“You can’t use an old map to explore a new world.” Albert Einstein
This speech was delivered to the Council of Forest Industries Annual Conference
Prince George, British Columbia
April 4, 2025
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Thank you for inviting me to participate in your conference today. The ideas and perspectives I will share with you this morning, are the product of almost 50 years of engagement in forest policy across the region—as a private citizen, a legislator and a governor. Sometimes, I think that our efforts to balance the complicated tension between social, economic and environmental values, is artificially constrained by a lack of imagination. This morning I will be asking you to look beyond the world as it is, and imagine what it could be.
At a time when we are experiencing an increase in the frequency and intensity of mega wildfires, millions of acres of Northwest forestland need thinning and fuel removal to reduce fire risk and increase landscape resiliency. Yet, our ability to manage across this landscape for multiple values is constrained not only by a lack of consistent funding, but also by a complex and outdated governance structure which limits policy solutions to those that can fit into an artificial patchwork of ownership patterns and political jurisdictions.
Furthermore, most of our social economic and environmental challenges are interrelated and cannot be solved in isolation from one another. Yet our politics and governance structures view the world in fragments— education, healthcare, public safety, housing, forest health, child welfare—as if these things are in no way connected.
As a consequence, for decades forest policy has been framed as a binary choice between economic and ecologic values. This has perpetuated an “us vs them” mentality and a zero-sum politics of scarcity, which inevitably creates winners and losers, undermining the ability to make consistent management decisions over time.
Over my long career in public service, I have come to believe that we cannot solve for environmental, economic and community values in a forest policy that is isolated and stands apart from the challenges that are confronting all of us in the non-forested parts of the Northwest. We need to include in the constituency for forest policy, those who may not see themselves as affected by how our forests are managed.
I arrived at this view, not just through my experiences as a State Senator and three-term Governor, but because for 15 years I represented a rural, timber-dependent community in southern Oregon, while at the same time, practicing as an emergency physician in the local hospital. This community was Roseburg in Douglas County, which encompasses the million-acre Umpqua National Forest. These experiences gave me a unique insight into the interrelated nature of social, economic, and environment issues—and of the fallacy of viewing forest policy as a binary choice between economic and ecologic values.
When I was elected to the legislature in 1978, rural Oregon was booming. Giant trees were being taken off the Umpqua National Forest, logs so big that a truck could only carry one at a time. More than 8 billion board feet was being harvested each year in the Oregon and the wood products industry directly employed 80,000 people at wages 30% above the statewide average.
I knew these people and their families. I sewed them up in the ER, set their broken bones and I delivered their babies. I fished with them, drank beer with them and I admired their work ethic and their commitment to their families. They were proud, hardworking people in a proud, close-knit community—a community that was supported almost entirely by timber.
Yet, I also found myself conflicted because I knew the level of timber harvest in the late 1970s was unsustainable and was damaging the ecosystem in a place I loved. I moved to Southern Oregon or one reason: The North Umpqua River, which runs through the Umpqua National Forest, and boasts a world class run of steelhead. I found—and still find— both peace and awe in the towering Douglas firs and in the emerald river. In the long summer evenings, I would fish the golden light off the green water and then camp in the woods above Steamboat Creek surrounded by the smell of fir trees and the sound of the river.
Then, in 1981, the housing market collapsed, and along with it the demand for lumber. Unemployment in Douglas County reached nineteen percent. When the recession came to Roseburg, Alice came to the ER—a woman in her late thirties, with medium length dark hair, and a haunted look in her eyes. She had a ragged cut on her left cheek surrounded by a darkening bruise It wasn’t a serious laceration but it looked to me like she had been hit by something … or someone.
As it turned out, it was her husband of fifteen years. He had been laid off from his job at the Sun Studs sawmill, where he had worked all his life, and where his father had worked before him. After several months of unemployment, he began to drink, he became sullen and depressed. And then abusive. Over the next few months I began to see more of this kind of thing, often people I knew— substance abuse, domestic violence, the disintegration of families.
This was the human and social consequence when proud hard-working people, through no fault of their own, were suddenly unable to put bread on the table or pay the mortgage. A loss of pride, a loss of independence, the loss of a sense of purpose. These were the faces of despair and hopelessness. It is an experience I never forgot.
