Preremembering Jerry Franklin and Norm Johnson, Oregon Conservationists
Figure 1. Jerry (left) and Norm (right), both wearing fedoras in a mature forest stand on BLM holdings in Douglas County, Oregon. Source: Francis Eatherington.
The old forests of the Pacific Northwest are in far better condition today than they would be if not for Professors Jerry F. (for Forest!) Franklin and K. Norman Johnson. “Norm and Jerry,” as they are affectionately (or, depending upon your point of view, derisively) known, have had a greater positive impact on federal forest policy in the Pacific Northwest than any other individuals.
The long partnership of these two old-growth humans (with an average age between them measured in the ninth decade) has influenced field foresters, federal forest bureaucrats, members of Congress, US senators, cabinet secretaries, at least one president—and conservationists. Fortunately for us and forests everywhere, both are still kicking (and still kicking ass, at that!).
However, they won’t be with us forever, and thus this preremembrance. It’s my policy to produce Public Lands Blog posts aperiodically on Oregon conservationists who greatly moved the Oregon conservation needle in their day. Previously, I have “preremembered” the former Oregon secretary of state, Norma Paulus; former Oregon governor Barbara Roberts; former US senator Bob Packwood; former US representative Jim Weaver; and legendary public lands conservationist Brock Evans. While Norm and Jerry have never held public office, they have had a greater impact on public forest policy than most who have held office. The only politician I can think of who has had more impact is Senator Mark O. Hatfield, but most of that impact was quite negative.
Jerry Franklin
Born in Waldport, Oregon, in 1936, Jerry moved with his family to Camas, Washington, when he was four years old. After getting his forest management bachelors and masters (the latter also in statistics) from Oregon State University, he received his doctorate in botany and soils from Washington State University in 1966.
I worshiped Jerry before I met him. My introduction came in the form of Natural Vegetation of Oregon and Washington, which Jerry coauthored. I first crossed paths with Jerry in Corvallis when I was in the process of dropping out of Oregon State University. He was even then a legend.
Figure 2. Natural Vegetation of Oregon and Washington was first published by the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experimental Station in 1973. An updated version was published by Oregon State University Press in 1988. “Natural Veggie” is still a classic in the field. Source: Oregon State University Press.
I wrote about my first encounter with Jerry in a chapter I authored in Old Growth in a New World: A Pacific Northwest Icon Reexamined (edited by Thomas Spies and Sally Duncan, Island Press, 2009):
In the late1970s, I attended a meeting with Forest Service research scientists on the Oregon coast, where I ended up in the bar at the Inn at Otter Crest. On my left was Dr. Jerry Franklin, even then the preeminent authority on Pacific Northwest forests. On my right was Dr. Jack Ward Thomas, even then the preeminent authority on Rocky Mountain elk.
Both had had more than one regional forester who tried to get them fired for their science. Fortunately, they were in the Forest Service’s research branch, and those who wanted them fired were on the agency’s National Forest System side. They went on to become the two most powerful scientists in public forest policy, figuratively being carried to greatness by the talons of the northern spotted owl.
The presence of alcohol and the passage of time have caused me to forget most of the bar talk. However, I remember Jerry being pessimistic about the timber juggernaut’s ever being reined in. At the time, two square miles of Oregon old-growth forest was clearcut each week. When Dr. Old-growth was so down, I could but quietly cry in my beer. I was doing so, when Dr. Wildlife loudly weighed in with optimism that things could and would change. Awed by both, I said nothing. Jerry, ever the skeptical and inquiring scientist, asked Jack why he thought things would change. Jack boomed out (concurrently punching my right shoulder with enough force that I had to use my left arm to counterbalance), “Because sons-of-bitches like him are going to cause trouble.”
Who was I to argue with science?
Jack’s bravado and Jerry’s modesty ended up pairing very well on behalf of westside forests, eastside forests, northern spotted owls, and other icons. Jerry kept on researching and publishing on old-growth forests. Again from my chapter in Old Growth in a New World:
Actually, at the time there wasn’t much published science with which to support sons-of‐bitches’ arguments, but that barrier was soon to be breached by a strategic leak. A few years before it was published in 1981, a Forest Service research branch draft report was leaked to the Oregon Natural Resources Council (ONRC) [now Oregon Wild]. Conservationists feared that political pressures from Big Timber would prevent publication of the report, Ecological Characteristics of Old-Growth Douglas-Fir Forests (Franklin et al., 1981). As a result, enough draft copies of the report were passed hand-to‐hand that it became a classic even before publication.
This fifty-two-page booklet energized the emerging debate over old forests. On the one-page summary of sixteen points, the eight authors exploded the major truths surrounding Old-growth forests. They are not biological deserts. Dead trees—both standing and downed—are ecologically critical. Productivity is very high. Structure and function are very complex. Natural stream function depends upon old trees.
As is often the case when the emperor is wearing no clothes, speaking up has powerful political repercussions.
