Jerry Franklin Oral History Interview, November 15, 2016

Samuel Schmieding: Good afternoon, this is Dr. Samuel J. Schmieding, Oregon State University College of Forestry. It is November 15, 2016. I am here in Issaquah, Washington, in the home of Dr. Jerry Franklin. He is Professor of Forest Ecosystems at the University of Washington, and also, he was Chief Plant Ecologist for many years with the U.S. Forest Service [PNW Station]. We are here to do an interview centered on the Northwest Forest Plan, but it will also include some aspects of Jerry's long and distinguished career, and it is part of the Northwest Forest Plan Oral History Project funded by the PNW Station of the U.S. Forest Service. Anyway, good afternoon, Jerry.

Jerry Franklin: Hi, Sam.

SS: Thank you for being willing to meet me. Now, although we've done an interview before, it was centered on Mount St. Helens, and so I'm going to ask you maybe some similar questions to what I asked you before, for this opening 00:01:00part regarding your biography. But perhaps, if we could gear it a little more toward forestry, ecosystems science, and basically, how you became who you were in your career, and how it relates to the Northwest Forest Plan So, I'll ask you, just kind of give me a biographical sketch within that context.

JF: How long do you want it

SS: As long as you want. This thing goes as long as you, as long as the time you've got, Jerry.

JF: Well, how I got to where I am, I guess starts with my entering Oregon State University in 1956 as a junior, and finally getting engaged as an actual forestry major. And I got a bachelors there in 1959, got a Masters in Forestry there in 1961. And when I was an undergraduate, I had a chance to get a student 00:02:00trainee position with the PNW Station, who had a small contingent in a big room in the basement of the forestry building. And so, as soon as I graduated, I was immediately offered a full-time position with the experiment station, Forest Service [Pacific Northwest] Experiment Station, which I took. And they helped me through a master's program which was in forest management. Then I did a Ph.D. in Botany at Washington State University with Rexford Daubenmire. And a really key person for me in my career was Bill Ferrell, who was a professor at Oregon State University. So, in any case, I had a full-time position as a researcher with the Forest Service Experiment Station. In the '60s, I was focused primarily on 00:03:00silvicultural research, ecological research related to upper-slope forests. But towards the end of the '60s, I got involved in a workshop on the proposed Coniferous Forest Biome Project of the U.S. International Biological Program (IBP). This was a program that was being administered by the National Science Foundation and it was, [originated because] they essentially were given a line item addition to their budget by the United States Congress for this U.S. IBP. And the U.S. committee in the IBP decided that they would primarily focus on studying six types of ecosystems, six biomes. One of them, well, there was a 00:04:00desert, there was an arctic alpine, there was a tropical forest, there was a deciduous forest, there was a desert, a grassland, and there was a coniferous forest biome. And the University of Washington had a workshop, i.e., they figured they had the market cornered on this project, they were going to get all the money for it. And a contingent of us came up from Corvallis, including Dick Waring and Ted Dyrness. Dick Waring was a young professor at Oregon State, and Ted Dyrness was another Forest Service scientist. But in any case, we decided we really wanted to get a piece of that action for Corvallis. And we had a heck of fight with the University of Washington over it, but the bottom line was in the 00:05:00end, we cut a deal with the University of Washington. They got the majority of it, but we got a big chunk of that National Science Foundation money to work on the Coniferous Forest Biome. This was an ecosystem study.

SS: And this was about a six or seven year -

JF: It was about '69.

SS: Yeah, and it lasted for about seven or eight years, correct

JF: It lasted for about six years.

SS: Six years, right.

JF: In any case, we then had a big dust-up at Oregon State University over whether we were going to study a natural forest or a plantation. And in the end, a group of us won out that, yeah, we were going to study a natural forest system, it's going to be an old-growth forest, and it's going to be down at the [H.J.] Andrews Experimental Forest. So, we were successful in that regard. And 00:06:00we decided to study a watershed that had been instrumented for a number of years, in terms of water yields and water chemistry. [Watershed 10] We went to work on it and we made a decision after the first year we would really put our money into a set of post-docs. You know, the first year, we did the professor-graduate-student-thing and we could see this wasn't going to get us to where we needed to go. So, we ended up hiring a group of post-docs as the primary people to carry out the program, and we were very successful in that regard. And the post-docs became the next generation of leaders. But in any case, that was the beginning of my involvement in ecosystem research, and it was 00:07:00really the beginning of research on natural forests in the Northwest as ecosystems.

SS: Now, Jerry, going back to the late '50s and early '60s as you were developing some of the plans for studying the periodicity of cone and seed production, both high-elevation and not-so-high elevation species, what do you remember about your ideas going in and how you were trained, but how the results and what you were finding out, that maybe was also informing how you would change what you were studying and what you believed, you know, vis-à-vis traditional forestry, utilitarian forestry, versus ecosystem science, and what became the New Forestry

JF: Well, that first decade I worked for the experiment station, I was pretty 00:08:00much boxed into doing traditional work. And so, what I did do was focus my work on the ecology of the constituent tree species. That was mostly what I did. My perspective at that point was pretty traditional, but I definitely was interested in learning more about old-growth forests and the Forest Service wasn't. Ted Dyrness and I, in the late '60s, really began to do some bootleg work, beginning to do some very descriptive work of the old growth in the Andrews area, as part of the classification study.

SS: Was that part of your overall vegetation work in the Pacific Northwest

JF: That was my vegetation work. That's correct. So, when Ted and I and Dick 00:09:00Waring went up to Seattle to participate in that IBP workshop, I didn't really have much idea at all of what an ecosystem was about. You know, they didn't teach us about that in forestry school. So, it was totally a new subject. They talked about structure and function of ecosystems. And at that point, I didn't have a ghost of an idea what the hell they were talking about, but I figured I could find out. The interesting thing for me, was that not only did I shift completely in my perspective as an ecologist and a forester from a traditional point-of-view, really with regards to both forestry and ecology, to this 00:10:00ecosystem perspective. But also, I had purposely avoided being involved with Douglas-fir forests, because I figured everybody knew everything about those already.

SS: Because they were the prime merchantable species and they'd studied that forever.

JF: Exactly, and so they'd studied that forever. What I didn't realize at the time was no one had studied natural Douglas-fir forests, and certainly not as ecosystems. So, I found myself now spending, you know, the majority of my time looking at Douglas-fir-hemlock forests.

SS: Now, had you read, or you probably have since then, the survey of the Douglas-fir forest region, the famous one that was done by H.J. Andrews and R.W. Cowlin [Survey of the Douglas-fir Region, 1940.]

JF: Oh, sure.

SS: How would you characterize that study today from what you know now

JF: Well, it really was very much of a traditional inventory. And, it had to do 00:11:00with large and small saw timber.

SS: Merchantable timber.

JF: Merchantable wood.

SS: Yeah.

JF: And so, there really wasn't much interest in learning anything about the character of the natural forest because we were just going to cut those down anyway, and we're going to convert them to managed-forests.

SS: So, you're in the 1970s, there's the IBP program, and then the momentum builds, maybe with the help of the post-docs, paradigm shifts in society, post-Earth Day culture, etc., and you move on into the EER [Experimental Ecological Reserve] transition to what became LTER. And I take it that during that decade, let's say, the '70s from the IBP until the beginning of the LTER, 00:12:00you were transforming your ideas about forests across the spectrum. In other words, it was no longer, oh, here's just these species that are going to be used for this purpose, this is a very simple model. And you started to see how multifaceted it was, and how complex it was.

JF: Absolutely did, but I also had a really significant detour because I got involved in this ecosystem study. The National Science Foundation took a look at me and said, We'd like for you to come back and be program officer for this program. And so, in 1973, I transferred from the Forest Service to the National Science Foundation, and I became the program officer, the first Program Officer 00:13:00for Ecosystem Studies. They established a new program. And it was a really critical period because the IBP money was ending. I was there right at that point-in-time. The National Science Foundation made the decision that what we're going to do, is we're not going to stop now, we're going to just convert that money that's been IBP, to funding an ecosystem studies program, and Jerry, you are the first officer for that. (Phone rings) I'm not going to answer that.

So, in any case, I spent two years at the National Science Foundation, sort of moving through the ending of IBP and the beginning of a whole series of new, post-IBP ecosystem studies. And it was a ball. That was also the time period in 00:14:00which we began to talk about how we can provide longer- term support for some of these kinds of programs.

SS: In other words, continuous.

JF: LTER was born in that period of 1973 to '75. Now, it took almost a decade for it to evolve into a functioning program. But that was where the discussions began within the National Science Foundation that led, ultimately to LTER.

SS: When you were doing traditional forestry, right leading up to '69 and '70 when this all started, did you have doubts, questions about things that you would later answer when you became trained and immersed in this new world of ecosystems science

JF: Well, yes, in a way. Because I'd always been interested in old-growth 00:15:00forests. That was, I grew up in them. So, we didn't know anything about old-growth forests at all, other than the fact they were very impressive, and they were also, one heck of a big wood pile. And what I realized in that first half of the '70s, was that we had developed a basic understanding of what these natural old forests were about. We had the beginnings of a comprehensive understanding. I thought at that time, and I think others thought similarly, that, wow, this is terrific, but what we're really doing is essentially creating 00:16:00historic knowledge, as those systems are all going to be cut down, they're all going to be gone. We are going to have them do a thorough analysis of it, so at least we'll have a record of what it was. So, we had no thought as we went through the '70s that there would be a major change in policy.

SS: Now, when you were younger, and even when you were in your young professional career, would you say that you looked at, shall we say, the impressive nature of old-growth forests in terms of their spiritual and aesthetic impact

JF: Yes.

SS: Not science, you know, the things that you would learn about how essential they are to ecosystem health, in fact.

JF: Absolutely correct. SS: But you didn't know that, but you still were impressed, you just didn't know that it was this other stuff, also

JF: But I knew they had to be special, that we just didn't know about them. About the only thing we knew about old-growth forests at that point, and in my lecturing on this, I often tell people, if you would have asked me in 1960, tell me something about old-growth forests, I wouldn't have had anything to tell you. We had no significant scientific knowledge of old forests. Now, that isn't quite true, but it's almost true, because we did have some understanding of the quality of the water coming out of those forests, and it was outstanding. And so, I always had this intuitive feeling, if we ever had a chance to do some study, some research on these forests, we would find out all kinds of exciting 00:18:00things. We just hadn't had the opportunity, and that's exactly what happened. I don't think I realized at the beginning of the '60s that we were going to develop as broad a vision, as comprehensive a vision of these forests, as we did during that decade. But we went from essentially very little knowledge to a fundamental understanding. So that when somebody, in this case some people on the Siuslaw National Forest, asked us to tell them what an old-growth forest is, that we know it's more than just big-old trees. We had a basis by that point-in-time, to say, okay, this is what it is.

SS: By the early '80s or the late '70s

JF: Well, we did our first workshop to try to bring our vision together in '78. 00:19:00And, you know, it was pretty rudimentary. It's embarrassing now, and that's the document.

SS: For the record, I'm referring to a foundational publication called Ecological characteristics of old-growth Douglas-fir forests. Jerry Franklin was the primary author; also, Kermit Cromack, Jr., Phil Sollins, Bill Denison, Arthur McKee, Chris Maser, James Sedell, Fred Swanson and Glenn Juday. Do you want to tell me about how the '70s crystallized all the work you did and the awareness into this foundational document

JF: That workshop was done, really, it was stimulated by the query from the national forests, the people in the Siuslaw National Forest, who said, Tell us what an old-growth forest is. And so, what I did was to say, Well, we'd better get a bunch of us together that have been working on it, and we spent a week at 00:20:00Wind River [Experimental Forest] in the training center, and basically produced that document.

SS: Now, before that time, people had different terms. Old growth was a term, but they just didn't know what it was. But there were also interchangeable terms; climax forests, virgin forests, some of the terms often used. Right

JF: Sure, sure.

SS: And what's the problem with climax

JF: Well, the problem with climax forest, is technically, a climax forest is one that essentially is self-perpetuating in the absence of some kind of major disturbance, and isn't undergoing any changes in composition. In fact, because Douglas-fir is so long-lived, any forest with a Douglas-fir forest with Douglas-fir still in it, certainly in the moist part of the forest region, is 00:21:00not a climax forest. It's still got its pioneer, which is the Douglas-fir. And so, it is not a climax forest. It is, however, an old forest.

SS: That's some of the legacy of the early ecologists such as Clements and people like that.