I share this with you because, although I spent much of my political career fighting to protect and enhance salmon and steelhead runs from the Umpqua to the Columbia, there is a human side to this story—one that cannot be ignored if we are to realize the kind of sustainable forest management we all desire.
Over the past 40 years this conflict – usually framed as a zero-sum choice between ecologic and economic values — has become almost a metaphor for the urban-rural divide which, in turn, contributes significantly to the environment of polarization and divisiveness that is shredding the fabric of our community—not just in Oregon, but across the United States. If we are unable to heal this rift, if we are unable to bridge this divide, we will be unable to take any long-term collective action—which is at the heart of a balanced, sustainable forest management policy.
For these reasons, must consider linking a number of issues together in a way that broadens the constituency base for shared goals—and that includes in the constituency for forest policy, those who may not see themselves as affected by how our forests are managed. And by solving for multiple problems at the same time, we may also be able to restore a sense of common purpose and shared identity to those of us who live in this region
To illustrate, let me use two high profile issues that represent the intersection of natural resources management and the provision of social services We don’t usually think of these issues as being interdependent because we don’t often consider them as part of a larger system. The two issues are wildfire and homelessness. Although I am going to approach these issues from an Oregon standpoint, I think the lessons and conclusions are applicable throughout the Pacific Northwest.
I picked these issues for three specific reasons. First, neither issue can be ignored from a political standpoint. They are immediate, right in front of us. They are in our face. You can go to almost any larger city in this region—from Portland to Seattle to Vancouver—and see unsheltered homelessness. It elicits a visceral response that is difficult to ignore. And all of us, no matter where we live, have experienced our air quality compromised by smoke from wildfires. This, too, is difficult to ignore.
Second, both issues are symptoms of larger problems, and without addressing the larger problems we cannot be successful in addressing either wildfire or homelessness. Finally, the larger issues, of which wildfire and homelessness are symptoms, are complex and interrelated—and cannot be solved in isolation from one another.
Let’s start with wildfire.
I don’t think I need to remind those of you here today about the risk posed by the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires. Four of the most severe wildfire seasons in the last century occurred here in this Province within the past seven years (2017, 2018, 2021, and 2023). And the 2023 fire season saw a record amount of land burned—15 million hectares—significantly exceeding the annual mean of 2.1 million hectares between 1986 and 2022. The 2023 wildfires cost more than $3 billion for suppression alone, and caused extensive ecological, social, and economic impacts, demonstrating that ecosystems, infrastructure, and communities in BC are not resilient to wildfire. The same can be said for both Oregon and Washington.
At the same time, we are facing a deepening housing crisis across the region. Over the next 20 years, for example, Oregon faces a projected need for over 550,000 new housing units, only 5% of which are needed to house those currently houseless—the other 95% reflects historic underproduction and projected need. This shortage has profoundly disrupted the supply and demand equation, driving housing prices up 19.7% over the past year. This has forced more people to rent which, in turn, has created a shortage of rental units and driven up rental rates—driving a vicious cycle.
This has created not only homelessness, but chronic housing insecurity for hundreds of thousands of families, and an acute shortage of workforce housing, which is disproportionately impacting rural communities. Chronic housing insecurity, in turn, triggers a well-documented set of “Adverse Childhood Experiences, which profoundly undermine a child’s ability to succeed later in life—dramatically increasing the risk of poor cognitive functions, learning disabilities and the early onset of many chronic diseases. The lack of affordable housing also compromises the effective treatment of mental health and substance use disorders—all of which need a housing solution. The annual cost to society of this situation runs literally into the billions of dollars
This problem cannot be solved by focusing only low-income housing, as important as that is. The solution requires rebalancing supply with demand by dramatically increasing our housing inventory across the board, including market-rate housing.
Creating a more intentional link between forest and family offers a way to solve for these overlapping challenges of wildfire and homelessness simultaneously, as part of an integrated strategy to make the solution space larger, in two ways:
First, by rethinking our governance structure in a way that allows us to view our forested landscape as a whole—and imagining how to design and harmonize management practices to achieve common outcomes across the entire landscape—rather than on just fragments of it.
