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| In the Forest Service's
next century, the big goals are ever more complicated by demographics
and politics |
By John Freemuth
for Headwaters News |
| The U.S. Forest Service is
about to celebrate its 100th anniversary. It is preparing
to host a national congress in early January 2005, and
has just completed holding a series of regional congresses
throughout the country.
On Nov. 18 and 19, the Cecil
Andrus Center, the Idaho Statesman and the U.S. Forest Service
presented one of those conferences in Boise, Idaho.
The topics
for that congress were fire and forest health. This essay
is a preliminary report that summarizes
some of the highlights of the event. The Andrus Center is
preparing a white paper based on yet-to-be completed transcripts
of the event that will
be posted on the center's Web site in
early January, and will discuss the
conference in much more detail.
The conference met with the background clear in everyone's mind. As the
Forest Service prepares to celebrate its anniversary, the forests aren't
what they used to be, or so it appears.
What this complexity seems
to counsel is humility because even our best collaborative efforts may take
years to show
results and may be limited by events beyond our control.
Years of fire suppression, drought and
bug infestations have provoked what some assert is a forest health "crisis."
We met with different views over what constitutes the various causes of the crisis,
whether those causes have cures, and whether forest health should be the core
of today's Forest Service mission.
We knew, going into the congress, that too many years of indiscriminate fire
suppression have placed many forest types in a condition where they are prone
to catastrophic wildfire.
We knew, too, that we continued to suppress fires even
when fire scientists suggested that we rethink that policy. Those of us who live
in the West are now painfully aware that we are in the midst of a multi-year
drought, and in the midst of insect infestations.
Overlaying this is increased
evidence of climate change and demographic change that may be altering western
landscapes and rendering fire policy more complex than ever.
What this complexity
seems to counsel is humility because even our best collaborative efforts may
take years to show results and may be limited by events beyond our control.
The congress was also very aware that Congress passed the Healthy Forests Restoration
Act about a year ago, the latest attempt to begin to do something about the conditions
of our forests.
The Forest Service views this legislation as perhaps one of its
best (and some inside the bureau ruefully say last) opportunities to show that
it has the tools, commitment and leadership to manage our national forests. Everyone
continues to watch to see how the legislation is implemented. For now, there
is often cautious agreement on where and how to proceed with that implementation.
The congress brought together speakers and attendees that, according to keynote
speaker Steven Pyne, "brought together an extraordinary assemblage of fire
lore - literally thousands of years of fire experience were in one room."
Pyne,
in that address, took us through a history of the various fire eras up to the
present time. What he left us thinking about was the complexity of today. We
are facing a new "Big Burn" – large fires to be sure,
but
not
like those of 1910.
The fires of today are greatly influenced by mankind's
own big burn, "anthropogenic combustion" or industrial use that increasingly
is seen as causing enough climate change to lead to more fires. What to do about
those fires leads to intense debate. As Pyne said:
"The perception among the fire community is that the nation has a deficit of
good burns, that the way to solve this shortfall is to reinstate fire across
the boards,
and that the public is unable to absorb anything other than a much-simplified
message.
"This time, dissent focuses on whether fire management should be based
on the ax or the torch. The great achievement of this era of reformation is surely
the indelible bonding of fire to land management. It is testimony to the complexity
of that concept that we have no story sufficient to tell what it means."
Telling the story of the new complexity of fire management was a topic echoed
by a number of speakers at the conference, including Elizabeth Arnold of National
Public Radio, Tom Kenworthy of USA Today and Rocky Barker of the Idaho Statesman.
Reporting on large wildfires is one thing, but the relationship of fire to forest
health and the resultant debate over the tools and methods to deal with it, another.
Indeed, this complexity and the difficulty of telling that "story" to
the public and Congress emerged as one of the most unsettling aspects of the
conference. While the older message on fire was told clearly by Smokey Bear,
the new message may not be able to be. Though one cannot discount our rapt attention
should Smokey ever walk out of the woods telling us, in that voice of his: "You
know, we've learned a lot about fires and forests since I was a cub."
