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BY PATTY WENTZ |
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As founder of Oregon's green-leaning Pacific Party, Blair Bobier has attended his share of environmental conferences. But last March, during a logging panel at the Public Interest Environmental Law conference in Eugene, he saw something new. While a panel of environmentalists waxed poetic about the spiritual significance of saving forests from clearcutting, a woman got up and began writing numbers on the blackboard behind them. The numbers that Karyn Moskowitz posted showed that the Bureau of Land Management lost $158 million on its programs in 1996, including $41 million on timber sales. "I'm as spiritual as the next person," she says, "but give me a break. This is what makes sense to the public. This is how we'll convince them: the pocketbook." Bobier liked what he saw. While most tree-huggers knew that the Forest Service was eating up tax dollars (estimates on how much vary widely) no one, until Moskowitz, had crunched the BLM numbers. Bobier recruited Moskowitz to join the party and run for office. In two weeks, she'll formally file her candidacy to challenge U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden in November. In a party that's trying to straddle the chasm between the radical tree-sitters of the Cascadia Forest Defenders and the genteel Sierra Club, Moskowitz could be the proverbial bridge. As usual, this year's small crop of Pacific Party candidates, like Bobier, are long-time environmental activists. But Moskowitz is rooted as much in the corporate world as in the forest. The 35-year-old Corbett resident grew up on the Jersey shore before earning a degree in microbial ecology from Boston University. She did research at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, then in 1987 was hired by Procter and Gamble Co. as a chemical salesperson. "I've always thought the best way to make change is to know the enemy," she says. Moscowitz spent six years working for P&G in San Francisco, all the while trying to turn the company toward more environmental practices. She was never successful, she says, because the drive for profits always won over environmental concerns. That's what convinced her that money, not emotion, is the key to environmental arguments. She left P&G and joined a new graduate program at the University of Washington, where she got an MBA in environmental management in 1992. Since then, Moscowitz has made her living doing environmental economic analysis for nonprofit environmental groups around the West, most recently in New Mexico. Moskowitz's speciality is detailing how the BLM and Forest Service are financially losing propositions. "Everyone involved in the struggle has to understand the root of the problem," she says. And the problem is that although the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management sell a lot of trees and other natural resources, they still cost the taxpayers millions of dollars each year. Locally, most of Moskowitz's work has been published by Randal O'Toole, a libertarian environmentalist who in 1975 founded the Thoreau Institute (originally Cascade Holistic Economic Consultants) to find ways to protect natural resources. O'Toole funded her BLM research. As a senatorial candidate, she has a broader platform from which to bring her arguments to the public. And one of her main points is that Wyden has been no friend to the environment--or taxpayers. Moskowitz raps Wyden's refusal to support a bill that would have stopped the 1995 salvage rider that allowed timber sales to go through without input from environmentalists. Now, she says, Wyden is sitting out the debate on the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act., which would phase out timber sales on public lands. (At this point, however, the bill has not had a hearing in the House, and there has not been a similar bill in the Senate.) The way to stop the flow of money out of the forests, according to Moskowitz, is to end federal subsidies of logging and to transfer that money to the timber communities that are already dying off as a result of over-cutting. She says the bill could unite fiscally conservative Republicans and green-leaning Democrats. As a third-party candidate, Moskowitz is clear on her role in the campaign. While she jokes that she's packed and ready to go to Washington, she says she sees herself as a link between extreme environmental groups and mainstream Oregon voters. Over the past few years, she says, environmental activists have caught on to the idea that saving forests can also save tax dollars. Now she says, it's time for the rest of the public to be educated.
originally published August 19, 1998 |
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