ROGERS, Robert FS 19 - 06-02-06 04 Original U.S ... · GLENN GOTTSCHALL: This is an interview for the Region Five oral history program for [sic] of Bob Rogers. This is June the second,

ROGERS, Robert FS 19 - 06-02-06 04__Original

U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service

Region Five History Project Interview with: Robert (“Bob”) Rogers Interviewed by: Glenn Gottschall Location: ? Date: June 2, 2006 Transcribed by: Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft; July 2006

[Begin CD 1.]

[Transcriber’s note: The recording is slightly hissy.]

GLENN GOTTSCHALL: This is an interview for the Region Five oral history program for

[sic] of Bob Rogers. This is June the second, and whenever you’re ready to go, Bob—why don’t

we get a little bit of background on you and your career and your family.

ROBERT ROGERS: To start at the beginning, I was born in Kansas in 1934. I moved to

California when I was six years old, so I was here in 1940 at the beginning of the war in 1941.

Grew up—started in L.A. but ended up in Bakersfield, where I spent most of my youth. At about

the time I was getting out of high school, I really thought strongly about a forestry career, but in

those days, 1940s, early 1950s forestry just simply wasn’t paying, but what was coming up on

the horizon was a cold war and the technology and everything that went with that, so I chose an

engineering career instead.

So I went through college, was married the second year of college, then went on to

UCLA, got a degree in engineering, and ended up in electronics primarily and bounced around

there for a little while. Ended up in Visalia. That would have been in about 1960. What I found

out when I was in Visalia—I was there for about five years, working for a small technology

Robert (“Bob”) Rogers, 06/02/06, page 2

firm—[was] that I was spending all my weekends, all my holidays, every minute I could get

away, practically, from work up in the mountains, Sequoia National Forest, Mountain Home

State Forest, all that area that was accessible to Visalia.

And finally in 1965 I took a hard look at my life that I’ve always wanted to go into

forestry. I’m spending pretty much all my time that I have available to me in the forest, so why

don’t I reexamine my career? And then I did. Ended up going to Cal for my forestry degree.

Came out of Cal in ’68 and went to work then for the Sequoia National Forest, practically in my

back yard, where I came from, in timber management.

So that was how I got into the Forest Service in the first place. I wasn’t really sold on the

Forest Service or a government career. I did look around at different opportunities, Park Service

as well as the production end of private industry. It just turned out the Forest Service had the

jobs and had the locations, and everything fit well, so that’s where I went.

Let’s see. Went through about five years doing the usual things that a forester does,

anything from marking timber to trail maintenance to sale administration and fighting fires, of

course. We all did that in those days.

From there, as a junior forester, I guess is what they would call it in those days, I went on

to a timber management officer on the Stanislaus [National] Forest, again doing pretty much the

standard things that TMOs did. And from there, then, went on to a silviculturist position at

Foresthill on the Tahoe [National] Forest. That was the transition. I was the second class of

certified silviculturist. It was just starting up in those days. Some of the training actually was

presented right down there at the Five Mile Camp, which is just outside of Columbia, close to

where I was working [unintelligible] at that time. So it kind of all gelled, and that appealed to

me, the technical and the forestry.


Never really wanted to go into administrative. Everybody used to ask me, “Why don’t

you want to be a ranger?” [Laughs.] Or, “What is the matter with you for not wanting to be a

ranger?” Well, in my engineering experience, I’d had administrative experience, and I didn’t

really enjoy dealing with budgets and supervising that many people and that kind of thing. I

loved engineering when I was doing engineering work but loved it less when I was doing

administrative work, so I stayed clear of administration in the Forest Service as much as I could.

Just my own personal aptitude.

Went from Foresthill back down to the Sequoia, where I actually started, there as the

forest silviculturist and again did pretty much what forest silviculturists do. Responsible for tree

growth primarily, which we’ll probably be talking about some more later. But I ended up

there—we did something unusual. We had the Giant sequoia groves there on the Sequoia Forest,

more of them than the national parks, actually, and more area, even, than the national parks, but

they were pretty neglected. I’d always had that on my mind since I was there the first time in the

sixties. The Forest Service really ought to be doing something in groves. The Park Service, at

the time I was there in the sixties, had begun their prescribed burning program for the benefit of

groves primarily at that time.

Well, anyway, when I got there in ’82, got back in ’82, the forest had actually started to

take some minor steps in growth management. They did that by doing a modest amount of

timber cutting. It was on the [unintelligible] District. I was all for that. I thought, Well, man,

it’s about time the Forest Service actually started thinking about the groves rather than ignoring

them or stepping around them, is actually what they were doing in those days.

Unfortunately, when the first few steps toward grove management, which involved

timber cutting, went basically without notice, then it almost all of a sudden exploded. That was


also the days of supply side economics, where there were huge amounts of pressure on getting

not only timber out but timber cheap and high-quality timber. The groves were about the only

place that hadn’t been cut that was even reasonably accessible on the Sequoia Forest, so there

were pretty much a headlong rush into the groves at that time. Within the space of about three

years, if I remember correctly, there was something like a thousand acres of groves that had been

cut and about another thousand or so planned.

Well, once the public figured out what was going on, literally all hell broke loose, and so

I ended up being the Giant sequoia specialist, primarily to thin off or—I shouldn’t say “thin off.”

What I mean is respond to public concerns about grove management issues. That was 1993. So

I was in that job for actually six years. At that time, then, the Sierra Nevada framework for plan

amendments was under way at that moment, and I applied for the job as silviculturist on the

framework, and that’s where I ended my career, in Sacramento.

Along the way, my first wife, who married me and stuck by me all the time, going

through engineering, going through school, coming back into forestry and that, had passed away,

and so I lost a wonderful helpmate there, but continued on with my life, remarried and so on. So

that’s about my personal story.

GOTTSCHALL: Bob, just for the time period prior to 1982, give me some sense of when you

first got started in the Forest Service, up to ’92. I don’t we got those dates.

ROGERS: Okay. Well, let’s see, my first job was 1968, [unintelligible] District, and was on

that district for five years—well, about five years, anyway—just doing the typical beginning

forestry jobs. Probably considerably more variety in that work than there was currently. We

rebuilt a garage and made an office out of it during the winter months [laughs] and things like


that. Didn’t quite have the burden of NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act, 1969]

paperwork and that that always kept you busy in the winter months nowadays.

So anyway, then from there I went to the Stanislaus. That would have been 1972 through

’77, another five years, roughly, as timber management officer. Then from ’77 to ’82, another

five years, at Foresthill as the district silviculturist.

GOTTSCHALL: Okay. Does that answer the question?

ROGERS: Yes, yes, that does.

GOTTSCHALL: Why don’t we go ahead and move on if you’re ready to get into some of the

specifics of the timber management program. We’ll start with the first question, [which] is:

During your career, how or why did working in timber help or hurt you or others, or

opportunities for advancement?