Pyne, in response to questions, asserted that the new "story" would
have to center somewhere around the biological issues in our forests.
Wally Covington,
another prominent fire ecologist, thought that consensus-based ecological treatments
at the scale of 800,000 or so acres made the most sense, something he and others
have been working on in the ponderosa pine forests of northern Arizona.
Yet,
we still must be attentive as to how we frame the issue, and what words we use.
Terms like forest "health" or ecosystem "health" remain
loaded, and are often seen as values hiding behind some sort of scientific
fact.
As Jim Burchfield of the University of Montana noted, "If we say
we have to cut the forest to save it, people won't buy it."
Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth was another keynote
speaker. Although many observers of forest policy don't agree that
the agency has a clear mission today, Bosworth offered a clear direction as to
priorities, asserting that outdoor recreation and ecological restoration should
be the agency's top concerns.
Bosworth noted, however, that what a "restored"
forest
would be like would depend more on a societal consensus than on a scientific
one.
Bosworth did say that commercial logging could be increased from its current
low point, but that most if not all roadless areas might well remain protected.
But building that consensus over forest restoration clearly implies active conversations
with the various publics that are concerned with forest policy. Those conversations
obviously take place in a space where politics are more complex and dense that
those during the progressive era when forestry and forest management began in
the U.S.
Tom Bonnickson, a prominent forester, remarked that those leading the
conversation need to be as "charismatic and persuasive" as Theodore
Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot.
The conference left us with the conclusion that what we are really doing behind
the concern for fire and forest health is imagining how we want our forests to
look by the end of this still-young century.
We need to come to some agreement
about that, and to more fully see what the economic, political, social and ecological
limits might be to reaching that vision.
As we celebrate the centennial of the
U.S. Forest Service, we need to remember what the agency has done, what it continues
to do well and what it deserves our thanks for.
We need to learn what has not
gone
so
well, why that has happened and what is being done, or can be done, to change
that.
Gifford Pinchot's stricture to look for the "greatest good
for the greatest number for the longest time" can still serve as a signpost
to finding that vision.
John Freemuth is a senior fellow at the Andrus Center for
Public Policy
in Boise, Idaho. |
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Analysis:
Some agency
history bears
repeating
By Shellie Nelson, assistant
editor
Headwaters News
Dec. 8, 2004
The U.S. Forest Service has helped define the
Rocky Mountain West for more than a century.
The agency celebrates its 100th
anniversary on July 1, 2005, established to manage
the nation's 155 forests and 20 grasslands that occupy
191 million acres, or an area about the size of Texas.
More than half of the total acreage lies within
the Rocky Mountain states. The Forest Service manages more
than 104 million acres across Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana,
Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah.
It also oversees 406 of the nation's 676 wilderness
areas, 149 of which are in the Rocky Mountain states.
The Forest Service held a series of regional "congresses" around
the nation to prepare for its next 100 years of "caring
for the land and the people."
The latest was held in Boise and focused on the role of fire in future forest-management
decisions.
With the Forest Service's large footprint across the West, whatever the agency
does will be felt and seen across the region.
When the Forest Service was created, timber
management was the agency's primary responsibility. Today,
the Forest Service is charged with satisfying multiple demands
and following myriad federal regulations.
The last half of the first 100 years saw far-ranging
legislation that affected and complicated the Forest Service's
mission: The Use-Sustained
Yield Act of 1960, the Wilderness
Act of 1964, the Endangered
Species Act of 1973, the Healthy
Forests Restoration Act of 2003, and the still-disputed
and as-yet-unenacted Roadless
Area Conservation Rule of 2001.
When Gifford
Pinchot was appointed the first chief of the Forest
Service, the total population of the seven Rocky Mountain
states was about 2.6 million, about the size of Nevada's
population today.
