Richard Haynes Oral History Interview, May 25, 2017

SAM SCHMIEDING: Good day, this is Dr. Samuel Schmieding, Oregon State University, College of Forestry. I am here in the home of Dr. Richard Haynes, a forest economist with a 32-year career with the U.S. Forest Service, as a research forester, project leader and program manager. And he also spent some time as an adjunct faculty at Oregon State University and the University of Washington. Now, Dr. Haynes has his own private consulting firm in forest economics.

RICHARD HAYNES: Yes.

SS: Today we are going to be doing an oral history interview funded by the PNW Station. This is going to be centered, but not limited to, Dr. Haynes' experience and time working on the Northwest Forest Plan. We'll be talking about the scope of his whole career, how he sees forestry economics within the context 00:01:00of the Northwest, but anything else he feels is relevant for this discussion. Good afternoon, Richard. How are you?

RH: I am fine. Thank you for the opportunity, Sam.

SS: Yes, I am very much looking forward to this. So, we'll start this off like we do with every interview. Basically, tell me where were you born and raised, and if you want to add a biographical sketch, that would be great.

RH: I was born in Washington, D.C. and I was raised in northern Virginia in a couple of counties. I went to high school there. I attended Virginia Tech. At the time, it was still called Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

SS: VPI, if I recall. Right?

RH: Yeah, VPI. We've gone through several name changes trying to get university into it.

SS: But isn't that still when they used to call themselves the Gobblers?

RH: Well, they still do, the Fighting Gobblers.

SS: But now, they're the Hokies? [Hokies common use-sports reference]

RH: Yeah, they were always the Hokies. The Hokies was one nickname, and the mascot was the Gobbler.

SS: I always wondered how there was that split personality there.

RH: Yeah, wild turkeys are common there, so I suppose, that speaks for that. Hokie, if I remember, was sort of an 1890's slang term. It stuck to them, just as the University of Virginia was called the Cavaliers.

SS: Now, was a Hokie, the people who went to the university?

RH: Yes.

SS: Okay, so you were a Hokie?

RH: Yeah, you were a Hokie, but they didn't really use it very much. It's just, we're the Hokies, you know, as a collection.

SS: I got you.

RH: When we'd march into a stadium or something, they said, "Here are the Hokies." After getting a B.S. and an M.S., I went on active duty for three 00:03:00years, serving in the Army. I came back and worked for the Department of Agriculture's Economics Research Service [U.S.] almost a year, and went back to graduate school because I wanted to get back into forestry and away from being just an agricultural economist or general economist.

SS: Now, what was your childhood like in relation to the natural world?

RH: I was an avid Boy Scout and belonged to a local troop, that was, in today's terms, I think it'd be called high adventure. We did a lot of camping and canoeing, my family, and we spent the summers until I was about 12 or 13 living on an old family farm where it was one of five farms that farmed together. I could roam for a mile in any direction with my cousins, with our BB guns, 00:04:00observed land that had been in the family for 150 years, and how it'd been managed. And people could tell you what was there when they were kids, 80 years before.

SS: You probably could say that your interest in agricultural economics was at least somewhat an outgrowth of your environment growing up?

RH: Yes, and in high school I got interested in conservation for some reason. And so that was just an extension of the managing of forests.

SS: So, this would have been in the '50s. Correct?

RH: Yeah, the late '50s.

SS: That was before the modern environmental age really began. Was there a particular event or incident, a friend or a mentor, that may have led you in that direction?

RH: Well, there was a gentleman who lived nearby and worked for the [U.S.] Park 00:05:00Service. He talked to me several times about the Park Service. He described the "cannonballs" kind of parks, and the more "natural" parks.

SS: The military parks? ["cannon balls"]

RH: Yes.

SS: Of which there are a lot in Virginia.

RH: Yeah, there are. It was more the observing as we hiked. We did a lot of the camping in Shenandoah National Park. We maintained five miles of the Appalachian Trail outside the park, where the Appalachian [Trail ran].

SS: The Blue Ridge Mountains. Right?

RH: Right, but north of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My family's farm was nestled in a little set of mountains called the Bull Run Mountains. So, I saw a lot of 00:06:00the natural stuff around me. I was impressed, particularly camping in Shenandoah National Park, and the transition from that to the private land, where the five miles of trails were that we maintained which were between Shenandoah National Park and Harper's Ferry. All of that now is a national park, a linear national park. It wasn't then.

SS: So, the noncontiguous lands have now been merged together through various methods?

RH: Yeah, but they just bought a strip. I mean, in some places, it's just 100 feet wide, in other places, it's blocks of land.

SS: Was this private donations or was it a Nature Conservancy kind of thing?

RH: All of the above, everything.

SS: All of the things put together?

RH: Right, and its headquarters is in Harper's Ferry now. But it's a 2,000-mile linear national park. SS: Is there a particular story or incident you remember 00:07:00that was especially impactful when you were camping and hiking and doing these things?

RH: Well, one thing was that near us was the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the canal built along the Potomac. In the era before railroads, it was going to link the Ohio Valley to tidewater, to the Potomac. When I was a teenager, we decided, the Boy Scouts, that we would ride the length of the path. At the same time, they had just made it a national monument. It had just become publicly owned. We were among the first groups to ride the whole length of it, because up until then, people had seen it only in chunks. Some cities had maintained the tow paths [for boats on waterways] as a path through their town. Other places, the first part of it went right through Georgetown. And it was, I think a national 00:08:00park, or national monument, maybe the first 20 miles, but they extended it to all 184 miles up to Cumberland, Maryland. So, I'd watched that process.

SS: Isn't that one of the routes where "Coxey's Army" marched in the 1890's, that big protest movement in the United States?

RH: Well, probably, because it would have provided--

SS: Well, it went right to Washington, that's why I'm thinking about that. [Coxey's "Army" took several routes, including the canal pathway.]

RH: It would have provided a route from the Ohio Valley, once you got over the mountains, but it turned out that the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad beat them to it, so the canal operated, hauling just coal and grain, until the floods of 1924.

SS: What do you remember about natural resource management dynamics within that context, certainly, the Shenandoah area, but more broadly speaking in Virginia 00:09:00and home of your youth? Things you saw that maybe you didn't understand at the time, but maybe made an impression that would be catalogued for later reference as you developed professionally?

RH: Well, Shenandoah National Park, where we did all the hiking, was a donation from the State of Virginia to the National Park Service. They had bought out farms, there was tax-delinquent land, and old timber company lands. And so, as I was hiking, I was always observant about how old fields were evolving back into forest, and why you had this kind of forest on this slope, and that kind of forest on another slope.

SS: So, even though maybe you didn't understand the science of succession, you could see and you were asking the questions about, well, what is this and how did this come to be?

RH: Yeah, and then on the family farms there was the same thing, because there 00:10:00you had people who had been born there eighty years before and they could say, you know, that used to be a field, and now it was tulip poplar, or it took us a long time to figure out how to get the stumps out of there, and now we're farming that [land], or you could just see it in the succession of the fields, what they did on various fields. They were also changing what they were raising.

SS: Now, up in the high mountains, it was still deciduous forest or did you get up into some coniferous up in the high Blue Ridge?

RH: Well, in the Blue Ridge itself on certain slopes you have what's called table mountain pines and two needle pine, so there'd be big stands of that on certain slopes. Also, in Shenandoah National Park you had a lot of succession going on, so you'd have white pine, if they didn't have much fire, eastern 00:11:00hemlock, those were just the natural species, the native species. But it was mostly deciduous. And then if it, down on the farm land if it was wet, you wouldn't have pines, you'd have pin oak and red maple because they could take wetter sites.

SS: Did they have commercial logging operations?

RH: Yeah, hard wood.

SS: Yeah, mostly hard wood.

RH: I had an uncle, one of my uncles, who had a small sawmill. Whenever we needed boards for a barn or something like that, we'd go cut a few trees down, roll them on the wagons, haul them up there, and he'd fire up the old mill and we'd cut boards. When I got to high school, I went to a fairly enlightened high school. So, they would accommodate. I got interested in conservation and so I wrote my history papers on things about that.

SS: What was the name of your high school?

RH: Yorktown, Yorktown High School.

SS: How would you have described the forests and the ecology of Virginia, especially as you became more trained later on and had more of a comparative context?

RH: I went to school where we studied dendrology and plant associations, all the way from sea level to the Canadian forest. VPI was on a plateau about 2,000 feet high, so we could go down into the James River Valley and we'd see southern pine forests, you'd see the-not the true, coastal forest, but the southern pine, the Piedmont forest. True coastal forest would have cypress in it. That would be the biggest difference. Atlantic white-cedar, swamp, with Tupelo, stuff like that, when you got down next to the ocean. Virginia had a coastal plain, a piedmont, 00:13:00and a mountainous side. We could do the lower piedmont up to the Canadian forest, which kind of comes down the Appalachians. At the very highest elevations, you have firs. And so, they taught us largely by plant associations, our ecology and dendrology work. I was well-trained in that sense. And for western species, we'd just walk around town because people planted stuff. So, you learned to identify the western species. But you have to remember, the Southern Appalachians are much more species-diverse than here.

SS: It's the same thing for my wife, who I told you about before the interview, a natural resource economist/forester from Peru, who said about the forest up 00:14:00here, there are a lot of trees, but there's not very many species.

RH: Right, it's not very diverse.

SS: And the Amazon was her point-of-reference, which is even more diverse, I would guess, than the Appalachians.

RH: Probably.

SS: How do you think the contrast between your home state and the Pacific Northwest, affected your views on managing coniferous forest areas that compose such a large percentage of the Pacific Northwest? How do you think that contrast would lead to whatever you did in your career, which was by then centered here in the Northwest?

RH: Well, I came here because they paid the most. I was a trained forest economist. On one hand, I was trained to work for large enterprises in forest 00:15:00management and with forest regulations, which is what a forest economist did at that time, and marketing. I was an agricultural economist, and a large part of that is marketing. I came out here because they paid the most and had interesting problems. I also knew that in coming here, the forest management was relatively simple. It's volume-regulated, or they were trying to volume-regulate their forest, which I always thought was a shell game, because I was trained in area regulation. So, when I came here, I thought forest management was relatively simple compared to what it could have been, and straightforward. They had species that you could regenerate that responded well to stand practices, 00:16:00and produced really valuable timber, tall and straight.

SS: Now, when you entered the university system, did you know what you wanted to study? Did you want to be an agricultural economist from the get-go, or did that evolve because of a particular relationship with a mentor or a class that turned you on? RH: I'd taken economics in high school and thought it was an interesting topic. And when I was at VPI, you had to declare a major before you could go.

SS: So, there wasn't the chance you go for one or two years and take a bunch of classes to figure it out? Right?

RH: The world was different when I grew up. That kind of thinking got you drafted.

SS: In other words, you needed to be in a "hard" program to get a deferment?

RH: Well, VPI required that you declare a major because different schools accepted [students] differently. Getting in their engineering schools would have been a challenge. I knew I wanted to do something in conservation, and forestry was the closest thing. VPI had the only forestry school in the state. I had to go to a state school.

SS: So, who were some of your most important mentors at VPI? People that you could cite as, yeah, that was my professor that really got me going, I loved that class, or what have you?

RH: My course advisor was a guy named Emmet Thompson, who was a forest economist, and later on, became a dean at Mississippi State [University]. He even served as president of SAF [Society of American Foresters]. He was a young 00:18:00professor and took an interest in me. VPI at that time was struggling to get accreditation, so they had hired really good faculty. And their forest ecology was taught by an English Professor named Sedgewick. [See notes]

SS: Sedgewick?

RH: Nate Sedgewick. He was a professor from England, and he was very thorough. We used Stephen Spurr's book, and he made it very interesting.

The entomologist [at VPI] was exceptional. Entomology was one of your capstone classes. He was really big on teaching professional judgment, not only doing 00:19:00things that you know, but rendering a judgment where you were extending what you knew. For example, here's a bug, you've got to key it out and identify it, and you can find five out of the six little features you're supposed to know [how to weigh evidence]. He was the first person that made me think beyond the facts. There were also wood technologists. Interestingly enough, they were mostly Hungarians, who came from the forestry school in Hungary. If you know forest history, you know they walked across the border during the Hungarian revolution. UBC [University of British Columbia] took most of them, and as they gained English skills, they moved around. We [VPI] had several. SS: You're talking about when the Soviets invaded Hungary in '56? Correct?

RH: Uh-huh.

SS: Okay.

RH: So anyway, he was a very thorough wood technologist.

SS: I would guess that, VPI, being that it was an engineering school, the 00:20:00technological aspects of it were very central to that whole school?

RH: It was also the ag [agriculture] school. VPI had put together a program, a very rigorous program they made you take in thirteen quarters. They utilized courses from other schools, rather than teach their own. I took surveying with the civil engineers, we took mapping with the ag engineers. We had to take a drawing and mapping class, so we took it with the ag engineers. We were general science majors the first two years, and I took zoology, botany, chemistry, 00:21:00physics and geology. That's all I did the first two years, as background. But we took classes like genetics and stuff with the other agricultural sciences students. They had a big ag science program, and animal science program. It kept you busy for the times you were there. And the summer camp. We all trooped off to summer camp.

SS: Because of the military aspect of the school?

RH: No, did that. That was another summer.

SS: Oh, okay.

RH: But the forestry [program] had a summer camp. We lived out of the back of a truck and visited mills for a couple weeks. We visited parks for a couple weeks. We lived in a little logging camp for about five or six weeks, where we'd cruise timber and conduct a pulpwood sale, logged it, and helped at the sawmill. They 00:22:00had a little sawmill there, and we helped.

SS: Very hands-on, pragmatic training.

RH: It was, with a very strong, supporting department. It was a strong program. I benefited from that. In hindsight, being in such a strong program has benefited me.

SS: So, you then just continued on there for your masters? Correct?

RH: Yes. They made it easy. I dual-registered the last term, so I took the hardest graduate class. I didn't know it at the time. I took the operations research class, their senior operations research class for all their industrial engineers. And the master's program required 36 hours, and it was five hours. 00:23:00So, my last term of college wasn't as carefree as some people's. I finished up my college classes and I took five graduate hours. In hindsight, I wouldn't have done it that way.

SS: You would have had more fun?

RH: Yes, I think so. Then, that summer, I had to do my military camp. So, I went off to Pennsylvania and did the basic training for the ROTC officers.

SS: How would you characterize your conservation ethic at that time? And of course, they weren't using the term "environmental" yet, as that was a '60s and '70s kind of word [reflecting biocentric shift in society]. How would you characterize your conservation ethic and perspective at that time? And even what was presented and indoctrinated at the school?

RH: Well, there were two important points. One were the observations of the 00:24:00natural forest around you. And with the history of those forests, we had learned all of our ecology in terms of forest succession or what we saw. We saw very little that you would have thought of as old growth. We saw old forests, but we spent time understanding their origins. That was one thing. The other thing was, in all the classes, we talked about how we were going to manage for thrifty young stands. There were discussions about how to plant [these young stands], and I was on planning crews. I ran planning crews in my spare time, so there were discussions about how we're going to plant forests, we're going to grow 00:25:00them. We'll harvest them, we'll tend them, and then we'll harvest. They taught a stewardship ethic. You know that the heart of forestry is good stewardship. So, they taught that. And they practiced that, or emphasized it, I guess.

The other was the notion that these stands are here today, but what went on that led them here and how might they evolve, because we would see those stands in different evolutions. There was lots of opportunity. We had the Jefferson National Forest there, they had just acquired old coal mine land, and we fought fires out there. I was also on a State of Virginia fire crew, and that was one of the things that forestry students do. So, this was all around you. Fought a fire one time through what turned out to be a quarry where they quarried mill stones. It was a special type of rock, an aggregate type of rock. So, here was 00:26:00this quarry, and the fire revealed this quarry of all these millstones still attached to the bedrock. They hadn't chipped them out of the rock completely yet. They all disappeared within the next couple of months when they were exposed, because people came in and hammered them out, hoisted them, to stow them away.

SS: Using what you're talking about now as a context, what did your early experience in Virginia in school and otherwise, prepare you for what you would find in the Northwest, and what did it not prepare you for, because of how different it would be in certain respects?

RH: Well, we have to skip ahead for some of that. I served in the military. In the military, I worked on the civil side of the [U.S. Army] Corps of Engineers 00:27:00for a while, and got to meet a lot of consultants who were doing economic studies. This convinced me very quickly that this was an interesting topic. Watching these people tackle problems, in this case, there would be a brief "deep-draft port" study. I've worked on the Mississippi and Ohio systems; replacement of a lock and a dam on the Ohio, and Lock and Dam 26 on the Mississippi. I became fascinated with the sort of questions they were working on, mostly costs and benefits, or how do you justify these costs. I worked on a project to build a sea level "Panama Canal," trying to evaluate the costs of building such a thing. And then, what sort of tariffs do you have to charge to 00:28:00offset that cost? You can criticize the Corps for a lot of things, but they do think about that.

SS: You're talking about the Army Corps, right?

RH: Yeah. I worked on the civil side. I was a military officer. At the time, they were short on computer-literate people. One thing I'd learned in graduate school was how to program. I was a very competent Fortran programmer. When I went in the military and the Corps figured that out, I ended up working on the civil side, essentially doing financial-cost calculations for a sea-level canal, and later, for other waterway projects.

SS: Are you talking about Vietnam?

RH: No. In Vietnam, I got there, and it turned out that they had a little office to try to figure out economic impacts, and the Corps of Engineers is where that 00:29:00kind of talent lay, so I got assigned to that office. Did similar stuff, but the cost of military restrictions, like if you don't let people harvest crops. I argued that we ought to keep the markets open. If those people can sell stuff, you can influence them and that increases their livelihood.

SS: Extensions of the "hearts and minds" philosophy?

RH: Yeah, right.

SS: That didn't go so well in Vietnam, but it was still a philosophy.

RH: It was a philosophy, and I was down there writing campaign plans to try to save the market areas. And I also did some "people's war" stuff; how do you sustain living units. Vietnam had a very frontier-like border between Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. There was a large unknown, heavily forested area that I 00:30:00helped study to plan defensive campaigns

SS: A pretty good-sized mountain range that kind of went, the ridge went all the way along Laos and Cambodia?

RH: Yeah. And--

SS: The Ho Chi Min Trail is along that mountainous ridge area.

RH: Right. I worked on sort of campaign planning, just to sustain people using some of the people's warfare, some of the Chinese stuff. You essentially put the whole units with their families out there, these ranger battalions.

SS: Did you spend much time out in the forest there? You likely did some.

