People sitting

Like birds on the fence

Listening, still.

Policy

Planning Forest rules

Revision revise.

Overhead

Pipes run like sunshine

Throughout room.

(Anonymous comment, Finger Lakes National Forest Plan revision meeting, Watkins Glen, New York, February 13, 2002)

It has 16,000 acres. Thirty miles of trails. A horse camp with open-air stalls. Pleasant views—long, lovely Seneca Lake lies a few miles west. But it’s hardly spectacular.

Wander through the Finger Lakes National Forest and what you see is a scattering of young woodlands, pine and spruce plantations, pasture, patchy shrublands and a couple of old vineyards cobbled together in fits and starts over twenty-five square miles at the crossroads of upstate New York’s eleven-lake Finger Lakes region. Though it’s pretty enough, the national forest lacks the plunging waterfalls and steep glacier-carved valleys that make parts of the Finger Lakes so stunning. And it’s a far cry from the nearly forgotten splendor of the ancient eastern forest.

So what’s in it for the U.S. Forest Service? Timber? There’s some nice red oak, some sugar maple and black cherry, but this was a patchwork of worn-out farms in the Depression, and the soil’s none too good. You can still find cellar holes marking some of the hundred-plus farmsteads whose owners took the couple of bucks an acre that the feds offered. Although the current management plan calls for harvesting upward of 400,000 board feet a year, some years they don’t take out anything.

Grass? Four-thousand-plus acres in pasture provides fair to middling grazing for 1,200 head of cattle and 400 dairy cows. Farmers between Albany and Buffalo truck them in to summer here. But the grass hasn’t been rejuvenated since it was seeded in, fifty years ago.

Anything worth mining? Well, there’s the abandoned gravel pit. Hector township used to go in and scrape up some gravel for maintaining the roads that crisscross the forest, but they’ve given up—the good stuff is long gone.

Gas? Now we’re talking.

Suddenly west-central New York is hot prospecting territory for natural gas. Just three years ago, production statewide was less than 17 billion cubic feet, enough to heat maybe 200,000 homes for a year. Old gas leases expired and weren’t renewed. Now, though, industry reps are knocking on doors and people are signing on in droves. State forests got put in the queue and nobody blinked an eye.

Nor did anyone seem too riled when the Forest Service first began negotiating a natural gas lease on the Finger Lakes National Forest. Nine-thousand-acre Sugar Hill State Forest west of Seneca Lake had some wells go in. Though the yearly lease topped out after three years at a meager three bucks per acre, in the most promising areas Sugar Hill’s one-time bonus fee for the mere right to lease bid out at over $300 per acre. The rangers anticipated a similar scenario. They calculated a likely take of $1.3 million right off the bat; not bad for starters. And certainly not bad for a little hobbyhorse national forest whose gross receipts come in well under $30,000 a year.

Yet within a few months the people in this resolutely Republican district had blown off the usual protocols—Forest Service procedure, the possibility of a court case—and gone straight to their town and county reps, their governor and members of Congress to halt, for a spell, gas leasing on forest land. How could one of the smallest national forests bring on so sudden and seemingly unequivocal a response? Indeed, why is it in the system at all?

After the feds bought out the farmers, the Soil Conservation Service ran the place for a while. But in the 㤺s, with the bulk of the land growing up in hardwoods, they passed it off to the Forest Service. The locals, naturally, were fond of it. Everyone showed up during deer season, picked berries in an old but everfruitful blueberry meadow near the crest of the ridge and gave their tots fishing lessons at the ponds. So when the Forest Service was ordered to put the land on the block—an 㥘s Reaganomics thing—the people flooded Congress with calls, letters, petitions. Oral history has it that this was the only time in sixteen years in office that New York City–bred former U.S. Senator Alphonse D’Amato bothered to come rub elbows with upstate homeboys. And there you have it.

Nonetheless, having nearly 11,000 acres of federal land in your township, that’s Hector’s share, can erode your tax base, especially when you’ve got just 4,800 residents to spread the burden over. Less than 3 percent of the royalties would have gone to the county and hence, maybe, the town.

“It’s one thing if it’s a private landowner who’s sold the drilling rights. Get rich, why not?” says Diane Carl, the town board member who drafted Hector’s anti-leasing resolution. “But nobody could even really say what the town would get out of the national forest deal. And the trips in and out were going to be unbelievable.” The Forest Service projected 30,000 one-way trips with big trucks and heavy equipment over town and forest access roads. Hector was obliged to maintain them while waiting anywhere from eighteen to forty years for royalties. “The devastation to the forest, to the animals, ruining a pristine area—nothing added up,” says Carl, who emphasizes that she is not an environmentalist.

As national forests go, the Finger Lakes is simply too small, too homey, not to care deeply about. “This is no remote wildland, but a familiar natural neighborhood,” says Kathy Engel, who lives adjacent to the forest. “Local revenues would have been miniscule in comparison to federal and industry revenue. People were unwilling to sell out their sense of place.”

The flap about the drilling happened just as the Forest Service began revising its management plan. So the community is taking a closer-than-average look at the rest of the mix: grazing, wildlife, timber, recreation.

Policies on grazing and wildlife seem to draw the least heat just now, but timber is sparking controversy. It’s unlikely the locals will unite on what to do about logging as they did on gas drilling. Yet there are issues around clear-cuts that could provide common ground.

It’s sad, but most folks have no idea that the craggy white pine of yore—and even an occasional tulip tree—once could have topped a twenty-plus-story building. Or that the American chestnut sometimes reached eight to ten feet at breast height. Look at the height and the girth of the trees in your average eastern wood lot and double them in your mind’s eye. But that’s history now.

And recreation? Everyone wants the forest to provide it. Recreation is what means the most to the people here. The birdwatcher and the turkey hunter may find common ground in grass, brush land or wood lot management, but the dude on the dirt bike and the hiker may never mix.

Indeed, the pressure is on for the three rangers who are charged with caring for everything on a grossly inadequate budget. “The most dramatic, the neatest, thing about this forest is the community,” forester Mike Dockry says. May he feel thus two years hence when the plan is complete. Population projections and pressures being what they are, this forest could be a laboratory for the future, a test case for the scenarios that could play out somewhere down the line in other eastern national forests.

Although timber harvesting is unlikely to go by the board, community involvement will surely affect how it’s done. The current management plan, for example, has 350 acresר.1 percent of forest holdings—set aside for reversion to old growth. These set-asides are scattered and meaninglessly small; most occur along trails. Some believe the planned old-growth corridors will keep people from seeing what’s really going on in the woods. Others see them as a courtesy to hikers and campers who, after all, are free to wander wherever they please.

Will the old-growth set-asides be dramatically increased in the next plan? Will the Forest Service eschew clear-cuts in the Finger Lakes National Forest? Will the dirt bikers get their own trail? “The people’s range of values is changing,” says Martha Twarkins, assistant district ranger. “What does the community want? Whatever that is will heavily influence future management.” The trick—in a community where some core groups are contentious, others merely vocal, still others mute—is hearing that range of values and then somehow balancing them in tandem with sound ecosystem values. Themselves open to debate.

People sitting

Like birds on the fence

Listening, still.