ROGERS: In my case, I saw timber management as nothing but helping me in my career. At

that time, early in the career, at least up until about 1980, say, there were good jobs in timber;

there was always demand for people who wanted to work hard and do the work, and so timber

was the place to be for advancement, [in] my assessment. There was [sic; were] a lot of other

things I would have liked to have done. I loved wildlife. I loved all the resource areas in the

Forest Service. But I didn’t really go after range management or anything else like that, because

timber is where the jobs were. I don’t have any qualms about saying that timber management is

what helped me advance in my career.

GOTTSCHALL: Okay. The next question is dealing with the importance of timber, timber

targets specifically. Could you recall how important it was for your Forest Service

administrating unit to meet those timber harvest targets?


ROGERS: Well, yes. At least starting out, the first five years on the Sequoia National Forest—

the name [Walter] “Walt” [Kirschner?] may have come up previously, and it’s going to come up

again. I see he’s on our interview list. Walt was a timber management officer on the Sequoia

Forest. He was really proud of the fact that we’d always met our timber goal, and so getting the

cut out, which was the terminology that was often used, was extremely important for those five

years.

Now, I felt like in my job that we were doing the right thing. I thoroughly believe that

the growth was at least equal to the harvest that we were doing, and I saw the need for a lot of

the remedial work. We were just at that time starting to break over from the custodial treatment

of the forest stands to the managed future stands. By custodial treatment, I mean a lot of salvage

and hazard tree and just cleaning up the forest in general, moving from that status to one of

looking toward the future in the second and third and fourth generation of timber crops. So that

was the first five years. Very important. I remember as a timber market, the first thing my boss

said, the TMO when we came in from work, [was] “How many trees did you mark?” [Laughs.]

GOTTSCHALL: I remember that.

ROGERS: It was sort of a challenge to see who could really do the best job, the fastest job and

everything else like that, so that’s the way it went the first five years.

The next five years of my career, I moved from—on the Sequoia, I should point out, in

those days I felt like I was on the frontier, truly. And the district I was on was fairly isolated.

We just did what we thought we needed to do, and that was about it. I remember the five-year

planning process, which is pretty agonizing nowadays. We just sat down [unintelligible] and

said, “Well, where haven’t we been?” [Laughs.] You look at a map and see where there isn’t


[sic; aren’t] any roads that was outside of wilderness, and we said, “Well, okay, let’s take a look

at this area.” That’s the way it was.

After my assignment on the Sequoia, then I went up to the Stanislaus, and that was a

different situation. I was at Pinecrest, a pretty busy area for all sorts of reasons but primarily

tourists. There’s [sic; There are] a lot of summer homes on private land as well as lots and lots

of Forest Service permit summer homes, so we were n the middle of a social scene there as well

as a forest scene. Got an introduction to public criticism right off the bat. Highway 108 went

right through the middle of our district, and probably spent as much time hassling with the ranger

and Caltrans over clearing for Highway 108 right away as anything else, because it was really

important how it looked. The ranger at that time was far more interested in my opinion of how

the forest looked. He was more concerned about that than what it produced. Salvage timber,

dead trees were—we didn’t want those visible. Hazardous trees—because of the number of

summer cabins and that kind of thing on forested land, we were very concerned about hazard

trees [unintelligible] removal and helping the residents to do that, through timber sales. So a lot

of effort was put into cutting timber for other than just simply getting the [unintelligible] out.

The Summit District never produced a whole lot of timber. I think our allowable cut was

only like 20 million [board feet], which is the entire forest now. [Laughs.] But that was kind of

small potatoes in the total mix of about 100 million or there [sic; thereabouts]. So I would say

the pressure on getting the cut out was less at that time than I had felt on the Sequoia, but

nevertheless the program was still really important, and we certainly did a lot of work preparing

timber sales.

Let’s see, from there then—that would have been up until ’77. In ’77, went up to the

Tahoe Forest, on the Foresthill District, and kind of went back in time a little bit. It was a more


remote district, but because of large fires in the past and also just the general course of things, the

easy tractor ground had been pretty well cut out, not devastated, but there really wasn’t much

commercial timber left for ordinary sales as I had known them previously.

That, at the same time, was ushering in the age of cable logging and some helicopter, but

primarily cable was the big thing. It became more difficult to produce timber, just plain more

difficult because the terrain and the economics—of course, the economics were getting to be

really a major, important part, so we were scrambling to put out timber. The timber targets, I

would say, still remained very important but were much harder to achieve. It seemed like you

just had to—you did the best you could. I don’t remember anybody being fired for not meeting

the timber target, but as I recall, we didn’t always meet it, and there was [sic; were] not any

particular repercussions from that.

Then after that—[Chuckles.] I think this gets it some other areas, but when I went back

down to the Sequoia then, there was huge emphasis again—again because of the supply-side

economic concept that started up about that time—there was huge pressure to put up timber

sales, but without being cynical, I have to say that the pressure was on putting up the sales, not

selling timber. We had one district that didn’t actually sell a sale for, I don’t know, two or three

years, but yet they put up timber for sale every year. [Chuckles.] And so the actual getting

timber to the mill was less important than it had been when I first started my career on the

Sequoia. That was for sure. We were still turning the crank, but if nothing came out, it didn’t

seem to matter quite as much as it had in the past.

But it’s a long answer to—

GOTTSCHALL: One other aspect of that, Bob: Were you comfortable with the levels of the

targets that were set?


ROGERS: Well, let me put it this way: Yes and no. Yes, because I knew that we were growing

as much timber as we were cutting. I never had a doubt in my mind about that. No, in that the

timber we were growing was a different kind of timber than we were cutting. We were cutting

old growth, at least in the earlier days, and pretty much through my career, even. We were

cutting old growth, and we were replacing it with young trees, little trees. By the early eighties,

a little bit before the early eighties, I realized that a lot of the public uproar about timber cutting

had to do not so much with the quantity, although that’s what we kept talking about; it was the

quality, and the quality of the timber stands that were left behind. So I was uncomfortable with

the fact that we weren’t really up front or maybe “not up front” is the word [sic; maybe “up

front” is not the phrase. ?]. We weren’t really training the public on where we were going with

our timber management concepts. The concepts were sound in terms of timber production.

They were not sound in regard to the other [amenity? community?] values that are attached to

timber management.

GOTTSCHALL: I see. Okay. What major changes did you experience in timber harvest

[unintelligible] units, silviculture prescriptions or harvest levels or budgets or high-risk—you

know, the standard cut or the UAC [unit area control]—

ROGERS: Ah.

GOTTSCHALL: [unintelligible] you did mention that. Or fire salvage or reforestation

following fires. What major changes did you experience?

ROGERS: That’s a lot of ground to cover. You mentioned one thing I’ll just start with, and that

is fire salvage. That’s kind of interesting, because early in my career, [if] you had a fire, you

salvaged timber, period. That’s all there was too it. I remember it was—oh, golly, it would have

been in the late eighties, when I was back down on the Sequoia Forest, the first time I ever saw a


fire that we didn’t salvage was one that was way out in the Piute Mountains, and there was very

little timber to begin with, and we looked at that thing. Of course, one faction said, “Well, we

had a fire. Let’s go get it.” But then when you looked at the cost of building a road and the

resource dislocation that would have been involved in the road, itself, let alone entering an area

that had been heretofore roadless and all that, and then you look at the value of the timber that

was coming out, it didn’t make any damn sense. So that was the first time in my life, with my

career at that point, which was twenty years into a career, where the Forest Service actually says,

“Geez, it just doesn’t look like it’s worthwhile doing.”