In 1910, there were less than half a million automobiles in the United States
and all-terrain vehicles were not even on the drawing board.
Pinchot defined forestry as: "the art
of producing from the forest whatever it can yield for the
service of man."
Pinchot was criticized by preservationists for his commercialization of the
nation's forests, and by Congress for his conservationist approach to Western
forests.
The current chief of the Forest Service Dale
Bosworth, says his top four
concerns for the nation's forests are fire and fuels,
invasive species, loss of open space, and unmanaged recreation.
Nearly one-third of the nation's population
now lives in the Rocky Mountain states, much of it in communities
growing in the urban-forest interface, as the nation's more
mobile society moves closer to its recreational opportunities.
Faster, more agile off-road vehicles, nearly 36 million nationwide, take recreationists
deeper into public forests and higher into its mountain ranges.
As people move farther into national forest lands, invasive species gain a
foothold, and humans spark more forest fires.
The forests themselves are not the forests
of last century. In Idaho and other western states, beetles
are munching their way through stands of lodgepole weakened
by years of drought. The drought has killed thousands of
pinions across Colorado.
Scientists and researchers say warmer temperatures brought on by climate change
are marching their way down the spine of the Rocky Mountains, melting glaciers,
extending growing seasons and changing the ecosystems of the Rocky Mountain
West.
As the Forest Service wrestles with these new
challenges, both man-made and natural, some things will stay
the same.
The Forest Service and its employees will still
be caught between the mandate to provide the nation with
natural resources and preserving nature's gifts for generations
to come.
Philosophical differences between Forest Service
employees and Department of Interior policy-makers will continue.
Gifford Pinchot, Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold, Arthur Carhart and Raphael Zon
are legendary giants in the history of the Forest Service. They all believed
in and fought for conservation practices, and their integrity and foresight
are still lauded decades after those battles.
In reading the history of these men, their
contributions to the neophyte Forest Service and their clashes
and frustrations with administrative policy, there are clear
parallels between the Forest Service of 1905 and the Forest
Service of 2005, and maybe by looking back, the agency can
avoid the pitfalls of the past and use lessons learned to
craft sensible policies for the future. |
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Science inseparable
Underlying the discussion about science and politics in agency
decision-making is a palpable irony: There has never been, and can never be,
a
separation of the two.
On this, the anniversary of the Forest Service, we ought not to forget that the
overlap of science and politics was an integral reason for the agency's very
creation.
What is past is indeed prologue, and the very same dialogue
of these pages was had when the Forest Reserves were under the domain of the
Department of Interior.
Congress, special interests and activists felt Interior had become too "politicized." The
"wise, scientific use" tenets
of
the Forest Service Organic Act were a direct result.
Furthermore, the storied debates around the balance of societal, economic and
ecological values in agency policy are not unique to our time.
Although greater vitriol probably characterizes today's paradigm, Pinchot and
Muir
continually and passionately wrestled one another on this same issue.
Does anyone think Theodore Roosevelt used "sound science" to expand
the
Forest Reserve and National Parks systems?
Of course not; he used brazen,
political moxie.
Perhaps a greater irony is that politics, not science, were
responsible for the demise of the Forest Service timber sale program - for better
or worse,
whatever your perspective.
The organizations who danced with glee on the graves of saw and pulp mills and
their dependent communities have not "sound
science" to thank. Rather, it was politics, acting itself out through public
opinion, Congress,
and later, the courts.
"Sound science" of
its own
is an inanimate object, as Dr. Freemuth aptly points out.
Taking another step backward in time, the Forest Service's decision to begin selling
timber in substantial amounts was of social derivation, as well.
The politics of a post-World War II era United States demanded that the economic
growth
spurred by returning veterans and their families, the housing sector
in particular, be captured using raw materials from the national forests.
The quagmire of politics in scientific decision-making is ages-old,
evidenced by each major Forest Service course change having been
politically rooted.
The truth is that all natural resource management decisions must inherently balance
the societal and the scientific.