RH: No, not much. You couldn't. That was no man's land.

SS: Too dangerous?

RH: Yeah. But I did spend time in the rubber plantations, because we were trying to keep them going.

SS: What did your exposure to a war zone like that do for you? How do you think that affected your whole perspective on what you'd end up doing once you came back to the states for the rest of your career?

RH: Well, I can remember telling my wife that I wanted a career that didn't 00:31:00involve a lot of hassle, that you could live in one place. Because up until then, we'd been moving around. I could also see that it was going to involve one more move back to school, and I was going to have to go back to school to get back into forestry.

SS: Were you doing your masters by then? And in what year did you graduate from VPI?

RH: Well, since I had done that class early, I was done, essentially, in fifteen months. I finished in December 1968. You know, most master's programs at VPI had the tradition that you came the summer before you started and you helped somebody with their project, you went to school for a year, and then you'd do your project that next summer, and your master's project, and people who were coming in would help you.

SS: It was just kind of a passing-the-baton kind of a system?

RH: Yeah. So, my first summer I went through all of the mills; anybody that used 00:32:00lumber in the Southeast, I went through their mill because there was a study for the Appalachian Regional Commission. Some Ph.D. students and I were collecting data. So, I went through all the mills, went through furniture plants, flooring plants. I've been through every kind of mill. Through all the big sawmills. We would leave Blacksburg on Sunday evening, show up at some area where we were going to go through the mills, and just all week long, go through the mills and come home Friday evening, wash your clothes, and get ready to go again the next week. I did that for two months. I lived out of a car. But that's the way they treated their graduate students. It was a great experience.

SS: Hey, that's how my graduate studies went. I lived out of my car on research trips because my budget was so small.

RH: Yeah, we stayed in hotels, you ate locally, you ate with everybody else. It 00:33:00was an interesting time. Very few places, would you actually stay in the same hotel more than a couple nights. When we did that, it was down at the furniture plants. We'd go down to Lexington where there are all these furniture mills. You'd go to one mill one day, the next mill, the next day.

SS: I'm going to return to that experience when we get to the Northwest, because I'd like to reference what you learned about local businesses and different ecological contexts and economic contexts, but also some similarities about local communities and economies. I'd like to return to that example, maybe at least as a reference point?

RH: Well, it was an Appalachian Regional Commission and I'll come to that because, well, when I went back to school at North Carolina State University, I 00:34:00went there because it had the best economics in the South. That's the best for agricultural economics [program] in the South.

SS: So, that's when you end up at Raleigh then, right?

RH: Yeah.

SS: North Carolina State University at Raleigh.

RH: Yeah.

SS: For the record.

RH: Yeah, North Carolina State at Raleigh, because it had the best ag economics in the South. It turns out, they had combined the ag economics and the regular economics together; that's what made it so good. So, most of the professors were either Harvard-trained or University of Chicago-trained. Very market-based.

SS: Kind of like the crème-de-la-crème of market-based economists?

RH: Yeah. It was in the South. And the other thing they had, which I didn't know about, and people hadn't told me about, it's where SAS [(Statistical Analysis System] was developed. It's a statistical [software] package. And they had the largest, at the time, they had the largest civilian computer in the country, called TUCC (Triangle University Computing Center). It was because Duke, UNC 00:35:00[Chapel Hill] and North Carolina State, had gone together for one computer [super computer]. They had one that served all three campuses. It was so big that IBM built a building there; they had a research facility there.

SS: It's incredible that our smart phones now have as much computational ability as a whole building.

RH: Probably did. But anyway, I didn't realize that. But when I got there, that was to my delight. And the reason why I say this is that they required me to be a stat minor. Economics essentially required all their graduate students to be stat minors, unless you had a note from your mother saying you were illiterate or something.

SS: When you say stat minor, what does that mean?

RH: Statistics.

SS: Minor, what do you mean by that?

RH: It meant that you were going to take three years of their statistics.

SS: Okay, I got you. Oh, "minor." I'm sorry. I was taking a metaphor in the 00:36:00opposite direction, like you were "mining" the computer. Never mind.

RH: No, no.

SS: Stat minor, got you. My fault.

RH: They also had written the textbook. Snedegar and Cochran, which was a very standard text. They were N.C. State professors. So, I took a class from one of them. I don't remember which one. He taught basic stat methods. But his stat methods were tied to using a little programming language that essentially had you write your own statistical packages. And it was very thorough. Most people think of stat methods as sort of "cookbook statistics." Well, this was sort of cookbook statistics where you had to mix up all the ingredients. They only gave you the barest bones recipes. Their statistics was rigorous. I took stat theory, 00:37:00and then econometrics. I say all of this because when I showed up out here, I was a much better statistician than almost all of my research colleagues.

SS: That leads me either to a question now or later, but I'm curious, what do statistics tell you? Also, what do they not tell you, in terms of the complexities of humanity, land management, ecology and things like that?

RH: Well, they just give you a way to relate information. But probably more important is that they give you a way to assess the power of relationships. Some are powerful and some aren't, and they help you understand that. We'll probably come back to this later on, but in essence, it's the inferences you can draw and confidence you can place in those inferences.

SS: Now, you were still in agricultural economics, or were you also -- ?

RH: I was in forest economics.

SS: By the time you're at N.C. State, it was forest economics, and you were maybe morphing some of the things you'd learned in agricultural economics earlier, but you were than becoming a forest economist?

RH: Yes. Essentially, I only took one forestry course, in, I forget what it was. It was some variant of forest, either management or something. Because by the time I finished at Blacksburg, I had taken operations research, which is always a key part of forest economics. I had taken the introductory, production economics, and land economics types of classes that are characteristic in the field. I'd taken advanced forest management, so I learned more about feeding southern pulp mills. Because that's what they were really training there. They 00:39:00were training procurement foresters, just people to run procurement programs. So, when I got to N.C. State, there wasn't any forestry left, and I'd had as much forestry as they taught. So, I took economics and statistics classes. And I took basic sociology in lieu of a language [curriculum requirements].

SS: So, what was different about N.C. State than Virginia Tech in terms of the culture and what you were taught, but also the natural environment that you were exposed to in North Carolina? There were some differences. As you go further south [Appalachians], the mountains get a little bigger.

RH: Right, we were often, I was out in the Piedmont. While I was there Weyerhaeuser came in and had these huge clear-cuts, and they were replanting 00:40:00those clear-cuts to pine plantations. People were sort of scandalized, because up until then, the pine forests were mostly natural forests that had come in following the boll weevil in the '20s. I mean, they were nice pine forests. But Weyerhaeuser came in and cut them down in big blocks, and that scandalized people that they would operate on that scale. But, I looked at them and said, "You know, this is the scale that you're going to operate on."

SS: It's another economic model. Is that how you saw it?

RH: Yeah. I saw that it made perfect economic sense, but other folks [might have thought differently], and we didn't have forest ecologists there at that time. There was a genetics institute run by a guy named Bruce Zobel, and there was a fertilizer co-op. They were the bulk of the graduate students. Then there was a forest utilization program that had been there for years. It was very 00:41:00traditional, it's sort of the OSU of the East. It had a big lab where you'd go down and bust up boards all you want, and they had an 88,000-acre school forest.

SS: In other words, the innovative forest product production kind of thing?

RH: Yeah, they had a little baby pulp mill at the end of one of the buildings they'd fire up every Friday afternoon for pulp lab, and they'd make paper. You know, they turned out very sophisticated folks, and they had a long history of turning out land managers. VPI was the come-lately school. When I was there, they were always struggling to get accreditation and they had a dean for years, a guy named John Hosner, who achieved what he set out to do, but it took his whole career.

SS: VPI, actually, Virginia Tech as they call it now, is pretty respected in forestry now.

RH: It is.

SS: It's come quite a ways. The fact the acting, well, I'm not sure he's still acting, but the Acting Dean [College of Forestry] at OSU, Jim Johnson. Do you know Jim?

RH: No.

SS: He went to Virginia Tech or came from Virginia Tech.

RH: But N.C. State was an old forestry school, and Duke was right next-door. When I was in graduate school, they were trying to wipe out the Duke School of Forestry because they wanted to use the school, sell the school forest off. It bounded the west side. [Duke campus/town-Durham, N.C.].

SS: Because they did have that, the big Duke Forest right there. It's kind of a famous private forest. RH: Right next to the campus west of Durham. But, it was an interesting place. It was an interesting time. They're very different schools.

SS: You were at N.C. State when David Thompson played basketball, weren't you?

RH: Yep.

SS: And Tom Burleson and the whole team that won the championship. Right?

RH: Yeah.

SS: Sorry to segue, I just realized that you were there during those years.

RH: Yeah, I was there. We became, and my wife is still an avid ACC basketball fan. When we went there, people said, "Well, you know, basketball's really popular here." Of course, I just sort of looked at the lady that was telling us that, thinking, "Well, golly, what's so big about that?" Well, she was right. You could lay down in the middle of the main street during a basketball game and you wouldn't be run over. We'd go to some of the games but they were so loud and noisy, it was better to watch them on TV. The stadium they had was one of the old original, big stadiums, but it had real flat seats, and my wife's only five-feet tall, so she couldn't see anything because everybody was standing up yelling, jumping up and down. It's better to watch them on TV, but, yeah, they're spectacular games to watch.

SS: I know, and it's funny though, because everybody often thinks of "Tobacco Road" basketball only in context of Duke versus North Carolina, but North Carolina State is right there, too.

RH: Yeah, and then you had Wake Forest, which is right there, also.

SS: The Demon Deacons.

RH: Yeah, and it was exciting to watch. Football there was just a joke. It was sort of entertainment. Anybody could go into a football game. They didn't have much of a stadium, a little bit of a stadium, but it had the big grassy, curved bank, and the students all sat on those grassy, curbed banks. By the end of the day, all the drunks had rolled down to the bottom of the hill. But it was just the thing, a nice afternoon in the Fall, you go out, take a picnic, and watch football. You're just waiting for basketball to start.

SS: Of course, the fun little bit of trivia about the Rose Bowl and Oregon State and Duke. Do you know the story? The only Rose Bowl to not be played in 00:45:00Pasadena. RH: No.

SS: In 1942, it was played at Duke Stadium because of the war and they were afraid to have a big game in California with the Japanese threat. So, the actual Oregon State played Duke at Duke Stadium in the Rose Bowl.

RH: Yeah. I think Duke had more of a stadium than N.C. State did at the time.

SS: Anyway, back to business here. You're at N.C. State and you're learning what you're learning. Did you have a specific mentor or a class or a book or a philosophy, that took you to the next level, really energized you?

RH: No, I wouldn't have been there if I wasn't energized because, remember, I had worked beforehand, so I knew what I was giving up by going back to school. My committee was surprised when, the first time we met, I said I've got to be 00:46:00finished in three years.

SS: Because you wanted to get out and do your career?

RH: Yeah, and I already had a master's degree.

SS: Right.

RH: I wanted to get on with life, you know, as I'd already put off getting on with life. I'd been in the Army, I worked at the Economics Research Service. I was anxious to get on with it.

SS: What was your dissertation subject?

RH: It was a "spatial equilibrium model" for the U.S. forest sector. One of my committee members was a very renowned gentleman, actually, part of two brothers who were renowned agricultural economists, both Harvard-trained, back when Harvard trained agricultural economists, a guy named Richard King. He had just reviewed a paper where some people had solved a long-term problem about spatial pricing, and he suggested that I apply that to forestry because he thought that it might work similarly for forestry. It's called site prices. The spatial issue 00:47:00in agriculture is, you've got, say, a farm here and a farm here, and you have the processing center here. How do you figure out what price they should offer the farmer, this farmer as opposed to that farmer. In the 1840's, a German agricultural economist named Von Thunen had solved that problem by making little concentric circles that represented transportation costs. And so, do you want to check that?

The transportation costs might be egg-shaped. It would be a perfect shape if everything had equal transportation costs, but it doesn't, and so, you have these, sort of egg-shaped zones [equal transportation costs]. In equilibrium, this is another point, later we'll get to this in a discussion of this, but in 00:48:00economics, a price only exists in a single point-in-time. So, the price of gas, today's price of gas, would exist here, and if it went over here to another point, this price has to be similar to that price, only different by the transportation cost because you would go over there. If it's cheaper, you'd go over there, but the cost of going over there offsets that difference.

SS: Which is why I fill up in Corvallis, because it's cheaper in Corvallis than Eugene. And I work in Corvallis and live in Eugene. I learned that over the last four years.

RH: Right. You've discovered how price arbitrage works.

SS: Exactly what you're talking about.

RH: In agricultural economics, this is a big deal because you're trying to figure out potential farm income as one of your main policy variables, as you're trying to figure out how to price stuff at the "farm gate," as it's called. In 00:49:00forestry, we knew there were different markets that had always been observed. You had a market for Southern pine, you had a market for, say, Douglas-fir. But we didn't understand how markets were arbitraging into each other. This provided an explanation for that. You take a single price for lumber, and it decomposes into the price in the various markets, and they sort of float in relationship to each other. So, he proposed that for my dissertation.

SS: Is that because most studies were still done kind of at a regional level?

RH: Oh, very much.

SS: As forestry and the intellectual environment in the United States evolved over the 20th century, the comparative reference points became sophisticated enough, you were able to come up with these more mature theories and philosophies? Right?

RH: Yes. In forestry, the question had been described by people at the 00:50:00University of California, called Vox, named after Vox and Zenuska, both forest economists. They had proposed this, but there was no way to solve it. It was not solvable. Richard King had reviewed this article by two gentlemen, Deloy and Norton, who had solved the problem partially, for some agricultural commodities. He asked if I could do it for forestry. So, I got involved in forestry. For me, it was more complicated as we had more products. Because in the end, what you're really trying to determine is stumpage price differences. They're a function of various products. So, I had eleven products. And I got the model together, and it was so big that I could only run it at night [on computer]. By this time, our 00:51:00daughter had been born, I'd put her to bed, and I'd go to a computer center.

SS: Your model, because of the computational limitations of that time, you didn't have enough space except when nobody was on the computer?

RH: Right.

SS: Okay.

RH: And before they'd do the administrative stuff, they'd let, there were a couple people like myself, who had big models. And I got it actually solved and it went out a couple decades because forestry is a 50-year proposition, you'd have to have some period of time.

SS: Because of the products and the regeneration dynamic and it's horizon. It is a long horizon.

RH: It's a long horizon. So, I demonstrated that you could basically get the model to work, that it worked as originally specified, that it gave you some interesting results, it wasn't very useable, but it got me a dissertation. I 00:52:00sort of squeaked out. I'd become aware of the sort of contemporary forestry problems, because the prelim system at N.C. State was a proposition system. One of the propositions I was asked to write. You had some assigned to you, some you chose. And there were four you had to write, and I could choose one, and I had to do my dissertation proposal, and there were two that were assigned. One that was assigned, was to develop a senior-level forest economics class.

In hindsight now, I realize that was my major professor. I thought he was just preparing me, because most jobs were teaching jobs. He thought he was being clever, preparing me. I had to read all the contemporary literature and threads 00:53:00of the main kinds of topics that were current, and that's where I read about some of the western issues. So, I knew about the Redwood Park issue. Actually, I'd learned about the Redwood Park issue because the son of the chair of Berkeley's Forestry [Dept.] was a VPI teacher on my committee. When his father, Kent Davis, the guy who wrote the forest management text, came to visit he would give talks about contemporary sort of western issues. And one of the talks he gave was the Redwood Park issue [on mix of state and federal lands].

SS: You're talking about when they decided to expand the original park [F. 1968] and the controversy about how they were going to incorporate these other lands [1980] before they got logged off too? Correct?

RH: Yes. And important to the Northwest Forest Plan, it was the first time they 00:54:00tried a jobs mitigation type plan, a restoration. We'll take away timber harvests and we'll have mitigation jobs. [Restoration, or "green sector" employment] This was the first attempt at that.

SS: They were trying to lessen the impact on the local economies?

RH: Uh-huh.

SS: Now, was there a mixture between Indian and non-Indian lands? Wasn't there some involvement with Indian lands around there?

RH: Not so much early on. It was mostly taking Forest Service land. The Indian tribes that you're talking about are probably the Yuroks?

SS: And there's the Hoopas and a couple different ones in there, but, yeah.

RH: Yeah, they may have in later adjustments, played a large role in making sure that their traditional products would be available. But in the original controversy, it was a matter of, we're going to take timber out of production, the highly productive timber lands, out of production.

SS: Now, you were telling me about how you were exposed to these ideas. When was the first time you actually traveled to the West and saw the big timber of the West, whether it be Redwoods or -- ?

RH: I came out for an interview.

SS: So, it was the '70s then?

RH: Yeah, as a teenager, I'd gone to Philmont Scout Ranch, and so, I'd seen the Southwest, seen the aspens, saw the elevation differences. But you know, that's like "Islands in the Sky" stuff [SW mountains rising from deserts]

SS: Right, you're talking about Arizona or New Mexico?

RH: New Mexico, up in the corner of New Mexico. But people didn't travel as much when I was a kid, back-and-forth to Florida kind of stuff.

SS: I may have asked a version of this question earlier. Your experience in the East as a student and young professional, but mostly as a student, what did that prepare you for in the West, and what did it not prepare you for, in terms of 00:56:00scale, scope, and certainly the diversity dynamic in that species were much different? What did you have to learn when you got here?

RH: Well, I had to learn to deal with people who were not very statistically sophisticated. I had to deal with people who were not modelers. Without realizing it, I was really good at large-scale models. And so, I came here and worked with scientists who-I worked with one scientist who took a picture every couple of years. He would compare the pictures.

SS: So, it was kind of anecdotal, impressionistic, not statistically-driven?

RH: Right. And they weren't smart enough to know that the plural of anecdotes is data. It was observational, personal observations. Not 00:57:00statistically-sophisticated was the science community I worked with. Klutzy with computers. They had a view of silviculture which I thought was overly simplistic.

SS: How so?

RH: Well, they had the 80-year rotation, 80-year stand management thing, pretty much etched in their minds. They weren't very flexible about that.

SS: In other words, they thought of one-size-fits-all kind of applications.

RH: Yeah. I always thought volume regulation was something you saw in county fairs, you know, some hucksters trying to sell you something.

SS: I mean, in terms of the volume was everything that mattered and then there was the get-out-the-cut kind of mentality that you saw?

RH: Well, it was how you regulated your forest. They regulated them on volume 00:58:00regulation, rather than area regulation. And so, it's subject to a lot of tricks. If you can grow your trees a little faster, it means you can cut a little more volume. You use a different yield function, you get more volume. It was just sort of this simplistic view.