Well, that was a subtle shift. But now, then, of course, you know, from the Biscuit Fire

currently all the way on back and several on the Stanislaus that it seems like any timber cutting,

whether it’s salvage or not, whether it’s for good reason or not, is a challenge, and so that’s

something that we’re living with today that’s totally foreign to me almost all my career.

Let’s see, other kinds of changes. I mentioned earlier, when I first got into my job in the

Forest Service, it was pretty much clean up the trees that are likely to die in ten years. That was

a very big part—I didn’t actually get into the unit area control method. I’m not sure anybody

ever did really implement it. I’m not sure anybody totally understood it. But we did mark

timber by units, but I don’t think that was exactly the unit area control concept, and the units that

we marked were you looked at the total amount of risk trees that are in the stand, risk for

mortality within ten years typically, and if—now, I don’t remember the numbers, but if a certain

percentage of the timber was going to be dead or likely to be dead in a few years, a predictable

time, then you just cut everything. It was a transition between purely just cleanup, get the worst

of the bad trees out—from that concept to, well, we’ve got to start over sometime, and this would


have been the time to start doing that. So we ended up doing a fair amount of clear-cutting in

those days. That would have been in the late sixties, mid seventies [unintelligible].

Then following that, the series of new timber plants, so called, that started in the

seventies—I was on the Stanislaus then, in the seventies, and that was a time where [sic; when]

some pretty sophisticated technology was getting involved. That was the beginning of the

computer age. It was before [unintelligible] plan, but it was—we had the [unintelligible] in those

days or [unintelligible] now. That was the beginning of the concept of, well—let’s see, the

terminology that was running around at that time—“allowable cut effect.” If you really looked at

your growth in the future, then that would allow you to do certain things in the present.

Primarily look at more timber was the way it was used.

But those were the days when we got to be looking at, oh, the Weyerhaeuser high-yield

concept, where you really got to start looking at timber as a crop, unabashedly timber [as] an

agricultural crop, so that’s when things shifted into pretty high gear in terms of the clear-cutting.

Just start over. And the time was of the essence. You couldn’t wait around for twenty, thirty

years for a seed crop to happen and all that. Better off, in most cases, to just clear cut and start

over. Especially with the tree improvement program that was going on, get the good genetic

stock in there and not depend upon Mother Nature so much.

So there was a definite shift from “clean up the forest” to “get it into full production,” and

that all happened over a period of, oh, gee, ten, fifteen years, something like that. It was pretty

rapid when you look at change, pretty rapid. Then, of course, the worm turned with

Monongahela. [Laughs.] And so pretty soon, then, we were back thinking more strongly about

alternatives to clear-cutting as we were as clear-cutting as being the answer.


Let’s see. I don’t know, I probably rambled a little bit there. Was there some other point

that—

GOTTSCHALL: No, I believe you covered that quite well. You didn’t mention Monongahela,

and that kind of relates to the next segment here, and that’s timber program changes. Which

laws or other Forest Service policy changes or court orders caused the greatest change to the

Forest Service timber program during your career, and why did you see that happening?

ROGERS: The Monongahela decision, of course, led to the National Forest Management Act in

’76, so I would say 1976 was pretty much a landmark date in forest management. The trouble

with that is that we didn’t really get the message. The kind of high-tech, high-production

agricultural approach or farming approach to timber management didn’t sink in, at least in

California. Even though the NFMA required certain justification for clear-cutting, because of

the Monongahela decision, I don’t remember ever giving it any serious thought, to tell you the

truth. I mean, I hate to say that, but in terms of following the intent of the law, I don’t think it

had a whole lot to do with what we did. The timber planning proceeded from that into the

nineties, even. This proves the point.

As a matter of fact, a little anecdote on that: The Sequoia Forest plan, although it was

supposed to be one of the last scheduled, as I remember, in that new round of planning in the

eighties, turned out to be one of the very first that was released, in one of the timbered forests, I

should say. At that time also, in the late eighties, the Sequoia National Forest was shooting itself

in the foot on the Giant sequoia groves in terms of public opinion. I had an attorney from the

Sierra Club tell me—well, okay, the forest plan was actually released on the Sequoia I think it

was 1988. Anyway, 1990, give or take a little bit. There was a forest plan or two. I think one or

two of the Southern California forests [sic; forest plans] had been released prior to ours.


But once our plan was released, we got sued immediately by the Sierra Club, among

others. The Sierra Club attorney told me that, “Well, after the Monongahela decision, we

thought clear-cutting had been put to rest, but then we saw it wasn’t, and we saw the new rounds

of planning that was [sic; were] going on; we saw what was happening there. Most of the timber

harvest was going to be coming from clear-cutting, and so we decided, a strategic decision on the

Sierra Club’s part, ‘We’re going to sue, and we’re going to sue’—well, not the first, necessarily,

but one of the first timber forests that comes out with their plan over the clear-cutting issue

because they didn’t get the message.”

The reason the Sequoia got—and then she went on to tell me, “So we had our sights set

on a timber forest, an early plan release forest plan that we were going to sue on. We didn’t

know exactly where that was going to be, but when the Giant sequoia issue came up on the

Sequoia Forest,” she says, “you guys were irresistible.” [Laughs.] “We couldn’t pass up this

chance.”

So anyway, going back to the NFMA, the Forest Service didn’t get the message or didn’t

act like it had gotten the message, and that has repercussions even today, I think.

GOTTSCHALL: Interesting.

Let’s go on with a topic relating to budgets and timber program relationships. In that

regard, to what extent did the Forest Service budget direction control the timber sale program or

vice versa, on your units during your career, and were there any significant changes in the

degrees of control?

ROGERS: Well, let’s see. Let me start with the vice versa one. Did the program, itself, control

the budget? One of the early recollections I have about budgeting—and this was before I even


dealt with budgets at all—we had what was called the old TBR, or timber budget review, T—is

that right, Glenn?

GOTTSCHALL: That sounds right.

ROGERS: TBR sounds like what I remember as being the acronym, but anyway, that was—and

this was in the late sixties or early seventies, and it was an annual thing, as I remember, where

we made up a plan—I guess it was probably a forest overall timber management budgetary

review. It came from the districts, and the districts compiled all that kind of stuff. Well,

anyway, in the old TBR, you got money for producing timber, so therefore you wanted to

produce timber, and you really wanted to produce timber in a way that produced the most money

[laughs] to run the organization.