Figure 3. The research report that was the scientific basis for the Pacific Northwest Forest Wars. (While Jerry Franklin was lead author, the other seven authors must not be forgotten. Thank you Kermit Cromack, Bill Denison, Art McKee, Chris Maser, Jim Sedell, Fred Swanson, and Glen Juday!) Source: Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station.
Jerry and I have not always agreed over the decades (and still don’t). As a scientist, Jerry is most concerned—as he should be—about making type I errors (scientists saying that something is true when it is false). As an advocate, I’m most concerned—as I should be—about type II errors (policy makers believing that something is false when it is true).
Norm Johnson
Born in 1942 in Berkeley, California, Norm received a BS in forest management (UC Berkeley), an MS in forest economics (UW Madison), and a PhD in forest management from Oregon State University. Johnson arrived at OSU as an assistant forestry professor the same year I arrived as an undergrad who loved forests as much as I hated forestry.
I loathed Norm long before I met him. He coauthored both the original and updated versions of the infamous “Beuter Report,” named after the lead author who was also Norm’s thesis advisor. As Randal O’Toole, an OSU forestry graduate, put it:
In January, 1976, John Beuter’s report, Timber for Oregon’s Tomorrow, was published by Oregon State University. The report showed that private timber landowners had cut nearly all of their old growth, and most of their second growth was not yet mature enough to harvest. The result would be a decline in Oregon harvest and jobs—unless the Forest Service and BLM were willing to “depart” from the non-declining flow policy and temporarily increase harvests until private forests matured.
The Board of Forestry clearly intended to use this report to pressure the Forest Service and BLM to give up on the non-declining flow policy.
The Beuter Report was a call to arms and contributed to my not returning that autumn of 1976 to OSU.
Figure 4. The infamous “Beuter Report” that radicalized many more than just myself. Source: Oregon State University.
This K. Norman Johnson guy developed (with others) “FORPLAN,” a forest planning linear program model that the Forest Service used as a timber scheduling model to liquidate old-growth forests. The model valued nontimber resources and values not for themselves but only as a constraint upon timber production. The Forest Service used FORPLAN as both a shield and a cudgel to jack up logging to historically obscene levels (at the peak in 1988, three square miles of old-growth forest on Oregon federal public lands were being clear-cut each week).
I hated FORPLAN and anyone who had anything to do with it. It would have helped if FORPLAN had been called TIMPLAN, as it wasn’t about forests but rather all about timber. At that point in his life, Norm was more a by-the-book timber scheduler than the thoughtful forest policy advisor and forest economist, forest sociologist, and forest whisperer he would become. Some years later, and again some decades later, Norm invited this OSU dropout to come lecture to his classes.
The Pacific Northwest Timber Wars
While both Jerry and Norm have had very distinguished academic careers, we focus here on how they’ve influenced and are continuing to influence public forest policy.
As conflicts began to arise in the mid-1970s over the amount and kinds of logging allowed on federal public lands, Congress responded by enacting into law the National Forest Management Act of 1976 (NFMA). NFMA in essence was a law requiring agency planning. The Forest Service convinced Congress that conflicts among the various statutory multiple uses (effectively timber versus watershed, wildlife, and recreation) could be resolved by more and better national forest planning. Of course, the Forest Service would need more money from Congress to do the planning, which it received.
The massive onslaught of national forest planning in the 1980s did not resolve conflicts but instead amplified them.
The upside of all this planning—conducted under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—was that the Forest Service and the BLM were forced to publicly disclose their old-growth-forest liquidation plans. While NEPA does not require protection of the environment, it does require federal agencies to admit to the environmental damage they’re doing. Under NEPA, the Forest Service and the BLM could liquidate all the old growth as long as they disclosed it.
As the northern spotted owl required old-growth forests to survive, the disclosure of old-growth-forest liquidation revealed such liquidation to be on a trajectory toward the eventual extinction of the northern spotted owl. Such is a violation of the National Forest Management Act (and the Endangered Species Act).
The Pacific Northwest Forest Wars were on: litigation, demonstrations, occupations, remonstrations, recriminations, legislation, lamentations, and much, much more.
The forest war was not just about the law but also about public values. The Pacific Northwest was diversifying away from its timber economy. Public attitudes were changing, and the region’s federal elected officials were feeling the heat from all sides.
In the beginning of the war, the problem for PNW elected officials was that if they didn’t continue to kowtow to Big Timber, they feared they would lose reelection. Later in the war, the problem for elected officials was if they didn’t recognize the changing politics of their voters who were increasingly concerned about old forests, they would lose reelection.
For the longest time—in fact, arguably to this day—the Pacific Northwest public forest management issue was/is an unsolvable political problem. In desperation, whether to get a court injunction or an endangered species listing, both elected and appointed policy makers reached for science, often with the hope that science would produce a political fat-free hot fudge sundae—something both very much desired and impossible. After all, such a dessert was what the Forest Service had promised Congress and the public in 1976.
When congressional committees commissioned what became known as the “Gang of Four Report,” Norm and Jerry were two of the gang.