SS: Now, you interviewed out here in '75? Correct?

RH: In the spring of '75, during spring break of 1975. I was finishing that summer.

SS: At N.C. State? . RH: At N.C. State. I had applied all over for university jobs. Had two standing offers from places I had worked for in Washington, D.C. I could go back and work for the Corps of Engineers. I could go back and work for Economics Research Services. Both offered me return positions.

SS: So, what made you want to come out here? They offered you what? RH: Money.

SS: It was more money?

RH: It was more money. The University of Kentucky was interested in hiring, but 00:59:00when I told them what the salary was here, they couldn't match it. And my wife didn't like the university environment. There was something about it that she just didn't think would be very suitable.

SS: So, you interviewed out here in Portland, you were hired, and you came out here in '75? Your first position was as a what?

RH: Research Forester, GS-12 Research Forester. I was hired and got here on August 25, 1975, for reporting. I was hired to work with international trade issues, log-export controversies, specifically. The first question they gave me was a little list of topics. One they couldn't find anybody to work on was the price impacts of log export restrictions. I looked at that and figured out, 01:00:00well, I know how to do price impact stuff. We did that in agriculture all the time. I figured that out much to their surprise, quickly.

SS: What percentage were they exporting at that time, approximately?

RH: Probably twenty percent or so, mostly from the State of Washington.

SS: But not so much Oregon?

RH: No, but Oregon shares the ports and this corner of Oregon.

SS: Was that because of the multiple port access points that are in the Puget Sound area and the--

RH: And the Columbia.

SS: And the Columbia. Right, I figured that.

RH: You got log exports out of Astoria, Longview, even Portland, at that time. You could go down right on the main docks in Portland and watch them load logs.

SS: Now, what was the gist of the controversy? Total log exports?

RH: Well, mostly it was jobs. You know, if you export a log to Japan, you--

SS: You lose a sawmill job here?

RH: You lose the sawmill job. At that time, there were about eleven jobs per million board feet. If you export the log, you lost around five to six jobs. But you gained a stevedoring job. That was the crux of it. The other part was that you drive up prices for everybody else, because you're shifting the supply curve back. That's what I did in the price impact thing.

SS: Because of the beginning of globalization in the Northwest in terms of its major extractive industries.

RH: Yeah, it was, but we'd been a log exporter. This region had always exported some logs. They really took off after the Columbus Day storm.

SS: Because of all the salvage logging afterwards? [high winds-blow-down]

RH: Yeah, all the salvage logging. And at the same time, the Japanese economic 01:02:00recovery [Post-WWII] had gotten to the point where they needed [building materials]. The Japanese liked the white woods for their post-and-beam construction system. They're one of the few places that builds wooden houses, so they would take our logs. We'd saw them and use them in construction. They went through the big mill in Portland at what's called Vanport, because it was just on the other side of the 205. [Hwy. in east Portland] You can see the remnants of it now.

SS: Yeah, I still see that name around sometimes, Vanport.

RH: You'd go through there, and they'd be stacking up cants out of old growth over on the side. When they got a load, they'd export those to Europe where they'd be re-sawn for furniture. Exports were always a part of this.

SS: Now, very early exports from the Northwest were to California because of the 01:03:00San Francisco boom and everything that happened in California.

RH: And San Diego.

SS: San Diego. When did it shift into the international realm? Was there much before World War II?

RH: There was always some.

SS: Okay.

RH: But not to the extent. It really took off after 1962. The modern controversy took off after 1962, because up until then it was just part of the product mix, export clears or stuff, and you still see those names.

SS: Now, I'm going to get to the specific questions here that I worked up here recently. In broad terms, how would you describe the forest economy of the Pacific Northwest in the immediate post-World War II era? When I'm describing 01:04:00that, I mean the first two to three decades? You weren't here initially, but you certainly studied it and became an expert on it.

RH: Well, you have to remember that the forest products industry here has been big since the 1920s. It was large before then, but a lot of that involved taking logs down [rivers/ocean]. That's where the Benson log rafts, those kinds of things, and they went down to Los Angeles, some to San Francisco, and some to San Diego.

SS: There's also a lot of private land logging that happened early, too. Right?

RH: Yes. Now, there's an interesting point about that from a historical standpoint. You should go look at the oral history interview with David Mason, the advocate who led us to the Sustained Yield Act of 1944. He argued in the 1930s -- you'll see this imbedded in the O&C Act [1937] and it's in the Elliott 01:05:00Forest controversy -- that we should adopt sustained forestry because that limits the ups and downs. It should give us more stable prices, and those stable prices will be the incentive for improved forest management. He especially argued to restrict national forest harvest to sustained yield flows, so that that would offer an incentive for better management on private lands. So, the sustained yield discussions had a price component in it, and to maintain communities. In the O&C Act, it's the only federal forestry acts that says you've got to sustain communities.

SS: Would you call that a mitigation measure also?

RH: No, that was the promise of sustained-yield forestry. It's not a mitigation 01:06:00measure, it's a promise.

SS: Okay.

RH: The industry here has been big. We've had industrial-sized mills, the biggest mills in the world have been here since the '20s, powered by modern means, by electricity, most of them, steam generation made electric. One of the earliest was out in Vernonia. It's not there anymore.

SS: Vernonia? Oh, yeah, right up there. [NW corner of Oregon]

RH: Up there. So, the industry had been big. It operated with railroads, and before the Jones Act, with coastal shipping. Once the Jones Act passed [1917], you really couldn't ship by water around to the East Coast any more, but you could do it by rail. Until they deregulated the railroad lines, you had blanket rates, so that it was cheaper to ship the lumber east. It wasn't as expensive, 01:07:00say, on a ton-mile basis, because you had these blanket rates in certain areas. Then they'd bring different manufactured goods back, so you were taking wheat and lumber east. Most of the private land had been cut up before World War II. All these trees around here, this area was probably cut just prior to World War II. What you see here is the regrowth [in years after World War II].

SS: It looks like there's about 50, 60, 70 years [regrowth], maybe?

RH: There's a park up right here [West Portland suburb], and you can see that it's old second-growth, by today's standards. It needs to be thinned, but the park district won't do that. After World War II, there was a report, the McKenzie Report, which suggested that the Forest Service increase its harvest because they could perceive it was going to decline on private lands. Even when 01:08:00I got here, there was a lot of controversy about how you're going to fill in the gap. There's this perceived notion of a gap coming. There as a thing called the Beuter Report, which talked about how to deal with the gap. People perceived that, and they were trying to come up with a policy that would transition its way through the gap to where you'd cut federal lands heavily, say, and then these private lands would regrow. Of course, that all assumes everybody was going to behave in sort of a "good forestry" sense; you know, that the industry folks will stop cutting their lands as heavily and rely on more public timber. And harvest here increased until 1964. Harvest increased rapidly following World War II because the U.S. was trying to house the returning veterans.

SS: The whole Cold War dynamic was a furious time of economic growth in the 01:09:00extractive industries, and not just in forestry, but in other areas, too.

RH: Right, and there were strategic materials studies. Timber was not on the high end of that list, but down in the bottom end of the list. People were still talking about it from a strategical sense, how you treat timber. And so, when I got there, there was this controversy about this transition from old growth to the second growth, and people had different visions for that. As an economist, my vision was, well, it's not going to be a smooth transition. We could have a "last tree party," the last big log off the industry land's going to go down, and people will shut it down until they'll reduce their production to match 01:10:00what's available from more moderately-managed public lands. When I got here, forest planning for the public lands was just getting ready to start, and people were still doing sort of ad hoc volume regulation models by timber-sheds or working zones sort of planning. But I got here before forest planning started.

SS: The 1976 National Forest Management Act changed planning, made it more sophisticated.

RH: Right.

SS: More multi-faceted.

RH: Yeah, more formal.

SS: Right.

RH: And it meant to make it more of a multi-resource [situation] because we'd had that Multiple Resource Act [1960] that passed, so we were supposed to be thinking more in a multiple-resource context rather than just timber.

SS: Well, I mean, that's when they included recreation and all the other values.

RH: Recreation, range, minerals, timber, and wildlife; five of them.

SS: And that really wasn't included in any meaningful sense before.

RH: No.

SS: People talked about it and there were elements in the Forest Service and other agencies that saw that as important, but it wasn't official policy.

RH: Right. It wasn't given equal status, because in the workings of plans, they were often on timber, how we're going to cut timber, where we are going to focus management activities -- because they're harvesting old natural stands. When I showed up out here, I thought, we're twenty years behind where they were in the South, because they were already seeing what planted stands looked like they had started planning in the '60s. They were cutting through the natural, the old boll weevil pine stands, and now, were replanting and seeing what they looked 01:12:00like, and starting to worry about whether, did you bed the stands to just let the pines up. A lot of the South is wet, or has wet seasons. They were sort of into the next round of questions. We've got all these stands; how do we manage them and how do we start to monitor our planting actions and our stand site prep?

SS: Well, the dynamics of scarcity will force you to look at things differently.

RH: Yeah.

SS: Out here the mythology of a boundless timber horizon was still very influential when you got out here, to some degree. Correct?

RH: Among the older people. But since the national forest cut hadn't gone up any since the early or mid-'60s, within the agency, they didn't see it as boundless. They saw the other people looking in wanting our timber, wanting us to put up 01:13:00more. And so, there's this tug-of-war between the stewardship traditions the Forest Service had because a lot of the forest hadn't really cut very heavily. Even when I showed up in 1975, some of them had just increased their harvest in just within the last decade. There were still people concerned, left over from when it was more of a conservation ethic, when you actually got talking to people in the forest.

SS: Coming in as a newbie who was very trained in economics and what you did, but in a new environment, new politics, and new ecologies, did you see the scenario as sustainable, economically or politically?

RH: Yes. I saw it as sustainable, but it was facing this big gap. And the more 01:14:00you got to thinking about how will that gap work, you realized that there was no way around some big drop-off. All the economic forces suggest that you adjust to a gap like that, not by slowing stuff down ahead of time, you run full-tilt until you run out. Then you fall off. And you readjust. So, I was different from many of my colleagues in that sense, because they were trying to find a way to transition through that. I looked at it from a straight economic view, which is that economics is relentless. And there's no "hand of God" going to lead you through this sort of a smooth transition. That's not the way. Economic 01:15:00transitions don't work that way.

SS: The numbers are there or they're not.

RH: Yeah. The log truck shows up in the morning or it doesn't, or you cut down through the log deck. And there was enough history of that all around. Forestry has a history of that. We cut the lake states out. We cut the South out two times. We've been through New England.

SS: A lot of conservation philosophy and forestry schools arose in response to concerns, outrage, over some of those things, like the cut-and-run logging in the upper Midwest, the railroad logging and things like that. Then, German foresters and French foresters and people [including Americans] started going back-and-forth, and those ideas started to transfer over here.

RH: Yeah, I was familiar with that. I'd seen the southern Appalachians cut out, and seen what came back. It's part of my education, and I recall walking up old 01:16:00railroad grades with an ecology professor trying to get us to explain why is this hillside different than that hillside. I'd been through all the mills, talked to a lot of the old duffers who remember what materials used to be, like how come all our yellow poplars are white now? We don't have any more yellow poplar.

SS: In the '70s and leading into the '80s, did you see what was happening in terms of the culture and the politics and the economics, to all the things that would lead up to the Forest Wars? RH: Oh, yeah.

SS: How did you see that, and what did you think was going to happen when you 01:17:00saw it unfolding? I don't think a lot of people really were prepared for how it would actually go, even to up until the present day.

RH: Well, first off, I observed the early projections; they were non-economic projections. There was a thing called the "Two Projection" study. Then there was the Beuter Report. I was involved in a thing called the Timber Harvest Issue study, where we developed some of the spatial models I had learned about. And I worked with Darius Adams [OSU forest economics professor] on supply and demand estimations. We combined the two and began to see how changes in one region would affect another region, and started to look at timber supply more in the economic sense, not in this sort of mechanistic what's available sense, but an 01:18:00economic sense. When you looked at it that way, you realized that the whole thing about the gap in the Timber Wars, was about how are you going to fill in this fall-off from the private lands, and can you substitute enough public timber to fill that in until private lands can sustain the current level of harvest.

Say it's six billion feet a year on the west side [Cascades crest to Pacific Ocean], six billion cubic feet. We looked at that and said that's not good economic sense. You're going to go from six billion and decline down to four, because that four is going to be made up of public supply and a reduced private supply. The issue then is, how fast is this transition? The transition, you're dropping one-third of your harvest, means a bunch of mills are going to close. 01:19:00We could tell that story. So, people kept saying, well, no, let's have departures from non-declining even flow. You know, if, in 1973, the Forest Service adopted a non-declining even flow policy, and the industry wanted to argue, let's have departures from non-declining even flow. So, for several decades, we'll raise the harvest up. We'll increase the national forest harvest, say, from two billion feet to four billion feet, to fill in that gap. And there was a lot of politics involved.

I was observant of all of that, and a participant in offering one view. It wasn't a very persuasive view, but it was one view that irritated people, because we'd point out to them that, well, your view makes no economic sense; it doesn't take into account costs. It's just this mechanistic sort of thing saying 01:20:00if you've got so much timber available, that it's available. It's available at a price. So there was an educational component. There were fast-thinkers in the industry who knew what we were saying, and knew the power of that, and knew what to expect. The Forest Service was being buffetted about. Foresters don't listen to their economists a whole lot anyway, and they didn't want to increase their harvest, in spite of having an assistant secretary, a guy named John Crowell, during the Reagan years [Undersecretary of Agriculture for Resources and Environment], who said you ought to. We didn't talk to the communities a lot. The 1976 [Forest Management] Act required us to identify timber-dependent communities, timber-based communities, but that was done by the forest planners.

SS: Not the upper-level managers?

RH: They set some standards and turned it over to the forest planners. And remember, planning was done on each forest, so I think there was a regional guide that listed the communities.

SS: Why do you think it was so? I have my own ideas, but why do you think it was so difficult for the forest plans, post-1976 act, to be done, implemented, and accepted? Because if I recall, most of the forests either didn't have plans or they struggled to get them together for many different reasons, in the years leading up to the Dwyer Decision and the spotted owl controversy, and the Northwest Forest Plan dynamics?

RH: I'll tell you a little bit of history you're probably not going to hear from anybody else. The reason each of the forests in the region were struggling, especially on the west side, because all their plans involved a drop in harvest. Essentially, when they first did the plans, they sort of kept harvest at where 01:22:00it was. But then, they kept layering on. Well, they didn't treat wildlife very well, so they'd have to tighten down some assumptions, or you didn't do this or you didn't do that. As they did that, it would drop the harvest on all the national forests. On the national forests, the industry said, "Oh, we don't like that." And the communities said, "We don't like that either." So, there was this tug-of-war with people who kept tightening down various restrictions and dropping the harvest. When the Interagency Scientific Committee, the ISC, went back to brief the Chief [USFS - Dale Robertson at time], and they had this big meeting.

SS: That was the one [ISC report] that Jack Ward Thomas oversaw. Correct?

RH: Right. At the very end of that, they had been working, they worked in our building, the same building I was in. Jack would come down, and we'd ask him to 01:23:00come down and tell us what was happening. When the Portland lab had a meeting, then Jack could come down. He was a very talkative kind of fellow. And he'd been a project leader. He and I were project leaders together. We shared the same supervisor. They worked about a year, and then, at the very end, they had to do economic impacts. And so, one day I was told I had two weeks to do the economic impacts of their report, because in Jack's world, there were only economic impacts. He doesn't understand that economics influences the questions, too.

SS: He just sees that, this one side of it?

RH: Yeah, one side of it and then at the very end before he can make his final report, he has to include the economic impact. So, I had two weeks to do the economic impacts. The regional economist, a guy named Alan Fox, and myself, we did the economic impacts. And so, we went back to Washington, we presented them, 01:24:00and we were in the meeting with the head of BLM and [Forest Service] Chief Robertson, and George Leonard, the Deputy Chief of the Forest Service. We presented the impacts and they're grim. They go around the room and finally, old George Leonard says, "Well," and at the same time, they're all wrestling with the plans, what are we going to do about these Region 6 west-side plans. And old George says, "Well, you know, one big boom is better than two little bangs."

SS: (Laughs).

RH: So, he rolled the owl and the other plans together, and got a big boom.

SS: Now, the owl and the ESA, those started to register [politically] in the early '80s. Correct?

RH: Yes.

SS: In terms of being an issue that was to be considered?

RH: Right, to be considered.

SS: Not the big thing it was later, but it was becoming that.

RH: Right. There was a lot of controversy over the size of the areas that would be needed, and they varied across EIS reports, and I did the economic analysis for those various EISs. I even have a little engraved glass cup upstairs from one of them. So, I was busy doing this. As they went along, I did the economic analysis. Because, at the same time I was doing the Forest Service's [econ. anal.], I was responsible for their RPA [Resources Planning Act] timber assessments. We had to do national timber planning.

SS: RPA is an acronym?

RH: Resources Planning Act.

SS: Okay, thank you.

RH: Divided up among the "multiple uses." there was a range specialist. I was the timber specialist. There was a range specialist, a wildlife specialist, a mineral specialist, and a water one. Water was always the weak link there. We 01:26:00organized research efforts and wrote the assessments. For twenty-five years, I was responsible for writing the timber assessments, which had a long, long history before me. There had been five or six of them before I got them, and I worked on the 1980, '85, '90, '95, and 2005 ones. That's why we could do the economic impacts in two weeks if we had to. We were always at some stage where we could do that sort of stuff. Let's see, where were we? You were asking about various EIS and ISC reports.

SS: Basically, I was trying to get you to get into the gist of the forest planning dynamics and problems that were there between 1976 and when everything 01:27:00blew up in 1989 and '90 with the lawsuit, the Dwyer injunctions and everything that would lead to ISC, FEMAT, the Clinton Summit, the whole thing. But before that, just kind of describe that trend.

RH: Well, as I described, the original plans had reasonable timber volumes from the industry perspective and the traditional perspective. But also, you have to remember that the industry collapsed in 1982. And there was a huge buy-back legislation for timber sales. We had to buy back sales, as people defaulted on their timber sales. I also worked on timber sales, as a forest economist, doing studies of competition. That's the bread-and- butter of being a Forest Service general economist. So, I worked on the National Appraisal Task Force in the 01:28:00mid-'80s. We had to buy back a lot of timber. A lot of people defaulted, and they had to sell it back to us. We took a loss, a huge loss, actually. Companies went out of business.

SS: Remind me or for the record-- what was the foundation of the 1982 timber collapse?

