations in 1983 that required Forest Service planners to revise their plans so as to increase timber production. O'Toole says local Forest Service personnel, resentful of heavy-handed control by Washington, have been increasingly open to cooperation. Mt.Lassen National Forest planners even asked him this fall to review their plan in advance of environmental groups in order to “get the bugs out.” “They don't have complete confidence in their plans," O’Toole says. “They don't think they're Randal O'Toole-proof.'* Talbot Bielefeldt is a writer living in Eugene. to farming trees, he has certainly blunted recent momentum toward supporting other uses of the national forests. Under Crowell, funding and staffing for recreation, wildlife, soil and water conservation, and forest research have all fared much worse than support for production of minerals and timber. In the national plan drawn up a year before Crowell came in, the Forest Service called for tremendous increases in “habitat-improvement” projects, which are aimed at helping wildlife in the national forests. The improvements—restoring damaged vegetation, creating hiding places, and protecting wetlands— were planned to help offset the destruction of up to 2 million acres a year of wildlife habitat because of development of all types of land. Under the budget restraints imposed by Crowell, though, the Forest Service has been unable to accomplish even a third of its habitat goals, and support for such projects is steadily declining. Crowell has also pushed for development of areas being studied for possible wilderness protection in order to get at the remaining old-growth timber. The intrusions necessary for this—timber-cut- ting and road-building—almost guarantee that in later evaluations the old growth will not qualify for formal protections. Many critics believe the strategy is clearly illegal under the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, and federal courts in California and the Northwest have recently stopped such spoiling of wilderness until more detailed studies of the areas are complete. Undaunted, Crowell has advised the Forest Service to continue until lawsuits are provoked over each specific intrusion. “It really comes down to a value question,” observes Robert Day, an ex-forest ranger and current director of the Maryland-based Renewable Natural Resources Foundation. “What do you want from a public forest? There is a question mark in the minds of many resource professionals about what level of timber production we really need from the national forests, and there are questions about whether the shift from non-commodities to commodities is really necessary.” Crowell’s cost-benefit vocabulary, however, is poorly suited to even discussion of non-commodities. He views old- growth forest as no more than “accumulated capital” ripe for “liquidation.” Doug MacCleery, Crowell’s chief aide and a former timber industry analyst, explains that harvesting the old growth now would be a financial “bonus" for an Administration that is plagued by a soaring deficit. “It makes sense to emphasize those resources which generate receipts to the treasury,” says MacCleery, which might explain why Crowell considered putting up to 6 million acres of national forest land on the auction block, until the shocked anger of conservatives and liberals alike derailed the sell-off. “You can expect commodity resources to do very well,” in the computerized plans, says Day, who chooses his words carefully and is considered by Forest Service observers to be a moderate mid- dle-of-the-roader. “This Administration reflects certain values and doesn’t want a program contrary to those values.” Day also believes that “this revolution in resource policy is happening very quickly.” Historically the agency has tried to schedule its woodcutting so a forest would produce a “sustained yield"—a steady harvest that doesn’t shoot up and down with unsettling ecological and economic consequences. Now, at Crowell’s urging, many national forests are to be overcut for a decade or two, to allow private forests time to replenish, although once the old-growth is depleted the overall harvest will plunge. Day, and many others, are worried about how quickly change is arriving—change that will shape the national forests for his lifetime, and longer. “There are a lot of things we don’t know about the natural environment,” Day says. “To err on the side of caution is, I think, reasonable and prudent.” Randal O'Toole has a computer in his bathroom. He uses it to conduct guerrilla warfare against the entrenched forces of the Reagan Revolution and the Forest Service bureaucracy. “I have two big concerns,” says O’Toole, a forestry consultant who works out of a tiny office in a converted gradeschool in Eugene, Oregon, sandwiched between a karate school artists’ studios 42 Clinton St. Quarterly
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