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5 PLANNING AND TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY IN THE FORESTS The sweetest smell to the Oregonian is that of sawdust. Roughly 65 cents of every dollar in incomes derives from wood and wood products. The lumber industry has made spectacular progress in recent years. With smart leadership, the industry has introduced conservation methods , both in its mills and in the woods.—Newsweek, November 9, 1953 S ocial innovation and social experiments characterized many of the reform strategies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. The Resettlement Administration made a halfhearted eªort to establish model communities for refugees from failed farming enterprises and disintegrating industrial centers; the Farm Security Administration provided labor camps for agricultural migrants in search of work; the Tennessee Valley Authority produced electricity and attracted industry to the distressedupperSouth;andtheBonnevillePowerAdministrationattempted to accomplish the same for the Columbia Basin.1 New Deal policymakers sought other planning solutions to the nation’s acute economic and social distress. With the encouragement of the president’s much favored National Resources Planning Board and the Public Works Administration, federal o‹cials in the Northwest formed the Pacific Northwest Regional Planning Commission in 1934.2 Its proponents argued that planning would stabilize industries and communities, soften boom-and-bust cycles, alleviate social distress,rationalizetheexploitationof resources,andcontributetosustainable 147 communities. Because of the region’s heavy dependence on timber harvesting , planning approaches appeared to hold special promise for the Northwest, especially among progressive-minded individuals. When the National Resources Planning Board reported in 1937 that the region had the potential to be the country’s permanent woodlot, powerhouse, and source of food, the Oregonian boasted that the Northwest still had su‹cient timber reserves to make it “the continent’s most important lumber yard.” But experts also contended, the newspaper declared, that sound conservation principles were “more important in the Pacific northwest” because of its tremendous supply of raw material.3 Throughout the 1930s there were voices urging caution, greater care, and stewardship in managing the region’s timber wealth. As early as 1934, C. J. Buck, regional forester of the Forest Service’s Region 6, suggested that Northwestern states adopt sustained-yield management policies to avoid “a day of social and economic reckoning.” The regional chief singled out Oregon’s Clatsop County as a living example of the eªects “of our present ‘cut-out-and-get-out’ policy upon families and communities.” Sustainedyield timber production, he believed, would stabilize the region’s economy and its cultural and civic life. An assistant Region 6 forester cautioned in 1935 that Coos County would face “an appalling tragedy” unless corrective measures were taken. And toward the end of the Depression decade, Forest Service o‹cial Edward I. Kotok joined those who were concerned about the long-term viability of lumber communities. Although the Northwest ’s forest problems were “yet in the making,” Kotok observed “adverse symptoms” already apparent in certain districts.4 With the onset of the Second World War and an economy operating at full employment, however, social planning lost its appeal as Congress moved aggressively to dismantle certain New Deal programs, including the National Resources Planning Board.5 In the Pacific Northwest, however, the planning process lived on in occasional studies and surveys. Charles McKinley, a consultant to the Pacific Northwest Regional Planning Commission, carried out one of the betterknown surveys of natural resources shortly after the war. War-related prosperity had erased all doubts about the permanence of the Northwest lumber industry, McKinley concluded. In its place, “patriotism and profit” 148 industrial forestry management and the turn to private enterprise had created an atmosphere “inhospitable to sober reflection” about conserving timber resources for future generations . “The demand blew the ceiling oª manpower and prices,” McKinley declared, and unprecedented postwar profits brought a mad scramble for marketable timber and much overcutting. Unless the region adopted a plan to reduce annual harvests “to the total perpetual yield from forests,” he predicted a period of intense industrial activity for a few decades, “then suddenly dropping to the stillness of dead communities.” McKinley added that the frenetic pace and huge scale of logging activity were also disrupting streams, destroying spawning grounds, and raising water temperatures. Illusions born of the postwar boom would, McKinley feared, “obscure the relations between basic resources and a healthy economy.”6 Despite much breast-beating about the region’s timber reserves, occasional voices urged restraint during the postwar years. “National welfare, in war and peace,” an Oregonian editorial...

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