RH: It was the recession. The recession started in the fall of 1979, and it dribbled on and off until 1984, before a recovery started. In the timber world, it recovered a year later or so. Housing starts stopped. We could look at the statistics. It dropped off. It was a recession as great as the recent recession, called the "Great Recession" now, and it was a very severe recession. At the 01:29:00same time, you remember, Mount St. Helens went off. There were people who were thinking grass was going to grow in the streets of Portland, especially after ash fall the second or third time.

SS: I remember the second big eruption when it blew into Portland.

RH: Yeah, blew into Portland. It was a mess.

SS: Two inches of it in places.

RH: Right, and it blew around for weeks because it would fall, and then we'd get another windy day, and you could watch it blow from one roof to another. Just gritty.

SS: And if you get that stuff in your carburetor, you're in trouble. RH: Oh, yeah. We changed air filters on a more regular basis. In my home and neighborhood, we washed the street down. We all got together one weekend and I still have a special little nozzle for my hose to wash ash down. Then we wheelbarrowed it off, dumped it. It was a mess. But forest planning during, say, 01:30:00from 1982 through '86, as people kept introducing new restrictions or new assumptions that restricted timber harvest, the general prospect was that timber harvest was going to fall dramatically under the new plans. That was the fear.

SS: And that's even independent of whatever became in the Northwest Forest Plan. They were already preparing for that.

RH: Right.

SS: Lowered expectations.

RH: Since we had this model of the timber markets, we made runs for both the industry and preservation interests. For instance, I did runs for Boise-Cascade, as they were looking for strategic planning. I also made runs for the Wilderness Society, because at that time, they had hired an economist to strengthen arguments they were making for wilderness preservation. I knew what both camps 01:31:00were thinking, and I was in-between them. You know, the environmentalists would have been happy with a twenty-five percent reduction [in harvest]. That's what they were thinking about the new plans, along with further wilderness withdrawals. At the same time, you had Hatfield working on a new Oregon wilderness bill.

So, all these things are going on, and people were starting to look at the spotted owl, it's threatened status, and what that would mean. There were a couple of EISs; I remember at least two EIS's being done that would accommodate the new, changing views about spotted owl management. You had the ISC [Interagency Scientific Committee] report folks, and they were the first ones really that sort of pulled in the conservation strategy, starting to pull that 01:32:00together for the owl, and all that sort of came together. The ISC report made its findings known and the Forest Service decided to take that in. You know, George Leonard's "one big boom;" we'll do the new plans and take the ISC strategy together. At the same time, we got sued, the Dwyer suits. [Seattle Audubon Society 1990 lawsuit, Judge William Dwyer, 1992 injunction stopping logging.]

SS: How would you describe the coalescing of forces? From the time you got here in the '70s through the '80s, you had all the environmental laws that were passed in the '60s and '70s, that were in staggered fashion being understood and used, politically and otherwise, and then you started to see the maturation of 01:33:00the environmental movement. All these things are coming together, as well as the rise of the "-ologists" within the federal agencies, the science people that were there, but in a much less influential role before the '70s, I would say. How would you describe that whole coalescing of forces leading up to the Dwyer decision?

RH: One anecdote I can remember, when I first got here, I'd go to a Society of American Foresters meeting, and, depending on the topic, you would be amazed at all of the pickup trucks with radio antennas on them. Field foresters would come in for dinner and for the topic. I remember amongst those topics, we had the business reporter there for the Oregonian, because forestry was on the business 01:34:00page. His name was Jim Kadera, and that was his beat. He was probably an old-school journalist, who would come every now and then and talk about what's important from a business perspective. And you have to remember, Portland and Seattle were the finance centers for our timber industry. They were a very large employer here. I used to get invited to the Portland Chamber of Commerce to give talks about log exports. I'd also get invited to the Port of Portland. They'd have breakfast meetings every now and then where they touted their features for the coming year. We'd get invited because we were part of that community, the business community. But, by the time we're speaking about now, we'd moved from 01:35:00the business pages to the front pages.

SS: As for the culture wars, if you want to call them that, a lot of this is really the culture wars of the post-modern generation moving into the natural resource management world.

RH: Right.

SS: I mean, that's how I would characterize it.

RH: That's a fair characterization. Portland grew enormously in the 1990's, especially this area [Beaverton/suburbs west of Portland]. When I got here, Intel wasn't here yet. Intel's so huge [Aloha], it's also in Hillsboro. We have neighbors now who work for Intel or the service industry that Intel supports.

SS: Yeah, Nike's here, too. [Beaverton]

RH: Yeah, Nike's just a mile up that way.

SS: Right.

RH: And Nike's going to get bigger and bigger, or at least that particular campus is. And the traditional industry that was here, Tektronix is much smaller.

SS: And I remember when they were cutting-edge high-tech. RH: Right.

SS: When I was a kid, people said, "Have you heard about Tektronix?"

RH: This neighborhood was filled with Tektronix people. Our neighbor across the 01:36:00street was one of their engineers. He got laid off, probably in 1990. Then, he worked for a patent attorney as he did patent description stuff for tech, and he became a registered patent agent. That demonstrates how industries change. During the fifteen years from 1975 to 1990, one visible thing to me was we moved from the business page and having Jim Kadera to talk to. Where I was fielding calls constantly from news reporters who wanted a jobs impact. I got in a lot of trouble one time after I'd done the ISC economic stuff. I was on an NPR interview one night, just after the Chief [U.S. Forest Service] had lectured people about press leaks. Here I'm driving home that night, and I heard me say 01:37:00on the radio, "Well, job impacts aren't hard to do, you just multiply the reduction in harvest by eleven jobs per million board-feet, and that's the direct impact." My supervisor was here at 9:00 that night with a transcript, wanting to know if I'd really said all that. What can you say? I said that. It's the truth.

SS: And that was when Dale Robertson was Chief [USFS], correct?

RH: Yeah, he was Chief. Max Peterson, there was McGuire, and then Dale Robertson. And Dale was a nice guy. Well, I knew all the early chiefs because, I actually knew them because I went on the Hill with McGuire at a time and I had to brief him ahead of time about all that. I knew Max Peterson, because when he was the Region 8 Forester, he would come by the schools every spring and give us 01:38:00a little pep talk about wanting to work for the Forest Service. He was supportive of research. And another, Bob Buchman, had urged us to participate in an international project called the IIASA Forest Sector Project and so we had briefed Buchman and Peterson about that. So, I knew them and had served like a general's aide once, on a UN forestry tour. I don't know if it still goes on, but it was a big deal when you were the host country. So, I was assigned to it when the U.S. was the host country and it was coming to the West Coast. And so, we went from Seattle to San Francisco.

SS: Paralleling this, how was the culture changing within the Forest Service, at least in your experience out here at that time?

RH: The big change was in who they were selecting as supervisors. When I first 01:39:00came, they were traditional timber people, folks who mostly came up on the timber side of the organization. Supervisors, starting in the early '90s, were more diverse [gender] and they had more diverse backgrounds, you had wildlife or range folks. When you worked on the east side [of Cascades], you got people in range conservation, wildlife or something else. Not too much social science yet. BLM was further ahead.

SS: But more research and science-y people started having more senior positions, is that what you're saying, in short?

RH: People who were more interested in what you had to say.

SS: Less of a top-down culture than a more integrated one?

RH: Yeah. Most of them had been on planning teams or had to use planning teams. 01:40:00One thing about a planning team is they teach a process. If you're successful, you know how to work process effectively. I was amazed whenever I got assigned to a joint-EIS science team, and I did that twice, one time in Alaska on the TLMP (Tongass Land Management Plan), and one time on the east side, as the Interior Columbia Basin Project was a joint team. In the Interior Basin Project the scientists hemmed and hawed about what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. The EIS people were organized. Within a couple weeks, they had their basic functions organized, they knew the steps they had to do, and we're still scratching our heads over deciding which groups are going to fight each other. Because they're [EIS people] focused on the process, they knew the process, and 01:41:00steps in the process.

SS: Right, and by that time it was a very well-developed and understood process within various agencies, and the Forest Service, in this case.

RH: Or BLM. I just worked with BLM for the second time, on their resource management plan. I did the economic stuff on it. I worked with the economics team. And yeah, compared to the one they did seven or eight years ago, this one's even more organized in terms of that - we've got to do this and we do this and this, and we only have to look at the question this way because that's the way that the agency managers will look at it.

SS: When you first heard about the Endangered Species Act, and then the "test cases" [both in 1970s] were on the snail darter [Tellico Dam] and the whooping crane [Nebraska Sand Hills] that led into the spotted owl. Did you understand the economic impact this was going to have immediately, or was it a thing of coming into understanding over a period of time?

RH: You have to understand, I've read the book, Noah's Choice. If you, and I 01:42:00would recommend that you read the book. Because you will understand that the people who wrote the Endangered Species Act knew what they were doing. And the people who passed the act didn't.

SS: You're talking about Congress versus --?

RH: No. The people who wrote the act knew it could have vast consequences. They weren't thinking that it would be applied, they were thinking more of it being applied to just to the people who passed it in terms of things like eagles, and you know, charismatic species.

SS: Megafauna [plus popular species, often mammals/birds], right.

RH: But it first got applied in an effective way to snail darters. And people could see what that meant.

SS: The Tellico Dam [Tennessee]. Right. And then the whooping crane was right 01:43:00after that about a year later.

RH: Yeah, but it didn't involve forest land.

SS: Right, right.

RH: So, yeah, if you thought about it, you knew what was coming. And the environmentalists did, too. They thought about it and realized here an effective tool.

SS: Well, they saw it as a political tool, for sure.

RH: Yeah, they did, to achieve their goal. The original Wilderness Society's goal was really around trying to preserve old-growth areas. Early in my career, I served on a Society of American Foresters [task force on] scheduling the harvest of old-growth timber. Jack Thomas and John Gordon, Norm Johnson were on it-no, Norm Johnson wasn't on it. Franklin [Jerry] was on it. It had all these big names and I was the little name down at the bottom. I was the numbers person. So, I put together--

SS: The bean counters, and then there were the "stars." [Big-name scientists]

RH: Yeah, the bean counters and the stars.

SS: Sorry, to be obvious. (Laughs)

RH: So, I put together the old-growth inventory for this region. I knew the 01:44:00facts and knew what was coming. And the Wilderness Society, since I did work for them, I knew what they wanted. They wanted to stop the harvest of old-growth timber. And they were pretty generous in their definition. They would follow the Forest Service definition, which was 250 years old or less than ten percent entry, with less than ten percent entry. It turns out, from the inventory data, you could drop it down, the Washington DNR used 160 years, and that would be fine. The stand structure between 160 and 250, doesn't vary very much, since I looked at the stand structure data by age class, and I'd gotten an FIA unit to give me the data.

SS: I'm going to ask you a question after we talk about some of the central things about New Forestry and Franklin.

RH: I worked on that, too.

SS: Yeah, we'll talk about that later. But since we're right on the edge of the 01:45:00Dwyer thing [spotted owl injunction], let's go.

RH: Okay, after the ISC report came out.

SS: Let's go right into that as soon as you get past what you're talking about now.

RH: We got sued.

SS: Are you talking about the Seattle Audubon Society suit? Okay.

RH: Yes, that's the Dwyer injunction.

SS: Yeah, it's 1989 [1990], and the injunction was 1992 [1991], if I recall?

RH: In the spring.

SS: It was filed and then the injunction was the following year, right? Yeah.

RH: They filed the injunction, the Forest Service hemmed and hawed, and the Justice Department said you've got to subpoena your witnesses. I was subpoenaed because I did the economics along with Jack Thomas. All of the ISC Committee was subpoenaed. They were subpoenaed, because some of them, they didn't want the other side to talk too. I'm told that I would have been subpoenaed by the other side, too, if the Forest Service hadn't gotten to me. I was going to go one way 01:46:00or the other. But we were subpoenaed and became, like the witness panel. There was a time gap. We were subpoenaed. Nothing much happened. We were all deposed about what we'd say, so there were no surprises in that sense. Then they set the date for the hearings in Seattle. A [U.S.] Justice Department team was assigned, so I had my own lawyer. And the only thing I remember about it is he liked lemonade, and I discovered there was a Mexican restaurant near where we were that served really great lemonade.

SS: And that's in Seattle, right?

RH: No, it was down here in Portland. SS: In Portland, all right.

RH: Because they came out and explained what you're going to do.

SS: Prepping you before the Seattle hearings. Okay.

RH: Years before, I had been prepped, the first time I was deposed. I got the 01:47:00one-hour quick course on how to be an expert witness. He just reinforced that.

SS: But then you got graduate studies in deposition preparation?

RH: Yeah, so we were housed in an old hotel sort of across the street from the theater and the court. By that time, there was a certain amount of political theater going on, people holding up babies, and so, we'd have to walk through a crowd to get into the room, those kind of things. Lots of extra federal marshals standing around. So, we testified. Judge Dwyer had given us a set of questions that we're going to hear testimony on. He had looked at the case and had come up with a set of questions that he wanted testimony on. And so, there was testimony on spotted owl reproduction. He had a series of questions, including some 01:48:00economics questions. So, I answered the economics questions and got cross-examined. Then he decided, you didn't say anything about log exports. So, he gave me a couple of log export questions. I had to arrange to get some big charts made and other things to answer his questions. They got Fedex-ed up, and the next day or the day after the next, I forget what the interval was, I got to go on the stand a second time for a primer on log exports and harvest, relative to timber harvest, just basic data questions.

Each night, us expert witnesses would have dinner together. But probably after the first day, we knew what the outcome would be because George Leonard was the Forest Service official who had to testify. He said at the very beginning that 01:49:00we didn't follow the environmental laws under the current Bush administration. We were shortcutting environmental reviews. And he admitted that, so the rest of the case--

SS: On the stand, he admitted that?

RH: Yeah. He's a person of great integrity.

SS: In other words, he wasn't willing to overly massage things just to try to get a favorable ruling?

RH: No. And he was not going to do much for the current administration; he wasn't going to jump on his sword for the current administration.

SS: Are you talking about George H.W. Bush, not the second one?

RH: Yeah. He was true to what he had to say. But, you know, we'd all had dinner together. It was good to talk to the other side, but you're sort of stuck with your side.

SS: Now, you were allowed to speak, witnesses, to each other?

RH: Yeah.

SS: During that period? There wasn't some, like, there were no gag orders?

RH: No gag orders. You just didn't speak to the other side. They kept us together.

SS: What do you remember about being in court and testifying?

RH: Well, the courtroom, actually, was sort of empty. It wasn't a huge courtroom, but a regular courtroom. And they had limited who could enter, as the crowds were outside.

SS: Because they were worried about people yelling and stopping it?

RH: Yeah, there was political theater going on in the streets.

SS: Could you hear that inside?

RH: No.

SS: Okay.

RH: Once you got inside the building, there were reporters there. They were allowed in. Some of them, a couple of them I knew, because I had talked to them ahead of time. And they'd come over and ask questions.

SS: Like the Oregonian reporter, right?

RH: Yeah, like the Oregonian. There was a woman Oregonian reporter, all through that period, I think, who eventually wrote a book. [Kathy Durbin]

SS: I think I know who you're talking about, but I can't remember her name.

RH: I can't remember her name, either. And you would go to court to listen to 01:51:00the parts that were interesting to you. You'd be spending time working on your testimony or working on responses to questions raised that you might get cross-examined on. It kept you busy. The only time you'd really got to talk to each other much was at dinner.

SS: Did you feel it was stressful, enjoyable, or a great experience? How would you characterize it in retrospect?

RH: Well, in retrospect, I thought it was very significant. But when I talked at the [PNW] station, I was living in a world of people who didn't know what was going on. They knew Jack Thomas was still a [PNW] station employee, but most of the station was doing what the station does.

SS: Whatever their jobs were, they were doing it?

RH: Right, and we weren't--

SS: And where was the office at that time?

RH: The what?

SS: Where was the PNW Station office?

RH: The [PNW Station] Director's office was shared with Region 6. And at that time, I was busy moving our lab from one side of town to the other side. I was the Director's rep [representative] for the Portland Lab.

SS: So, you guys were plenty busy?

RH: Yeah, I had just moved the lab to this new location, and I had just become, in the spring of 1991, a program manager, so I had more responsibility. Dwyer told us that it would be several weeks or months before he ruled. And the lawyers said he would rule on a Friday afternoon after business, or as business 01:53:00shut down, he would rule, which he did. On a late Friday afternoon, he ruled. I actually met Dwyer earlier, because he had married [as judge] friends of mine. He had married Darius Adams and Claire.

SS: How interesting.

RH: I had met him, because we went over and he performed the ceremony.

SS: How would you describe William Dwyer?

RH: Very thorough. He seemed like other lawyers. He didn't seem to have a point-of-view, and I thought maybe they all worked that way. He sent this list of questions, stating that I want testimony on these questions. He'd looked at the case, and I guess he thought, these are the points that I want to address, and he was very specific. Then, as the testimony went on, if he wasn't satisfied, he'd ask more questions, like the log export questions. And people 01:54:00would have to go scurrying around. I think they had to get an extra genetics expert to come in and explain something.

SS: So, it was very professional?

RH: Yes, it was very professional. And the courtroom was relatively quiet.

SS: The reason I say that, is I often hear people characterize anything connected to the spotted owl as "environmental fluff." Now, being twenty-five years later, and not looked at like this was a serious legal and scientific analysis of the problem by a competent judge. I'm talking about how people caricature things in their memories.

RH: Well, I think in the spotted owl wars, Judge Dwyer is often forgotten. They just start with the Northwest Forest Plan and FEMAT.

SS: Well, some people I'm talking to, they remember who Dwyer is.

RH: Yeah, and because there's some science disciplines who didn't get to the 01:55:00"big boys' table" until FEMAT. I'm talking about the social scientists. They weren't part of the primary discussions in forest management.

SS: So, the ruling came down, what, a few months later?

RH: A little longer than people thought. People thought that, especially people like George Leonard, who admitted that the Forest Service did not follow the rules, the environmental rules, they expected a much quicker ruling. So, there was some uncertainty. Now, at the same time this is going on, the Forest Service had been reselling a lot of those sales that had been bought back or had to buy back as part of the buy-out legislation.

SS: So, stuff from the '82 recession when the timber prices dropped?

RH: And U.S. timber harvest peaked in 1989. The U.S. market and the Japanese market boomed simultaneously.

SS: An ironic juxtaposition in history, right?

RH: It peaked. So, Forest Service timber sales programs were at all-time high levels, where they were selling lots of sales, but these were sales that had been prepared, some of them ten years before, and then had been resold or redesigned and resold.

