No one stood up and shouted. None of the questions cut like razor-edged barbed wire. No reply was laced with acrimony. Heck, even the few sharp exchanges were delivered with civility.
Where was the discord and rancor? The flared nostrils and bruised egos? What happened to the high-blown rhetoric and the low blows? Was this really a conference about the Forest Service and its land-management practices? Or had I, in my usual befuddled way, wandered into the wrong auditorium?
It turns out I was in the right place (and even made it at the right time). But I was not alone in my initial, puzzled reaction to the character of the discussions that emerged at the symposium on the future of the Forest Service, held at the University of Montana on Nov. 28-29. Sponsored by the Cinnabar Foundation and the university’s O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West, the conference drew more than 100 participants from local, state, and federal agencies and regional grassroots organizations, along with a healthy representation of academics, activists, and engaged students.
The roster’s range was impressive in its own right, and although the organizers surely would have loved to have doubled attendance, given the frigid temperatures outdoors, their hearts were no doubt warmed by the generous — and inclusive — dialogue that took place indoors. Really, you had to have been there.
No one embodied these dramatic changes in temper and tone more than Mitch Friedman. Now executive director of Conservation Northwest, which he founded in 1988 as the Greater Ecosystem Alliance, Friedman gained early notoriety for leading protests against harvesting of old-growth forests and in defense of the endangered spotted owl. In pursuit of these objectives, he helped pioneer a new form of environmental civil disobedience, putting his body on the line or, rather, in the trees.
Back in the day, had he shown up at a conference on the Forest Service’s management practices, his ideological gibes, and the attendees’ less-than-genteel responses to them, would have brought down the house. Not so at the 2006 Missoula confab.
That’s in part because Friedman preempted any potential (or residual) hostility by complicating his biography and that of his listeners: “We have come together here to discuss the Forest Service, a massive institution with a vast and complex mission,” he said in opening. “Each of us brings to this challenging discussion our own complex perspective.” As did he: “it might be convenient to consider me as a West Coast liberal green, which as one of the first tree-sitters, I surely must be. But I’m also a deer hunter, a failed pole vaulter for the Bobcats of Montana State, and have a work history ranging from driving forklift in Chicago to driving cattle in southeastern Wyoming to monitoring foreign fishing vessels in the Bering Sea. Which me showed up today? Which you showed up today?”
Those queries are reflective of the very paradigmatic shift that Friedman then explored. The capacity of timber beasts and tree huggers to challenge one another’s suppositions while acknowledging the on-the-ground realities that have led them to their assumptions, has moved Friedman (and others) to accept that the demand for ecosystemic health does not preclude job creation. In the process, they now pursue the triple bottom line, in which economic profit, environmental sustainability and social justice are inextricably linked, as the only way out of what once appeared an intractable conflict.
Not all agree that our perspectives have matured to such an extent that we can achieve these goals. One skeptic is environmental historian Samuel P. Hays. He was not in Missoula in body, but was in mind, if only because while there I was reading his just released book, Wars in the Woods: The Rise of Ecological Forestry in America. In probing the manifold sources of enmity that have roiled environmental politics for the past three decades, Hays, now an emeritus professor at the University of Pittsburgh, doubts that these tensions have run their course.
Indicators “of partisan politics,” he concludes, “might well tell the tale as to the changing fate of ecological or commodity forest objectives.” The Republican Party’s anti-environmental platform and policy “has been and will continue to be a decisive factor in the evolution of this contest.” Reaching a similar conclusion, albeit from a different vantage point, was former Chief Jack Ward Thomas. “Many of the environmental persuasion,” the former chief of the Forest Service asserted in his address in Missoula, “unable to recognize or appreciate their overwhelming victory in efforts to bring down the [National Forest] timber harvest levels, continue even today to wander around yesterday’s battle fields bayoneting the wounded.”
The rebuttals to Thomas’ sardonic thrust were disarming. The only moving objects “I’ve shot on a National Forest this fall,” quipped Matthew Koehler, of the WildWest Institute “was an elk and two deer.” Once in staunch opposition to the agency, the long-time activist cited several instances of collaborative endeavors his group and the Forest Service had embarked on in recent years.
