Norm Michaels Oral History Interview

Norm Michaels had a long career as a forester on the Willamette and other national forests in Oregon and California, including a period of work as part of the Andrews Forest community. He begins this oral history describing his upbringing as an urban kid in the San Francisco Bay area whose exposure to nature and forests came mainly on family travels to the Sierras, Yellowstone, and elsewhere. His mother taught one year in the Sierras and the Plumas National Forest was in the backyard, which cemented his interests in forests and forestry. Next, he describes his training in forestry mainly at Oregon State University culminating in 1972, followed by several different jobs with the Forest Service, including work in insects and disease and silviculture positions.

The interview turns to his experiences and perceptions of forestry issues in the Coast Range vs west slope of the Cascade in terms of the emerging values of hardwood tree species and regeneration issues, including use of herbicides. He describes how Forest Service hiring practices in the mid-1970s kept him a technician rather than a forester and how federal legislation forced the agency to change its practices, including reducing the backlog of clearcut sites lacking regeneration. He outlines other aspects of Forest Service history, including discouraging construction of a dam in the Grand Canyon, and the challenges posed by designating ad-hoc Wilderness Areas without removing the acreage from the land base for calculating the harvest level. Despite the challenges, he contends that the agency had a strong esprit de corps and a help-one-another culture. After working in temporary positons on the Siuslaw National Forest he got his first permanent forestry position in Bly, Oregon. He proceeds to describe the forests, working conditions, aspects of daily life, and working conditions, including the paucity of technical information to support management decisions. In 1979-1981 he was able to complete a MS in silviculture split between OSU and University of Washington while still working in Bly. Then he moved to the Willamette National Forest and mainly worked on timber sale planning.

Michaels describes his gradual exposure to the Andrews Forest and several of its luminaries, like Dick Waring, Jerry Franklin, and Eric Forsman, and his gradual awakening to the spotted owl issues. But before going far with that topic, the discussion shifts to the meanings of terms like “ecology,” “environment,” “wise use,” “preservation,” and “conservation” – and then his own values for forests and how they changed over time. As these changes occurred, he anticipated that the spotted owl issue would trigger a major change in federal forestry, and he faults the agency leadership for not seeing it coming and making the change needed to reduce the impact. He expresses an openness to fresh thinking about forestry, including New Forestry advocated by Jerry Franklin and his own arguments for longer rotations on the Umpqua National Forest, where he was stationed from 1985 to 1998. He describes the big contrasts between the Umpqua and Willamette National Forests in terms of forest conditions, workplace culture, the local communities, and the strength of environmentalism, and then he extends the comparisons to include Bly and the Siuslaw National Forest. The different locations varied in terms of size of timber cut, mill capacity, and the impact of Judge Dwyer’s injunction on harvest and then the Northwest Forest Plan.

Michaels gradually connected with the Andrews Forest beginning in the 1980s and increasingly when he arrived back on the Willamette National Forest mainly through reading research findings on the spotted owl, old growth, dead wood, and other topics, and factors leading him to adopt an ecosystem perspective. The conversation then turns to fire regimes, individual large fires, and the potential for management action to influence them, which varies greatly between the east and west sides of the Cascade Crest in response to forest and fuels productivity and climate. In the closing five years of his career as silviculturist for the whole Willamette National Forest, leading up to retirement in 2010, Michaels also oversaw silviculture on the Andrews Forest, including experiments, such as the Un-even Aged Management Project. He discusses the relationship between researchers and the National Forest, which he considers cooperative and mutually beneficial, but also how few people know about the Andrews Forest. He commends those in the research-liaison position, such as John Cissel and Cheryl Friesen, for sharing the science findings with managers and the public. He closes the interview with fond memories of his career, even as he moves on to his next life with some consulting work.