SS: So, the lag effect had a double-whammy to it? In other words, you were going to not only get the injunction, but you were going to get the end of whatever this was that had been in the pipeline.

RH: Right, right.

SS: Is that a correct way of [stating things]-okay.

RH: Yeah. And part of our testimony, my testimony, was is that the effects wouldn't be felt right away, because you had timber in the pipeline, they would be felt as this uncut volume on the contract was. So that was part of the controversy. At the time, the industry argued as if the price impacts would be huge, and it's going to raise the cost of housing. But I put together an 01:57:00estimate that said, no, it's not going to raise the cost of housing. And lucky for me, the Weyerhaeuser economist said the same thing, so the industry stopped that argument. It was going to have a price impact, but not in the sense it's going to raise the cost of housing.

SS: Weyerhaeuser obviously could say that, because they had such gigantic private holdings. [Especially in southwestern Washington.]

RH: They didn't buy public timber. If the prices go up, they just make money, and they laugh all the way to the bank.

SS: Aren't there some people with the cynical view that some of the big players like that, who had private timber holdings, almost enjoyed aspects of this because it pinched the market to their advantage?

RH: Well, we're going to come back to that because they--

SS: I just thought that--

RH: And I'm going to explain to you how.

SS: This is based on a rumor that I hear, that I don't necessarily agree with, but I can see where it could be true.

RH: It could be, but you have to remember that the bulk of private timber land 01:58:00is owned by individuals, not by big companies.

SS: And Weyerhaeuser was kind of an exception to that rule.

RH: Weyerhaeuser is the one exception. And Weyerhaeuser, above all things, is a very dedicated land steward. They take stewardship seriously, and they like to make money, too, of course. The Boise-Cascades guy was a guy named Don Smith. Walter Jerrick was from GP [Georgia-Pacific] or somewhere. I forget the fourth one, it was from the South. And they were--

SS: What about Crown Zellerbach? Were they a player?

RH: No. They were bought out by then.

SS: Oh, okay.

RH: They were never a big player.

SS: Aren't they more up in Canada?

RH: Yeah, they own McMillen, and they were a [big player]. They got bought by a 01:59:00guy named Goldschmidt, because he figured out their stock was grossly undervalued to their assets. He bought them, sold off the timber land, then ran the mills until they essentially couldn't run any more. Sold them, too. But in the period between the Dwyer injunction and FEMAT, we came to understand what the economic impacts were. At the same time, there was an election. I was surprised as I'd drive in the countryside, the rural areas in Oregon, in that there were no Bush signs. The traditional rural support for Republicans was not there, because they felt betrayed.

SS: Because of what happened during this whole process?

RH: Yeah, during the whole process. Mills were saying we're going to have to start cutting down because there's no sales, and the Forest Service wasn't selling anything. People were cutting the uncut volume under contract. And you can see the end of that. At the same time, we had a recession, the 1991 recession. And I can remember testifying that I couldn't tell the difference right now between the injunction --

SS: And the recession?

RH: And the recession. Because, as an economist, you're observing shut-downs, you're observing price changes, but then, in a couple years, we started to recover from the recession, and prices [timber] spiked. We had a price spike in 1993.

SS: Because of the supply/demand dynamic?

RH: Yeah, the supply, and that price spike was enough to bring on types of materials that we had not used before, things which had been sitting on the shelves, used for engineered wood products.

SS: Right, but smaller circumference wood. RH: Right.

SS: Things that would have been considered junk or scrap or whatever.

RH: Right, and at the same time, unobserved largely, was what happened with the old traditional mills. We had the 1982 to '84 recession. The old thinking was that during a recession, mills don't retool, they just sort of shut down, and then, they start back up. What happened during that recession, was that a lot of the mills retooled to become small log mills.

SS: Those were the smart ones.

RH: They were the smart ones. Largely they did that because people that held 02:02:00their bonds forced them. Instead of defaulting, it'd be cheaper if you guys just kept operating, but you're going to do it, and take all the labor out of it. If you think of an old mill, you had the green chain, you had twenty-five guys standing out there pulling boards off a green chain. Well, in 1986, if you went back, there would only be one or two people because it's now all automated. There are twenty-five people [jobs] who disappeared. They never came back. The U.S. industry during that recession, forced wages down that broke the union. It used to be that Canadian and American producers shared the same union. But the Canadian producers didn't take that, as they wouldn't take a wage reduction.

SS: That also parallels or follows the Reagan years' attack on unions, which started with the air traffic controllers as part of a broader cultural dynamic 02:03:00against organized labor. It had been in the works for quite a while.

RH: Yeah, it was part of all that. Weyerhaeuser forced them [wages] down, and essentially said, you guys take a reduction or we'll shift production to the South. They said, here's our cost, you're competing in that market. I gave a lot of talks at that time about how you've got to be cost competitive to compete to supply. The main driver on the supply side is cost. The hardest audiences I had to talk to were any of the labor union-related audiences, because as an economist, I had nothing good to say to them.

SS: Like globalization, we talk about it now, it was already in force back then.

RH: Right.

SS: But now, it's on hyperdrive because of high technology and the internet, and people think in terms of globalization as a primary default, mentally. But it 02:04:00flattens the world.

RH: Yeah.

SS: Read Thomas Friedman's book on the "flat world," and it's true. You were competing against what we used to call the Third World or developing world. That whole dynamic changes your bargaining power.

RH: It's the reason we don't produce much furniture in the U.S. any more. Ever since Pottery Barn successfully convinced people to buy knocked-down furniture, nice looking knocked-down furniture, it wiped out the Broyhills and factories in Lexington [Kentucky] and High Point, North Carolina.

SS: We bought some Broyhill furniture after we remodeled the house that I live in now, but it's made in Vietnam.

RH: Uh-huh.

SS: For Broyhill, or they put the stamp on it, or whatever they did.

RH: Actually, I went through one of those factories in Malaysia. It was a Chinese-owned factory and they'd just been moving it down. The day I was there, 02:05:00they were making bar stools and shipping them to Home Depot. They were putting them in a container and it was made out of rubber- wood. But it was Swedish equipment owned by Chinese. Chinese are the traditional merchants of Southeast Asia, or they were Taiwanese-Chinese.

SS: It's amazing how with forests, now that they've become part capitalist, part whatever you would call their government, they've reversed that really 600-year long trend, where China, the great power, withdrew into itself. Now, they're coming back.

RH: Right, they're coming back. They were always the great power in Southeast Asia. When I was in Vietnam, they owned the rice mills, or Chinese merchants did. Next to Saigon, there was a town called Cho Lon, which was the Chinese part of Saigon. But it was very Chinese. They're traditional merchants, and they 02:06:00owned all the rice mills and any kind of manufacturing. It was their money.

SS: Let's return back to after the Dwyer decision. Tell me what's happening, and take us up through the ISC, the Gang of Four, and then into FEMAT, or the Clinton Summit and then FEMAT. Kind of take us through that based on your experience?

RH: Well, the Gang of Four had no economic questions, so it was just the Gang of Four. I knew all four, but they were so busy. I knew Thomas better, and the thing he kept talking about was the role of expert judgment. On one hand, he was hesitant of the gladiator-type fighting where one expert duels with another, but 02:07:00at the same time how much information do you have to have to make a good judgment? And make sure you don't contribute to our ant problem.

SS: (Laugh) We're talking about cookies (ants in room). Back to the question.

RH: But so, in the Gang of Four, whenever I'd talk to him [Thomas], that was a perennial concern. During that time, I was busy working on the 1990 RPA timber assessment. I'm a program manager, and at that time, it was a shared leadership kind of commitment. Every month I had to take a week to go meet with the leadership team, and we wrestled with transforming the [PNW] Station from a project to a program basis. And there was a lot of stuff going on to stay busy. And I was still involved in the international work stemming from the IIASA 02:08:00Forestry Sector Project, still trying to worry about forest sector modeling.

Let's see, if I remember, 1992. Clinton got elected. There was going to be a Forest Summit. As they put together the people to attend the Forest Summit, a lot of people thought I would be asked to attend, but the OSU folks sort of got in the way, so one of the economists who attended was a person named Brian Grieber, who had only peripherally been involved. But I was never on Norm Johnson's Christmas card list. Somewhere, early on, he had been sort of 02:09:00astonished that I'd gotten a Forest Science article, as he was the economics editor. I had gotten a Forest Science article accepted with what he saw as some very simple, two or three, very simple regression equations. He thought it wasn't rigorous enough. But I pointed out to him, it got accepted. And second, it's not the equations that are important, it's the theory you're showing, [and in this case] that there had been a fundamental mistake in how people had related forest products markets from product to stumpage. And that you only needed a couple simple regressions to show that they had a made a mistake.

SS: Sometimes, the simplest is the truest and the best.

RH: Yeah, but that's not Norm. Anyway, Norm had a low opinion, or lower opinion, of my skills. Brian was more pliable, I think, and he attended the Forest 02:10:00Summit. I did a lot of preparatory stuff for various people, but I didn't attend. The Forest Summit promised there would be a FEMAT. So, when FEMAT came, I got rounded up. They sort of got all the warm bodies.

SS: Well, you had ninety days, you needed lots of bodies, and lots of minds.

RH: There were three of us on the economics team; Brian, myself, and Cindy Swanson, who was there because she had done wildlife valuing, and the social science team. Brian and I looked at the stuff I'd done for the Dwyer trial. We redid the analysis, given these particular harvest reductions. We knew what the 02:11:00results were going to show. Cindy Swanson reminded us not to be quite so market-driven and to be a little broader, and we wrote up the economic stuff and turned our report in. There are two anecdotes I'll tell you. One was, every afternoon, we'd have these meetings, or not, every day, but most every day, was this meeting, and we'd sit around the table. The big shots sat up front.

SS: Are you talking about in the Pink Tower?

RH: In the Pink Tower.

SS: This was in downtown Portland, the Pink Tower, which is the United Bank building?

RH: Right, United Bank building.

SS: Okay.

RH: Since I had an office in Portland, I didn't need to go to the Pink Tower. I only went to the Pink Tower when they had these formal meetings.

SS: Okay.

RH: In the formal meetings, they would be arguing some particular point. And the economists and the social scientists, we got to sit at the end of the table sort of over in the left corner furthest from the kitchen, you know, the crumbs level on the table.

SS: In other words, the ecologists, the biologists, the forest people, those 02:12:00were the central people?

RH: Right.

SS: Right.

RH: And it was interesting. The main argument was between people like Jerry Franklin, who said, "Well, tell us what type of habitat you need and we can grow it. We can manipulate stands to give you that habitat." And, like I said, I'm going to tell you three anecdotes.

SS: Okay.

RH: One day, the guy from the [U.S.] Fish and Wildlife Service, whose name I can't remember right now, stood up, crossed his arms, and said, "You are going to do it this way because our bird's listed."

SS: Are we talking about the murrelet or the spotted owl?

RH: Spotted owl.

SS: Because the murrelet was already listed, or was it yet?

RH: I don't think it was.

SS: Okay.

RH: The other anecdote was that we had gotten along, and we, the economists, had presented our results. All we did was present some results and tables and do this gathering of the main thinkers and they thanked us for the economic 02:13:00impacts. But that afternoon, oh, geez, his name has just slipped my mind. My cohort, my other economist cohort, he and I were talking, and Gordie Reeves comes up to us, very distraught because he's finally realized what we've been trying to tell him all along; harvest levels and acres are colinear. You reduce acres, you reduce harvest. You just can't move harvest around. In the volume regulation they use, they are linked. He had just realized it because, and you have to remember that the heart of FEMAT, it's a dual-habitat conservation strategy that connects PACFISH, which I also worked on, I did the economic analysis for PACFISH, and it's the economic analysis for the fish conservation strategy, and it's parallel with the habitat conservation strategy for spotted owls.

SS: So, you have your terrestrial and your aquatic, picking a parallel.

RH: The way they combined them is a connected habitat strategy. So you have, say, a cluster that's an owl habitat area, and it's connected by a riparian zone to the next owl [habitat unit]. You can think of it like splotches connected with corridors, connecting corridors. They used riparian corridors to connect the spotted owl habitat units. When you do that, you take a lot of acres out and you drop harvest. For some reason, Gordie had never figured that out. He didn't realize it. The third anecdote was at the very end when we're having a grand presentation. All the political types are in the room. There were two political 02:15:00watchdogs. Tom Tuchman was one. They were in rooms most of the time. I forget who the other one was. [James Pipkin, asst. to Sec. of Int. Bruce Babbitt]

SS: Jim Lyons, was he there?

RH: Yeah, he was there, in and out. Jim Lyons is sort of a flighty kind of person, where Tom Tuchman's a more serious kind of person. I knew both of them from different experiences, had worked with them in years prior. But we were having this big, sort of the political roll-out. Finally, it comes down to my turn to talk, and somebody says, "Well, what's going to be the economic impact? You know, how can you describe it succinctly?" And I said, "Well, the economic impact for most American families will be about the cost of a pizza dinner." There's a woman named Margaret Shannon, who was in the room also, and she said that when I said that, the political types sighed with a great sigh of relief.

SS: But they're talking about nationally?

RH: Yeah.

SS: Not the influence on-

RH: Local.

SS: Regional, but also local.

RH: Yeah, we had talked about that. But they asked, what is the broad impact? Well, it's going to cost the average American family about the cost of a pizza dinner.

SS: Wow.

RH: And if you don't have Margaret Shannon on your list of folks [to interview], she was a keen observer. She was on the social science team.

SS: This is a more specific question relating to what you just talked about. What were your goals going in to the FEMAT process, and how did you strategize to complete the task/mission given by the team to complete the process? Also, 02:17:00how successful do you feel you were at carrying out your original mission or goal?

RH: Well, we were very successful. Again, they just asked for economic impacts, which we knew since I had done them already for the Dwyer injunction. We knew what they were going to be, and it was just a matter of getting the correct harvest numbers tied to a specific [national] forest, and then making some inferences by the different sub-areas that they wanted. So, it was for us a very straight-forward task.

SS: Was it less free of the political and judgments made by the other members of the team, where things were, shall we say, more "squishy?"

RH: Yeah, that's a fair thing to say. Once they had come up with what acres could be in the Matrix lands, then you could compute the timber flows from that. 02:18:00Once we had timber flows from Norm [Johnson], it was just a straight-forward analysis, very similar to the analyses we've done. Didn't have to do anything new. The only new stuff was splitting into the sub-regions that they wanted.

SS: Also, you had to come up with numbers for each of the ten alternatives?

RH: Yes, but they're just changes in timber flows. You do the analysis for, say, 101 million board-feet, then you do the analysis for 110 million board-feet. It's just a number.

SS: What do you think about the zoning scheme, the idea of the reserves [Late-Successional], the Matrix, the AMA's, the aquatic and the core? How do you feel about how that was designed?

RH: I always thought that it was not well-designed. I now realize one of the 02:19:00things that was a problem, was that we had assumed that people were willing to experiment, they were willing to take chances, or to tolerate some risk and experiment with different ways to manage. What we didn't realize was that actual land managers are highly risk-averse, and so there's no incentive for them to, say, modify your riparian standards in an AMA, or in a riparian zone from the Aquatic Conservation Strategy. [NWFP]

SS: Weren't a lot of typical manager types not in the central FEMAT panning?

RH: They were not there.

SS: That's what I mean. So, you're talking about the managers of the type that were in the FEMAT process, were more the science-research types, rather than the 02:20:00traditional admin-manager types? That's what I'm talking about.

RH: Yes. It turns out the people who were becoming our district rangers, the lowest level of line officer. We only thought of them about the few of them that we had worked with, but didn't think about what the typical fellow or woman would do. That was a problem throughout the FEMAT and post-FEMAT efforts. We did not understand where the incentives would be to experiment, change, or modify standards and guidelines.

SS: Within the FEMAT framework?

RH: Within the FEMAT framework, the FEMAT process set core standards and guidelines, but they also set ways to change them, but there was no incentive. 02:21:00If I'm a district ranger, and it says, I've got to have a tree height buffer, I'm going to have a tree height buffer, that's the easy thing to do.

SS: Don't create and don't innovate, in other words?

RH: Why should I innovate? I'm being judged on how I implement things. It's a focus on inputs and not on outputs. I worked with a science community that never understood that. And I couldn't get that through to people.

SS: Elaborate a little more on that point?

RH: Well, the aquatic people talked like they understood production processes. They would talk as if they understood that if you combined these inputs, you can get these kinds of outputs. It turns out, that was all talk. It was part of their "group think." They really focused on the input, like we've got to have a one-tree buffer or a two-tree buffer. And they couldn't explain to you why, what 02:22:00is the marginal difference? Do I get more fish? Do I get twice the number of fish if I have a two-tree buffer? They talked as if they understood that process, but they didn't.

SS: They were doing it because they thought it sounded good?

RH: Well, it sounded good and it reduced a risk.

SS: Right.

RH: You know, they combined a lot of things. But they focused on the inputs and not on the output. What's the outcome that you want to get to? We'll come back to that when we talk about the Interior Columbia Basin Project.

SS: Okay, all right.

RH: But in FEMAT, it was focused on the inputs. And historically, I just finished reading a book looking at the shift to ecosystem management. And even the scientists that I work with have just written a book called, People, Places and Forests. They're trying to talk as if this is some great science, like we've 02:23:00shifted it. But it misses a lot because it doesn't speak to the objectives you're managing land for. It's as if the objectives already have the very best science. What's the outcome you're trying to achieve? And who for? You know, you're managing forest land, this is public forest land, and you're managing it in trust for future generations. How do you do that? How do you meet their needs while meeting your needs?

SS: Right.

RH: I thought during the same time that the sustainable forestry debate has changed more broadly into a sustainable development debate. That's to increase economic prosperity that's environmentally sound and socially just. Where does FEMAT fit in that? Think about it. It doesn't. It's scientists on the loose. This is managing like we want you to manage it.

SS: Well, that's one of the big criticisms of FEMAT.

RH: It is.

SS: Immediately after, but even now long-term, that certain things that were supposedly promised or more, prospects did not exactly play out the way they were outlined in the plan.

RH: Yeah, you couldn't even get Region 6 to sell their reduced cut.

SS: But you had scientists, basically, scientists and more scientists and more scientists, which is a novel thing and I think there was a really good aspect to that, but, and I'm putting a big "but" there. I think we're starting to see some of the shortcomings that were, number one, that the plan [NWFP] was open to criticism, justifiably so, from day one. And then you can tell me about maybe some of the specific examples of what its shortfalls had proven to be. But that's kind of my take on it. Even though I thought it was a very novel idea, I can see where it would be problematic.