JF: Sure, technically, you'd have to have a forest that no longer, the Douglas-fir had died out of it, and the hemlocks and the cedars had taken over, because they are tolerant and they are perpetuating. But Douglas-fir is so long-lived that almost none of our forests have ever started with Douglas-fir and survived long enough, that they lost all of their Douglas-fir . So, they weren't climax forests in a technical sense.

SS: So, you're at the NSF, you come back.

JF: And I come back and I'm a project leader.

SS: For the Forest Service

JF: For the Forest Service [Pacific Northwest Research Station].

SS: But you're also the PI at the Andrews

JF: Yeah, I wasn't initially when I came back. You know, Dick Waring had sort of been the PI for Oregon State. But, Dick really wasn't interested in heading up a very broad program. Dick's always had very specific interests and a very specific way of doing things. And he really wasn't that interested in sort of leading a team of people for a long period of time. So, when I came back from Washington, D.C., I was the Project Leader for the Forest Service with the responsibility for the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, and with responsibility 00:23:00for Cascade Head Experimental Forest as well. And so, I was well-positioned and I had a lot of Forest Service resources that were under my jurisdiction, and I was in a really good position then, to merge those with funds we were getting from the National Science Foundation. That's what we did. Ultimately, it was in 1979-80 that we produced our first LTER proposal. It was at that time that I really took over the leadership, and Dick Waring pretty much dropped out.

SS: But Dick was a real pivotal figure.

JF: He was a pivotal figure in the IBP, especially.

SS: How did you two complement each other I mean, you were very different in how 00:24:00you saw science. He was much more quantitative-centered. Is that true

JF: Much more quantitative, much more hypothesis-oriented, and had very specific interests, where I've always had a very broad, general interest in the ecology and natural history of these forests.

SS: And in terms of the kinds of paradigm shifts we're talking about, it's not just scientific, it's probably cultural. We're going to take a break for a second. (Break) Okay, we're back on the record after a short break.

JF: Well, basically Dick was involved in it all through the '70s, but when we actually developed the first LTER proposal, it became pretty clear shortly after we got the first LTER grant, that this was not something that he really wanted to continue to run. So, I took over that responsibility of being PI on the LTER 00:25:00grant as well.

SS: So, this would have been LTER 1, correct

JF: Yes, it was.

SS: For the record, even though we're going to talk about the Northwest Forest Plan and the Forest Wars here real shortly, tell me a little bit more about the transition into the EER, the Experimental Ecological Reserve, there was kind of a little era, and then all of a sudden it changed to LTER. Why did the terminology change and how did that come about

JF: Well, I wasn't in the National Science Foundation during that five years from '75 to '80, so I know that the concept of these long-term funding things was very controversial and had to undergo an evolution. They even had two workshops that were supposedly designing what LTER was supposed to be. But in 00:26:00the end, as it finally emerged, the assistant director for Bio within NSF at that point-in-time, decided that she really wanted these to be individually-competed, hypothesis-based, long-term grants. And so, I think Long-Term Ecological Research moved the focus away from a place, and much more to something that was more traditional and that she was more comfortable with. There was a lot of controversy within the ecological community about these, and 00:27:00a lot of discussion and controversy within NSF about exactly what these should be. So, it was sort of a close-run thing, I think, the decision on the part of NSF to go ahead with this program. But LTER, Long-Term Ecological Research, I think, was the name that they finally adopted as being one that they were comfortable with.

SS: It's very interesting how what would become the science and the process of the Northwest Forest Plan, monitoring all the things that would happen, essentially would also have components of that thing to it.

JF: Huge components of it.

SS: Huge components. And how would you characterize the transition from a more 00:28:00deductive perspective on science and management with a kind of an atomistic view of the world versus a more holistic, shall we say, inductive view, which I think ecosystems science, and certainly the New Forestry, and all those things definitely incorporate at least large elements of that with deductive studies still being there, but it shifted, it was kind of inverted, and one was within the context of the other

JF: Well, it was very controversial. It was very controversial within the ecological science community; it was very controversial within NSF. And there was great antagonism against IBP by many of the traditional ecologists because it wasn't really hypothesis-based science at all. It approached it in a very 00:29:00different way.

SS: And so that was essentially what I just said, I mean, you had methods and paradigms and models, but it was inverted. It was more like, okay, let's see what all this stuff tells us, independent of some structure.

JF: Absolutely.

SS: Is that fair enough to say

JF: And it would have been fair to say that when we started doing this research at the Andrews, we really didn't have any hypotheses at all. What we decided was, okay, we get to study these systems. I guess, the first thing we'd better do is a carbon budget, a nutrient budget, and a water budget, and see what we learn. And of course, you didn't get very far into trying to fill in the pieces of a budget before interesting things begin to emerge. And so there, then you 00:30:00were beginning to develop, you know, things that were more susceptible to a hypothesis-based kind of a science.

SS: Once you got the momentum in, shall we say, an extended database and sets of observations that can tell you something independent of going into with this different model or question or deductive pair, right, when you say that question

JF: Right.

SS: Yeah. So, let's go back to forestry. You're in the LTER era. What was happening in the Pacific Northwest I mean, you had the 1976 National Forest Management Act, which, for its day and considering where it came from, was still fairly progressive.

JF: It was tremendously progressive. There's a book out by a fellow by the name 00:31:00of James Skillen [Federal Ecosystem Management] that is really quite good at relating some of that historical development including the National Forest Management Act of '76. But effectively, the way the NFMA was written, there really was no alternative but to ultimately adopt an ecosystem perspective on forests. You have to realize that up until that time, forestry was traditionally based on the view of a forest as being a collection of trees. And you manage that collection of trees to produce wood, more than anything else. So, that was the most important thing that you were getting from the forest.

SS: And the softer values would have been couched in still humanistic values, 00:32:00recreation, for example.

JF: Right, but nevertheless, the professional forester was trained to think about the forest as a collection of trees, not as an ecosystem. And in fact, back in 1950, we wouldn't have, there was no science to support a view of the forest as an ecosystem. One of the things that's happened in the last 60 years of my lifetime, has been, we've gone from this very simplistic vision of a forest as a collection of trees, to a very comprehensive knowledge of forests as ecosystems. And interestingly, that perspective was reflected in legislation like the ESA, like NFMA, like NEPA, before it was reflected in the attitudes of the professional resource managers.

SS: And even with many scientists.

JF: Absolutely.

SS: And so, it's almost like the cultural and political paradigm shift predicted the science, in some ways.

JF: Well, yes, except what happened, I think interestingly, was that some of our leaders in policy recognized very early on the importance of the idea of the ecosystem. And the whole notion that everything is in fact linked together. Rachel Carson gets some credit for that. Aldo Leopold gets some credit for that. But in any case, the ecosystem perspective became incorporated into legislation 00:34:00that forced ultimately resource managers to begin to view systems that way and manage them that way.

SS: How long did it take you to realize what these laws meant

JF: Well, I didn't realize where things were going to be going. Right up through the '70s and into the '80s, I didn't anticipate a major change in policy. So, I really didn't understand the legislation that well or what the implications of it was, and it took about ten to fifteen years for it to be sorted out through litigation. Ultimately the courts were the interpreters of what the laws meant, and I don't think the agencies themselves understood the significance of what 00:35:00had gone on. That was why, ultimately, they were unable to come to grips with it. They failed.

SS: And even develop plans that would be able to hold cultural, political and legal muster.

JF: Well, that's right.

SS: I mean, it took them, I believe, in the Oregon and Washington areas that became the Northwest Forest Plan area, all of the forests, it took them 10, 11, 12 years, to come up and basically finish all these forest plans. But when it came down to legal challenges, none of them held up.

JF: None of them held up. Absolutely.

SS: I mean, they tried.

JF: They tried, but they failed.

SS: Why did they fail

JF: They failed because they didn't understand that the laws really meant what they said.

SS: They thought they could still pigeon-hole them within the old paradigm.

JF: They thought that this was all essentially verbiage, but the reality was in 00:36:00the end, we're going to cut a lot of wood. And so, they could not believe that in fact, they would be forced to change their priorities.

SS: Now, during the '60s and '70s, and the early '80s, what do you remember seeing and feeling and knowing about the traditional industrial forestry and the clear-cutting, that was still going on as it had

JF: Well, what was becoming very clear to me was that, first of all, it was not taking account of a great many of the values that were out there, and that we were going to have to make some significant changes. So, I was believing that 00:37:00there was going to have to be change, but I thought it was going to be an evolutionary change rather than a revolutionary change. And so, I began to really try to think about things like a kinder and gentler forestry. I began to think about and talk about leaving trees behind.

SS: That's the New Forestry. [Term used in 1980s1990s to describe not-clear-cut centered, lighter impact methods, more progressive forestry.]

JF: Not clear-cutting. And so, even I remember in the late '80s, meeting with the.......what were they called The big eight conservation organizations. You know, I think there are eight of them.

SS: Well, the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, was the Isaac Walton League considered one of those eight

JF: Yeah, and Audubon.

SS: Audubon, whatever, I can't remember all of them.

JF: So, they had a meeting in Portland, and they invited me and the Regional Forester [Region 6] to come and talk with them. One of the questions they asked us, is how much of the remaining old growth do you think we're going to save We both gave the same answer, which was half, and we were wrong. Both of us were wrong, that ultimately indicated, this is going to be a revolutionary change, it's not going to be evolutionary. And the interesting thing about the Northwest Forest Plan was, we weren't asked to preserve all the old growth; that isn't what President Clinton asked us to do. He asked us to develop a scientifically-credible plan that was legal for management of the forests within the range of the northern spotted owl. So, we came up with a plan that left out 00:39:00some of the mature and old forests, because we didn't think we needed to set it all aside.

SS: Which, I believe, in terms of the ten alternatives that came up, the one that saved the most or all was called the green dream, correct

JF: Yes, as far as that goes, the Northwest Forest Plan was a green dream. There wasn't an environmentalist out there that could believe what we did. Because essentially, we flipped the perspective on the national forests exactly 180 degrees, from an emphasis on timber to an emphasis on ecology. But it didn't set aside all of the old growth. But the minute after the Northwest Forest Plan [NWFP] was passed, they began to try to log some of the old growth that was allowable under the - [NWFP]

SS: - In the Matrix and AMA's, correct [Zoning categories in NWFP.]

JF: Yeah, and immediately, there was a societal response, the essence of which 00:40:00was, it may be okay from a scientist point-of-view, but it's not okay with us. So, where society was on it was essentially, no, you're not going to cut any more old forest. We're going to come out here, we're going to hang in the trees, and we're going to lie down in front of the bulldozers. Basically, the politicians and agency people decided we can't manage forests this way. We can't have to go out and put a bunch of people in jail every time we do a timber sale. So, they quit. They just quit trying to cut old growth. You know, they'd take a swing now and then, and they'd get backed down. In the end, basically, the agency said, this isn't working. In fact, they just stopped doing regeneration 00:41:00harvesting. Now, the thought didn't ever occur to them, well, we could go into the plantations and do that and probably get away with it. They didn't do that. They still don't.

SS: Now, when was the first time, within the context of what you know now and knew then, about endangered species and the Endangered Species Act, that you heard about the [northern] spotted owl

JF: Well, I heard about it in the late '70s and early '80s, because a lot of the research was going on at the Andrews. A lot of Eric's work.

SS: Eric Forsman

JF: Eric Forsman's work was it, and I knew Eric. So, I knew about the northern spotted owl, but in the mid-'80s, if you'd told me that we're going to stop essentially logging all of the old-growth forests because of the northern 00:42:00spotted owl, I would have said I don't really believe that's going to happen. I couldn't believe it. And I think that's one of the reasons why the environmental organizations were very concerned about listing the northern spotted owl, and debated whether or not they were concerned, this could break the Endangered Species Act.

SS: Now, if I recall, the agency that hedged the longest was the [U.S.] Fish and Wildlife Service. Correct

JF: First of all, the agency interfered politically in the listing process the first time, and got whacked down by the judge for doing that. They went back through it, and did have to list it when they approached it totally on a scientific basis. So, that was political involvement by the elder Bush 00:43:00administration in the listing process. The listing is supposed to be based entirely on scientific criteria, and they hadn't done that. But even before that, it wasn't one of the major environmental organizations that petitioned for listing of the northern spotted owl. It was a little organization [Green World] because the big ones were all afraid that if this bird gets listed, this could break the Endangered Species Act. Because in fact, is they try to shut down logging in the old-growth forests in the Northwest based on the listing of a species, somebody's going to change the act. So, they couldn't believe it. The elder Bush administration couldn't believe it. The Forest Service itself couldn't believe that this is what was going to happen. And so, they failed. And 00:44:00in the end, when the judge in Seattle [William Dwyer] finally said, no more timber harvesting within the range of the northern spotted owl until you have a credible plan for sustaining the northern spotted owl. When that finally happened, nobody would believe the agencies any more. So, what did they do They got a whole bunch of scientists in this building in Portland, and we weren't trained to make plans. But we did. Glen Juday got us all together. There wasn't a decision-maker [manager] in that group. Incidentally, there wasn't a decision-maker involved in the Gang of Four report, either. Basically, it was 00:45:00totally an effort on the part of scientists, federal and otherwise.