That was a time when commercial thinning was just beginning to be considered a good

thing to do, both for the forest but also it was a good thing to do because it produced more

money to support the foresters, like me. [Laughs.] So I remember we searched and searched for

thinning sales, anything that we could call a thinning sale. [Laughs.] And I don’t remember the

rules, but you had to have a certain amount of thinning actually in there. If you had a [few down

acres?] to sweeten the pot along with the thinning, that made it really attractive, and we could get

off pretty good thinning sales if we had a few of those scattered around. So we searched for

thinning sales in order to get the money. In that case, our program sort of shaped the budget.

The other way around was more common, of course, that you just kind of sat there and

waited to see what money was going to come forth, and then with that you knew how much you

were going to put into the timber program for the year. I mean, that’s a vast oversimplification,

but let me give you an example of how I got cynical on that whole thing. Well, the short answer:

Did the budget drive the timber program? The answer is hell, yes. Absolutely. The example I


was going to give you here on the Stanislaus, again, in the seventies—a very innovative forest. I

think it started on the Shasta-Trinity [National Forest], but I could be mistaken on that.

It was a budgeting program called Advent. It was a wonderful concept. What you did is

you figured out what all of your goals were into the future years, in all resource areas, but I was

in timber at that time so I was only concerned about timber, really. Then you costed out all the

things that you had to do in order to meet those goals. So we did that. The Advent program was

supposed to convert the work programmed into the dollars needed to support the work.

That got us into perc [percolation] charting and all those kind [sic; kinds] of things—I

mean, real management technology, for a whole entire year. We knew this was coming, so for a

whole entire year, I had our district clerk keep track of everybody’s time: what they spent it on in

timber and broke it down in a good amount of detail, how many hours in appraisal work, how

many hours in timber marking, and on and on and on. And so when it came time, then, to put

our first program together, I said, “Man, this is great! You want me to do how many board feet?

Here’s what you got to do.”

We had a five-year plan, and we knew all the steps that it took to carry out those five-

year plans. We knew that you had to start in year one in order to get all of the roads or rights-of-

ways cleared or the property lines cleared, and we knew it took two or three years in there. We

knew how long it took to do an appraisal. Boy, I mean, we had it down cold. So, “Here’s our

five-year program,” and that’s approved, so we knew how many board feet in which years.

By that time, we also knew pretty much where we were going because we were pretty

advanced in our timber planning. We didn’t have our timber plan published yet, but we knew

pretty much where the timber was and the kinds of mixes that we would be putting on the market

and that for ten years out.


All right, so it comes time, then, to build our budget for the year, so I sit down and put all

these things together, add up all the numbers, put in the budget request, and when it finally came

floating by several months later, it had no semblance to what I’d put in [laughs], either in the

functional accounts or the total amount. So I asked the forest—well, there was a deputy

supervisor, [William] “Bill” [Fredicame?] at that time, and he was the one running Advent. I

said, “Bill, this doesn’t look anything at all like what I planned.” And he told me—this is almost

his exact quote—“Oh, Advent is just planning. This is execution. There’s no relation between

the two.” [Laughs.]

So at that point—well, it’s not like I quit believing in long-term planning, but I didn’t

take it quite as seriously from then on, and I just kind of waited to see what the money was going

to be, and that wasn’t too hard to figure out because it was pretty much like what you had last

year, and so you actually shaped your program around what you could expect, not what you

really needed to be doing. And the two were usually quite different.

Did that answer—I forgot what question you asked me.

GOTTSCHALL: I believe so.

Why don’t we talk about this item relating to specialist relationships, timber management

and other specialist relationships. How would you characterize the relationships between the

timber management people and other specialists on the units during your career?

ROGERS: They’re quite variable. I’ve got to say quite variable. I think that goes back a lot to

the individuals that I dealt with. It probably shouldn’t have been that way, but some individuals

saw timber as an evil force, and their job was to do whatever they could to slow that evil force

down. Others saw timber management as a vital part of the Forest Service, a legitimate part of


the Forest Service and wanted to apply their skills to doing the best job of it that could be done.

Those are kind of the extremes in the variability.

I got to really thinking about that at that time that I went into silviculture as a position.

What I felt is that by and large, be it forest supervisor or district rangers, the line didn’t quite

know what to do with specialists. Most of the line that I was dealing with had come up pretty

much through the ranks, pretty much like I was going, and then about—well, let’s see, we started

getting hydrologists in probably the seventies. Hydrology was probably one of the first –ologists

that I recall. There was always a landscape architect or two running around [laughs], people like

that.

But it seemed like the Forest Service was actually hiring specialists because it’s like

something you really ought to have but didn’t quite know what to do with. And so the reason for

the variability was that the specialists—some of them were really objective. They understood

the Forest Service pretty well, the goals and that, and were able to perform just more or less

naturally, and the other ones, that wanted to throw roadblocks, were pretty much anarchists in

concept. So that was kind of the way that worked.

I know that some of the most admired people in my career have been—well, there’s a

botanist in one case; there was a soil scientist in another case, a wildlife biologist. It covered

pretty much all of the spectrum of people who helped me in my job and wanted to complete the

Forest Service mission because they saw a bigger picture than some of them did.

GOTTSCHALL: Did you see a difference in the training support or career paths of timber

management and other specialists?

ROGERS: Yes, I think so. I can’t speak too much about what kind of training other specialists

got, but I do know that at least early in my career—well, I’d say pretty much throughout the


career, except the last few years, timber management people had wonderful opportunities in

training. Geez, I got so much training my first few years that I didn’t know what to do with it all.

And not only just in timber. For example, I remember attending one search and rescue training

that the Park Service put on. That was one of the things that my boss thought, “Well, you know,

that would be good for you to know or know how to do a little bit of rock climbing and the kind

of things you have to do. We might need that.”

And then fire, of course. We were fortunate enough to participate pretty strongly in fire

suppression in those days, and so we went to a lot of fire training stuff, along with the fire

people. Fire was the other one that had lots of training, specifically forest fire. And then that

continued with the silviculture certification and the workshops that we had. A lot of really,

really good, high-tech, useful information that was always available, and it was just a matter of

making yourself available to take advantage of it.

The other specialties—my sense is that they did not have as much opportunity as we did

as timber foresters for training in their particular fields, and it’s too bad. And it’s too bad that

maybe our timber training didn’t reach out more strongly to the other specialties. I know

working with landscape architects, for example, I was just really totally amazed at how little they

understood about how forests grow. It seemed like most, not all but most I dealt with [said],

“Oh, oh, oh, don’t change it.” Well, it’s going to change whether I do anything or not. [Laughs.]

There was one incident that I can relate. It was a landscape architect that was kind of

serious about tree growth because he wanted to be able to project a cut-over area over a few

years or some years, and he went out—this was at Foresthill. We had a lot of research going on

in that district, and we had some growth plots put in by the PSW [Pacific Southwest Research

Station] folks out of Redding, [William] “Bill” [Oliver?] and company. These were trees at that


age—I don’t know now, but it was fifteen years, twenty years, something like that they’d been in

the ground. They were different levels of thinning studies is what they were.