Second, by reframing the current wildfire and forest health debate in a larger context that includes other policy goals, and social values and political constituencies —that may not, on the surface, appear to have anything to do with how we manage our forests.
For example, suppose Oregon decides to make this a top priority by committing to build —let’s say, 10,000 units each year for 20 years. We will use, to the greatest extent possible, Northwest restoration fiber, small diameter logs and other sources of “low-value” wood from the forest health treatments necessary to reduce wildfire risk and to improve landscape resiliency—and from forests that are managed to certain standards of sustainability. Furthermore, these units will be constructed—again, to the greatest extent possible—from mass timber produced in Oregon, and many of the units will be built by local modular housing companies.
This two-decade public financing commitment would serve the same purpose as a long-term forest stewardship agreement, or a long-term timber supply contract. It would provide the fiscal certainty for private sector businesses to invest in expanding mill capacity in certain areas, expanding mass timber production facilities, expanding modular housing infrastructure, and expanding workforce training in the forest products industry and building trades.
Let’s assume that these 10,000 housing units are mass plywood panel units of around 1,000 square feet each. That would require 90 million board feet of wood each year. We also know that Oregon has 5.6 million acres of landscape at high risk for wildfire, and that restoring and maintaining the resiliency of this land will require active management, including thinning, fuel removal prescribed burns
Restoration harvests yield 5-20 million board per 1000 acres, depending on stand location and condition. So, by treating between at 4,500-18,000 acres of high wildfire risk forestland per year, we can produce enough wood for our 10,000 housing units. And by viewing our forested landscape as a whole, we can determine where to obtain this fiber in a way that best meets ecologic, economic and community needs, while maximizing climate resilience and minimizing wildfire risk.
This landscape-level approach would allow us to reduce wildfire risk and increase carbon storage and general forest health. It could also allow a more rational and effective way to address habitat, biodiversity and drinking water across the landscape and provide more stability for the forest products industry and for rural communities. Finally, and importantly, it would put forest policy at the center of a multi-faceted strategy that engages multiple stakeholders in common cause.
We are now solving not only for forest values—forest health, landscape resilience, reduced wildfire risk, biodiversity, harvest, habitat and clean water—but also for homelessness, housing insecurity and rural economic development, for family instability, for reducing the generational impact of adverse childhood experiences, and for effective efforts to address mental health and substance use disorders.
By addressing housing supply and housing insecurity—using restoration fiber and sustainable timber—we expand not only the solution space for a more holistic forest policy, but also engage new partners from the social service and education sectors who now become invested in sustainable forest management.
Finally, by developing a policy and financing strategy that addresses the regional housing crisis by using locally sourced wood—as part of a more holistic landscape level approach to forest health and resiliency—we may be able to offset the cost of subsidizing forest health treatments, the low-value wood supply chain, and building out more dispersed processing infrastructure, with the billions of dollars of avoided public cost that will accrue from increasing housing production. This in not dissimilar to the tax increment financing used to build public infrastructure.
As I said when I began these remarks, we are suffering from a failure of imagination. We need a larger regional vision for how we will manage our forests over the next few decades—a vision that is not constrained by current statutes and regulations, or by the existing boundaries of ownership patterns and political jurisdictions. We need the courage and the capacity to look beyond the way the world is—because frankly, the way the world is … is the problem. It’s simply not working.
A few of you may be old enough to remember President Kennedy’s 1962 speech challenging the nation to go to the moon:
“We shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away, a giant rocket, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun– and do all this, and do it right, and do it before this decade is out.”
What an enormous leap of imagination. Kennedy did not give us a roadmap, only a destination. But in doing so he changed the debate from where we wanted to go to how we were going to get there—and unleashed the innovation and passion of the nation in common cause. And we did it, we did it because we imagined it—because the storypreceded the accomplishment.
Today I am asking you to imagine and to start writing that story of the future of forest policy across the bioregion we call the Pacific Northwest.
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References
The Future of Forest Policy in Oregon
White Paper prepared for Sustainable Northwest, August 2021