SS: Going back to the start of this process, late '80s. The ISC report, the Gang of Four report, and the EIS's. I think there were different ones [EIS reports] on the spotted owl. There was one in '91 or one in '92.

JF: Yeah.

SS: And then you had FEMAT, the thing that came out of the Pink Tower camp. [Scientists in Bank of America building in Portland, Oregon, for ninety days, to devise scientific alternatives for managing NSO region.]

JF: Right.

SS: Camp or slumber party, I jokingly call it. The 90-day slumber party

JF: It was interesting.

SS: But how did that come about For instance, tell me about Jack's role, but also how the Gang of Four came together, and how these strong personalities, very talented scientists in their own right, in different disciplines and sub-disciplines, how they came together But start with Jack first. [Jack Ward Thomas]

JF: Well, there's a sequence here, and it does start with Jack. It starts with 00:46:00Jack before the judge shuts everything down when the chief of the Forest Service goes to Jack and says, Jack, I want you to get all the owl biologists together and I want you to provide me with a scientifically credible plan for sustaining the spotted owl on the national forests. Okay He said, I want a plan and I want it to be scientifically credible, but also try to design it to minimize impacts on other Forest Service activities. Between the lines, that was trying to minimize impacts on allowable cut. So, Jack did that. And that started, I think, in '89.

SS: That's the ISC report

JF: That's the ISC report. Then it was published in '91.

SS: And that's an acronym for Interagency Scientific Committee

JF: Committee.

SS: Right.

JF: Well, they did a heroic thing. I was absolutely stunned when I saw the report, because they did two things. First of all, they said the basic strategy that's been proposed out there to essentially provide habitat for so many pairs of owls in isolation, isn't going to work. He said we've known that all along. We've known all along that we really need large contiguous blocks of habitat which will sustain 20 or more pairs of owls. So, these little individual habitat preserves aren't going to do anything. They aren't going to succeed. Instead, we 00:48:00need to essentially have large habitat blocks and many pairs of owls. That was a total break with everything we'd previously heard, all the stuff that had gone on before. And furthermore, even though they were trying to cut slack, the impact was huge. And you know, basically they proposed about 7 million acres of Habitat Conservation Areas.

SS: In the ISC report

JF: In the ISC report. So, big impact on timber harvest. And so that report went back to the chief [U.S. Forest Service].

SS: And that was Dale Robertson at that time

JF: It was Dale Robertson. Dale went to the White House after the shutdown by the judge, and said, Can I implement this report And they said, No, you can't. 00:49:00Too big an impact on timber harvest.

SS: This was during, right when Clinton was in, or was this still Bush

JF: No, this was elder Bush.

SS: That's what I thought.

JF: This was 1990-91.

SS: Okay, that's what I thought.

JF: Okay, so it was '90. Nothing happened for about 18 months. The elder Bush administration was running around thinking there's got to be some way around this. This can't be. We've got to find some wildlife people that will say, no, you don't have to do that. Well, that didn't work. We've got to find an alternative way of doing this to this. And the BLM had all kinds of proposals. We'll raise owls and release them. There was all kinds of weird stuff. So, nothing happened. So, in '91, two committees of the United States House of 00:50:00Representatives decided to get together, to which a third one adhered in the end. So, there were three committees and three subcommittees. They said, We're going to call in these guys, these experts, and have them explain to us what the hell's going on, and what we have to do to get out of it. These three House committees met together, for the Gang of Four to come and tell them, you know, each of us in our own way, what's going on. And so, there was Norm [Johnson], there was me, there was John Gordon, and there was Jack Ward Thomas.

SS: Who came up with the name the Gang of Four

JF: Well, the industry came up with it afterwards.

SS: You mean, timber industry

JF: Timber industry, because it was pejorative.

SS: That's what I was going to say, it wasn't complimentary.

JF: It was pejorative, absolutely. So anyway, we went in there, and we didn't coordinate anything beforehand. We just each went in and talked about our subjects. Norm blew them away, because he said - he was a recognized man about allowable cut - we've been overcutting for a long time. They wanted him to tell them how much, and he's a very conservative guy. He wasn't going to tell them what he really thought, but he said quite a bit, maybe ten percent. And the thing about allowable cut is, it's the maximum that you could possibly harvest if everything worked out perfectly. And it never does. But we've been cutting that amount anyway, and so we've really been overcutting on these national forests for quite a long time now. That was stunning to them. And I told them 00:52:00about the old-growth forests, that this was really about an ecosystem, it wasn't really about a bird. Jack talked to them about the owl and what the owl committee people said. Incidentally, one other thing I'll come back to, that report of the Thomas Committee [ISC] did one other incredible thing, and that had to do with the 50-11-40 rule, what you do to areas in between the habitat conservation areas [Rule refers to 50 percent of land between HCAs having stands of at least 11 inches in average diameter, and a 40 percent canopy cover].

SS: And that would be analogous to what later would be the Matrix in the AMAs in the context of the late successional reserves in the Northwest Forest Plan. Correct, more or less

JF: Yeah, in a way.

SS: Yeah, okay.

JF: But anyway, we went off after giving this testimony to a back room in one of 00:53:00the House office buildings, and were sitting there with several committee members. I was sitting close to Harold Volkmer.[D-MO] Now, Volkmer was a Southern Democrat, well-respected by both sides of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. He was sitting there, and he was chair of the House Agriculture Committee, which had included the forestry subcommittee. He was writing on a back of an envelope, and I said, Congressman, what are you writing He said, Well, I'm writing down what we have to put into a bill, in order to solve this problem. Oh, you're writing our law on the back of an envelope That's what I was 00:54:00thinking. He went back to what he was doing, and about thirty seconds later, he looked up, looked at me, and he said, You know, if you could just tell us where the good old-growth is, we could solve this problem. I said, Well, we can do that. I don't know how we could do that, but we can do that. Jack Ward Thomas was trying to kick me, and he was kicking Norm Johnson instead. Norm will tell you this story probably, but that led to, Well, here's what we want you to do. We want you to go back to the Northwest, you four, and we want you to map all the old growth, grade it as to its quality, and give us a plan for what we 00:55:00should put into legislation to solve this problem. And we were kind of playing, and after having said that, I'm not sure we really want to do this.

SS: Well, you weren't sure that you wanted to put a number or a box around an idea that you hadn't really had a chance to flesh out yet.

JF: Well, that's right, and besides that, who's going to pay for this And well, there goes my sabbatical. But anyway, he said, Well, if you don't want to do it, we will do it. Oh boy, that had us by the short hairs. Boy, no one's going to map and characterize the quality of old growth, my old-growth forest, but me. I don't want any congressional staffers doing this. So, they had us, and sent us 00:56:00home. But, as we went out the door, literally as we went out the door, Volkmer said, Oh, and one more thing, don't forget the fish. We don't want some damn fish blowing us out of the water after we've got this thing solved. And so, Congressional folks knew right away, it wasn't just about owls, it was really about old-growth systems. Volkmer was very aware that it wasn't just about the terrestrial part of that system, it was very much about the water part, too, and fish. And so, the Gang of Four became the Gang of Four - Plus Two. And we wanted to be the Gang of Six, but they wouldn't let us do that. But Jim Sedell and Gordie Reeves became, you know, equivalents.

SS: Co-partners in the aquatic side of things

JF: Co-partners on the aquatic side. So, now we've got it all. We've got the forest ecosystem, including the streams, worried about fish, worried about owls, worried about murrelets, worried about all old-growth systems.

SS: Although the murrelets weren't quite in the equation yet, at the start, is that correct

JF: They were.

SS: They were Okay.

JF: Yes, they were in the Gang of Four exercise.

SS: So, even in this first report

JF: Even in this 1991 report.

SS: And he's talking about the Alternatives for Management of Late Successional Forests of the Pacific Northwest.

JF: Right.

SS: Which is co-authored by the Gang of Four Norm, Jerry, Jack and John.

JF: Right. So, Norm can tell you the story better than I can. So, but we come back to the Northwest and they want this done in a month. So, how are we going to do this all The congressional people had essentially said to the Department 00:58:00of Agriculture, in fact, to both departments, Interior and Ag, give these people whatever resources they need in terms of personnel.

SS: And this is still Bush administration

JF: This is still the Bush administration.

SS: But you do have Democratic Congress, though. Senate and the House

JF: You've got a Democratic House.

SS: Right, but not the Senate

JF: Not the Senate. Senate's Republican.

SS: Okay.

JF: So, I figured out, okay, how am I going to get the best assessment of old-growth forests I'm going to pull in all of those staff people out there on the forests and on the BLM districts, the biologists, the silviculturalists, the aquatic biologists, the wildlife people, who know their properties very well, and we're going to get them all together in a great-big room, and give each of 00:59:00them responsibility to map the old-growth forest on their forest. And so, that's what we did.

SS: This was the one that was at the [Portland] Memorial Coliseum, correct

JF: Right. Norm arranged this, rented it, and so we had this big room. Each [National] forest and BLM district is laid out geographically, so that the Willamette is right next to the Deschutes, is right next to the Umpqua, etc. So that the people on one forest can see what the people on the other forest, how they are mapping theirs, and they can coordinate, connect up their mapping on the forests. And so, the four of us supervised that. Each one of us took responsibility for a piece of it. And I don't know all of it, but you've got 01:00:00these four alphas all in a room, actually, at least five, with Jim Sedell, and every one of us sort of took a key responsibility and carried it forward. It was incredible. We had 130, 135, 140 people, for, I thought it was two weeks. Norm says it's only one week, but it sure seemed like two weeks to me. And we did all the mapping and we did all of the characterizing. Norm, being the brilliant policy analyst that he is, said, You know, what we're going to do here is we're not going to give them a plan. We're going to analyze a whole broad range of alternatives and we're going to evaluate each from an environmental and from an 01:01:00economic perspective, and we're going to give that whole analysis to them. And, you know, Norm's absolutely right. That's what you need to do in policy analysis. You need to give the decision-makers a really broad array of alternatives to look at, and some critical criteria for judging them by. They were all designed, so that each one, you could look at the marginal cost and benefit as you added each additional increment of preservation, for example. It was an incredible exercise and Norm was the mastermind, and in the end, we could put it all on a single chart. So, six weeks later, we go back.

SS: To Washington

JF: To Washington, D.C.

SS: The same committees, correct

JF: Same committees. Chief [U.S. Forest Service] was in the audience.

SS: Dale Robertson

JF: With everybody else, and so, we make this presentation on what we did and what we concluded.

SS: Now, was this basically this report

JF: That's this report.

SS: Okay.

JF: But, it's all summarized on a single table. And I don't know if that's in your copy or not, but it was amazing.

SS: Now, the only thing in that copy that Norm said that was missing, was one of the maps in the back that wasn't in the copy. He gave me the copy.

JF: Well, in any case, you know, we went through it. Let's see, concluding observations. The presentation of them was fascinating. John Gordon was our 01:03:00spokesman, and John is a big man with a deep voice.

SS: Or as people say, the Voice of God, right He's got that almost James Earl Jones kind of presence. Yes

JF: He does. And so, Norm, I'm sure, will tell you about some of this because John didn't particularly agree with the report as we had written it at that point, but he just went ahead and at the end of it, he said, okay, one of the things, you know, we provided an array of alternatives. Basically, what it showed them was there is no free lunch. Jack liked to talk about that all the time, that you cannot have five billion board-feet of timber every year and have viable owl populations. You have to make a choice. You can't do that. And the 01:04:00range of alternatives, which went from deep green to deep brown, showed that. And this is what Gordon put in at the end. So, we'll describe the beginnings of a practical ecosystem approach to conserving biological diversity. Nature does things in twos and threes, rather than singly. So should we, in seeking to preserve nature But here was the one I just couldn't believe. It seemed to be so quieting, the last thing. We have provided a sound basis for decisions given the time and information limits within which we operated. Science, at least as exemplified by the four of us and those who assisted us, has done what it can. The process of democracy must go forward from here. (Laughs) They loved it. They loved it. Those politicians just loved this. SS: So, the other people in this 01:05:00committee, that's officially the Gang of Four, were people from the Northwest. How did John Gordon become added He was at Yale at the time, and he was kind of a more traditional eastern establishment academic. I mean, how did he get put into that and what did he bring to the table

JF: John, he's the Dean at Yale. Yale is, you know, the ultimate forestry school in a lot of people's eyes.