I remember this landscape architect guy went out there, and he had a range pull, a [big,

tall?] range pull. It might have been a sixteen-footer or twenty-foot pole or something like that,

with one-foot increments, I think it was, on it. And so he was taking pictures of all these various

trees and estimating the height or measuring the height—I don’t know how tall the trees were.

And he came in and he said, “When were those trees planted?” And I said—I don’t remember

the numbers right now, but it was, like, say, fifteen years ago. He said, “Why, they’re, like, way

over my range pull. They look like they’re thirty-feet-high or so.” And I said, “Yes, this is Site

1A.” [Laughs.] And he was just totally unfounded [sic; dumbfounded] that a tree could grow

that fast and change so rapidly over time.

But anyway, like I said, a lot of landscape architects didn’t have a feel for the fact that

what we do in the forest is pretty temporary, no matter what it is, and things will change. It

won’t always be that ugly clear-cut.

GOTTSCHALL: Okay.

[Recording interruption.]

GOTTSCHALL: We’re back on, and the next area [is] we’ll cover those areas of controversies

in and around the timber management program that you may have experienced, Bob, so I’ll let

you just go from there.

ROGERS: All right. I touched a little bit on clear-cutting earlier and how the Forest Service

kind of like missed the point in terms of public reaction, but long before 1976, I think we had the


sensitivity in the Forest Service to deal with the public reaction had we taken advantage of it

then. I’m thinking about a timber sale that I was—we’d call them PSOs in those days, but timber

sale administrator, or at least an assistant administrator on the [unintelligible] District. This was

a very large timber sale. It was something on the order of—it was well over 10 million; I think it

might have been our entire cut, somewhere around 20 million. As a matter of fact, it was old

Ten Mile Sale, and it was one that the forest was behind on its timber target for the year, so at the

last minute they pulled out all the stops; they sent crews from all the various districts and

swarmed around that sale and marked it.

That was before I got there, but about the time I got there, it was being logged. There

was an awful lot of very, very heavy marking on that sale. By that time, we’d wised up, and if it

was marked so heavy as to being [sic; heavily as to leave] virtually nothing left, then we went

ahead and made clear-cuts. I marked an awful lot of timber just cleaning up, tidying up these

real, real heavy risk-marked areas. Keeping in mind this was [sic; these were] the days when

you always met your timber target, and we were almost down to the wire and didn’t meet it yet,

there was some damn heavy marking in there. They weren’t all risk trees, believe me.

Anyway, Buck Rock Lookout looked right into this area, just above Hume Lake there,

and it was a very heavily traveled tourist attraction, and the Park Service sent people to Buck

Rock for an experience on a lookout. And it was a spectacular view in all directions. I got to

thinking about that and thinking, Man, this isn’t going to go over good when they see nothing but

bare dirt for a couple of thousand acres, or whatever it was.

So I talked it over with TMO. Larry [Cavote?] [pronounced cuh-VOH-tee] was the TMO

at that time. We decided to work with the loggers—I mean, it had to be by mutual agreement—

to mark out some trees, but mostly what it was working with them to be very, very careful about


the reproduction, whatever was left. So rather than clear off the ground like we would have

ordinarily, just bulldoze it and plant it, we worked very hard to keep these little patches of

reproduction and smaller trees where they weren’t marked.

That was, like, in 1970, thereabouts. It was before ’72, anyway. We had a silviculture

workshop where we went back and revisited that sale area. I think the general agreement was,

geez, it looked pretty good, and that was twenty years later, about. [Laughs.] About. Then, of

course, that’s what clear-cutting morphed into, probably in the nineties. There was always that

huge amount of effort to leave something to soften the site and feather the edges and everything

else like that. But had we been doing that more deliberately and advertised the fact, I think

starting in about 1970, we wouldn’t have a lot of these problems that are on the list going down

through there. All right, that’s clear-cutting.

Even-age management. Well, of course, even-age management often gets equated with

clear-cutting, but that’s not necessarily the case. It doesn’t have to be that way. What I

remember—the problem with even-age management in most people’s mind [sic; minds] where

it’s a controversy is that they’re thinking in terms of a wheat field [where] everything is nice and

uniform, in nice, even rows, and it doesn’t look like a forest anymore. Well, I don’t see a

separate issue between clear-cutting and even-age, frankly.

What I do know is that uneven-age management—in fact, there was a conference on that

sometime in—I don’t remember the date, but late seventies, I think. When you look at attempts

world wide to do true uneven-age management [laughs], it usually deteriorates into either some

form of raggety-taggety, unmanaged stands or reverse, back to even-age management in the long

run, and very little real practical experience on that across—that experimental forest in Arkansas

is [sic; was] the leader in the country at that time, and more recently Blodgett Forest [in western


Washington]. But the fact is, we didn’t really know anything but even-age, and we didn’t market

it very well.

Let’s see, reforestation backlog. I’ll just note that that was a very good effort. I was at

Foresthill at the time when most of that money was becoming available. That was actually later,

in the seventies. I think we did some pretty good work. To some extent, the impetus for getting

the backlog cleaned up was counterproductive in that, just like the old thinning sales, we did

some reforestation that was pretty easy but not necessarily really productive for the money spent,

but we accomplished targets and got congratulated for it, and got the money, so we did some of

that.

Okay, sustained yield. Probably don’t even need to talk about that. I don’t see it as a

controversy, the sustained-yield, even-flow policy, other than the fact—I’d mentioned earlier that

it required converting—at least the way we were doing it—converting from older stands to

younger stands, without much deference to the people that didn’t want that to happen.

Okay, salvage sales. Well, it’s a mess, and it’s largely because it involves timber cutting,

and that’s about the only reason I can think of it’s even controversial.

Use of herbicides. That was really big, and it still is, of course, and for good reason. I

remember—golly, one of my early jobs was to go out and spray bear clover. I don’t know if we

ever killed very much of it, but we sure sprayed a lot of it. We’d put on a garbage sack with a

hole cut for your head to stick out of [laughs], and that was the protection we had. Had those old

backpack mist blowers, 2,4,D. We were spraying a 2, 4, D, 2,4,5 [sic; 2,4,5,T] mix. Agent

Orange. That stuff went everywhere. When I think about the way we treat any chemical these

days compared to what we did in those days, it makes me shudder.


But anyway, I was involved in some programs in the early—the very first Earth Day.

Again, my memory is foggy, but around 1970 [April 22, 1970], the very first Earth Day. I and

another forester, [Kenneth] “Ken” [Slater?], actually, by name, put together a program to present

to school kids. The Earth Day, itself, was initiated, I think—that was right at the time that the

Agent Orange issue was getting to be loud, and I think probably that had a lot to do with their

launching Earth Day.

But anyway, of course, after that we had many, many, many silviculture sessions

regarding the use of herbicides and what was the latest knowledge and the safety and dah, dah,

dah, and what we knew about cancer and all that kind of stuff. It occupied a huge amount of

time. It did. Of course, many of us got qualified to apply herbicides through the state program.