I submit that our reluctance to regard these inseparable dance partners with
equity
has and will continue to cause public lands policy to swing in ever more
radical vacillations toward opposite ends of the political spectrum.
In one final irony, "sound science" is shrinking toward irrelevance
with each stroke of the pendulum as we "wish in one hand" for its reinstatement.
Aaron Everett
"Big Timber Lobbyist"
Black Hills Forest Resource Association
Rapid City, SD
Author's blog:
Sound science is slippery
Roy Heberger has brought up a vital issue concerning national forest and all
federal land management: the role of science in land management decisions.
But first, I would remind readers that the Andrus
Center will post both the entire transcript of the congress on fire and forest
health and our white paper, on the center's
website by the end of January.
This will allow everyone to read what was said those two
days.
Roy called on us to support land management using the "best available science" for
decisions, while avoiding having that science changed to fit a "politically-based" decision.
I hope we would all agree with his second point. Recently, an example of how
this might occur developed when a report categorizing the state of scientific
information on the sage grouse was edited for content as to appropriate references
by a political appointee in the Department of Interior.
Two resultant documents
were sent to a panel of senior scientists in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
as part of a process to decide whether to list the bird as an endangered species.
The second document had certain references removed and others added, with no
explanation as to why.
While it would have
been possible to compare the two documents, it would have taken an extraordinary
amount of work. This editing had the effect of whitewashing the discourse and
argument needed to determine what is the "state of the science" regarding
the sage grouse and it habitat.
This is wrongheaded and Roy is right to object,
as do I.
On the other hand, we need to acknowledge that "best available science" is
a complicated concept.
Science is best seen as both method and a result stated
in terms of probabilities.
We would all hope scientists would follow the scientific
method when it came to their research. If they did not, we could question whether
the result of their inquiry was "scientific."
An example might illustrate
the point about probability statements. A few years ago, the Idaho Chapter of
the American Fisheries Society polled itself at its annual meeting and more than
90 percent of its members concluded that breaching the lower Snake River dams
would
have
the highest probability of restoring wild salmon runs.
They also said that decision
was a societal and thus a political decision, not a
scientific one. Science speaks in terms of probabilities, not certainties, when
informing decision-makers.
One further complication is the growing use of what I term advocacy science:
research with pre-ordained conclusions embedded in carefully selected hypotheses.
Thus, to put it crudely, we like cutting trees or we do not, and we try to "do
the science" to support our values.
What we are left with is a great deal of confusion about what using the "best
available science" actually means.
It ought be used to inform decisions,
becoming a necessary but insufficient condition for sound decision making.
But
it cannot make decisions for us, unless we want to empower a cadre of scientific
elites to do that.
If we do, then perhaps my vote should count more than yours.
After all, I have a PhD, in political "science."
John
Freemuth,
Andrus Center for Public Policy
Author's
blog:
New era, for real?
Most readers are aware that the Forest Service is about to celebrate its centennial.
Readers are probably aware of the spirit, and of the history of that time.
Gifford
Pinchot was the agency's charismatic "founder" who articulated
a set of principles set within the general context of scientific management
and democratic accessibility that allowed the new agency to flourish and prosper.
At a recent regional forest congress in Boise, Forest Service Chief Bosworth
took attendees through his interpretation of various eras of national forest
management, complete with his acknowledgement that there were always those who
disagreed with the dominate policies of the time.
He offered the thought that
we
were
entering a "new period" today, of "ecological restoration and
outdoor recreation."
But, as he and many other speakers and attendees at
the congress noted, achieving agreement on the purposes of ecological restoration
would require trust. Trust of the Forest Service, trust by the Forest Service,
and trust among those who work on forest issues in an era where decentralized
decision-making is seen as better decision-making.
Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho appeared to agree with the chief. In a televised
speech to the gathering, the senator praised the recent Forest Health legislation,
not surprisingly.