SS: At least in terms of legacy and history, yes. [Henry] Graves was the first dean, etc.

JF: And John was the nearest thing that we had to a statesman in forestry. He has this, he's a great mind, and he also has this presence which is very powerful. And so, he was a natural choice. One of the congressional staffers who 01:06:00put together the Gang of Four, was from Yale. Jack was the best-known forest wildlife biologist that we had. He's an elk specialist, but that didn't make any difference. I'm the old-growth guy, and Norm is the best policy person in the world and knows allowable cuts inside and out. He wrote the program. And so, then we pulled Sedell and Reeves into it to deal with the fisheries issue. And the interesting thing, and there's a doctoral dissertation at UW on this, is that those committees had decided to adopt us as their experts. And they believed us and they were not going to question anything that we told them.

SS: And this is, of course, before we had this huge anti-intellectual, anti-science thing, kind of take over the Republican Party.

JF: Absolutely.

SS: You still had Republicans that believed in science, for example

JF: Absolutely. And so, when we made this report to them, and what we said in effect, is that conserving old growth and spotted owls is going to cost you bigtime in terms of impacts on allowable harvest.

SS: And what was their initial response

JF: The initial response was sticker shock. They believed everything we told them, but they couldn't believe how much timber harvest they were going to have to give up, to get any kind of a credible outcome.

SS: Now, how many of these congress people were from the Northwest

JF: A lot of them. And during the break, we went down, and Bob Smith, who was 01:08:00from southwest Oregon, he was a southwest Oregon congressman around, the one that -

SS: Medford, Grants Pass, that area, or ---

JF: Well, Eugene.

SS: Oh, okay.

JF: It's the same one that -

SS: DeFazio is now

JF: DeFazio.

SS: Oh, so it's his district, District 4

JF: The most important timber district in the United States. He was looking at this chart that laid out the alternatives, and what the economic costs and the environmental benefits were going to be. He was standing there looking at it like this, Norm and I walked up, and so Norm said to him, Well, Congressman, what do you think He said, Well, we're not going to legislate anything less than an eight. Less than an eight Man, that is going to reduce the allowable cut by 01:09:0080 percent. So, Norm said, Why Why nothing less than an eight And he said, We are not going to legislate anything that has an L [One alternative from 14 alternatives considered that has a low viability ranking regarding the ESA - from Very Low (1) to Very High (14) probability in species viability].

SS: What do you mean by an L in it

JF: Well, in effect, what he was saying is, we've got these alternatives laid out there, and they give us the probability of viable owl populations, connected old-growth networks, fish habitat, marbled murrelet habitat, other old-growth species. And every one of them has a very qualitative grading on it. The 01:10:00probability, if the probability is very low, VL, that means less than a five percent probability of success in achieving that goal over the next hundred years. And so, we'd done that for all five of those things for this broad array, actually, it went from about one to 14, it was about 14 alternatives that went from very brown to very green, or very green to very brown. And so, very low, low, medium low, medium probability, 50 percent probability, that you would have it for a hundred years. Medium, medium high, high, very high, a 95 percent or better probability. And basically, what he's saying is any alternative that has 01:11:00an L in it, which was less than a 50 percent probability, wasn't credible or acceptable as something to put into a congressional bill. The point here is that he looked at that chart and could immediately identify the decision space he actually had. You know, the decision space didn't include just blowing off spotted owls and going for five billion board-feet of timber, and that was part of a comprehensive policy analysis, but it wasn't going to happen. And so, in the end, the congressional folks put together a bill that was essentially equivalent to Alternative 10 on a 14 or 12-point scale, something like that.

SS: You're talking about Alternative 10.

JF: Green.

SS: In the FEMAT report

JF: No.

SS: Oh, Alternative 10 of that

JF: This is in the Gang of Four.

SS: Okay, got you. I just wanted to make sure.

JF: They put together a bill. It was even greener than eight, it was 10. And it essentially involved reducing timber harvest by 80 percent. But in the end, the Speaker of the House Representatives said, I don't want you to vote this out of committee. So, the three committees put a bill together that they agreed on. The Speaker of the House said, Don't vote it on. I don't want it on the floor.

SS: And he tabled it. They tabled it

JF: They tabled it.

SS: Or did they kill it or they tabled it

JF: They tabled it.

SS: Okay.

JF: So, that was the end of the congressional effort. But the Gang of Four report had dealt with fish and old-growth and owls and murrelets, and a thousand 01:13:00other old-growth species. So, it was the first time now we're really looking at all elements in this system. So, it was a critical step which started with an owl report, now we have a scientific analysis that considers all the elements of the system, and that was absolutely critical to positioning us for FEMAT.

SS: Now, the owl report, I believe, was this one. Correct (Viewing reports interviewer brought for reference.)

JF: No, the owl report was-

SS: Oh, this is 1985. So this is early then

JF: Yeah, the 1991 one, the Thomas Committee.

SS: Okay, I'm sorry, gotcha.

JF: So, the Thomas Committee had given us the notion that to deal with owls, we needed big reserves, we needed to worry about the areas between the big 01:14:00reserves. The Gang of Four report really focused in on old growth and really focused in on aquatic systems and fish. So now, we have a really comprehensive background on which to build a Northwest Forest Plan.

SS: What was the peripheral noise or interactions between the timber industry and even environmentalists as this was going on Because you already had, one of the injunctions was in effect, right

JF: The injunctions were in effect.

SS: Right, I mean, Judge Dwyer made two decisions, correct

JF: Yeah.

SS: And the second one was already having an impact, and was basically, a test, and he said, No, this stands. And so, you were going forward. But what was the push from the timber industry and the environmentalists

JF: Well, what they'd done with Dwyer, was at this point after this, they went 01:15:00back to him essentially with the Thomas Report.

SS: The ISC

JF: The ISC Report. So, Dwyer read it and said, Well, this is interesting, but this is old now. We wrote this three or four years ago, and you said in the report there might be new information, and there is. And you haven't incorporated that into your original document. And incidentally, I've read the Gang of Four report, and what about the old-growth forest So basically, the administration came to him with the Thomas Report, which was really written in 1990, and he said, Well, that's good, but it's dated now. So, he gives them a 01:16:00whole bunch of questions, Now you take this back, and you take my questions back, and you come back to me with a response. And that was the ISC Report. And was that what is was called, Scientific...it was -

SS: Which one are we talking about now

JF: There's another report.

SS: I don't think I have that one with me.

JF: Do I have a copy of it upstairs

SS: Do you want to take a break just for a second

JF: I don't think I have a copy of it.

SS: But just speak to it, okay

JF: Basically, the Forest Service went back and put together a scientific group, an internal scientific group, to respond to the judge's questions. In the meantime, before they got back to the judge with that, Bill Clinton was elected 01:17:00president. And he had said, I'm going to solve this problem.

SS: That was one of his campaign promises

JF: That was one of his campaign promises.

SS: And, if I recall, he put together what became the Forest Summit within one or two months after his inauguration. Correct

JF: Absolutely. He brought key members of his cabinet out. And even before he did that, he set up a FEMAT team. The FEMAT team was to do a couple of things. One was to review all the science. And the second thing that the FEMAT team was to do, was to develop a series of alternatives that were scientifically credible and legally possible within existing law, and basically consistent with those first two goals, cut society some slack. That was the mission of the FEMAT team. 01:18:00And it was very significant. I don't know if he knew this, but the goal of that group then was to provide the alternatives from which the president would select a preferred alternative, and all of which would be used as a basis for a NEPA-based process. But this [FEMAT] was not a NEPA-based process. This was a closed process. Nobody got into the pink tower. Jack's main job was to keep everybody out of there and let the scientists work essentially freely without pressures from outside.

SS: For the record, the pink tower is the U.S. Bank building, in downtown 01:19:00Portland. I believe they were on the 14th floor of a place affectionately called the pink tower, because that's where people almost lived for-

JF: For three months.

SS: - three months. And so, talk about, I want you to go back. Do you want to describe the Clinton Summit first, or the dynamics of the pink tower first However you want to talk about that.

JF: Well, I think the really important process that went on was not the timber summit, it was what happened in the pink tower. The job of that team was to basically review all the science and to essentially develop a series of alternatives that could be used in a NEPA-based EIS process. That's it.

SS: So, when you were given the charge to do this, and it was the Gang of Four-Plus Two that were basically the co-managers, correct

JF: The Gang of Four was ended with that report. So, John Gordon wasn't in this [FEMAT] process.

SS: Right, correct.

JF: It was mostly an agency-based process, but they pulled in a few academics. Norm Johnson and I were two of the academics they pulled in.

SS: Gordie Reeves, Jim Sedell are still involved, correct

JF: They are Forest Service people.

SS: Who were the main BLM players in the pink tower

JF: I couldn't tell you.

SS: Couldn't tell you, okay.

JF: I didn't know the BLM people very well at that point-in-time. But, Sedell and Fred Swanson and Gordie Reeves were all there, and they were really focused 01:21:00on developing the aquatic component of the Northwest Forest Plan. The owl people were there and were very much there developing the owl component of it. And they were very wedded to their HCA's that they developed back in 1990. And so, they wanted those to be the basis.

SS: Conservation areas

JF: Habitat Conservation Areas. SS: Correct.

JF: And, you know, I was very wedded to the old-growth concentrations that we'd mapped and characterized in the Gang of Four report. But essentially, we had all of that body of science behind us to work from.

SS: Now, what were the ground rules for this You were initially told you had sixty days, but then you were given an extra thirty. What did they say, come up 01:22:00with somebody, go camping out and come up with a synthesis, or a document that we can then go produce enough viable alternatives for the president to make a choice of one Is that how that came about

JF: Well, there were a whole lot of evaluation processes that went on. For example, each group of organisms had expert teams that came in and the different alternatives were evaluated in terms of how well the experts in fungi and insects and one thing or another thought they would work for their critters. But the way it broke down is you really had, groups of people that were sort of 01:23:00working on their particular problem, and there wasn't a lot of effective interaction going on between them. So, the aquatic people are doing their aquatic strategy, and they weren't aware of or paying much attention to what the old-growth people were doing, or what the owl people were doing. And also, they should have put Norm Johnson in charge of the alternative development, and they didn't. So, the first seven alternatives were kind of a hodge-podge. They weren't beautiful, incremental kinds of blocks that built where you could look at the marginal cost benefits beautifully, but you could in the case of the Gang of Four. They were a hodgepodge of seven alternatives, and they were sort of everybody's things glued together, and so there was no real coordination 01:24:00between, for example, terrestrial and aquatic.

SS: What you might expect from such an intense, rushed and polyglot type of effort. Correct

JF: Absolutely. And there wasn't anyone really in charge. Jack was really the outside man, the figurehead and one that was dealing with the politics of this. He was dealing with the White House. He was dealing with interest groups. He was dealing with the Native Americans. His job was to try to keep all that crap away from the science folks that were doing the work.

SS: Because there were a lot of rules about who could even go on to the 14th floor.

JF: Absolutely.

SS: I mean, if you got permission and you weren't one of the science people, didn't you have to almost wear like a fluorescent traffic vest or something Is that true

JF: That was the case in the Gang of Four.

SS: Okay, that was the Gang of Four.

JF: That was the Gang of Four. The reason for that and the Gang of Four, was I had brought together all of these staff specialists from the Forest Service the BLM and the Fish and Wildlife Service, put them in a room together and said, I want you to map and characterize, good, better, best, the old growth on your forest. That's your job. I didn't want any decision-makers in there looking over their shoulder, saying, God damn it, don't put anything there. That's our timber sale next year. I wanted them to feel completely free of pressure from decision-makers, rangers, supervisors, regional foresters, and free of any pressure from enviros or timber interests. The Gang of Four, we wanted them 01:26:00isolated, but particularly, we wanted them isolated not just from the stakeholders, but from decision-makers in the agencies. We didn't want them to come in.

SS: So that principal carried forward to FEMAT

JF: Absolutely. I was the only one who ever brought in any of the decision-makers. I did it after the first seven alternatives, as none of them looked very good. None of them did very well at producing timber because they were very inefficient. They were everybody's things piled on each other.