RH: Yeah. And perhaps in a historical context, people will say it was an abrupt 02:25:00way to shift land management objectives without having a discussion about land management objectives.

SS: Well, you're basically saying, look at the land managers, they have made a mess of this thing, so now the scientists can figure it all out. And now in history, one of the good things, but also the problem in the "objectivist paradigm," which like science, there was always some objective paradigm that's the model for all things. And I think the illusion was based in that. If we get a bunch of scientists free from politics in a room, they're going to come up with a more objective, rational, sustainable solution. And I think that is a very naïve assumption myself.

RH: Yeah.

SS: And even historians, we self-critique ourselves because there was often the 02:26:00assumption that the objectivist paradigm and the historian who really sticks to it, is going to come up with more or less a better representation of history, and their analysis is going to be more true and stronger. But everybody's got filters. Everybody's got biases, even when you really try to be fair and all that stuff. So, that's kind of my little opinion about that.

RH: Oh, it's a fair one, because the post-World War II experience is based on the idea that science and technology won the war for us, and that if we rely more on that, we'll improve our lives and prosperity. There's lots of good examples of that. Teflon, for example, was invented as a coating for tank tracks in snow and ice. And now, we use it in our kitchens all the time. SS: But I will 02:27:00also say geography won World War II because we were not attacked, invaded and bombed. We were the industrial base for the Allies.

RH: Became the industrial base.

SS: Well, yeah.

RH: There's several interesting books recently about "Fortress America," about how you take a Ford production plant and turn it into a B-24 factory using the same techniques [production-assembly line]. The U.S. was able to do machine millwork far better than others, largely because there was a Ford engineer who ran a lot of the early stuff. And just in his mind, "well, an airplane's like a car," we can build them bigger and better. Henry Kaiser, you know, this is Henry Kaiser's thinking. [Shipbuilder/industrialist]

SS: Ships, right.

RH: The only legacy we have of Kaiser today is the Kaiser health plan that survived.

SS: That's a good thing, a health plan. Imagine that?

RH: But it's the health plan that he had for his ship yards. We are Kaiser 02:28:00[Permanente] members, and have been for years. One advantage of the war. But, I stepped away from FEMAT because from the economic side, there wasn't any money to do more work. That's not true for social science folks. For them, FEMAT was the first time they got to the table.

SS: You're talking about the original 90 days [FEMAT], which I think they extended to 120. [Actually was 60, extended to 90]

RH: They did.

SS: So then, you're done with that, all the rest of the people go home and the social scientists, you say, still continued on?

RH: Well, they had gotten cross-wise, as they had done some surveys and they had gotten cross-wise on information requests about that. But it gave focus to the social science research community that they hadn't had before. Because before, they had worked on a hodge-podge of stuff, most of them did recreation work, and 02:29:00social science and community work. It gave them a new dimension, a new focus. Before, economists had worked on the community question because of timber-dependent communities. But they expanded it into community well-being, and it really did stimulate a lot of social science on how you measure change in these forest-dependent communities. And so, that was a good, a positive outcome. A couple years afterwards, I became responsible for the [PNW] station's social science work. But right after FEMAT was done, I got assigned to the east side project, the Interior Columbia Basin Project. So, for the next several years I worked the east side issues, and only came back to the Northwest Forest Plan after one time in a station leadership committee, our current station director at the time, Tom Mills, was touting how great the FEMAT science was. And I said, 02:30:00"How do you know it's great? We haven't looked at it and tried to measure its greatness." So, I got assigned to write the first, and you have it in there, the "Highlights of the Science Contributions to Implementing the FEMAT." And in that, I began to discover some of the things we didn't do well, and one of them is the risk.

SS: That leads me to the question I was just going to ask you. If you're going to gauge things afterwards, maybe in a few years, what did FEMAT do well and what did it not do well, in your view?

RH: Well, the--

SS: What were the shortcomings and the successes?

RH: Its big shortcoming was that it didn't spend enough time on the implementation, thinking, "How will people implement this?" It didn't do that. It assumed people would experiment, because, at that time, adaptive management seemed like such a good thing, and people didn't do that.

SS: The AMA idea seemed like a great idea.

RH: It did, it did. The best scientists of the day, [C.S.] Hollings and those folks, were extreme advocates for it. If you think about it, and me thinking about my military training, they taught adaptive management. There was always an exercise and invariably it involved, you take an objective and you get graded on taking the objective. The military has these little acronyms, like estimate, and "E" means this. Well, you have to consolidate your position because you have to be prepared for the next thing. In those exercises, as soon as you sort of got to the objective, if you weren't quick in consolidating the position, you got attacked again, or you got attacked anyway. But you got good points if you 02:32:00responded, and bad points if you didn't. So, they taught adaptive management. And they also taught, you're going to take the hill this way, and then you get halfway along and they say, okay, these people are dead. Now, take the hill with what you've got left. That was the "Fort Benning School of Leadership." [Ft. Benning, Georgia.] I'd been through that and I did very well.

So, adaptive management, to me, wasn't anything-and at the same time, I was trying to organize the station's discussions around risk management. My whole master's thesis was on decision-making under uncertainty, so I was trying to get the station to think more about risk assessment, you know, where does our work fit into a formal risk assessment model. And I wasn't doing very well, because 02:33:00in forestry, people tend to comingle risk management and risk assessment. They look at a problem, and think, I've got a solution to that problem. Our bug people were terrible. You know, if you've got dying trees, we've got to do this. Well, no, no, no. Why do we have dying trees? What are the risks? And then how do you manage those risks. Separating that, it's a two-step process. The other two steps in risk management are risk communication, and then, risk perception. And not everybody sees risks the same way.

SS: The thing that most people have to said to me about the AMA's were, like you said, a good idea, but the context and reality of implementation is the most common that I've heard about, and a more general principle across the whole shebang is "survey and manage." [Survey for multiple species in management areas to gauge environmental impacts.]

RH: Yeah, see, that has no economic counterpart.

SS: But I mean, in terms of managerial practicalities on the ground, and I think it was Norm who said this or somebody else, but they basically put a fine filter on a process that would have been better served by a coarse filter.

RH: Right, yeah.

SS: It mucked things up to the point of almost guaranteeing stopping [NWFP] mechanisms from functioning. Then you throw in environmental groups and lawsuits, and everything kind of grinds to a halt, and even less than the economic predictions you and your team came up with. Would you say that is a fair assessment?

RH: Yeah, it's a fair assessment. There were people, advocates for various species groups, who got to the table and into the writing of the standards and guides, and I think Norm's point of about "fine" and "coarse" is a good point. But that goes back to your three planning levels. You always have to remember 02:35:00what level you're planning at. That fine filter stuff, you don't really get it until you're down here in the weeds, at the finest scales. You know, it was just a lot of misunderstanding. There wasn't an adult at the table that dealt with the "here's how we implement this."

I know the aquatic scientists in their Aquatic Conservation Strategy made the other scientists really jealous because it was a coherent strategy for how to manage the species, where the other folks didn't have a coherent strategy that included restoration. So, it made them jealous. But to their credit, the aquatic people had a strategy. If you think about it, that's a risk management strategy. They didn't have a good way to assess the risk. And their way of doing that sounded an awful lot like planning. What they thought that somebody could do 02:36:00that on an afternoon, or, you know, it was a quick process. But they didn't understand that a forest management team would look at that and say that's a planning process. And because it's a process, we've got to do this and this and this and this. You know, they didn't understand that. So, when they thought we could do that quickly, that risk assessment step quickly turned into a very difficult step.

SS: So--

RH: But I stepped away from all that because I got assigned to the east side.

SS: Okay, tell me a little about the Interior Columbia Basin Project.

RH: Well, while all this is going on, on the west side, the east side is saying, cynically, they were saying, "How do we keep this from spreading to the east side?" And the Forest Service is looking at the east, saying, "Well, we've got 02:37:00these changes on the west, do we have these same issues on the east side?" They'd had PACFISH go on a couple years before-hand, and the headwaters of the PACFISH are all over on the east side. I was working the Columbia and Snake, the sockeye issue. The thing about PACFISH was that when we did the analysis, mostly it just meant that you had to get the stuff out of the streams. You'd change road crossings, how you do road crossings. You leave wider buffer strips along streams. It actually had a bigger impact on recreation and on mining because over there, mining was a hobby activity, a recreational activity, people operating old mines, messing up the streams, and you had a lot of campgrounds where people did stuff. And that's an education, for law enforcement and education. Don't pee in the streams, folks, use the outhouses, move the outhouses across the road, that kind of stuff.

SS: And there was use in some of these, you know, amateur miners would use 02:38:00certain chemicals?

RH: Yeah.

SS: In trying to extract whatever or separate whatever, correct?

RH: In terms of economic impacts, we had to estimate how much it would cost to buy out those claims because you couldn't, well, you could regulate, say, or control chemicals, but you couldn't regulate how they used suction dredges, or, well, I guess you could regulate the season they could use section dredges, but it still puts out a lot of sediment. We did the analysis on buying out claims. And there were a lot of claims. But, so, I had done PACFISH. So, I got assigned to do economics there, and worked from 1993 to 2001 other than doing that west-side summary report, trying to get them to be better about risk assessments, which was a losing battle.

SS: So now, you're still on the home turf here in Portland as the manager?

RH: Yeah. But my work is over on the east side and in Alaska.

SS: But let me finish my point. In 1995, the final report [NWFP] comes out to the President and Congress, and things start to unfold, and as they unfold, even though you weren't central to it, how did you see the reactions to successes and failures, and problems that were coming up with how the plan was being implemented? How did you see the culture or the dynamic, the institutional reactive mechanisms to this?

RH: Well, you saw resentment for the scientists who'd put the plan together. When you went and talked to the head F.S. [National Forest-level] folks about the difficulty they were having in trying to implement this, because they were 02:40:00just being sued right and left, or the impossibility that you've placed for them [administrative, management-wise, logistical].

SS: You're talking about like in the Matrix lands and the other lands where they thought that they were going to make up for the losses in the reserves, and then they were being sued, everything was just piling up, right?

RH: Right. I worked on various New Perspective [Forest Service program ca. 1995] studies to see if we could do various types of New Forestry [forest management concepts from Jerry Franklin] prescriptions to harvest and create a landscape mosaic within the Matrix areas. I worked on a couple of those studies. I managed the station's effort to look at "Compatible Forestry," a program advocated and funded by PNW Station Director Tom Mills. We don't manage just for timber, you manage for a whole suite of things. How can you manage compatibly? Because all 02:41:00the discussions always talk like you're only managing for two things, say, environmental goods, and on this axis, you've got timber, and every guy just draws a line like this. They think they're always at those points on the line. But if you think about it, almost all the time you're inside there somewhere where you could move with either mutual gains, or you could move keeping, say, timber steady and improve environmental [outcomes]. You know, because policymakers are thinking of it as a two-dimensional problem.

SS: And, being a modeler, you know that no matter how good the model, it will always be incomplete compared to the complexity of reality.

RH: Yeah.

SS: And is that? RH: Yeah, that's a fair statement.

SS: Yeah.

RH: But, all of the Northwest Forest Plan money went to other people. Being an economist, working on incentives, the only money that we got is for some community work. So, I did social science work. We did stuff that paid the bills. 02:42:00I was assigned to the TLMP team, the Tongass Land Management Plan. Did their demand projections. Worked in the Chugach [National] Forest Plan. Worked on the Interior Columbia Basin Project for eight years. What else did I do? Eventually, fire research came along. We had to do fire research. After 1995-96, the Northwest Forest Plan wasn't a big driver of economics research. We got gold stars for being the closest on the job impacts. That's not a very good gold star.

SS: Describe why it wasn't a good gold star.

RH: We estimated pretty close to the impact of what the job loss would be.

SS: Do you think that the people that pushed this through, the center of energy, do you think they really had any idea of the reality of what would happen over time, say 10-20 years? I mean, do you think they were naïve or, shall we say, idealistically optimistic, in a sense that--?

RH: I think it would be polite to say they were idealistically optimistic. I had to go to Europe in 2004. I won a prize and I had some extra money, so I took some of my program members and called in all my European favors. We went on a "show me" trip for two weeks. We had to give seminars; that was what we traded. I can remember in Sweden, people just being stunned that the U.S. would make a 02:44:00policy-decision, essentially to impoverish a whole region. They couldn't see that, because in their world, "we" [Swedes] practice sustainable forestry. They have a mix of community forest and privately-owned forest, and not much public forest. You wouldn't make a public policy decision [Sweden] that impoverished a whole region. They had a hard time seeing that, especially my statement about it costing Americans about a pizza dinner [each], but all the impact is born, really, in a relatively small area.

SS: Also, you've got Sweden, a country that is smaller than the Northwest.

RH: Yeah, but--

SS: So, you can look at it, it's almost like they are a region in terms of size, economically.

RH: But they couldn't understand why a government would do that. SS: I 02:45:00understand. I'm just trying to find comparatives.

RH: Yeah, there's only eight million of them. There's eight million Oregonians and Washingtonians, actually.

SS: And I'm not trying to belittle the Swedes, the European countries.

RH: But think about that.

SS: I'm just trying to do a comparative analogy.

RH: But think about that. They couldn't understand that you would manage public lands, essentially the high ICUN categories, and why would you do that. These are highly-productive timber lands.

SS: Well, I have a theory. The pendulum swing reaction is that you see in the '90s and through the present, is a pendulum swing over-reaction to the excesses of previous generations, where there was a thing going on there that wasn't sustainable, and then, the hammer came down and it came down perhaps too hard.

RH: Well, I think you could be right, but it's better to think about what are the objectives that the Forest Service has had, that have been assigned to it, or that they've advocated for. We started off with Gifford Pinchot, the "greatest good for the greatest number," but we really didn't harvest very much. The harvest was mostly on private lands and we were conserving timber. Then the Sustained Yield Act passed [1944], we're going to manage these forests sustainably. And post-World War II came and the cut was rising on public lands, national forest cut was rising too rapidly actually as people eroded stands. And we got the Multiple Use Act [1960] because folks became concerned. When did the first, the Wilderness Act, passed in, what, 1962, '64?

SS: 1964. [Political process lasted from 1956 to 1964]

RH: Early advocates of that were looking at early Forest Service efforts to develop primitive areas. Then in the '90s, you're talking about a changing of objectives. Our land management objectives reflected broad societal goals. We live in a society that doesn't need and doesn't want us to harvest for the couple billion cubic feet we used to harvest every year. And so, we now harvest a couple billion cubic feet every five years. It's the land management goals. At the same time, one of the things that's going on in the background that no one else will tell you is that when I went to school, we were trained to talk about 02:48:00the "New Forestry." A study had just come out called the "South's Third Forest." It said that the forest we're planting today is vastly different than anything we've had here before. It grows faster, you have better quality, smaller hardwood proportions, and it's manageable.

In the 1980's, I worked on the "South's Fourth Forest" study. In that study, we had data from these stands that people were just glimpsing when the "Third Forest Study" was done. Based on those data, we said that we're going to get fifteen percent more yield from these managed stands. And I did the 2000 RPA, we actually had real data, we were getting fifty percent more growth from those 02:49:00stands. Essentially, between the mid-'90s and 2005, we saw the transition in the U.S., where the bulk of timber used here used to come from natural stands, and by 2005, the bulk now came from managed stands. Those managed stands are only 50 million acres out of 500 million acres. So, we've shifted the bulk of harvest away from natural stands sort of scattered all over.

SS: To plantations, essentially?

RH: To plantations, essentially.

SS: What is the percentage that's coming out of the Northwest the last twenty years, in terms of national production, national output?

RH: We should be factual.

SS: Richard is going to look for a book. He's got a book, that's got a lot of--

RH: I'm looking for harvest by owner, history and projections.

SS: Analysis of the Timber Situation in the United States, 1952 to 2015. This is 02:50:00the book we're talking about [for readers].

RH: This is the 2000 RPA Timber Assessment. I could go get the 2005, it would have slightly more recent data; harvest by region, harvest by owner. Why don't you turn that off for a minute?

SS: Okay.

RH: While I look.

SS: Okay, we're back on the record there. Richard's going to--

RH: Historically, the west side [Cascades' crest westward to Pacific Ocean] accounted for almost thirty percent of U.S. timber harvest. But after the owl, it dropped down to about fifteen percent.

SS: So, it was a dramatic decrease. RH: Yes. Now, we still have a large forest products industry here, and it's still very large mills which further complicates the problem, because the little neighborhood mills are all gone.

SS: They're the ones that took the brunt of it because they didn't have the economies of scale or the leverage to survive the downswings.

RH: Right. And the industry that's here now is less diverse than the industry 02:51:00that was here in the 1980's, even in the recession. The implication of that is, industries that are very similar can only pay the same amount for stumpage. In the past, we were able to sell timber, or you could hope a specialty mill would show up, or somebody that made plywood. You had a plywood producer competing against a lumber producer. But now, they're all lumber producers and they produce the same kind of lumber.

Now, there's another anecdote, and this affects Weyerhaeuser. Following the price spike in 1993, lumber became very expensive. So, people had to look for substitutes. And what they found were the little wooden I-beams. These had been invented earlier. So, instead of cutting a 12-inch board to use as a joist, you 02:52:00can use the little wooden I-beam.

SS: Laminated?

RH: A laminated, they've got like a--

SS: And they're stronger.

RH: It's stronger and it doesn't squeak. When prices dropped back down, consumers didn't switch back. So, Weyerhaeuser's stuck with all these stands that they had been managing to cut for what they called the "wide market."

SS: The big stuff?

RH: The big stuff, 12-inch stuff out of it. To cut a 12-inch board, you've got to have like a 14 or 16-inch top.

SS: Right.

RH: Well, suddenly, they don't need any of that. So, they exported that, or they cut, used it up. Now, you don't need to manage stands for 40-45 years, you can manage west-side stands for 25-30 years.

SS: They get big enough logs to do the laminating and small beams. Right?

RH: Right. And they're cutting 2-by-4's, you're cutting two-inch dimension lumber. You know, twos, fours, maybe some sixes, and you can still cut them long 02:53:00here and run a 32-foot, I mean, we can still grow a 32-foot log in one tree, and still have a good six-inch, 6-8-inch top on that log in 35 years. So, essentially, one consequence of the spotted owl was to change the lumber market such that we're going to shorten rotations on private land. So, you'll get a further separation between public land and private land, and you reduce the opportunities to sell timber from the public lands.