Even though we were exempt, we abide by state regulations, so if you’re supervising or using

herbicides in the Forest Service, then you really should have been a qualified applicator, with a

little card and everything. That was a really big impact.

Then, of course, the alternatives to herbicides, the hand grubbing and cutting and

everything that we did to avoid the use of herbicides was, in my opinion, a shameful waste of

manpower and money. Anyway, I can get pretty cynical about all that exercise.

Okay, let’s see. Another thing on here—developing lack of trust in the Forest Service

timber harvesting by state and some local entities. That’s an interesting one. That comes, in my

opinion, directly from the lack of trust of the public, and, to a large extent, the state and other

public agencies are responding to what they hear from their constituents, which is the public.

Again, I think it’s very sad that we allowed the controversy around timber harvesting to build the

way it did and essentially ignore all of the warning signs along the line.


It got to the point where I just asked myself one day—this was probably, oh, probably

around ’94, ’95—no, I should back up and say that as a result of the Giant sequoia cutting that

we did in the middle eighties, the Sequoia National Forest, to my knowledge, received its first

timber sale appeal. That would have been probably ’85. And the appeal was over several timber

sales, but mostly it was focused on Giant sequoia groves, where we were cutting there, but there

was [sic; were] a couple of other sales that did not involve Giant sequoias.

Anyway, we got appealed, and I was the guy who had to figure out what do you do with

an appeal once you got one. [Laughs.] To my knowledge, I was the first person on the Sequoia

National Forest to have to write an appeal response. When I read over the appeal points that the

appellants had made, I had to say, Well, you know what? They got a point. Looking at it from

their perspective—and I was not embarrassed, but I had to say, Well, by golly, this is not

[unintelligible]. It’s not just hate. There was some of that, of course. “We don’t like the Forest

Service because of the way they made me put my campfire out” or something like that. There

was some of that stuff going on, but by and large, the appeal points were well thought out, and

they were valid.

Well, of course, what I had to do then was go back and look at how we did the

environmental analysis generally, was what I had to do, and try to think, well, did we know

about these things or had we thought about these things? Oftentimes I was very happy to see that

the guys that had done the environmental analysis were far more thoughtful than appeared on

paper. That made me feel good about the people that were doing the work on the ground, but the

fact that the appellants weren’t satisfied told me there was some other kind of a problem there.

And so I went back and read Gifford Pinchot’s Breaking New Ground again, because

something wasn’t jiving [sic; jibing] here. I knew that the Forest Service had a wonderful


reputation in the early days, and I could see that it was deteriorating right before my very eyes,

so I did that, and I would read a little bit, and I’d come to a place and it would say something that

I just [would say], Wow! Why, that’s exactly the problem we’ve got today. And go on and there

was, Wow!, another one of those moments of enlightenment.

I ended up highlighting, oh, I don’t know, probably a hundred or two [hundred] places in

that particular book, and earmarking—I actually made up a little index of quotable quotes from

Gifford Pinchot to say, well, if only we went back and concentrated on the fundamentals of

dealing with people, then we would not have the kind of [unintelligible] as we have, and we

certainly would have more support than we have.

So that was a big learning experience that I had, and then taking that a step further, trying

to do something with that idea, just go to the framework. When I went up on the framework—

you know, we had the major areas of noxious weeds and fire and all those things and meadows

and such, watershed concerns. I think probably one of the first things that I proposed is that we

deal with public trust as a major issue because, with the experience on the Sequoia—the way that

worked out, by the way, it became routine. We would put up a timber sale or—not put one up

but release an environmental assessment. We’d get an appeal. We would respond to the appeal.

And then we’d get sued. Just like clockwork, every time. There was [sic; were] other things that

went into that.

But anyway, I saw that we were heading toward gridlock in the timber program because

of all the effort that was being put into the appeals, lawsuits and everything else. So I thought

the framework would have been a wonderful place to actually address that issue on a higher

plane. Well, the answer I got was something like, “Oh, that’s beyond their scope.” “Saving the

Forest Service is beyond the scope? I don’t get it.”


So anyway, I still believe that if we just simply went back and try to figure out what

made the Forest Service so good in the first place, what is it we were doing then that we’re not

doing now, that the organization could actually turn around. As a matter of fact, I responded to

both the chief and the regional forester, and this would have been the mid to late nineties. They

were asking exactly that question: What are we doing that we should keep doing, and what are

we not doing that we ought to be doing? There was quite a bit of introspection going on in that

period of time, and I didn’t really see any results of it, to tell you the truth.

Anyway, that kind of goes through your list there.

GOTTSCHALL: Bob, one of the things I know would be really interesting for people to hear

also from you would be your recollection of I believe it was the [unintelligible] of the Sequoia

National Forest, the new—

ROGERS: Oh, the monument.

GOTTSCHALL: The monument.

ROGERS: Yes, the monument.

GOTTSCHALL: I believe that occurred during the first Bush [President George H.W. Bush]

administration, and you had a hand in that that you might want to recall or recollection.

ROGERS: Yes, the monument was something that spun out of control, frankly. That’s why we

had it, but it was 1993 when the forest supervisor decided that we needed a Giant sequoia

specialist. Gee whiz, it started in ’85, when we got into trouble. We stopped cutting in groves

because of that. Our timber plan was released. We got sued over that. Ended up mediating that.

A very large portion of the mediated settlement had to do with Giant sequoias. All about putting

buffers around them, how you treated the buffers, and what you did, what you didn’t do and so


on. The mediated settlement agreement was quite specific and quite restrictive, at the same time,

on what you did in Giant sequoia groves.

At about that same time, after looking at what other people were doing—see, we have

Mountain Home State Forest within the boundaries of the Sequoia Forest that had been cutting

timber in Giant sequoia groves for forty years, with little public reaction or negative reaction to

it. We also had the Park Service in the Sequoia and Kings Canyon parks that had been doing

some sort of management, prescribed fire, at least, in groves since the 1960s.

I reasoned, “Wait a minute. These two agencies are doing a lot more intensive things

than we’re doing on the logging side, and we probably ought to try to pool our resources and find

out how we can support each other and, again, get the management thing going on Giant sequoia

groves.” I was interested a lot more—well, I should say exclusively on the ecology of the Giant

sequoia groves rather than [sic; groves than] I was the production capability of the groves.

However, I saw that the production capability of the groves—that is, timber production—was

probably a major way to get the ecological work done. There just isn’t money enough to go

around to do everything that needs to be done or pay for everything that needs to be done.

You’ve got to have a revenue somewhere. Again, Gifford Pinchot was very, very astute about

that. He realized that very clearly.

During that time, we formed a Giant sequoia cooperative, we called it, which brought

together all of the various agencies that managed Giant sequoias. That includes not only

Mountain Home State Forest but also the Calaveras Fig Trees. Had a representatives from that.

University of California. The University of California owns a little piece of Redwood Mountain

Grove. They have a facility there. And the Park Service, of course. Yes, Mountain Home. So


we had a pretty good number of people that were coming together to actually start talking about

Giant sequoia management.