SS: So, was this in the first sixty days, and then you realized you needed thirty more days Is that why the thirty days got added on

JF: Absolutely. We can do better than this. We can do better than this, and the White House said, no, you can't. We want you to finish this. And we had to really fight with the White House to get them to let us have another thirty days. And you know, this whole notion that the President was putting pressure on 01:27:00us to provide an alternative that would produce more timber, was just bullshit. They didn't want us to take another thirty days at all. But in the end, we did three more alternatives.

SS: 8, 9 and 10. (Alternatives in FEMAT identified by Arabic numbers)

JF: And-7, 8, 9 and 10, yeah. Right. And I was responsible for 9. And my strategy was, okay, our problem here is we haven't integrated the aquatic and the terrestrial strategies, so we need to take some time and see how we can make a more efficient reserve system.

SS: Is that when the buffer zones started to become more malleable in terms of how they first came up in the first sixty days, shall we say

JF: No, that's totally different.

SS: Okay.

JF: No, this just had to do primarily with the reserves. So I worked with Eric [Forsman], I worked with Jim Sedell, I worked with Norm, and a few others, but those were the key people. Basically, we came up with a more efficient reserve system that still got pretty good ratings in terms of how effective it was. So, those then became 8, 9 and 10. The White House picked 9 as the alternative, the preferred alternative. Now mind you, the important thing here was the development of these alternatives, all the scientific evaluation and development of alternatives, which had to be scientifically credible and legal, because NFMA 01:29:00requires that, and ESA requires that, as this was done outside of any kind of public engagement.

SS: And that's unusual.

JF: It was absolutely essential, because if you tried to do that in a public forum, it would blow up. Then they took FEMAT, which was roundly criticized -- oh man, everybody hated it -- and used that as the basis then.

SS: Both the left and the right

JF: Yes, absolutely. There was a special issue from the Journal of Forestry on it. And they couldn't say enough bad things about it. But it became the basis then, for the alternatives in the EIS. And of course, we went out there, tens of thousands of comments came back, and it underwent significant modification. 01:30:00Alternative 9 became much greener, because the lawyers were concerned, when they went back to Judge Dwyer, they wanted a slam-dunk. They wanted to know he was going to find for going ahead. And so, basically, they revised Alternative 9, made it greener, and that became the basis then for the final EIS.

SS: Then, the Record of Decision came out of that

JF: Absolutely. Now, one of the things that happened after FEMAT was handed off 01:31:00to the EIS, the team that had been assembled went and did other things. Norm and I went back to our universities. Jack became Chief of the Forest Service. Basically, the central team disbursed. And then, a new group of people responded to the comments and determined implementation guidelines. Let's just say, they made some decisions in modifying Alternative 9, and in the guidelines (See survey and manage) that made it difficult to achieve some of the Forest Plan's main goals.

SS: So, in terms of came out in the final form of this, tell me about what was good about Alternative 9, and how the modifications became problematic in terms of this, and also, the implementation of the Forest Plan in reality

JF: I'll give you two.

SS: Okay.

JF: The first one is a fairly simple one. In FEMAT, we decided to create these 01:32:00Adaptive Management Areas. And incidentally, they were only in Alternative 9; they weren't in any other alternatives.

SS: There no AMA's in any of the others

JF: There were no AMA's. But Tom Spies had been saying, we keep telling these people they can't experiment, or they can't implement a different strategy until they experiment, and we don't give them any place to experiment. So, we need to do that. So, we created these Adaptive Management Areas, ten of them, each one designed to deal with some particular kind of issue or problem. Well, the wildlife biologists, people that were concerned with owls and concerned with murrelets, really hated AMA's. They said, All those are going to be is just woodsheds for the local communities. We hate this.

SS: Basically, you're bribing local people to like a plan or accept it. Right

JF: Yeah, so we had made -- if you read FEMAT -- you'll discover we tried to make it as attractive as possible for people to do different kinds of things in the Adaptive Management Areas. In one example, we said you can begin to do things without having any comprehensive plan for the AMA at all. If you've got something you want to try, you don't have to wait around, just get right at it. And we even asked for additional funding sources for it, funds for them. Well, when the team that followed FEMAT was asked, how should we change this They decided to make it very difficult to do anything in the AMA's. They wrote it so 01:34:00that before you can do anything in an AMA, you have to have a very comprehensive plan for how you're going to use it. So, that is a major impediment.

SS: Did that include Survey and Management [Extending NWFP mandate which focused on viability of a few species, like the northern spotted owl, marbled murrelet, etc., to potentially hundreds of species in a given area.]

JF: Now, that's the second issue.

SS: Or, Survey and Manage, excuse me.

JF: Survey and Manage [Policy name in NWFP] was the second one.

SS: Right, so okay.

JF: But the problem was, there were about 427 species or species-groups, that there just simply wasn't enough information to judge whether or not the preserve system it would establish, which was 80 percent, essentially, of the federal land-base, was adequate to cover those species. So, it wasn't that they were unknown, they were not adequately known. So, what do you do if you don't know whether or not your reserve systems cover those Logic would say, oh, you make a 01:35:00commitment, we're going to find out. We're going to go out and survey in the reserves, and find out whether they're there. No, they didn't do that. Norm thinks this was done by design. What the biologists did was create the Survey and Manage. And it says, before you can do anything in the Matrix, you have to survey for all of these species. If you want to do anything, you have to survey for them, and if you find them, you have to do something to protect them. So, they became absolute trip wires. First of all, it's hugely expensive in time and money. Some of these fungal things required four years of data. So, Survey and 01:36:00Manage became essentially a mine field, as you couldn't really get anything done at all in the Matrix or in the AMA.

SS: Now, Jack Ward Thomas, from what I've heard, had the strongest terms for his disapproval of the Survey and Manage concept. Correct

JF: Yes, and it was some of his own people that did it.

SS: To me, it's the epitome of creating a dynamic of paralysis through analysis.

JF: Well, it certainly does that. The thing about the Northwest Forest Plan was, it was a coarse filter approach. We're going to set aside a lot of reserves.

SS: And this was fine filter [Survey and Manage.]

JF: This was fine filter. And it created a disastrous situation.

SS: Especially because it was incorporated into something that was legally binding.

JF: Yes. The enviros used that to essentially prevent any significant activities 01:37:00for about the first ten years. They still use it. That would have likely not happened if the original team had been there to help write the guidelines; if Jack had been there, if I'd been there, if Norm had been there. If that decision was made, we'd have said, Come on, people, if you don't know about these species, you have to go out in the reserves and go out and see if they're there. [Implications dramatically slowed down management]

SS: Who funded the FEMAT process Where did that money come from

JF: Well, somewhere in the executive branch.

SS: It was the executive, okay.

JF: Yeah, I mean, it was President Clinton's.

SS: And basically, everybody had to go back to their lives and their regular work, after that was done

JF: That's right.

SS: Wasn't the original FEMAT team consulted [On policy guidelines that went into Record of Decision, document on how to implement NWFP].

JF: No.

SS: And you guys had no idea this was going on until this [NWFP] came out

JF: That's right.

SS: What do you remember your first reaction was when you were reading this, and started seeing, you said the two areas, but you were obviously probably picking this apart, going, okay, interesting -

JF: I was very disappointed, I mean, it was --

SS: Did you recognize the potential for -

JF: Oh, absolutely.

SS: - undermining the credibility and implementability of the Northwest Forest Plan

JF: It was obvious, instantly. That's why Jack had the kind of reaction that he did, because at that point-in-time he was Chief of the Forest Service, and now he was going to have to live with this, which meant that not very much was going to get done. And sure enough, it didn't.

SS: Wow! Just hold on a second. (Break in audio.)

JF: Let's go ahead and get started.

SS: We took a short break. Jerry is now looking through the actual 1995 Final 01:39:00Report [NWFP], I believe, sent to the Congress or to the President

JF: This was a Report to the President and the Congress.

SS: And the Congress. I was correct, okay.

JF: They don't really have - oh, it's okay.

SS: That's pretty much a polished, abridged overview for fast reading, that report there, if I recall.

JF: I just wanted to reiterate the importance of the scientific efforts that led up to the Northwest Forest Plan, and particularly, the Thomas Committee's report in 1990, and Gang of Four [report] in 1991 that really looked at the whole northwestern ecosystem, terrestrial and aquatic. Those were really the basis for 01:40:00FEMAT in the development of the Northwest Forest Plan. Without those previous analytic efforts, I don't think we'd have done nearly as well as we did in the Northwest Forest Plan.

SS: Now, how much did the idea of the scientific pulse affect you in your original idea to come together with the first cram session that was at the Memorial Coliseum in Portland Was this kind of modeled on that idea, where you had the science pulses where you'd go out and bring people together for one or two weeks, and you'd go into the field, whether it was the Sequoias or Rocky Mountains Was this kind of the same idea

JF: No, it really wasn't. I see where it has a resemblance. The main impetus to do the first pulses had to do with team-building, and the fact I was leading a 01:41:00large group of people at Corvallis, Forest Service and academic, and I was the only one that knew all of them. I wanted them to get to know each other better, and that's where the idea came. And it seemed like, let's take everybody someplace we haven't been before, and camp out and do field studies together, and then share every evening over a campfire what we've seen that day. And it worked. It did build much more of a team, a much more integrated group. But no, it does have the resemblance that when I thought about, how are we going to respond to this congressional direction to map and characterize the old growth, 01:42:00how can I do that And the only way I could do that was to get a large group of people who had been spending their entire lives out there on the ground, and they really knew their systems. Bringing all that expertise, all that staff expertise together with their maps and ortho-photos, and more than anything, their personal knowledge of the ground, was the way to do it.

SS: In terms of this method of bringing people together, the two instances, the Gang of Four and then later, the larger one, the FEMAT, has that been used as a model again in larger or smaller sizes, here in the United States or even in other countries

JF: I don't really know, to tell you the truth. We used it in California. We 01:43:00went from doing FEMAT in the Northwest Forest Plan to SNEP, the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project, which was funded by the Forest Service, but operated actually through the University of California at Davis. Norm was involved in that and I was involved in that, and my responsibility again was the old forests of the Sierra Nevada, and assessing them. And again, the way I did that was to bring together a large body, it could have been as many as 150 people.

SS: Was this in the '90s or 2000's

JF: This would have been in the '90s. This would have been about '95. And again, 01:44:00I brought them together in a hotel in Sacramento for a week. And again, just bringing together, not decision-makers, but staff, the experts on various areas of wildlife, of hydrology, of fisheries, or forests. And we spent a week working in a very large conference room in this hotel. And interestingly, after that one, people came to me and they said thank you for treating us like professionals.

SS: The science people

JF: These staff people from the [national] forests and the [national] parks and 01:45:00the BLM districts came to me, and basically, they were asked to do a professional task and given the freedom to do it. And in both cases, they were really grateful for that.

SS: Why do you think they had such gratitude based on their experience before, in your opinion, and why they would have that reaction

JF: They didn't feel people were really paying attention to them and their knowledge. They didn't think their knowledge and their capacities were being fully-utilized. They were being constrained by agency missions.

SS: Now, do you think that was also true with the people that were involved with the Northwest Forest Plan

JF: Yes.

SS: So, they found, shall we say, a new form of professional self-esteem

JF: They did. SS: Through that process

JF: It was stressful for them, however, because I remember one of them, a 01:46:00really, wonderful person. She was really stressed by the fact that she was being asked to tell me where the good old growth was on her forest. And she had been working with these people over the years to try to develop a credible timber program. She understood the tension between tell me about the resource, even though it maybe was going to have an impact on your timber program, and she talked to me about it. I said, Just remember, in this exercise, your clients are the owls and the fish and the trees, and that's all you need to worry about. And 01:47:00you know, they did a wonderful job. Both exercises -- they did wonderful jobs.

SS: Now, what was the dynamic between the BLM and the Forest Service before the Northwest Forest Plan process You can include the whole continuum of events. And what do you think that the process of collaboration, grudgingly or otherwise, did for the relationship and the dynamics between the two agencies

JF: Well, for a while, it worked. You know, Clinton said, You're going to all work together. And BLM, you're going to be in the same soup with the Forest Service. So, the agencies really did come together and work as a unit, but that gradually was eroded afterwards as each went its own way.

SS: Back to their normal modus operandi.

JF: Before moving back to their modus operandi. And so, you know, they are very different cultures.