SS: Do you think we're going to have a swing back in the other direction because of the political situation in this country, where certain interest groups not afraid to seemingly go really far are going to try to take things in a certain direction, or do you think that that ship [back to pre-environmental age ethic and practices] has come and sailed?

RH: I think it's sailed. I have often thought that, as the demographics of the 02:54:00U.S. changed and minority populations grew, the environmental community is mostly white upper-middle class, the declining part of the population. So, if there's going to be a change, it'll be a change as political power shifts to, say, this other community, which is less well-off and they may want, say, more housing. They may be willing to make tradeoffs that the people currently in power, the white upper-middle class, won't. But I can't say that out too loud because you're getting into the social part of sustainable development.

SS: But traditionally, minority communities, at least in the last, well, quite a bit of time, if you want to talk about environmental issues, they're more concerned with social justice issues in terms of how pollution and other things affect where they live.

RH: Right, where they live.

SS: In terms of the NIMBY dynamic because they are in the back yard of a lot of industry.

RH: Right.

SS: Which is different than, like you said, the white or upper-middle class, the conservation/environmentalist elite, who have a much more preservation-oriented urban perspective.

RH: Right. No, I think they're changing. It will come. It will come slowly. I'm not exactly sure what that means, given that with forest management we have an industry here which has sized itself to operate off of private timber lands. Mostly, this is a region of large contiguous blocks of well-managed private timber land. And then the U.S. South. Places that depend on, like the Rockies, where we'd like to sell more timber, but it's natural stands, a lot of bug kill, that's really difficult.

SS: Economically difficult.

RH: Economically difficult. So, you won't be able to do the restoration forestry 02:56:00that the silviculturalists would like to see. Remember, the timber sale contract is still the only legal way, unless it's a stewardship contract, that we can sell timber.

SS: Because it's the people's property.

RH: It's the people's property. We're required by law to make fair market value. And since I work on timber appraisal stuff, I can tell you that somebody's going to sue us pretty soon over whether we're getting fair market value or not. It would be an easy way to stop timber sales.

SS: So, what do you think is going to happen? In your view, if the spotted owl and the Dwyer decision, FEMAT, and the Northwest Forest Plan, had never happened, and let's say they'd slogged along with the Forest Management Act of '76 and whatever they did with that, where do you think we'd be today, if that had just been allowed to play out without all this other high-profile, dramatic stuff?

RH: Well, the national forest harvest would probably be twice what it is currently.

SS: You think we'd be up close to what the level might have been --?

RH: No. It dropped ninety percent. You know, it would have dropped to, say, fifty percent.

SS: Okay.

RH: That was imbedded in the plan, the standards and guides.

SS: So, there was expectations that it was going to decrease anyway?

RH: Right, that was George Leonard's big decision. The spotted owl got blamed for a lot of stuff.

SS: Well, it's an easy target.

RH: It was. And yeah, with a lot of legal justification. But the forest planners were going to drop harvest on the west side, regardless.

SS: So, what did you learn about doing your work on the east side that relates to what we're just talking about right now, on the west side? I mean, you kind of led into that, but maybe a little more elaboration.

RH: Well, on the east side there were a couple important lessons. First off, 02:58:00there was no species as compelling as the spotted owl.

SS: In other words, charismatic, etc., etc.

RH: Yeah, there are wolves, there's grizzlies, there's sockeye salmon. There are lots of them, but often, they're uniquely located. It's also an area the size of France. It's huge. And with very few people in it.

SS: The east, you're talking about?

RH: Yeah, the east side. You know, the whole state of Oregon, the whole of eastern Oregon doesn't have enough people to be a congressional district. Walden has to represent some folks over on the west side, too.

SS: Yeah, I know.

RH: But, the State of Washington, on the other hand, has-there's as many people 02:59:00in Spokane as in all of eastern Oregon.

SS: By far, many more.

RH: Yeah, eastern Washington actually has some people in it, but not many.

SS: And you've even got the Tri-Cities down there in the south, too.

RH: Yeah, you've got the Tri-Cities. [Kennewick, Richland, Pasco]

SS: Also Wenatchee and Yakima and all that.

RH: So it's [Oregon] a much more rural area. It's also an area where you can see the American frontier re-emerging. The American frontier, as defined as six people or fewer per square mile. That's from the 1890 Census.

SS: The old Frederick Jackson term, the famous "frontier thesis."

RH: We see areas where the frontier is returning, where you have issues of capacity and resilience and as well as those about developing community leadership there, and what role do public lands play in that. The questions were much more fascinating, and people there were willing to try to add things up to very broad measures. We had goals of trying to maintain ecological integrity, or 03:00:00trying to maintain social and economic resiliency. I learned that biophysical scientists liked the concept of integrity, and in their world view, a system has integrity when it's in its steady-state equilibrium. If a system gets disturbed, let's say, you have a very broad fire, you've disturbed that, so the question is, how fast does that return back to this steady-state world? This really comes from the aquatic literature. There is a guy named [James] Karr, who defined aquatic integrity. On the east side, we actually tried to have objectives for ecosystem management, different than the west side. The west side, remember; FEMAT is a connected habitat conservation strategy for two species, salmon and owls. On the east side, we actually tried to do ecosystem management with 03:01:00objectives and a framework that laid this out. Surprisingly, that was insisted on by Jack Thomas, who I think understood the shortages on the short-falling on the west side on FEMAT because he couldn't communicate what it was. But people said, "Well, this looks like ecosystem management." Everybody picked up on that. But on the east side, he said, "Be deliberate. Have a framework that lays out your objectives and how you achieve it." So, on the east side, it was designed to deal with how you manage the lands to achieve ecological integrity, or to improve ecological integrity and social and economic resiliency. It had two dual goals, a biophysical and a social and economic goal.

SS: I think one of the key differences is that economics and the culture of "big 03:02:00forests" were much more intense than you would find on the east side. You had a lot more space to develop something like that on the east side. Do you get my point about that political and cultural space?

RH: Well, there are only a couple places timber plays a big role. You have a forest over there where you have a huge grazing program. You have long-standing minerals there. Most people perceive the forests are also at the headwaters of their streams. People live down in the valleys. Wildlife was important, both for viewing and for hunting. It wasn't that it was balanced, it was just more balanced. It wasn't dominated by the timber. You still had big timber producers. You've got Potlatch [Lumber Co.] sitting there in La Grande. Up in northern Idaho there's a cluster of manufacturing. Missoula [Montana] has a lot of manufacturing.

SS: Is there a Hines mill that is still operating on the eastern side?

RH: Not any more.

SS: Not anymore, I didn't think so. The Burns one's [mill] gone, right?

RH: Right. Hines had some kind of special contract they operated till the end of the contract, and then, they disappeared early in one of the recessions.

SS: In Klamath Falls, there's not too much going on down there, anyway.

RH: They're still milling there.

SS: Yeah, there's some milling.

RH: You still have a sawmill, and there's still one in Madras or Prineville. I also think John Day still has a mill -- used to have four or five.

SS: Doesn't Warm Springs [Indian Reservation] have one?

RH: It just closed. They closed, gave up. Their problem had more to do with management, I think. They gambled they could put in a waste fuel boiler to generate power. In short, they put in a very sophisticated boiler and thought they were going to gather wood waste, say, from Portland or anywhere, take it and generate power, but it didn't work. You can't put out that kind of smoke. You run into air quality issues. They got stopped. But the east side, it came to 03:04:00an end when the Clinton administration left, and Bush came in and said we're not going to do that type of planning, broadscale planning. And we all got a paper weight and went home.

Not many people were involved in the Timber Wars as long as I was. A lot of them came only for FEMAT.

SS: Right.

RH: And it changed their world because it made them see their science. For some of them, it was the first time they felt important. I know that's the case for the social scientists, since I managed them. It was the first time they'd gotten 03:05:00to the table in a significant way.

SS: Validation is important, although sometimes you can make too much of it in terms of your sense of self-importance, is what I'm saying.

RH: Yeah.

SS: I'm not saying anything about any person or anything. I think that you're talking about a social dynamic that's kind of human nature, shall we say.

RH: Yeah. It was human nature. Some people milked it, took the money and didn't deliver. A lot of our scientists did that. They sort of like got their mouths on the tits first, like a bunch of piglets. And they sucked it dry without really doing much, just doing more of the same stuff.

SS: Now, regarding the monitoring, first, I want you to talk in general about the monitoring efforts since 1995, but also specifically, about variations you 03:06:00have seen within the traditional economies that have been impacted by this. What are the ones that have succeeded, and what are the ones that have just withered away and died, or just really struggled? Regarding the monitoring program as a whole, what's your opinion of how it's been designed and implemented, but also economically, if you want to maybe use a couple examples, variations within the matrix of economies reliant on federal timber lands. What were the ones that have adapted, what are the ones that haven't, what mitigation measures have been tried? If you want to just kind of talk about that cluster of things I just threw your way.

RH: Okay. Are we on the record?

SS: Yes. We're on.

RH: Okay. Well, I was responsible for the economic monitoring and became 03:07:00responsible for the social side, too. The community monitoring.

SS: All right.

RH: One of the first things we did is that we got into a disagreement about the number of communities. People wanted you to monitor and worry about their favorite communities. Everybody wants to worry about Coos Bay. So, we put together an effort to try to identify the number of communities. It turns out there were about 1,200 communities in the owl region. And you have to ask yourself, which ones do you worry about? Which ones are the least resilient, the least able to handle change? That caused us to have a disagreement with the state. The State of Oregon wants you to worry about distressed communities. They 03:08:00do that on counties, looking at counties with high unemployment or something. But we're dealing with counties that might traditionally have higher unemployment, because of seasonal work. People work in the summers and in the winter they ranch. So, on the basis of employment statistics, it looks like high unemployment. You have a ski area where people work in the winter, and in the summer, they just screw around. So, you had to understand that. But the states wanted us to deal with distressed areas using their traditional measures. And we said that's not the way you measure community resiliency. You measure it in some other way and then you try to assess it.

SS: How would you define community resiliency as a concept?

RH: There are different definitions of it. I was responsible for an early 03:09:00definition that dealt with wanting a measure of economic diversity, because you're trying to address the economic well-being part of community resilience.

SS: The same principle that goes behind when you say you need to have a balanced financial portfolio? RH: Yes.

SS: Yeah, right.

RH: You're looking at measures of civic leadership. I think that was about it, the multiple measures of each of those types of things. I forget, there's maybe another term or category. And you'd try to assess these for all 1,200 communities. That's what we tried to argue. And we did. We did an assessment. We had a way to engage the sort of community status to that. It meant that we were in constant sort of disagreement with like the states, who wanted us to worry about distressed areas. One time I almost had a second asshole chewed into me by 03:10:00the community leaders of Coos Bay because I told them I wasn't going to worry about Coos Bay because it was too big. You have over 10,000 people, you've got community leadership, you've got a resilient community.

SS: You have diversity.

RH: Yeah, you've got economic [diversity].

SS: And it's a very old community. [1850s]

RH: Right. Just because you don't like what you've got, doesn't mean that you're a low resilient community. You're actually a high resilient community. That you're here today arguing with me suggests that. And it didn't go over big.

SS: I can see that.

RH: Instead, you need to worry about the Long Creeks; you have the Mount Vernons in eastern Oregon. They were places that--

SS: Where is Long Creek?

RH: It's north of John Day. It's in the next valley over.

SS: So it's really up in the sticks up there.

RH: But it had a sawmill.

SS: Yeah, I know where it is. Is it in Gilliam [County]?

RH: It's in Grant County [Central-north part of eastern Oregon].

SS: Grant.

RH: It's on the Grant and Umatilla. [Boundary area between counties.]

SS: Umatilla.

RH: I think it's on the Grant County side.

SS: Right. But in those places there isn't a lot of options because there isn't diversity to start with. And if you lose the single leg, well, guess what?

RH: Guess what? Those are places you might have to "fight fires" differently. You don't have a local response. You start to think about how you manage lands. Maybe those are areas that we ought to look at some special contracting provision that limits [local participation]. One of the big revelations in restoration forestry is you're offering stuff to the lowest bidder, not offering stuff to a targeted group unless you--

SS: Or the best bidder?

RH: Or the best bidder.

SS: In other words, that low-bid rule sometimes gets us in a lot of trouble.

RH: Right, because originally, they thought that in part, economic mitigation is what will substitute restoration. It would be the local loggers going to get the 03:12:00contracts [restoration]. Well, no, it's going to be some person who's figured out how to do stuff, maybe from western Washington, who is going to truck the logs somewhere else, unless you design it such. How can you stretch the contracting rules so you can serve local needs and don't get the contracting officer and the line officer in trouble? So, those were all sorts of lessons. Also then, there's the monitoring scale [question] of what scale do you monitor at?

SS: And what is it that you are realistically capable of monitoring?

RH: You can't monitor at the community level without doing survey work, and social science survey work is just as expensive as anybody else's survey work.

SS: And let me tell you that is right as a person, who, I'm not even in the social sciences because historians are considered "tweeners."

RH: Tweeners, yeah.

SS: We're between humanities and social sciences, and sciences, and we get even 03:13:00less funding and interest than the social sciences do.

RH: Yeah. It cost me just as much to keep a crew in the field for a week, and people didn't want to pay for that. To them, they wanted the information, but it demonstrated there was no value in the information if they weren't willing to pay for it. Instead, they'd go out and survey for some three-legged newt or something. So, we did monitoring using secondary data. We did get the states to provide us county-level data and which turned out to be perfectly adequate for much of the monitoring. It turned out we had done economic monitoring for years at higher scales, we just had to adjust the scales down because that had been part of the work we had done.

SS: If you were going to characterize the last twenty years in a two or 03:14:00three-paragraph sound bite, how would you do that?

RH: In regards to what?

SS: The economics, the monitoring data, the resilience thing, if you were going to give me a sound bite. Perhaps it's unfair to call it a sound bite.

RH: What we discovered was that most people lived in economically-resilient communities. But area-wise, it was a different story. There were vast areas that had communities that were not resilient. You could think of them as brittle, not adaptable to change. What I'm saying is that there are many places that are rural communities that are very small service centers. Look at where Les Schwab has tire dealerships as an indicator, where are there regional service centers.

SS: Right. Critical masses in various areas.

RH: The reason why that's important is if you're going to have local fire crews, if you're going to have, say, people who own equipment, how many construction crews can you have, if you want to build a road somewhere or close a road, where is that [tire service] going to come from? So, that's what we learned. I think that was a huge breakthrough; to move the timber-dependent community's discussion to about communities of high social resiliency, and what are their characteristics relative to communities of low resiliency. We should target actions such that we either mitigate in those lower resilience communities or that we don't impact them, because they're being impacted already.

SS: Those would be the communities that you see in the news about the 03:16:00"backwater" [forgotten] America, the opioid epidemic, the despair?

RH: Yeah, but we're also--

SS: Or is that, yeah?

RH: There's some of that here. But at the same time, some communities that are being overwhelmed are being changed by the in-migration of retirees. Think of Medford and Central Point. If you have enough money, live in Los Angeles, have enough money, and you want to retire north, you're going to go to Ashland.

SS: Right.

RH: But Ashland's pretty picky about who they let in. So, if you're an ordinary Joe, you're going to go to Medford, Central Point, or Grants Pass. Think of how those areas are growing. And all of those, not Ashland, but the others, were all timber-dependent communities in the 1977 definition. They're something else today. And we see the same thing happening on the east side where you have what's called "ranchette-ing." People retire early, and if they have good health, they want to live the dream. Get forty acres, put a double-wide on it 03:17:00and a horse barn, and live the dream. That's ranchette-ing. Well, if you're in Walla Walla, you'll get a vineyard.

SS: But basically, what you're saying is, it's the same thing that happens in New York City. You're seeing the gentrification of rural America.

RH: Yes.

SS: In a dispersed, multi-faceted kind of way.

RH: And that's happening here. The Walla Walla area is one. Think of Bend, the Bend-Redmond area.

SS: Especially Bend, yeah.

RH: Sisters, the triangle, gentrified, ranchette-ed. It is a gentrification. You can predict where that's going to happen. It's got to have an airport. It would be really great if the airport had jet service; Horizon can only do so much. Walla Walla's got an airport, the Tri Cities have an airport. Actually, there's airports all over eastern Washington. Eastern Oregon's another story. Pendleton and Klamath and Redmond are the three airports.

SS: Bend doesn't have an airport?

RH: No.

SS: Just a small little regional one?

RH: No. You fly into Redmond.

SS: Really? Being in Eugene, I've never flown to Bend, so I did not know. RH: They might have their own private aviation airport.

SS: Yeah, right.

RH: But commercial aviation flies into Redmond. And in the summer, Alaska is smart enough to have a direct flight from San Francisco to Redmond.

SS: I did not know that.

RH: Well, if you look at how immigration and migration works, the airports play a big role. They're all old military airports. The Pendleton airport is where the B-25 Mitchells [WWII medium bomber] practiced takeoffs and landing because there's a drop-off at the end of the runway.

SS: Oh, so.

RH: Walla Walla's an old B-17 base. Huge, huge runway. The airport just uses a 03:19:00little corner. It's a huge triangular-shaped thing. And Madras, or Redmond, is an old military airport that is also a Forest Service fire base.

SS: I want to go back and ask --

RH: I want to go back and add a comment about the east side and the Interior Columbia Basin Project. One of the things that this project made the scientists do, is it made them measure things. Until then, we could just argue that this is better, that this watershed is better than that watershed. But when we got to the Interior Columbia Basin Project, we had to develop measures. At first, there were scientists that were utterly resistant to that. But then a fellow named Danny Lee came and worked with them, and he helped them understand that it's not 03:20:00an absolute measure, it's just an ordinal measure. You ranked things from best to your worst, and the top third are your really good guys, the middle third are your average, and the bottom third, is below average. That would be sufficient. And that was a revelation to them. After that, they were able to rank all their watersheds. I think they had 163 watersheds, so they ranked all their watersheds and assessed them on their ecological integrity. The best ones, the top third, had good ecological integrity. I think that was a real breakthrough. It showed it was possible to do that. So, it was one of the accomplishments.

Now, in the Interior Columbia Basin Project, we started to suffer the same accusations being made against FEMAT about it being ad-hoc science.

SS: And also, a closed-door, non-open session. Because in session, that's what FEMAT was for a period of time, it was a cloister of scientists, with the public 03:21:00not looking in.

RH: Right. And the Interior Columbia Basin Project was an open process.

SS: Okay. But it still got the criticism?

