Richard Haynes Oral History Interview

Richard Haynes was a Forest Economist with the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the Forest Service who specialized in assessing forest resources and markets and played a central role in important events leading up to and through formulation of the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) and other regional conservation strategies. The very broad scope of his experiences and willingness to speak about them frankly yields a wide-ranging oral history, dense with interesting stories and views. Haynes begins the interview outlining his early years: born and raised in the Washington, DC, area, then taking his BS and MS degrees at Virginia Tech, followed by three years of active duty in the Army and a year with the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service before returning to grad school. Through summers on a family farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, family travels, and Boy Scouts he had plenty of exposure to the natural world, and he was inquisitive about forest succession and distribution. His account of the forests of the region reveals his deep interest in them. He describes coming West because “they paid the most” and “had interesting problems.” Then he discusses why he went to Virginia Tech, the many forms of training he received, including work in forests, his military service, and his PhD program at North Carolina State University, which he characterizes as, “sort of the OSU of the East.” He describes the massive changes underway in forestry of the Southeast and the economics modeling he pursued, even as he was getting an introduction to forestry issues of the West via readings and seminars.

Haynes describes his early exposures to forestry and forest scientist in the West (commencing in 1975) as challenging because of their lack of sophistication in modeling and statistics, despite the simplicity of the management system they were locked into. He gives a summary of forest products and international trade history of the Northwest in the 20th century, including the role of forest products perspectives in early legislation guiding federal forestry. He speaks about the anticipation that there would be an inevitable, socially disruptive transition from an old-growth to a second-growth economy, but that forest planning was not being done when he arrived about the time the National Forest Management Act of 1976 was passed, which provided a multi-resource perspective. He considered the West to be 20 years behind the South, and the West was going to hit a big drop in cut level, as other regions of the US had experienced earlier. He outlines the arguments about sustaining the combined harvest level from federal and private lands and how national forests were ramping up environmental protections, but not addressing the resulting reductions in timber available for cutting. This was brought into full view when Haynes and a national forest economist presented their analysis of the impacts of the plan developed by the Interagency Committee on the Northern Spotted Owl. He describes how his regular job doing every-five-year assessments of forest resources under the Resources Planning Act of 1960 provided a frame of reference for anticipating the spotted owl impact. He also recounts how busy and complicated the 1980s were for anticipating the future of forestry, given the recession of the early 1980s, escalating lawsuits from environmentalists, Wilderness Area activities, the eruption of Mount St. Helens, and other matters. His experiences with Environmental Impact Statement assessment teams and BLM showed him how much more process-oriented, effective, and efficient were the planning teams than were scientists in dealing with big, complex issues.

Haynes leads into the NWFP-related efforts by commenting on how environmentalists’ success in passage of the Endangered Species Act and their objective of protecting old-growth forests set the stage, and how he encountered key players Jack Thomas and Jerry Franklin on a Society of American Foresters taskforce on the harvest of old growth (report of 1984). A particularly interesting part of the interview concerns his interactions with Judge Dwyer (who placed the injunction on federal forest logging in ca. 1990) and the confluence with the peak in timber harvest, which was in part a ripple effect from the 1982 recession. He goes on to describe the restructuring of the forest industry, its mills, international trade, and manufacturing of items like furniture. Next, he turns to the marginalized, but critical roles of economics in the Gang of Four, President Clinton’s Forest Summit, and the Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team (FEMAT) process. Many anecdotes explain the content and mood, including the impact of the expected big reduction in harvest level on most American families – “about the cost of a pizza dinner.” He elaborates on the differences between his views and those of the biological scientists who ramrodded the processes that led to the NWFP; “It’s scientists on the loose,” he says. He repeated contends that the scientists did not have an open discussion of land management objectives. During FEMAT, in his subsequent several-year stint on the Eastside in the Interior Columbia Basin Project, and his return to Westside duties he became increasingly involved with social scientists and the human dimensions of the issues they dealt with, and this leads him to discuss views of risk assessment and adaptive management, which he was exposed to in his Army service.

Drawing on his rich range of experiences, Haynes continues to touch on a wide range of topics in the contexts of the Interior Columbia Basin Project, analysis of early effects of the NWFP, the Tongass and Chugach National Forest planning, fire research, and travels in Europe, which provided a very different perspective to view Northwest issues. He provides context by summarizing the history of legislation guiding federal forest management, and segues into several analyses of forest resources of the Southeast and the US as a whole. He explains how changes in forest products interacted with the market place and shortened the harvest rotation length on private lands. Asked to speculate on what Federal forestry would be doing absent the spotted owl and NWFP, he suggests that the timber harvest level would be significantly higher. He also contrasts the Westside and Eastside planning efforts in terms of having clear objectives that could be assessed, and the issue of assessing the vulnerabilities and resilience of small communities in Oregon and Washington, which became a major task of a research program he directed. He outlines the profiles of many communities across Oregon and Washington.

Haynes continues the interview commenting on the overall trajectory of the change in forest policy symbolized by the NWFP. He says he could see the change coming as social objectives for management of the environment, such as symbolized by the Endangered Species Act, collided with the past expectations for a high level of timber harvest. But, he asserts that implementation of the NWFP has been complicated by the risk-aversion of land managers and the public status of the lands. He is complimentary of forest supervisors who communicate about the management of risk embedded in their process leading to their decisions. Concerning workforce and culture within the agency, he describes the national forest system as making major progress in diversifying the discipline, racial, and especially gender diversity of their leadership, but less so on the research side, except in his own research group where women became a major component of the staff. He argues that management objectives are not clear in part because there are conflicting values ranging from utilization to active restoration measures to a hands-off approach, and he finds comparisons among countries with different levels of private vs. public ownership to be revealing. Haynes closes the oral history by reflecting on how much success he had over his career by taking the broad view and being willing to take on applied problems and communicating about them effectively.