My whole idea at that time was [to] get some long-term research going to talk about or

see what we could do in the way of restoration, restoration being—you know, it’s kind of like a

cliché, almost: the groves are being overrun by white fir. Well, are they? [unintelligible]. And

then if they are, we don’t have much. And then, what do you do about it? There’s [sic; There

are] any number of things you can do, from prescribed fire to timber harvesting. I saw a real

opportunity for timber harvesting to actually help the groves to help themselves, because we did

quite a bit of fire analysis in some groves and found out what you might expect. Sometimes

they’re pretty well protected just naturally, but a lot of times they weren’t, and so the usual thing:

thinning and fuels reduction was important to maintain the groves.

But anyway, in terms of the controversy and the monument, early on, in the early

nineties, it was very clear to me that either the Forest Service could take charge of grove

management or we’d have somebody else take charge of it for us. I remember writing a paper to

the management team saying exactly that. My concept at that time actually—I thought it was

inevitable there would be legislation, so my pitch was, Let’s make it the kind of legislation that

we want, rather than of someone else’s choosing, knowing that if someone else got to choose the

legislation, it would be “put it in the park,” basically.

Well, we never really gathered that challenge in, and time went by, and legislation was

passed. It was passed by essentially preservation type of mentality, and there’s nothing wrong

with preservation, provided it is truly preservation. It turns out that a lot of the concepts of

preservation are pretty close to museum concepts. Since a forest is a growing thing, you have to

factor that in to what you do or don’t do with it.


Anyway, in terms of the monument, there was a proposal—oh, golly. This came from

actually the Save the Redwoods League, and if I’m not mistaken—I’m a little fuzzy on it now,

but I think there was a proposal to make it a national monument, and we talked to the Save the

Redwoods League, and working with them—they helped us to create the presidential

proclamation. They saw a need to have some national recognition of the status of Giant sequoia

groves, so that’s how the proclamation came about that George Bush, the first George Bush

presented in 1992.

Now, that was a campaign year [chuckles,], and George Sr. Bush was looking for an

environmental issue that he could identify with in a positive way, and so things kind of came

together there. Working, again, with the Save the Redwoods League, that did a good thing for us

in that it kind of headed off a legislation attempt on the SRL’s part. At the same time, I thought

it was a good thing because it gave the Giant sequoias a national status then that they hadn’t had

before, at least on the national forest.

So anyway, that’s how that came about. Then, of course, George Bush came out to

present the proclamation on the Sequoia National Forest. I was fortunate to be able to escort him

on a nature tour, a little nature trail that was created on the [Tulle?] River District at [Freeman

Grove?]. Dell [Vingelli?] was the district ranger at that time. In fact, I think it was Dell that

probably suggested that I be the one to lead the trail walk we did. That was before I was even in

the job of the Giant sequoia specialist. We didn’t have a specialist at that time.

But anyway, that’s how the little trail walk with George Bush came about, and it’s also

how the proclamation came about, which was then the beginnings of something bigger, which

turned out to be the monument issue.


GOTTSCHALL: Not many people get a chance to do that, to actually accompany the president

of the United States on a trail walk. Why don’t you give us some idea of how that happened.

ROGERS: [Laughs.] Well, that was really interesting. It was very interesting. First let me say

that—just some impressions. George Bush was just a very nice, very personable type of guy, the

kind of person that I’d be happy to have for a neighbor, on that level.

A couple of little insights: The trail went off from a parking area there in the grove, so

the president was surrounded with all sorts of security and his White House advisers, et cetera

and that kind of thing. But he asked—well, the first stop was a White House press corps, and so

my first insight to his political concerns was he asked, “What’s the first stop?” We’re starting to

walk down the trail at that time. His associate, whoever it was—I don’t remember—said, “Your

first stop is just around here, and it’s going to be the press corps.” His immediate reaction was,

“It’s not going to be Dan Rather there, is it?” [Laughter.] I might have the wrong name, but a

Dan Rather-like person; in other words, a liberal media person he didn’t really want to have

messing up his day.

GOTTSCHALL: [Laughs.]

ROGERS: And the answer was, “Oh, no, no, no, he’s not going to be there.” So okay, and he

was all happy. We went down and talked to the press corps and all that kind of thing. Where we

stopped on that stop was a cluster of relatively young trees. They were big trees, but there had

evidently been a very intense fire in that location on the grove about nine years prior to that, and

the trees were, oh, a hundred feet tall, taller and that kind of thing. Very large. So I had an

opportunity to talk to him about fire and fire recovery and the fact that trees do grow back after

devastation like that and dah, dah, dah. Gave a little bit of a fire ecology thing.


Then we went on down a little ways, and there was a huge Ponderosa pine, as I recall. It

was kind of a scenic place. We stopped for some photos and that. But luckily a bear had just

dumped right there near the trail, so—oh, yes, and there was a log, an old rotten log that had

been a little bit torn up or pushed over by the bear, so it was another little opportunity to get a

little bit of a nature-in-action type of discussion about bears and what they do and all that. So

that was fun.

From that, we proceeded, went on down to—the next was another bunch of people that

was [sic; were] the outdoor writers. It was Outdoor magazine and, gosh, I don’t remember who

all was there. There was [sic; were] about twenty or more people. And I was supposed to leave

the party. Then it was another little walk down to where there was a—we had picked out this

really nice Giant sequoia called the George Bush tree; we named it in his honor, and that’s where

he was giving his political speech, presenting the proclamation.

Well, anyway, at that point I said, “Well, Mr. President, this is where I’m supposed to

leave.” He said, “No, don’t go. Come on, join us.” Made me feel pretty good. So I sat there and

listened to all the stories that he had about his youth and his outboard motor and the little light

that they had and all that kind of stuff—you know, just folksy stuff.

Went on down a little bit further. There was a tree, I remember, that was full of carpenter

ants. Carpenter ants are pretty interesting, so they were talking about how they excavate the

wood and make their nest and all that kind of thing, and he was interested in that. Another photo

op. It was interesting to me to see all the entourage of clambering for—“Oh, lemme get my

picture taken.” That was kind of disgusting, frankly. But anyway, there was a photo op, and he

was used to doing that, so he just let everybody have their opportunities there.


Still, the conversation was just pretty folksy and matter of fact, and I was enjoying it. He

was, evidently, also because we were quite late in getting—we didn’t follow the schedule, and I

think he was a half hour longer on the trail than he was supposed to have been. [Ronald] “Ron”

[Stewart? Stuart?], who was regional forester at that time, was warming the crowd up. It was a

pretty good-sized crowd. I don’t know, there must have been a hundred or more people at the

presentation point.

It was really funny. Later on, I heard this story. Of course, I wasn’t there so I didn’t see

it, but Ron would be talking and doing what he does best. You know, he’s a very entertaining

guy, very articulate. So he was talking about whatever he was talking about, probably Forest

Service and that kind of thing. Then I think at least on three different occasions, somebody

would hear something, “Oh, here they come.” And so he’d [say], “And now let me turn this over

to the president of”—and some guy pops out of the bushes, one of the security people, wearing

[laughs; unintelligible]. “Oh, not him. Okay.” And this happened over and over, because he

was late, and he was expected any second now. It’s got to be! Well, anyway, he kept that

doggone crowd going for about a half hour, I think, and he was supposed to only be five minutes.