RH: It still got criticism. But at first, people could wander in anytime. And then it became like a "science week." One week a month, we would have meetings with the public, sort of like show-and-tell with the public. There was an agenda and various people would come. One time we organized a debate between different proponents of what's called the second income theory, about how public lands are generating and attracting people who come and bring economic activity with them. We had several proponents and opponents to come to speak, and we'd have a couple hundred people show up. It was an open process, but still, the science community, we were being criticized because it appeared to be doing "ad-hoc science."

So, what we did is we got an agreement with Forest Ecology and Management, a 03:22:00well-respected journal, for a special issue, and we put together a special issue to highlight all of our science. We had the scientists write 10-12 articles explaining the science, and there were a couple articles that were difficult to get through the review process. We had to have independent reviewers. But it did reassure everyone that we were doing good science, at least science that would stand the scrutiny of its peers. And FEMAT never did that. They did it in bits and pieces, but never as a whole. Okay, that's what I wanted to add.

[End of Part 1]

[Start of Part 2]

SS: That's very good. Now, what do you think is the most important reason for having created and implemented the Northwest Forest Plan? I mean, what are the most important lessons learned from that, both successes and failures? And what 03:23:00have we learned from this process regarding proactive management as well as the human limitations on managing nature? And you've got to throw a little code up at the barred owl in there, too. (Laughs) It's a human limitations thing.

RH: Well, I guess, the process for changing land management objectives for public lands, especially national forest lands, is not a smooth process. It's not set by the agency itself. The agency contributed to the first couple sets of objectives, but in this particular case, it was society-at-large. You could argue that it was done in a clumsy fashion using the Endangered Species Act, but the Endangered Species Act was decided on as a societal goal. This is an 03:24:00implementation of that goal. It changed our land management objectives without really having that debate. At the time it was not avoidable. You could see it coming, from the mid-'80s through to the Dwyer injunction. You could see, sort of like Tetris [game/process of arranging shapes in various orders to achieve some goal], like the blocks kept falling more and more and more.

SS: There was a critical mass and you knew there was going to be a climax, and something was going to happen?

RH: Yes, you could see it coming. If you didn't see it coming, it was because you weren't paying attention. But, I saw it coming. I think the lesson I learned from it had to do with what we talked about before, that we essentially developed a plan, or FEMAT developed a plan, that was not implementable. It did 03:25:00not take into account the incentives that land managers see. They just see a bunch of standards and guides, and that's what they're going to follow. If you think about it, that's why they're selected. These are people who can follow a process, implement process, they're people motivated to follow a process.

SS: They're not innovators?

RH: They're not selected for that.

SS: They're administrators. They're followers.

RH: People who can work process.

SS: Right.

RH: Yeah. I think if they call them administrators, you know, it belittles them because some of these people are very good. They see a problem, they understand how you get there, and they can manage a diverse group of people towards that.

SS: But they were hamstrung by certain things?

RH: Yeah. They're extremely risk averse. We didn't understand that because in the science community we have screwy attitudes about risk.

SS: And I think you already partly answered this, but do you think that the 03:26:00Northwest Forest Plan process was kind of a one-shot deal? In other words, it's not something that you can transfer to another biome or another region or even another country?

RH: It's not transferable.

SS: You talked about Sweden, for instance, that's why I'm saying it.

RH: It's not transferable. It's a strange situation of where you have public lands, and somebody in Pittsburgh has as much right to say what happens on the Willamette National Forest as somebody in Sweet Home, and there's just a lot more people in Pittsburgh.

SS: Right, exactly.

RH: That was another hard lesson I had to explain to folks.

SS: Repeat that again a little, or clarify that point a little more?

RH: Somebody in Pittsburgh has as much right to what happens on the Willamette as somebody in Sweet Home. I was giving a talk in Sweet Home one day.

SS: I be they didn't like that very much, did they?

RH: No, they didn't. And there's a lot more people in Pittsburgh.

SS: I know, that is one thing people [some rural constituencies] have a hard time with. In all the years I've done research and journalism in the West, no 03:27:00matter how hard you try to talk to them about federal lands, as the people's lands, the model of the U.S., the good parts [aspects] of federal lands, etc., they often don't see it that way when they live there.

RH: No.

SS: They see it as some "big brother" thing in the distance that's messing with their freedom. And you could make an argument that said, in Europe when the kings owned everything, you guys couldn't do anything. You'd be these little serfs, feudal serfs over here, and you couldn't do a darned thing. And there are these problems here. I understand a frustration with bureaucracy, but it's best to pull back and look at this thing like this [objective overview]. However, it's hard to convince them of that.

RH: It is. When I do large fire cost reviews, the successful forest supervisors 03:28:00are those who could instill a good neighbor policy. Who can talk about how I'm fighting a fire on this side, because we want to be good neighbors here, but I'm not going to fight the fire over there because that's shifting resources from higher risk things. They're able to communicate that. When I talk about people who can follow a process, that's part of that. It's being able to communicate their strategies. But they're not going to be risk-takers. Not going to be innovators. We asked too much, but I think we were naïve.

SS: Okay, we're back on now. RH: There wasn't a big cadre of economists, there was a small group of us. And a couple people like Darius Adams, they were 03:29:00willing to do the analysis, but they didn't want to participate in the bickering stuff. They didn't see the sense of that. And there were a couple academics that were just the opposite, but discredited themselves early on. So, people wouldn't listen to them anymore. It left very few of us. And Brian Grieber, who did serve, he got disillusioned very quickly, and after a few threats, he left OSU. He got both disillusioned and he thought the Dean [OSU-COF] had compromised him, and he left and went to work for Weyerhaeuser.

SS: Was this back in the '90s?

RH: Yeah, Weyerhaeuser offered me a job. I turned it down and Brian took it.

SS: Was that when [Carl] Stoltenberg was the dean?

RH: Yeah, Stoltenberg was still the dean. It was towards the end of his days. Then, after the FEMAT summit and after he and I worked together on the FEMAT, 03:30:00there was some ruckus, Brian got disillusioned, and Weyerhaeuser's pay looked really good.

SS: Having thirty-two years with the Forest Service in the Northwest, how would you describe the Forest Service culture here when you started, and how did that change until you retired? If you wanted to just kind of say, this is what I saw.

RH: Well, I have insights that you won't find elsewhere. I did the last survey of the forest supervisors. The forest supervisors have a series of surveys of them. They have funny names like "Air Bird" and "Snow Bird," and I forget what ours was called. The thing that surprised me about the change, when I came, it was a male organization dominated by timber people, many of them military veterans. These were people I recognized and you could relate to well.

SS: Well, you had a military background.

RH: Yeah.

SS: And you went to a school [N.C. State] that was very regimented.

RH: Right, I recognized them. And you know, you could live with that. But the thing that surprised me, as we all started at the same time trying to diversify our work forces, different both in discipline and gender in the early 1980's, the National Forest System was far more successful. They moved women and they moved minorities, they moved nontraditional foresters into line officer positions where we never did before. They were successful. And the people they were hiring were highly-motivated. It's not that the motivation changed or the adherence to Forest Services values changed, they were just different. They brought a different approach to the table. And even in my thirty-two years, I 03:32:00had a program that went from mostly male to where the women were in administrative positions.

SS: They were the secretaries and the assistants [previously.]

RH: To where two-thirds of my scientists were women. So, I had to learn how to behave differently. They communicated differently, they chatted more. I couldn't grunt three times at them and they'd run off and do something. I'd have to explain first, have to ask how they were, you'd explain why this was important, what they could achieve with the outcomes. They asked different questions. They worked just as hard as men. They'd stomp through the mud just like men. I didn't notice any differences about that. They lifted boards just as heavy. We did utilization studies, social science field work, and economics. I had a hard time getting women to be economists. A couple of them complained, that it was very 03:33:00isolating. They wanted to work with people, not numbers. Claire was an exception.

SS: Montgomery?

RH: Yeah. She was an exception even in the early days.

SS: She's still there - is she retired from OSU now?

RH: She's supposed to retire the end of this month.

SS: Oh, okay.

RH: I'll have to send her a note. I tried to hire her one time. But those are the changes I've noticed. That it's not the sort of monolithic forestry organization that it was when I first came, and I think that's for its betterment. On the fire reviews, I've watched some female forest supervisors really explain quite well to why they did things they did with the neighboring communities because they're sensitive to that. They worked ahead of time, rather than letting it be a crisis. And the old fire dogs seem to respect them for it. 03:34:00The fire community's still mostly male.

SS: Still today.

RH: Yeah, but the fire management officers work for a forest supervisor.

SS: So, we've definitely got more gender-integrated in the Forest Service, but how about the management and the objectives and the philosophy? I mean, do you see disjointedness, disunity, or do you just see a new paradigm being more dominant than it was 35-40 years ago?

RH: I see the Forest Service more adrift than ever over what are their management objectives. I'm working on a study trying to come up with a new starting point for timber appraisals across the whole country. When I talk to folks in the West, they're struggling with this as a restoration strategy. But 03:35:00it's a timber sale, how do I make this timber sale achieve the objectives that are being set for it. I see people struggling more than they need to. And then the line officers pressuring them, well, we've got to sell this. It doesn't make any difference, how you value it, just get it so it sells because that's part of a broader strategy. And in cases like that, somebody's going to sue us over the fair market value question.

SS: Like you said earlier.

RH: It's just, it's lurking in the wings. And so, I don't see the--

SS: Where would that come from? Who would be the interest group or that would be the most likely candidate for being the litigant?

RH: Well, the industry [forest] could be one, because they say, "Look, you guys are giving junky stuff away. You ought to put together a real timber sale that could be sold and get fair market value for it, because we'll bid on it." Whereas, the environmentalists are just trying to stop any activity at all. You 03:36:00know, there's a group out there that says, "Well, let nature take its course. Just don't let it burn down my house."

SS: Yes, I know the mentality, but yeah.

RH: And the conservation community, there is a large constituency who thinks that the best restoration strategy is hands-off. I also managed the [PNW] Station's restoration work for a little while.

SS: Right.

RH: And restoration's all a question about either fixing damage or speeding up natural processes.

SS: Right.

RH: Those are the two questions you ask. Hands-off is a restoration strategy only if it achieves the outcome you want.

SS: Have you ever read Richard White's Organic Machine?

RH: No.

SS: It's about the Columbia River. The one thing he thinks that 03:37:00conservation/environmentalists miss, or their foundation is skewed, is they almost always view humans working in nature as an automatic pollutant.

RH: That may be true.

SS: And I agree with them on that standpoint.

RH: Yeah, it's sort of strange because, when I first started, we were still guided by a lot of utilization principles, you know, the greatest value for the greatest number.

SS: Kind of a technocratic utilitarianism, right?

RH: Yes.

SS: Right.

RH: I saw those objectives changed. In some cases, the multiple-use, the first planning efforts, I thought, were well-intended. Maybe we needed to look at a mix of things. As we did that more and more, it came to show that the greatest 03:38:00values from public lands were really the non-consumptive. If you look at a market basket of stuff, the greatest values are recreation and water. We're the biggest provider of dispersed recreation opportunities. Timber and the traditional extractive ones are less valuable. But people looked at that and said, in some kind of sense of worth; that means they're not important. You should have more of this and less of that, but we're not communicating that right. Somehow, you have to think more about compatible uses. Recreationists are using roads built with timber dollars. You don't get to that campground over there here in the back of some national forest without driving on a road built 03:39:00with timber dollars.

SS: A lot of the infrastructure was built on the back of timber receipts.

RH: Right, on timber receipts.

SS: And/or infrastructure created for the timber.

RH: And the maintenance of those roads is still being paid for with timber receipts because we put up a timber sale, and we put a chunk of money in there for road maintenance.

SS: Right.

RH: So, how do you better communicate these mutual uses? And I don't know. I don't have a simple answer. I just see that as sort of a pending question that we still struggle with.

SS: That's why we have jobs. (Laughs) But an interesting kind of just sidebar here as we wrap up is, like I told you off the record, my wife is a forester and a resource manager from Peru. And the arguments that we have here over what we can do, what we can't do, clearcutting, they don't do that down there. Nature is 03:40:00do much more demanding in the Amazon and the Andes, when you're talking 15,000-16,000-foot passes dropping 15,000 feet into the Amazon swamp. I'm just talking about the geography here, the relative elevations and challenges of creating infrastructure in a more developed economy, but also geographic limitations. And it's something that's unique to the United States and North America, I think, at least in this particular latitudinal swath. [Temperate zone, resource-rich, etc.]

RH: Yeah, we have an interesting forest sector. The only other country in the world that has anything quite like us is Finland, in terms of property rights. Their forest is mostly privately-owned like ours. Private landowners sell timber 03:41:00to support their forest industry. Sweden and Norway have a mix of, still have common property, where villages own property and private property.

SS: Canada?

RH: Canada is all public land.

SS: That's what I thought.

RH: It's Crown land [legacy term-British Empire/Commonwealth/meaning here -"public land"] managed by the provinces. There's a little bit of private land in the east, and depending on how the native land settlements go, there may be private land-like stuff in the west, but it's "Crown" land, or public land. There are only four or five countries that are significant softwood countries. Much of the world works off of hardwoods. Us, Canada, Japan, Russia, the Nordic countries, and Austria, are the major softwood-producing countries in the world. The rest of it is hardwood.

SS: We don't have a lot in Central Europe because there's so many people there, and the forests are rather limited and small?

RH: They were mostly cleared and they replanted. What they did replant, they replanted with Norway spruce in the 1800's, and that's a brittle wood. It 03:42:00suffered badly from acid rain. They planted a lot of beech and oak because they needed firewood and they needed furniture wood. Only two countries, U.S. and Finland, manage their softwood sort of alike, or have property rights similar, where you can compare them. They both have market-based systems. The U.S. differs because twenty percent of the forest land is still publicly-owned. Actually, twenty-nine percent, twenty percent federal, and nine percent state.

SS: Which is an outgrowth of the continental expanse coupled to how the settlement process happened in the 19th century, as well as how territory and statehood status was assigned.

RH: Right.

SS: It was a unique dynamic to American history.

RH: Right, and then you have public lands in the East which were abused lands bought back up during the Depression, or abandoned coal mines. For example, the Jefferson National Forest [Virginia] is old coal mining, lands owned by a coal-mining company.

SS: There's been a lot more rehabilitation in the East in a lot of respects.

RH: It is especially so in the very southern national forests, like Mississippi. They bought highly-eroded croplands. I mean, stuff that you see in these pictures, you know.

SS: Ravines and arroyos?

RH: Right, and they replanted them. They used the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] to replant them, and those are all highly-productive forests now.

SS: Very good. So, anything else you want to add as a capstone here? I'll leave that up to you, any story that you have?

RH: Let me just add one thing about personal rewards. I don't know whether you're looking for that.

SS: This is your interview, Richard, so you say what you want to say.

RH: Let me, I'll say this about personal rewards. People often argued and didn't 03:44:00want to get involved in these policy-type studies, because they felt that it would diminish their personal rewards because we lived in publish or languish society. The [PNW] station had a peer review-process that was rigorous and really stressed the impact of science accomplishments. And it had a lot of our scientists reluctant to participate in public policy debates, or science that would be used in public policy debates. I was evidence that that was not the case. I went from being a GS-12, the same thing everybody's hired at, new Ph.D. scientists, and I was a GS-15 in 10 years. I zipped right through what most people took 30 years to do. And that was on the back of applied work. First, I 03:45:00solved the problem that people had posed about the spatial equilibrium of relating markets or changes in the West. You could see how they rippled across the country. Darius and I solved that in a highly-solvable fashion. And that enabled me to deal with some of the early stuff, forest policy stuff, including the early owl runs. And I benefited by that. I had published as much as anybody else published. My old major professor told me if you get two articles in Forest Science, your reputation's assured. And within the first couple of years, I had achieved that. So, I was evidence that scientists' concern about participating in these debates was detrimental to your career, was misplaced. And sure, I had to go up on Capitol Hill and testify, and I had lawyers lecture me on ethics. 03:46:00But in the end--

SS: The "Ivory Tower" is safe for some people.

RH: Yeah, it is.

SS: I understand why they like it, but I understand your point completely.

RH: Yeah, but FEMAT offered some people the opportunity to suddenly see their science in a new context.

SS: As having applied relevance on a high-profile level.

RH: Yes, and they were then able to finish the sentence, "This work is important because..." This work is important because it allowed us to establish effective standards and guides for riparian management. And the evidence here, you know, an individual can write a reference and say, yes, it did. So, the Gordie Reeves, the Gordies-Gordon Grant, there are those folks, it gave them the opportunity to see their science, and it helped them professionally, to grow professionally.

SS: Right.

RH: There were also people that it didn't help because, though they participated in the same things, they didn't publish their science. They went back to doing what they had done before.

SS: The safe corner of whatever they were in doing their work, right?

RH: Yeah, they went back. That's where they were comfortable, and they didn't want to do the extra work. You had to live by the sweat of your tongue. You had to be able to stand on your feet and explain why these are the standards, what led you to these standards and guides? Why are they good? You had to be able to, in an evidence-based way, argue why they are. And remember, the rules of evidence say, you have a piece of evidence and you also know its weight. You might think of a murder trial, you know, if somebody's holding a smoking gun that's of the same caliber, that's a lot of weight. But if somebody's standing 03:48:00there and there's a smoking gun on the floor over there somewhere, that has a different weight. Same smoking gun, but a different weight. So, you have to start thinking about your science and the rules of evidence.

Some people got this and some people didn't. I eventually became a super scientist, or whatever they call it, largely on the weight of just thinking of the bigger scales. I did write the framework for the Interior Columbia Basin Project, arguing that you've got to have goals. And if you're going to have objectives, they have to be measurable. Getting scientists to measure their stuff is tough. But we did. Folks, people came in and helped them. And we were able to in the end, look at the three alternatives and rank them one relative to the other. And to me, that's a huge accomplishment. You can place them in a two-dimensional space and you can say, you know, Alternative A is better than B 03:49:00in this way. It moves you further up on ecological integrity [scale], or it moves you up without impacting social and economic resilience. That's the political tradeoff.

So, I think that's important, as you talk to these folks, you need to think about [how] it challenged some scientists and some scientists rose to it. You know, certainly Jack Thomas. He described his science as being a mile wide and an inch thick, when you had a serious discussion with Jack. But he saw the connections. He was able to see the connections. And we called it "dancing beyond your fingertips." You know, when you made judgments, you didn't want to get too far beyond the fingertips of your knowledge. And you're waving your arms enough already. So, how do you do that? You make judgments based on the evidence you understand and your assessment of the weight, and you communicate that.

SS: On that note, I think that's a really great finish. Thank you.

RH: Okay. Now, traffic-wise...