But then he went on to say the law had to be implemented in
an "open and transparent process" that recognized the "value of
urban watersheds" and "put as a third or fourth tier value, commercial
uses as they relate to forests."
His hope, it was clear, was that some forest health-related timber harvest might
be used to help pay for restoration, not an unreasonable request.
But what he
did not say, quite clearly, was that commercial use was a first-tier value when
it came to forest health. Of course, it all depends on developing more agreement
over the meaning of forest health,
and work that needs to be done.
In fact, all of the agencies – local, state and
national – agree they need to much more clearly articulate what they
mean by forest
health and what they think the role of fire is on the landscape.
Are these signs that we are feeling our way towards a new "consensus position" as
to the purposes of our national forests? Perhaps.
Our congress saw weariness over the timber wars. State- and local-based environmentalists
appeared eager to work towards collaborative agreement on specific projects on
the ground.
Although many of us might agree with Tom Bonnickson that it would not hurt
to have those leading the conversation be as "charismatic and persuasive" as
Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot were, I suspect that most of the real
work will be done by many people, in many places, and it will take time.
But something may be happening, if this congress is any indication, that could
end
up affirming the chief's suggestion that we have entered a new era.
John Freemuth,
Andrus Center for Public Policy
Real power
I know Dr. Freemuth was reporting on the Forest Conference of Nov. 18 and
19, 2004, in Boise, Idaho, but I'm disappointed
that either the conference, Dr. Freemuth's report, or both did not include
mention of species that are imperiled because of forest management (or
more broadly, land management) decisions of the past.
Please understand I am not pointing the finger at Dr. Freemuth. I thank him
for an analysis about a conference I was unable to attend.
I'm venting a
frustration over the apparent fact that we are somehow unable to inject real
ecosystem thinking into our decision-making process involving federally managed
lands.
If you go to a medical doctor, I assume you want that doctor to be free to
practice the best medicine that is available and not have his or her medical
recommendations hampered by insurance considerations/limitations.
Similarly, we need to approach land management using the best available science,
and not change the science to better fit a politically based decision.
We
need to ask the sustainability question while at the same time meeting legal
mandates. Pernaps we need to apply science to those mandates as well.
Doing
otherwise has brought us to where we are today with respect to the national
forests, and with respect to the imperiled species I mentioned above. Mistakes
were made, so to speak.
So, to me, the real question is this, "How do we give the Forest Service
decision-makers the real power to make the very hard, scientifically supported
decisions that may go against the politics of the moment?"
Therein lies the problem.
Roy Heberger
Boise, Idaho
Give Smokey a new job
During the Andrus Center conference,
one speaker lamented that media expected the Forest Service to explain
their fire management
policy
in a 15-second sound
bite.
It seems impossible, doesn't it? Yet, for 60 years they've
explained their policy in only 5 seconds: "Only you can prevent forest
fires."
Through one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history, the
Forest Service convinced the American public that fire suppression was always
the
best policy.
Now that they know fire management is much more complex, they're
stuck with an outdated but beloved image. The question becomes do you retire
the bear or repurpose him?
I'm not sure you could successfully retire the old bruin. His shadow
would still cast a couple more decades into the future even if you suddenly
could no longer buy baseball caps and baby rompers emblazoned with
his face.
The Forest Service should issue a new tool belt to Smokey. His message about
preventing accidental fires is still valid, but he needs new ways to talk
about how fire can also benefit his woodland friends.
Sure, it's a more complex
message, but the public is capable of understanding it. How many of us mistakenly
thought the commercial showing the middle-aged guy drilling a football through
a tire swing was about footballs or tire swings? Presenting nuanced messages
about when fire is a friend and when it is not would be a worthy challenge
for Smokey's handlers, the Ad Council.
Smokey is out there right now and just like a lot of folks in their 60s,
he's
feeling a little useless. He wants to help. The Forest Service should recognize
the skills he has and really put him back to work.
Rick Just,
Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation
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