When President Clinton wanted science to guide what became known as the Northwest Forest Plan, Norm and Jerry were key team members of the Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team.
After his Forest Conference in Portland in April 1993, President Clinton promised what would become the Northwest Forest Plan. When Clinton demanded a “scientifically sound, ecologically credible and legally defensible” way out of the Northwest Forest Wars, he turned to Norm and Jerry (and others).
Norm, Jerry, and their team (a rather large team, as the money flowed freely to produce a plan in record time and on time) came up with eight options for consideration. None of them cut enough timber for the Clinton administration. Clinton demanded that Norm and Jerry (and others) come up with another option, and hence the creation of “Option 9,” which became the Northwest Forest Plan. Big Timber claims to this day that it promised 1 billion board feet annually (down from the obscene high of 5 billion board feet), but it actually did not.
When Congressman Peter DeFazio and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar tried to figure out how to log BLM lands without wiping out all public values (aka “ecological forestry”), they turned to Norm and Jerry.
When Senator Ron Wyden tried to legislatively resolve the controversy pertaining to logging on BLM holdings in western Oregon, he called on Norm and Jerry.
In the end, all the legislation failed, in general because Big Timber and its puppet the Addicted Counties (addicted to clear-cutting forests to generate federal timber receipts to fill potholes and educate children) refused to compromise. (I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank both Big Timber and Addicted Counties for being so continuously obstinate.)
The Textbook
Along the way, Norm and Jerry and Debora L. Johnson (quite the forest analyst herself, who happens to be married to Norm) coauthored Ecological Forest Management (Waveland Press, 2018). I reviewed the book in an earlier Public Lands Blog post. From the opening of my review:
The authors of Ecological Forest Management have thrown down the gauntlet. The battle between traditional production forestry (PF) and ecological forest management (EFM) for the hearts and minds of forestry students everywhere, for the profession of forestry itself, and for the acceptance of the public has been joined. EFM offers a constructive alternative to landowners, foresters, forestry students, and the public suffering disillusionment with the agronomic simplification and reductionism of PF.
Ecological Forest Management deconstructs—nay, pantses—PF by both critique and example. It exposes the limits—ecological, social, and (somewhat) economic—of PF. “We decided to adopt ecological concepts as the foundation of our forest management text, upon which we would build economic and social considerations,” say the authors. Of course, this is very rational, but it’s also quite radical in the profession of forestry.
The book reflects the radical evolution happening in forestry, a profession that is part science, part art, and part craft.
Figure 5. The new instant-classic forestry textbook, Ecological Forest Management, advocates ecological forest management rather than traditional production forestry. Source: Waveland Press.
“Norm and Jerry” Rock On
It’s never “Jerry and Norm,” perhaps because it doesn’t rhyme with “Tom and Jerry,” either a couple of Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters or a Christmastime cocktail. In recent decades, many have thought of them as “Normandjerry,” two people often speaking as one, with each learning from and challenging the other.
Both Norm and Jerry are still running on all cylinders, and forests everywhere should be glad for it.
In 2019 Norm and Jerry told the State Land Board that turning the Elliott State Forest into an Oregon State University College of Forestry research forest is a good idea—but don’t be logging any natural forest, they advised.
Last year, Norm and Jerry wrote an open letter to the Forest Service about the agency’s proposal to change the so-called “eastside screens” that generally protect old-growth trees from being logged. Norm and Jerry are okay on changing the screens, but the Forest Service doesn’t agree with their recommendations.
Currently, the proposed Flat Country Timber Sale south of Clear Lake and west of the Mount Washington Wilderness in the McKenzie River watershed of Willamette National Forest (Figure 6) has drawn their opposition. This is a straight-up old-fashioned Forest Service timber sale that makes no pretense about logging being for restoration or what-have-you. It’s all about the board feet. The sale is in “Matrix” per the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP). Matrix was envisioned as the logging free-fire zone outside of the late-successional and riparian reserves. The NWFP is a quarter century old. In the past two and a half decades, scientific understanding of the importance of mature (not just old-growth!) forests to carbon storage and sequestration and the conservation of biodiversity, along with the problematic barred owl, the problems with post-fire logging, the problems of fire exclusion, and other problems has resulted in the NWFP becoming out of date.
Figure 6. Jerry and Norm doing field work in the proposed Flat Country Timber Sale area. Besides Norm and Jerry (and Debbie), being on the case, so are some lawyers.. Source: Debora L. Johnson.
Resting on their laurels Norm and Jerry are not. They are finishing up a book on the Northwest Forest Plan, with a very working tile of The Northwest Forest Plan: A History (Oregon State University Press). (The third author on the book is Gordon Reeves, an OSU salmonid ecologist who was one of two key aquatic scientists similarly engaged in the Pacific Northwest Forest Wars.)
Jerry has moved back to Oregon from Seattle and is working on a memoir.
The coming years will see Norm and Jerry continuing to move public forest policy more toward the public interest for the benefit of this and future generations. Stay tuned.
Thanks, Jerry! Thanks, Norm!