GOTTSCHALL: Good story.

ROGERS: It was an interesting day.

Oh, a little anecdote on that, too. It was in July, as I recall, and it was [sic; we had] one

of those sort of unusual thunderstorms we have sweep through the area. Well, that’s kind of on

the east side, so it’s not too unusual on the east side of the Sierras. It’s Kern River Canyon, so it

wasn’t unheard of, but [it was] unusual. And a good soaking. I mean, like an inch of rain or

more at that point, anyway. In fact, it changed some plans about travel and everything like that

because of a thundershower that night.


The next morning, it just cleared off. It was one of those “only God can make a day like

this.” Blue sky, puffy clouds—you know, everything was wet. I remember one of his White

House staff—you know, we were standing around out there, and they were showing up and

getting stuff together and all, and “What’s that smell?” “That’s just the wet pine needles and the

forest smell.” “Oh, I thought you guys came out here and sprayed or something.”


ROGERS: Air freshener! You poor souls.


ROGERS: You know, they’re not any further off the concrete than that. It was humorous, but it

was kind of sad to think that’s what our country’s being run by.

GOTTSCHALL: [Laughs.] Very interesting story.

Well, we’ve kind of come to a point where it’s kind of your opportunity to summarize or

pick up any items that you may have missed in our discussion about timber management on the

national forest. I’ll just turn it back to you.

ROGERS: Okay. I’ll just mention a few points that I think are significant in one way or another

to the Forest Service, let alone my own self. The wilderness. During my career, we had the

[RARA I and RARA II ?] [Roadless Area Review and Analysis], both. I remember RARE I. It

was a hurried thing, and we’d kind of [unintelligible] stuff in and all that kind of stuff. There

was no wonder there was a RARE II. But I thought at that time it’s a good thing the Forest

Service is taking stock. We’d gone from the old primitive area to the wilderness areas, and you

have time to reevaluate, so that was a good thing.

But then, later on, when it began to develop that there might be more wildernesses

proclaimed, the only thing I saw in the Forest Service was, We don’t do wilderness here. I don’t


remember ever, at least on the forests that I was on during those days, that we said, Oh, yeah, we

support wilderness for this area, that area and that kind of thing. When I got down to Sequoia,

they were downright resentful, I think, of the fact that the Domelands had come in during that

period. I couldn’t understand that. You know, that’s a legitimate use of the national forest land,

and—wait a minute. Aldo Leopold was working for the Forest Service when he invented the

damn concept. And now they were disclaiming it. I don’t understand. But that was one thing

that just puzzled me. I was in timber, remember, and timber had lost sight of the other values in

the forest at that moment, it appears.

One of the things that I remember when I came into the Forest Service was the old PRI

system. I can’t remember what it meant. You got graded in three different areas. I can’t

remember the acronym. But anyway, I’ve been in private industry, and I worked for two

different companies, and they all had some way of evaluating employees, of course, like

everybody does, but they’re [unintelligible], and didn’t seem to get to the real heart of will you

hire this guy or not?

My first experience with the old PRI system was, Whew! This is pretty darn good. Now,

it called for a supervisor to be kind of a psychoanalyst, in a way. You have to evaluate not just

what the person did but also his potential and also pretty much his character. I thought that was

really wonderful. Of course, that had to change. And it did. Later on in my career, I saw the

review process, the annual review process as being pretty damn useless. I didn’t think it hit the

critical issues or was not being administered well enough to separate out the sheep from the

goats.

GOTTSCHALL: Do you recall what brought about that change from the PRI system?


ROGERS: No, I don’t know why it was changed, although it was changing at about the time

there was [sic; were] huge social changes in the Forest Service, starting with the consent decree,

but not necessarily as a result of the consent decree. The consent decree—that’s another thing I

have here on my list, actually. [Laughs.] [It] was a really good thing. I think there was justice

involved in that. But when you get lawyers involved, then justice doesn’t necessarily make the

decisions, and I think it was one of those things that, when the Forest Service—I don’t know in

this case if we abdicated our responsibility or just avoided it long enough the court finally had to

step in, but when the court steps in, forget common sense.

As a result of that, of course, then we had the Equal Employment Opportunity policy,

EEO, that were anything but equal opportunities. Much, much for the worse for the Forest

Service. There was [sic; were] some extremely good people that were getting opportunities and

performed well, but there was [sic; were] a lot more that got by that shouldn’t have, to the

detriment of the organization a lot of times, and not only in terms of what kind of people filled

positions but also what happened to the morale of people who either should have been filling

those positions or didn’t have an opportunity to.

Again, it was one of those things where, had we been in charge of it, then we probably

could have done the right thing, the common sense thing and kept the organization stronger, but

to abdicate—it gets me into leadership, and [unintelligible] you want to go there, but I’ll just tell

you one thing. I remember one of the most disillusioned moments of my life in the Forest

Service was a supervisor who was trying to get a forest plan done. He said—he was probably

being cynical, but it just completely shook me to the foundation. He was all excited because we

had a deadline to meet, and he’d been chewing on this thing for several years, like they do. He

said, “Let’s just get the damn plan done. The court’s gonna decide what we do, anyway.”


That, to me, was total abdication. If you think that way, then what in the hell are you

doing in the supervisor’s position? You’re supposed to be a leader, not a follower. And he was

telling me that “I’m okay with following the court.” I didn’t have too much experience with the

court orders and that kind of thing in those days that I do now, and I know it’s a lot worse than I

thought I was even then. You get involved in letting a court start running your life for you, they

don’t have the same interest in it as you do. It’s totally wrong.

Well, all in all, looking back, I’m darn glad I gave up my engineering career and went

into the Forest Service because I loved what I did for almost the entire time.


ROGERS: I’m sad to see the way things have changed and the controversy that is totally

gridlocking the organization, and the frustration that appears in everyone, all the way down. I

thoroughly believe the GS-7s and GS-9s still know what the hell they’re doing and ought to be

allowed to it, but can’t, for all sorts of reasons. I guess I’m just an optimist in that I can see ways

for the Forest Service to emerge really on the high ground again and make things like sell off the

national forest lands that Representative [Richard W.] Pombo is promoting, make them

[unintelligible]. But it’s going to take some other approach than what we’ve got now going.

I don’t think I have anything else I need to say.

GOTTSCHALL: Okay. Well, Bob, I sure appreciate your time and your insight on your career

with timber management. This will then end this interview.

ROGERS: All right, Glenn, thank you.

GOTTSCHALL: You’re welcome.

[End of interview.]

Documents

ROGERS, Robert FS 19 - 06-02-06 04 Original U.S ... · GLENN GOTTSCHALL: This is an interview for the Region Five oral history program for [sic] of Bob Rogers. This is June the second,