SS: How would you describe the cultures

JF: Well, the BLM in the State of Oregon, has had this mission of managing the O&C lands. It has this congressional mandate for generating income. And so, they have always been very aggressive, not necessarily insensitive, but very aggressive about implementing their [logging] programs. They knew what they had to do. So, it was a real challenge, and it was a bigger challenge for them than it was for the Forest Service, because they had this strongly conflicting mission. And there's always been objections that they shouldn't have been 01:49:00subjected to the same plan that the Forest Service was, because they had this different mission. [As set by federal legislation] But the reality is that both agencies on both properties have the same laws that they're having to deal with. They're both subject to the Endangered Species Act, and they're both subject to NEPA. So, in many ways, but interestingly, the BLM now has become the more innovative organization. Perhaps a part of that was because they have these two missions that conflict with each other, and so they're really challenged, 01:50:00whereas the Forest Service isn't challenged on the economic side at all. So, they can be very conservative and laid-back, and try to avoid making any kind of waves.

SS: Well, there's been more activity on the BLM lands in the last 15-20 years.

JF: Absolutely. There's been much more creativity. How the hell do we integrate these things How do we meet our environmental obligations and still meet, to at least some degree, our economic obligations to the counties So, the Forest Service, because it has no clear economic mandate-there's nothing in the National Forest Management Act of '76 that says you have to cut a lot of timber, 01:51:00or cut any timber at all. And so, basically, it's very easy for the agency to take a very soft approach.

SS: Well, you can interpret multiple-use, which is still a paradigm, but you can interpret that in markedly different ways.

JF: Well, you can, but like the way it's worked out, the National Forest Management Act, does mandate that you provide for biological diversity. It does not mandate that you cut a certain amount of timber.

SS: Well, the expressive statements would have been addressing modus operandi and practices as it had been for 71 years up to that point.

JF: Yeah.

SS: What about the State of Oregon and the State of Washington, and you could 01:52:00even say California, in terms of their lands and the interface, economically, ecologically, hydrologically, and all these continuums that work together These are artificial boundaries around malleable ecologies which are completely different.

JF: Sure.

SS: I mean, what do you remember about the states of Oregon and Washington, and even going forward, how they're dealt with this, and how the interlocking parts fit together

JF: Well, interestingly, I think the comparison really, is between Washington and Oregon.

SS: Tell me the differences. I know you've spoken a lot on this before, but I'm interested in your take and how the two states, the cultures, differentiate, and how this played out even before the Northwest Forest Plan, but especially since

JF: Well, among other things, the timber industry has always been more powerful 01:53:00in the State of Oregon than in the State of Washington, at least in my lifetime. Washington has always been, I don't know if we'd call it a more progressive state, it's been certainly much more oriented towards growth, and it's been more oriented towards industry, towards business. But you might think it, you know, the environment would not do so well here. But the interesting thing is, take a look at where the national parks are. And Washington has three large national parks.

SS: Oregon has one. [Crater Lake]

JF: A small one.

SS: Relatively small one.

JF: And so, in many interesting ways, because the timber industry is structured 01:54:00different in the State of Washington and because the population has been less dependent on the wood products industry, the Northwest Forest Plan has not had nearly the same impact in Washington as in Oregon. And in many ways, Washington is much more conservation-oriented insofar as its public lands are concerned.

SS: The state lands.

JF: The state is. Very simply, just look at the fact we've got three big national parks. Oregon has always prided itself on being environmental, and I'm an Oregonian and I was born in Oregon. But interestingly, they've never let that 01:55:00interfere in any way with cutting Douglas-fir trees. Okay And you see the fact that there's no significant preserve that's been created, based on state initiatives in the State of Oregon.

SS: And I believe you can go on down to the Willamette Valley or to the Coast Range where a lot of the state lands are in various forms, and you still see massive clear-cuts going on up to right now.

JF: Oh, yes, you do. And in fact, forest practices in Oregon are much behind where they are in the State of Washington, particularly where riparian protection is concerned. And you get another reflection of the difference in the attitude of the population. Now, the other reason for this is that the structure of the industry has always been very different in the two states. In Washington, you know, it was primarily three large land owners.

SS: Weyerhaeuser

JF: Weyerhaeuser, Northern Pacific, which became Plum Creek Timber Company, and Boise-Cascade. And so, this has been the core of the industry, and they own their own lands. So, they've never been particularly dependent, any of them, on public lands at all.

SS: And you've had a lot more smaller operators in Oregon.

JF: Yeah.

SS: I mean, still large, some of them.

JF: In Oregon, you had a lot of medium-sized companies that are family owned.

SS: Like Rosboro in Springfield.

JF: Seneca.

SS: Yes, the Jones family [Seneca, in Eugene], right.

JF: Hampton. Yeah, all of it. So, there's always publicly-held corporations like Weyerhaeuser, that understand they operate in a larger social context, and they adjust, adapt. Medium-sized, family-owned companies don't necessarily do that. 01:57:00And so, the whole battle in Oregon has been much more ideological, and the industry has much more power in the State of Oregon than it does in the State of Washington. That's why credible restrictions on management in private forest lands has never happened in the State of Oregon. It has happened in the State Washington.

SS: So, in other words, a large, private landowner that is interfacing with some key watershed, let's say, the Willamette or the McKenzie or the Santiam or what have you, and let's say, whatever they do on private lands is going to affect watersheds and other things.

JF: Amen.

SS: They just go, too bad or -

JF: Too bad, it's private land. It's my land and I'm doing good forestry, you know, I'm replanting. Sometime if you get a chance, visit the Siletz River basin. You can see it's pretty much like a bomb's been dropped on it.

SS: That's basically where the Toledo mill [upriver from Newport on Yaquina River] was fed from back all those years. Correct

JF: Well, yeah, in part.

SS: Yeah, yeah. JF: And so, the attitudes in these two states are very different, particularly towards the public lands.

SS: It's interesting. That's a real conflict with perception, even with me, an Oregon kid who's from Eugene and he's back there again, you know, land of the Grateful Dead, green people and hippies, and even straight politicians like Tom McCall, a Republican, who oversaw these state level progressive environmental laws. It goes against perception.

JF: That's right, and they've never been able to pass, for example, restrictions on clear-cuts.

SS: Even with a Democratic-controlled Senate and House for many, many years

JF: Never happen.

SS: You haven't had a Republican-controlled Oregon State Senate or House of 01:59:00Representatives for a long time.

JF: That's right.

SS: So, that's really interesting how you see the difference between that. Now, how much of the FEMAT report did you actually write

JF: I don't know.

SS: But you were involved with the writing

JF: I certainly was, and particularly, Alternative 9, and other aspects of it related to the old growth. So, but that's also fuzzy in my mind.

SS: If you were going to look back on this, the FEMAT report, let's go back, but without going into the things that were added into this that became problematic. If you were going to break out the six areas; terrestrial ecology, aquatic watersheds, resource analysis, economic investment, social assessment and spatial analysis, how would you characterize the strengths and weaknesses of the product that came out of that What was the best part of it, and what part do you think even within Alternative 9 that could have been better Either at the time, 02:00:00or in retrospect.

JF: Well, it's pretty clear to me that there should have been a lot more emphasis on active management. We did a great job of stopping activity, but we didn't do a great job of identifying where aggressive active management was needed. We allowed for it. Think about the east side forest within the range of the owl. SS: Basically, east of the crest. [Cascades Mountains]

JF: East of the crest. And we basically wrote into the plan, that it was okay to manage those to restore historic conditions. Nobody did it. But we needed more. 02:01:00We needed to do more and say what needs to be done in terms of active management. So, we should have said something pretty profound about that. We should have said something very much stronger about salvage [logging].

SS: In other words, it wouldn't have allowed some of the provisions that were in here, but also other things to kind of paralyze even the intentions.

JF: Correct.

SS: In other words, the vacuum that was created and the economic activity dynamic which was never going to be what it was, but it really should have been better.

JF: Yeah.

SS: Is that what you're trying to speak to

JF: Yeah.

SS: Okay.

JF: And the riparian. You know, what we did was we did interim riparian buffers. We said, then you do watershed analysis and you can change those buffers. Well, we said you could do that, but nobody did it. We should have said, You will! 02:02:00Somehow, we should have provided a much more active force than we did in terms of what should be done out there, what should you stop doing, and what should you start doing.

SS: Although, in retrospect, at the same time, it's still rather remarkable what was done in a short period of time.

JF: Oh.

SS: I mean, it's easy to in hindsight, say, well, we should have, could have....

JF: Of course.

SS: I mean, obviously.

JF: Of course, absolutely right. And another thing was that we didn't realize, being naïve scientists, was that you can allow all the latitude you want for adaptation, but that doesn't mean anyone is going to take advantage of it. So, we wrote a plan that had all kinds of opportunities for people to change the plan. None of the stakeholders wanted that. None of the lawyers wanted that. None of the agencies wanted that.

SS: They wanted a static thing that was like a rock.

JF: This is it. I don't want any uncertainty about it. And adaptation is all about uncertainty, change.

SS: And nature is a moving target.

JF: Yes, it is.

SS: Just like humanity, right

JF: Yeah.

SS: So, now, do you-oh, okay.

JF: One other thing that we missed completely, was the fact that the greatest amount, the richest stage of forest development in our region, is the period after a disturbance and before a canopy closes. So, it's the early successional ecosystems. They are hugely more biodiverse than any of the closed canopy forest stages. None of us were thinking about that.

SS: So that wasn't addressed

JF: That's not addressed at all.

SS: And whether you want to stick to your specialty in old-growth, late- successional forests, how have you been involved since the plan [NWFP] There's obviously teams of people who are doing the monitoring on the ground, but what has been your involvement, and how have you either guided or watched or counseled the process of monitoring after-the-fact

JF: Well, I've evolved hugely in terms of my own thinking about it. And I had focused on old growth, but I've enlarged my view to the entire ecosystem, from start to finish, and not just the old. So, I have a very holistic view. You need the whole successional sequence, I say. I had no involvement actually in implementing the plan [NWFP]. And Norm and I have not really been involved with 02:05:00the plan for probably a decade or more following it's signing. We became involved as a result of the controversy over the O&C Lands [2000s], and the politicians involved us in that. And so, that's how we've returned to an engagement with federal forest policy, the Northwest Forest Plan and its implementation. SS: Why don't you describe that process and how your reinvolvement started, and give me a sketch of how that's occurred

JF: Well, it's a long story, but I'll make it short, and simply say that politicians in Congress particularly, but also in the White House, once Obama 02:06:00was elected, were really interested in thinking about alternative approaches to management of the O&C Lands that would achieve both ecological and economic objectives. It sort of started with both Senator [Ron] Wyden [D-Oregon] and House people wanting to write legislation that would protect old growth, increase activities to improve the health of the forest, and provide additional timber over what's happening now. It would solve some of the constipation of the Northwest Forest Plan. And so, about 10 years ago, that's how we began to get 02:07:00involved advising the congressional folks on what to put into a bill that would try to do those things. That evolved to proposing some kind of a partial cutting on some of this land, and showing what that would look like. So, would you come down and mark an area and show people, asked Congressman [Peter] DeFazio [D-Oregon] asked us to do that.

Then [Interior] Secretary [Ken] Salazar, six years ago or so, got involved in trying to - What happened was, in the younger Bush [George W.] administration, BLM had developed a new plan, a revised plan called WOPR (pronounced Whopper), 02:08:00Western Oregon Plan Revision. It was going to start cutting old growth and things, and they sort of did that right at the end of the younger Bush's two terms. When it was challenged and Obama was in, he said, No, we're not going to do that. We're not going to do WOPR. But they had to come up with some initiative in terms of, well, okay, what are you going to do And so that was when Secretary Salazar got involved, and he invited Norm and I to get involved. He asked us to go down there and actually work with BLM in developing some pilot projects to demonstrate our alternatives. So, that really began to get us involved in BLM's plan revision, if not a larger plan revision.

And Norm and I decided that we've got to put down our whole idea here, we've got to have a comprehensive view of how to revise Northwest Forest activities, federal forest activities. If we just give congressional people the pieces or the Secretary of Interior pieces, they can choose whatever they want. So, we decided we had to produce a comprehensive report on what we think, a total strategy. So we did a report, we abstracted it, and published it in the Journal of Forestry, on what we think would be an appropriate strategy for management of federal forest lands going forward. We published that in the Journal of Forestry. So, that got us totally engaged in this activity. But to a fair 02:10:00degree, now, we're closed out again. The BLM developed a revised plan which they have adopted, the administration has approved, and they are moving forward on, but which is going to be challenged in court. And, a lot of our thoughts were in that plan. They didn't do exactly what we said, but took a lot of pieces of our work, and used it. The Forest Service hasn't really engaged us at all.

SS: You mean in terms of, let's say, revitalizing the stagnancies of the Northwest Forest Plan

JF: No, I mean, we've not been engaged in any official way with the Forest Service in its consideration of revising the Northwest Forest Plan.