Active and retired Forest Service employees confirmed the increase in community-based watershed restoration and fuel-load reduction projects in the wildland-urban interface, and their words bore witness to elevated levels of collective trust manifest in the processes by which important aspects of land management now were being proposed and enacted.
More compelling than this dialogue about change was the startling array of imaginative proposals that came from the podium and the floor, which opened up a constructive debate about the future of the agency and the lands under its care.
Thomas and University of Montana Professor Martin Nie pressed for the creation of a Public Land Law commission, the purpose of which would be to untangle and streamline the last thirty years of judicial findings, executive orders, and legislative determinations that have complicated the legal environment in which federal environmental managers and the public operate. Doing so would allow the “long-term management of our public lands for the benefit of the American people” to regain its place as “a critical component of our National spirit,” Thomas declared.
No less ambitious was Mitch Friedman’s declaration of a Marshall Plan for environmental restoration on the national forests. To regenerate battered terrain, community-based projects must depend on the cultivation of strong, stewardship-based leadership that is able to survive “substantive challenges and tugs from naysayers,” a model of behavior and methodology that might best be developed through what he dubbed “a restoration management institute.” There, “Forest Service staff and collaborative group members” would be “trained in the latest science on restoration planning and field craft.”
Where might such work come to ground? How about in Region 7, a no-longer extant administrative branch of the Forest Service? Under discussion since the late 1990s, this virtual space would be framed around “experimentation not geography,” said Sarah Van de Wetering, a senior fellow at the university’s Public Policy Research Institute.
She led a lunch-time discussion about the possibility, suggesting that national forests and grasslands, and their community partners, could submit proposals for pilot projects that would be overseen and monitored by a board of trustees with initial funding from federal budgetary sources; their management plans would be developed by a collaborative group, implemented by existing public-land managers, and then assessed by its trustees.
The larger goal of a reconstituted Region 7, like that of the other exciting concepts that emerged at the conference, is to clear away some of the legal, ideological, and political roadblocks that have hindered our capacity to imagine new and better ways to manage our public lands.
This represents an immense challenge, but the 193 million acres of forests and grasslands surely are worth the effort. That realization, after all, was at least partly responsible for the emergence of collaborative models as an antidote to once-prevalent public brawls and courtroom dramas. Just so, a similarly deep appreciation for this extraordinary acreage was what induced so many to attend a conference entitled “Challenges Facing the U. S. Forest Service: A Critical Review.” The commentary, pragmatic and practical, that then flowed forth was yet another sign of the emergence of a more sophisticated land ethic.
This productive dynamic did not mean that at the close of the conference we held hands and sang “Kumbaya.” Nor should we have done. Comity is never complete and neither should that be the aspiration. Democracy, however collaborative, requires dissent to remain honest; contention is its lifeblood.
Nowhere is this ethos better reflected than in the mission of the national forest system, a point Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the Forest Service argued, at its inception. Consider his famous dictum about the agency’s mission, to produce “the greatest good for the greatest number, in the long run.” Few have read the preceding sentences that place his maxim in context: “In the management of each reserve [forest,] local questions will be decided on local grounds,” the progressive forester observed, “and where conflicting interests must be reconciled the question will always be decided from the standpoint of the greatest good for the greatest number, in the long run.”
Achieving that balance would be tough, but that it was a balance born of contention was a natural consequence of democratic life. Who then would be the final arbiter, the decider? The oft-contentious citizenry: “The National Forests exist to-day because the people want them,” Pinchot avowed in 1907, words that reverberate still. “To make them accomplish the most good the people themselves must make clear how they want them run.”
Char Miller is professor of history and director of the urban studies at Trinity University. Author of the award-winning Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism and co-author of the Greatest Good: 100 Years of Forestry in America, he has written extensively about the history of the U. S. Forest Service, writings that will appear in his forthcoming collection, Ground Work: Conservation in American Environmental Culture.
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