Jack Ward Thomas goes to Washington: the scientist made famous by the spotted owl becomes chief of the U.S. Forest Service - Interview

E: The Environmental Magazine, April, 1994 by Will Nixon

Upon entering the U.S. Forest Service headquarters in Washington, DC, a red brick Federalist battleship with a clock tower and a castle turret at the front corners. I half expect to find a few rasta-haired wood nymphs from Earth First! roaming the halls. The rhetoric was almost that wild last November when the Clinton administration picked Jack Ward Thomas, a wildlife biologist who also led studies on the northern spotted owl, to be the new Chief of the agency. "We can't survive him in Oregon," huffed Republican Representative Bob Smith from Thomas's own district in the eastern part of the state. (Smith, a rancher, often earns "O"s from the League of Conservation Voters.) "This is the most sweeping change of the Forest Service since its creation," gushed Andy Kerr of the Oregon Natural Resources Council. So as I entered the Chief's corner office, which overlooks the Washington monument, I was surprised to find that, in fact, Jack Ward Thomas is a Forest Service loyalist with a prominent dark green, fir-shaped Forest Service pin on the lapel of his plain blue suit.

Hollywood might cast Thomas as an old Roman Senator with his bearish build and big round head that has grown bald back to a fine garland of white hair, but he doesn't have the garrulous, wine-spilling personality. Some have even called him crusty, which I can see in his brusque replies to questions he doesn't want to answer, but otherwise he's straightforward, even philosophical in a country porch sort of way. He has a soft voice with a western flatness and a faint Texas twang from his younger days at Texas A&M. For the past 20 years he has been the Chief Wildlife Biologist at the Forest Service station in La Grange, Oregon, studying elk, deer, turkey, wildlife diseases and wildlife habitat management, which made him well known among local hunters, loggers, conservationists and scientists but no one else. Then he was assigned the northern spotted owl. In 1990, he led a small team that produced "The Thomas Plan," which ended the 1980s timber boom by recommending that eight million acres of forest be protected for the endangered bird. Last summer, he headed a team of 100 scientists and economists that prepared 10 options for President Clinton to choose from for his Northwest Forest Plan. For his work, he has received death threats, traveled with bodyguards to public meetings, and become the most famous wildlife biologist in the country.

The Forest Service manages 191 million acres of National Forest with over 36,000 employees and an annual budget of about $3.8 billion. So Thomas has much more on his hands than the owl. But the most important thing to know may be that he did not come easily to this job. His wife Margaret has terminal cancer. But she helped persuade him to do it. "The thing about Jack is, he has to have a challenge," she told Kathie Durbin of The Oregonian. After she's gone, she added, "He can work through his grief through his work... It's important to him and it's important to me."

E: How do you feel about coming into this job?

Thomas: I'm really surprised to be here. I never had any idea or any ambition to occupy this seat. But I'm excited. The era we're running into in natural resource management, despite all the screaming about, the Forest Service, is probably the most exciting, dynamic time in my 40-year career. I don't think these windows of opportunity for change come along but once in a generation. Being chief of the Forest Service is the most exciting place to sit in the most exciting time in 40 years.

In the past, somebody studied elk or the spotted owl or the marbled murrelet without having an idea of how it all fit together. Now we're seeing research that's not so much about individual species, but how they fit together in the larger scale. We call it "landscape ecology" or "conservation biology." And in the past, foresters who cut down trees would think about growing the next one or two generations. They wouldn't pay much attention to the longer term - or how that patch of cuts related to other ones. It was done piecemeal. Now we're looking at what we call "the cumulative effect" and thinking about "ecosystems" or "preserving biodiversity." When I headed the President's panel, we had to look at liverworts and lichens, slugs and bugs - all the things nobody ever paid much attention to before. My God, if you looked at them one at a time, you'd be at it into oblivion, so we have to look at the ecosystems.

Everyone thinks that Aido Leopold was the first one to have this idea: "To save every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering." But this idea appears in the ancient religious texts, the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible. You can find it in the story of Noah's Ark. Life is precious.

In December, you sent a memo to your top staff with six principles: "Obey the law. Tell the truth. Implement ecosystem management. Development new knowledge, synthesize research, and apply it to management of natural resources. Build a Forest Service organization for the 21st century. Trust and make full use of our hard-working, expert workforce." Someone reading it might think this agency must have been in pretty bad shape.