SS: What can you see, other than some things we've talked about, now that we've 02:11:00seen some of the problems, especially on the economic side, what could be added or augmented that would make it, shall we say, a more effective plan-document moving forward, the Northwest Forest Plan

JF: Well, our Journal of Forest article lays out what we think, but it's really very simple. First of all, you've got to distinguish the moist forest from the dry forest. That is, frequent fire forests effectively from the canopy fire forest.

SS: And that was not really addressed [In NWFP]

JF: It was not.

SS: It was focused on the moist forest

JF: It was focused on the moist forest.

SS: Right.

JF: We acknowledged the dry, but we didn't do a damn thing really, because we were tired and didn't have the knowledge to deal with it. So, in the moist forest, just for the time being, for the foreseeable future, just take the 02:12:00mature and old forests off the table, manage some of the plantations to restore old-growth conditions, but begin to do regeneration harvests in some of the older plantations, and with one of the goals being creation of early successional ecosystems. Very simple. Basically, manage forests that you've already harvested, and leave the ones that haven't been cut before, alone. Whatever you do, make sure it has an ecological content as well as an economic content. On the east side, very simply, basically restore as much of it as you can possibly get done before it burns out. We produced a manual on our ideas 02:13:00about how you do that, and we've laid out a pretty comprehensive vision, and it's relatively simple. But it remains to be seen, you know, how much of it, if any, the Forest Service is going to pick up. I am astounded that it seems to just be outside of their bandwidth to think about doing regeneration harvests in plantations. Now, why wouldn't you do that at this point-in-time But they've got all kinds of reasons why they don't want to do this. So, all they do is thin.

SS: What would you say about the evolution of environmentalists in relation to this subject, forestry in the Pacific Northwest, their original role, how they've evolved, and their role positively, but also negatively

JF: Well, we have some organizations and some individuals who simply do not want any timber harvest on the federal lands, and they will use any device to try to achieve that goal, fair or foul. So that's a problem. But the large national environmental organizations are pretty much on board with the kind of approach that we are suggesting. It's pretty much what was in Wyden's bill.

SS: So, in other words, the Oregon Wilds of the world are the ones that are putting the hammer down, no matter what everywhere

JF: Actually, no.

SS: No

JF: They aren't.

SS: Oh, I stand corrected.

JF: They aren't. They have a level of reasonability with them. But there are a number of very small, grassroots kinds of organizations who absolutely are opposed. But Oregon Wild isn't that intense. And they have become moderately reasonable, particularly when it comes to restoring dry forests. And they probably would find it perfectly acceptable to do regeneration harvest in plantations if the Forest Service was to propose such a thing.

SS: Now, what do you say to the timber communities that have been decimated by many factors, globalization, technology, the whole dynamic of what the good-old 02:16:00days were, and whatever has happened since then. What do you say to those people, who certainly have a perception, and as we're dealing with a new presidential dynamic that seems to me to be a tsunami wave of harsh reactionary sentiments, including, you know, the people from those communities. What would you say to them

JF: I would say to them, I agree with you that the federal lands should be providing more in the way of economic return. And that this could be done, and in ways that are ecologically sound. Basically, I view those people as some of 02:17:00our most important potential advocates for public lands in the future. We've found, when we were doing this work in southwest Oregon, that most of the people, the ordinary people we talked to, don't like this intense management that's going on. They don't like that, but they also don't feel that all the federal lands should be reserves. Norm and I agree that they shouldn't be. There should be a greater flow of timber. It would be good for both the forests and the communities if there were.

SS: So, when you meet with them, or if you do in whatever setting, what do you tell them, or what do they tell you

JF: Well -

SS: Because in the Northwest Forest Plan, the bureaucrats, the environmentalists, are easy targets. That's usually what you hear from people, at least when they're in an angry moment.

JF: Sure.

SS: But when you're having a reasonable moment, you or Norm is talking, whomever, what do those conversations go like, and what would you say to them if you had a calm forum where you could really communicate

JF: Well, I'd say to them, we should be doing more management on our national forests. And it should be focused primarily on previously harvested lands. And if we did that, we could provide you with probably two to three times the amount of timber that you're taking off currently.

SS: Now, realistically in terms of the smaller and medium-sized mills, which a lot of them are shut down, or they have to retrofit their operations for smaller 02:19:00logs or what have you, or forest products broadly-conceived, if something was achieved where there was more material, that's a real crude term, but what would be the possibility of bringing back something in a smaller, more restrained way than in the good-old boom days

JF: Total possibility.

SS: It is

JF: Absolutely. Yeah, for example, I took my students to a mill in Skamania County down on the Columbia River. And their biggest problem is logs. If they had more logs, they could sell products and could increase, for example, the number of shifts that they are operating their mills. So, the capacity is there.

SS: We're almost done, Jerry. What have been the forest health dynamics over the twenty years of the Northwest Forest Plan that you can measure I mean, you've had studies on how much less or more there is, vis-à-vis models and projections, you have the owl and all those things, but how would you characterize the NWFP at twenty years, if you were going to give it a progress report or a synopsis statement

JF: Well, in the moist forest, it's really gotten better. We stopped cutting and things are growing back. All you've got to do is go to the Andrews and take a look at that landscape. But things have gotten much worse in the dry forest. It's a tremendous contrast. I'm going to be talking on Thursday to a group in Portland, and one of the things I'm going to tell them, is that the 02:21:00Douglas-firHemlock region is probably the most vulnerable major forest region in the world to climate change and invasive species. There's a tendency to think that these forests don't have to worry about anything. It's moist and they're productive. But they're very vulnerable. How did we get on that I guess you asked about the health of the forest.

SS: No, I asked you to give me a twenty-year report card, if you will.

JF: Things have gotten better on federal land over the last twenty years. Things have gotten much worse on private lands over the last twenty years. The way that private, the way that management on the TIMOs and REITs has moved has been 02:22:00extremely destructive. [Timber Investment Management Organizations and Real Estate Investment Trusts] On the dry forest, things on all lands are worse than they were before because we've just built up, created more and more fuels.

SS: In other words, the paralysis dynamics we've been talking about have helped create a tinder box

JF: Absolutely, and we have by no means begun to make a dent in that. But I will say that in the last decade or so, we have gotten more momentum on the east side. We are doing more.

SS: Now, when you're talking about the east side, you're talking about the Cascade Crest, not eastern Oregon.

JF: Yeah, the dry forest, the pine.

SS: You're talking about eastern Oregon, too, the Blues and what not

JF: You know, we've very definitely gained momentum over the last decade, and so, we are doing a lot. But the question is, are we going to do enough fast 02:23:00enough, before we're totally overwhelmed by it being burned black

SS: Now, the B & B burn was on the crest, but also the east side, would that be a case-in-point [Large fire centered near Santiam Pass, Central Cascades]

JF: It certainly is a case-in-point. Not all of it, because it didn't just burn frequent fire forest, it burned a lot of stand replacement kind of forest, too. So, it's a mixture of the two. But those forests have been in decline, most of those forests on the east side, have been in decline throughout my entire career, the last fifty years.

SS: Is that probably because, even before all the dynamics [political] changed, it wasn't as merchantable or shall we say, proactively manageable, in a real sense

JF: Well, it was being managed to produce stand replacement forests. It wasn't just fire suppression. We were clear-cutting and planting it into plantations that were very dense, so we were managing it to the degree we were for timber production, and we were not managing it all to be resilient in the face of fire. And spruce budworm epidemics, they were always going on in that forest. The first major fire that I remember was in 1966, and, you know, they just got more and bigger. I got some numbers the other day from the Fish and Wildlife Service, that there were at one point, 44 spotted owl territories. Between the B&B Fire 02:25:00and the Davis Fire, they are now down to four occupied sites.

SS: That's pretty grim.

JF: That's pretty damn grim.

SS: That's like nine, well, one out of-that's nine percent.

JF: So anyway, I'd say that due to the Northwest Forest Plan, we've made real progress in the conservation and restoration of old forests on the west side on federal lands. So, we've had largely a positive influence. On the east side, the plan did nothing to stimulate activity, and delayed it. But based on other incentives, we are beginning to do a lot.

SS: What would have happened, in your view, purely speculative, if there was never a Northwest Forest Plan Where would we be in 2016

JF: We'd be in court I don't know. I don't know where we'd be because, if there was no alternative route forward, given the laws that we have. So, assuming that the laws stayed the same, if you didn't resolve it legally in some way as we did with the Northwest Forest Plan, nothing would be going on, I think.

SS: One thing that you kind of brushed over, but I would want to get at least a couple anecdotes about, is the Clinton Summit. You did mention it, but you said the FEMAT was much more important. But for the sake of the record, could you talk just a little bit about the experience of being involved in that, and what you actually spoke during that, and so on

JF: Oh, yeah, it was cool.

SS: So, just tell us a little bit about that.

JF: Well, it was a very important event because what Clinton did was to demonstrate the importance of this problem as far as he was concerned. He came and brought much of the cabinet with him, and they spent a week at this. So, he was putting down some serious markers that, I think this is really important, 02:28:00important enough I'm giving it attention. By doing that, he gave currency to the actual development of the Northwest Forest Plan.

SS: Now, there was one day that was actually televised, or portions of it were

JF: There were actually parts of two days.

SS: Parts of two days. And now, you testified during that, it was like a big, huge roundtable kind of a thing, wasn't it

JF: Uh-huh.

SS: What do you remember about that It was Clinton, it's his cabinet, and other people. What do you remember about that, and also, your testimony

JF: What I remember most about it; I don't remember what I said, and it wasn't for very long, whatever it was, it was brief. What I remember most is sitting next to the Vice President [Gore], and him passing notes to me all the time. (Laughs)

SS: Do you remember what Al said to you Al Gore

JF: Yeah, he was asking me questions, every once in a while, well, like, what did you think of that Some comments like that, you know So, anyway, it was a real ego trip to be there and sitting at that roundtable.

SS: Kind of like, well, I've arrived now, right

JF: Wow. No, I'm not sure I took it so much that way, as what I care about is really centered to this agenda here. Wow, we're going to change what we're going to do with these forests.

SS: And you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but you represented a 02:30:00countercurrent and ideas that were counter to many established norms.

JF: Oh, yeah.

SS: And so, you were considered a gadfly.

JF: A renegade.

SS: A renegade for a long time in the Forest Service and in academia.

JF: Still am.

SS: Still am, but I mean, before it was normalized. (Laughs) At least, with some people, right So, it must have been vindication to some degree for you I don't mean that in a negative sense, but just validation, probably.

JF: Yeah, validation is much better.

SS: That's a better term. Vindication's an angry word.

JF: Yeah, it was validation and I was grateful. And I was very aware of how lucky I was to be in the place I was at the time. And so, gratitude and joy at 02:31:00the change in the policy, the change in the perspective. And I don't take it for granted, and I worried because, you know, it can go the other way.

SS: How hard would it be to -

JF: Not hard.

SS: - change everything

JF: Not hard.

SS: And you know exactly what I'm talking about.

JF: You bet.

SS: We just had a 9.0 earthquake, politically. [2016 election]

JF: I was just thinking today about, you know, that all of this was done by executive action, and whatever is done by executive action can be undone by executive action. And I said, and I would say today, the environmental community were fools. As soon as the Northwest Forest Plan happened, their priority should 02:32:00have been to get it legislated, and they didn't. And they could lose every bit of it today, because it is solely based on presidential action. So, they were fools. And you know, it reminds me of what Congressman Miller from California ---

SS: George Miller

JF: George Miller. After we went in briefed him on the Northwest Forest Plan, he said, Okay, you go back and tell your environmental friends that, you can hold up the stage, and you can get the strong box, but if you hang out for the watches and the rings, the sheriff's going to get you. They should have got away 02:33:00with it, and that would have been translating this from an executive action into a legislative action. And they're so arrogant, so unthoughtful about what could happen, that they didn't do it.

SS: But in all fairness, Jerry, don't you think I has something to do with, remember the timing. In 1994, the Gingrich mid-term, counter-reaction and Contract with America, and really, that's the beginning of this reactionary movement, in parts of Congress, anyway.

JF: Sure.

SS: So, it would have been awful hard to get through, don't you think

JF: I don't know.

SS: I think it's a fair question though.

JF: I think, I think they could have done it. And if they had been working on that rather than trying to make the plan unworkable, which is what they did, 02:34:00they might have been able to do it. But anyway.

SS: So, do you think that even acts like the Endangered Species Act and some of those acts are in danger

JF: Sure.

