REBEL WITH A CAUSE: Andy Stahl has plenty to say about the impending Bush administration.

Q&A
ANDY STAHL: FOREST SERVICE REBEL
A veteran of tree politics doesn't see much green coming from the latest Bush

BY PATTY WENTZ
pwentz@wweek.com

When the five Supremes appointed George W. Bush to the presidency two weeks ago, it wasn't just Al Gore who had to begin looking for a new job. Bush has begun the process of naming a new cabinet, and eventually he'll pick someone new to run the Department of Agriculture, resulting in an inevitable shakeup in the U.S. Forest Service.

Andy Stahl has seen his share of administration changes and has a pretty good guess as to what Bush means for the forest. Stahl worked for the U.S. Forest Service for two years, then went on to
be both a timber lobbyist and an environmentalist. According to Kathie Durbin's book Tree Huggers, Stahl was one of the catalysts who put the spotted owl in the national headlines in the forest wars of the 1990s.

Today, Stahl is executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, which has 500 current and past employees of the Forest Service as members. The group was born of the frustration of Forest Service employees who saw rhetoric and industry interest winning out over science and the public interest.

WW talked to Stahl about the new regime we can expect in the Northwest regional office. He doesn't paint a very green picture.

Willamette Week: What now for the Forest Service? It's overseen by the Department of Agriculture, and obviously Secretary Dan Glickman is out. But what about lower? What happens to Mike Dombeck, who was appointed chief of the Forest Service in 1997? He's been a public advocate of changing the role of the Forest Service to one of stewardship, not product management.

Andy Stahl: Easy answer. Dombeck will be replaced. It's pretty clear the housecleaning going down the ranks. Another example: Jim Furnish, deputy chief for national forest service. He was the point person for the chief on the roadless-area environmental impact statement. He's a lightning rod to the timber industry, and he's out.

So who are we going to get for Forest Service chief?

There are both internal candidates and external. But I think the next chief will be someone who has no experience with the forest service. I suspect it will be someone with a business background, but not with a timber background. That's too obvious. But that person probably won't last long. The government is capable of chewing up and spitting out those people.

What about locally? Will Harv Forsgren, who heads our region and runs the show in the Mount Hood National Forest, be replaced?

I would think Harv is fairly high
up on the ax list because he's a fisheries biologist and a personal friend of Dombeck. You can divide the regional-forester crop in two halves. All fish biologists and those who got there by being good bureaucrats. Forsgren was an outspoken supporter of Clinton's roadless plan, which the industry hates, and they don't like biologists, either. Forsgren even wrote an op-ed piece for the [Eugene] Register-Guard in favor of it. He didn't have to do it. None of the other regional heads did. I think he's out.

Given that the bosses are getting thrown out, are the Forest Service workers freaking out?

It's split down the middle, like the rest of the country. The younger people, the women, the "-ologists" (hydrologists, fish biologists, etc.) are saying, "Oh, shit." The older white men, the forest engineers, are saying "Hallelujah, we can turn the clock back."

What will that look like? Clearcuts? Landslides? Carnage?

I'm anticipating a return to "active management of the forest." That's the phrase they like to use. That the solution to all forest ills is "log it." It will be, though, more subtle. They've learned a lot in the last eight years. It will be gussied
up and put in a nice shiny public-
relations image as controlling fires, stopping insect and disease epidemics, that sort of thing, but it will amount to the same sort of thing down on the ground.

What will happen with Clinton's roadless plan? Will Bush try to overturn it?

No, it's going to be sneakier than that, and there are two avenues that will be attempted. One, which has already been announced by Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, will be a review of the roadless rules--along with a whole lot of other Clinton rules--under the Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Act, which gives the Congress 60 days to review a rule and give thumbs-down on it. Then if the president signs the thumbs-down, which this president will be inclined to, the rule is dead. The other option, if the split Congress doesn't have the guts to do that, is more subtle. That's to arrange for some plaintiff, some citizen out there, to bring a lawsuit against the roadless plan.

On what grounds?

It doesn't matter, because you
settle the case behind closed doors, and the settlement is that you rescind the rule as part of the settlement, and you get a court to sign it. The really sneaky way is to file the lawsuit in Idaho and have it heard by a judge who has already shown his disposition to think the rule is bad--and there is one--and make sure the Justice Department doesn't defend it very enthusiastically. The Justice Department can say, "Your Honor, we have some questions about this plan as well."

Let's talk about Eagle then. Glickman has called for an independent scientific review of the sale. With him gone, what happens?

The sale gets logged.

When?

Whenever the guy who bought it gets the financing to log it. The guy who bought it sold his mill after the Asian market tanked, so he aligned himself with the environmentalists. However, the Forest Service is not going to cancel the sale. He's going to have to fulfill his contract.

What will happen with the independent scientific review that Glickman called for?

I don't think it will even happen.

Will they say, "That was a dumb idea under the prior administration, and we don't have to do it"?

Right. They'll say, "This is a good sale, it's the thinning of second-growth forest, it passed all legal reviews (of course, there were none allowed because it was a
salvage-rider sale). There is an environmental impact statement for it. We're going to log it."