Roads fragment forest habitat on the Tongass National Forest. Forest Magazine file photo
This issue of Forest Magazine examines one of former U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth’s “four threats”: invasive species. These threats—the other three are fire and fuels, loss of open space and unmanaged recreation—all have a common denominator. They are the result of Forest Service negligence and malfeasance.
Regarding fire and fuels, Bosworth said “we must return forests to the way they were historically, then get fire back into the ecosystem when it’s safe.” But it is the Forest Service that has zealously suppressed forest fires for 100 years, with little thought given to fire’s ecological role. Even today, while it professes to know better, the Forest Service still measures success by the percentage of fire ignitions suppressed immediately. Its goal, in fact, is to halve the present “failure rate” of fires that escape initial attack from 2 percent to 1 percent.
When he addressed the loss of open space, Bosworth promised the Forest Service would help “balance growth and development with open space conservation.” Yet throughout its history, the Forest Service has been a major engine of unsustainable economic development in the rural West. The Forest Service routinely subsidized old-growth timber logging to prop up logging companies and the small towns that were dependent upon them.
Bosworth also said that off-road vehicles “are a use that should be managed carefully.” But there is no bigger booster of off-road vehicles—and the companies that get rich making them—than the Forest Service. In California alone, the Forest Service has received more than $116 million from state off-road vehicle license fees to provide these loud, smelly, erosive beasts with national forest access.
When it came to invasive species, Bosworth’s promise was furthest from reality: “Public lands—especially federal lands—have become the last refuge for endangered species—the last place where they can find the habitat they need to survive. If invasives take over, these imperiled animals and plants will have nowhere else to go.”
Yet virtually everything the Forest Service does has promoted the invasion of alien weeds. A hundred years of livestock grazing, logging, mining and the construction of more then 400,000 miles of roads have provided the seedbeds and vectors for hundreds of invasive plant and animal species. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the federal lands least devastated by outsider species are wilderness areas, where logging, road building and motorized vehicles are barred by law.
In the evolutionary battle between endangered species and invaders, the Forest Service’s actions speak louder than Bosworth’s words ever did. For example, a century of Forest Service logging in the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth rainforests has driven the northern spotted owl to the brink of extinction. This patchwork quilt of clear-cuts also may have contributed to the barred owl’s invasion into spotted owl habitat, further endangering this rare forest bird.
The Forest Service simply refuses to stop invasive species at their root causes. The agency chooses toxic pesticides over limiting livestock grazing; it chooses shooting barred owls over protecting old-growth forests. To Bosworth’s four threats ought to be added a fifth—the Forest Service itself.