SS: I mean, that takes much more than an executive order, but ---

JF: Sure, and the only thing we've got left to us is that 60 votes in the Senate.

SS: Because of the filibuster act. [Not an act, but how it was being used.]

JF: Because of the filibuster. But that could be changed.

SS: To a simple majority

JF: To a simple majority. And anyway, they could do it. And this guy's radical enough that, George Bush, Jr., you know, the younger Bush, was not smart enough 02:35:00and radical enough to do something like that, to pull that off. This guy is. [President-elect Trump] SS: Or at least the people around him. So, yeah, I know, it's scary.

JF: I don't think he's smart, incidentally. I'm not suggesting he's bright. He's quite gullible.

SS: Oh, good.

JF: And like you say, Sounds good to me. Let's do it.

SS: What have you learned from the Northwest Forest Plan process regarding proactive management, but also human limitations on managing nature

JF: I think a couple of things about it. First, as I told you earlier, we should 02:36:00have emphasized active management as much as we did preservation. But I think, we really have a body of knowledge that would allow us to collaborate effectively with the forest that we didn't have. If we would choose to use that knowledge, I think we're in a better position than we've ever been to do things that are good for both the forest and society.

SS: What does this tell you about science, its limitations and its role I mean, obviously, you had all the science people together and this was a novel thing celebrated by your community. But what does it teach you about the limitations 02:37:00of science or the vulnerabilities of decisions based on science

JF: I'm not sure. I think one of the things that has become very clear, is that science is not going to be necessarily the determinate of the decisions that are made. But at the same time, as long as we have laws like the Endangered Species Act and National Forest Management Act, that require scientifically-credible plans, I'm very hopeful. And the way those have been written and interpreted, they require scientifically-credible plans or else the courts are going to find 02:38:00them in violation.

SS: Last few questions about people. Kind of give me little paragraph synopses. I'm going to drop some names, and just kind of say, this is what I think about when we bring up this name. Jack Ward Thomas

JF: A big man. A big ego. And a very complicated guy, but very definitely a guy that sincerely sought to do good. But at the same time, you know, it's hard for 02:39:00me to be objective about Jack because he's very competitive with me. I think it's unfortunate that Jack, probably it was expecting too much, but I really expected him to be more independent as a chief than he was.

SS: When he was Forest Service chief It was only two or three years, right

JF: Yeah, and he did some things that really needed to be done, in terms of morale, and in terms of representing the agency that we were going to follow the law. If you don't like it, change the law. But at the same time, I think he was trapped in a bubble. And I think his successor probably might, did more than, 02:40:00much more than Jack did, to actually change the content of what was being done.

SS: Was his successor Dombeck

JF: Mike Dombeck, yeah.

SS: Right, Mike Dombeck.

JF: And he was able to do that because he kept, he stayed outside the bubble.

SS: Another person that's no longer with us, Jim Sedell.

JF: Oh, Jim was wonderful. And you know, he had an energy and enthusiasm. I used to describe Jim as a guy that's skipping along just dropping petals, rosebuds everywhere. And he was just an incredible source of ideas and enthusiasm and 02:41:00energy. But he needed several people to sweep up after him.

SS: So, he was a tornado that created all this stuff, and then -

JF: And he generated a lot of ideas, and other people took them and often got credit for them, but they were really his.

SS: For example, what would be an idea that was his

JF: Oh, I think in many ways, the river continuum concept was very much something of his making. He was very good at bringing people together and stimulating a team. Wonderful. Just a very positive person.

SS: Very ironic and sad, that both he and Jack died of the same illness.

JF: Yeah, pretty much, that's right.

SS: Pancreatic cancer, I believe.

JF: I didn't know for sure which cancer got Jack, but that certainly was.

SS: I've heard it was pancreatic. Yeah, but he fought it longer. He had a remission, I guess, then it came back. With Jim, it took him pretty quick.

JF: Jack, you know, was an incredible storyteller. And if you ever, have you read his book, Forks in the Trail

SS: No.

JF: You need to get that book and read some of those stories. They're absolutely uproarious.

SS: Marty Raphael, yesterday, in our interview, told me a couple of the stories, because he traveled to India with him a couple of times. And he says, the people that knew Jack, as he'd start going on with his stories, Marty said, we'd finish 02:43:00the story because we've heard it so many times before. But they said it with affection, you know

JF: Yeah.

SS: Norm Johnson

JF: One of the most generous people that I've ever worked with. Brilliant, an incredible analytic mind. And he has done so many things that he lets other people get credit for. He was the one that made the Gang of Four a success. And he did it in terms of both the logistics and in terms of the intellectual content of it. And we [Franklin and Johnson] wrote a paper ten years after the 02:44:00Northwest Forest Plan for Conservation Biology on the Northwest Forest Plan, and he had all four of us as authors of the Gang of Four, even though John Gordon wasn't one of the people involved, actually, with the Northwest Forest Plan itself. And he insisted, you know, that Jack needed to be the senior author, that he deserved to be that. Well, Jack didn't probably write two words in the whole god-damned manuscript. Norm and I did it. But that's just Norm.

SS: But that also might have been political pragmatism as well because of name recognition perhaps

JF: Well, and he would say that. But in this case, he thought that Jack deserved it because he was the leader of the Northwest Forest Plan. But he's doing the 02:45:00same thing with the book that we're publishing, Ecological Forest Management. [Published in 2018] The whole thing started with a project he was contracted to do. And so, eighteen months ago when we got into really beginning to write it, he called me up and said, you know, the authorship is going to be Norm, me and Debbie. And he called me up and said, I talked with Debbie and you should be the senior author.

SS: Debbie who

JF: Debbie Johnson, his wife.

SS: Oh, okay.

JF: The three of us are on it.

SS: Oh, okay.

JF: And I protested and I continued to protest, and he says, No, you should be the senior author, and that's because we'll sell more books that way.

SS: (Laughs) Pragmatism.

JF: He is pragmatic, but he's also a wonderful, generous person.

SS: And also, a really close friend of yours, too.

JF: Oh, I love working with him, and we're an excellent team.

SS: And you have fun doing it, right

JF: We have fun doing it and we respect each other, and so we're not afraid to say anything. And it's wonderful. I hope we can continue to do it for the rest of our lives.

SS: John Gordon

JF: John is kind of an enigma. He is the nearest thing we have to a statesman, and he put together the Forestry Congress. But once he's retired, he doesn't 02:47:00have the continuing interest in it, nor is he willing to do anything that he doesn't get paid for. Norm and I have done a hell of a lot of stuff we wouldn't get paid for. So, I like John, I've always admired and respected him, and it's always amazed me how his presence is commanding. And I wish that his Forestry Congress had been more successful. Though I really looked at him as being the nearest thing to a statesman that we've had, and who is not strongly identified with any ideology, any particular set of interests. He's got a very good mind, 02:48:00very analytic mind.

SS: Gordie Reeves

JF: I don't know Gordie that well, really. I knew Jim Sedell much better.

SS: I'm just thinking of all the members of Gang of Four - Plus Two, so I've covered them all. I wanted equal opportunity here to tie things up.

JF: I think Gordie has so much experience. He's such a deep well as far as expertise is concerned. And you know, he's a fisherman originally, and a scientist. I think, if I had any criticism to make of Gordie, it's that one of his great strengths is his persistence and courage, and perhaps one of his 02:49:00weaknesses, is that he gets ahold of something and perhaps loses perspective on it in terms of its importance or value. I've never worked much with Gordie because he was not a part of the ecosystem team. Jim Sedell was. Fred [Swanson] was. Jim Hall was. Stan Gregory was. So, I've gotten to know them, much more personally connected to Jim Sedell and Stan Gregory than to Gordie. But I have a 02:50:00great respect for Gordon.

SS: What about lesser-known people that were involved with the original process, but especially the long monitoring process that's gone on, either by naming somebody, or by just making a statement about all the people that have continued this work The monitoring of and the continued planning and reassessments, and implementation of different things

JF: Sure. Well, I think, Tom Spies sort of stands out.

SS: Yeah. I should have asked you about Tom. Say something about Tom.

JF: Well, Tom is just such a dutiful and competent individual, and has provided so much continuity. So, I think he's outstanding, and I guess, that should be 02:51:00obvious by the fact he's the senior author on the science synthesis. I wish at times he was a little more adventuresome and not quite so conservative, but I made a good choice when I hired him.

SS: Fred Swanson

JF: Oh. (Laughs) He's just great. He's always challenged me, and it's been a very positive and stimulating kind of a thing. Fred is just an incredible intellect and thoughtful individual, and obviously, extremely sensitive.

SS: What did he bring to the Northwest Forest Plan, because he kind of came at it from the fringes, but he still kind of maintained his tentacles, and he kind of does everything, he even does poetry and the humanities stuff that he's continued to do. But a person like that seems to be just as necessary as the people that are more singularly focused on one aspect of something.

JF: First of all, his role in the Northwest Forest planning process was really to help develop the aquatic strategy. In that respect, he was outstanding, and he's always had a very large spatial perspective on things, which has only grown over the years. But he's really a disturbance ecologist. And so, he really evolved from being a geologist to a disturbance scientist. And he brings his own 02:53:00brand of energy and enthusiasm to things, and also, he has an outstanding way with the words.

SS: He's a very good writer.

JF: He's a good writer and he puts together memorable phrases. (Laughs) So, and he's a good friend. I trust him completely.

SS: So, if you were going to make a capstone statement about the Northwest Forest Plan, from the perspective of today, what would you say as regarding forestry, and your life What would you say about it

JF: Well, I think it was an extraordinary group of people that put it together. 02:54:00And certainly, the Andrews, Corvallis ecosystem scientists, were absolutely critical. I'm not sure that we could pull off anything as half as good today. Maybe we could.

SS: And why do you think that is Do you think that's because of the extreme polarization of society, the political malaise, budgetary limitations that have certainly grown over time, sequestration as a prime example

JF: Yeah. I think part of it was the time and commitment of an administration to 02:55:00bring something, putting something really positive together, despite all of the forces that were trying to prevent it or influence it. I think there's a real challenge today to separate. I think people don't understand how important it is to separate the public involvement process from the development of scientifically credible and legal alternatives. I think that's something I've only learned. And whoever, whether it was luck or whether it was somebody smart enough to understand that's the way you had to do it, and that was why it worked.

SS: Because you didn't open it to the entire democracy

JF: No, and when they did that subsequently in the Interior Columbia Basin Project, nothing came of it. They spent millions of dollars and spent years, and there was no substantive outcome.

SS: Because everybody was just backbiting and back-and-forth, and no decisions were made

JF: Yeah. You can't produce scientifically credible legal alternatives in an open forum, I don't think.

SS: Well, I mean, going back to the ancient Greeks, they talked about the foibles of democracy. And you know, the idea of the philosopher-king, as long as he was benevolent, would get stuff done. It's the same principle.

JF: Yeah, I know. But, you know, I think, for example, in revising the Northwest Forest Plan, that there would be a lot of latitude to have a process in which 02:57:00you developed a series of alternatives that stayed within the bounds, scientifically and legally. And then, having defined the boundary conditions, then allowed, people working there with forest-based cooperatives, for example, that really work within that. But they've got some sideboards, and you work within those sideboards. And that's kind of what I'm describing. So, anyway, I think it's there's got to be an element of luck in pulling these things off.

SS: Timing is everything, correct

JF: Well, I think that really is true, and it was good timing on it. And Norm might tell you that it may be the last productive planning process that's ever going to happen.

SS: I'll let him tell me that. But why would you, how would you interpret that statement, which has kind of a fatalistic doom and gloom context to it

JF: That fundamentally the circumstances are such today, that there's no way that you can have an effective forest planning process. And that basically we'll just continue to stumble and fumble along.

SS: Is there anything else that you'd like to say as a concluding statement, something that you might want to say that we haven't talked about yet

JF: I don't think so, but we've been at it quite a while.

SS: Three hours on the record, Jerry.

JF: Yeah.

SS: I think we're both fizzling out of energy here, so we will make it a formal sign-off right now, and I will shake your hand and tell you, thank you very much for spending an afternoon with me and talking about the Northwest Forest Plan among many other subjects. And this is Sam Schmieding, Oregon State University, signing off at Jerry Franklin's house, and what's the name of your city

JF: Issaquah, Washington.

SS: Issaquah, I'm sorry, I drew a blank. Issaquah, Washington, on Squak Mountain.

JF: We're on the north slope of Squak Mountain, in Issaquah.

SS: We're in the Issaquah Alps. [Local name] Anyway, signing off.