Protecting the nation’s water sources may become one of the agency’s priorities. Photo ©Randy Beacham
There is a striking moment in the 2005 U.S. Forest Service-funded documentary, The Greatest Good. Towards its close, the film probes the uproar that accompanied the agency’s unilateral decision in the late 1960s to launch massive timber operations in the Bitterroot and Monongahela National Forests. The “Oh My God” clear-cuts that scarred previously green hillsides infuriated residents in Montana and West Virginia, sparking local protests, statehouse and congressional investigations and federal lawsuits. One result of the controversy was the 1976 passage of the National Forest Management Act, which required significant public participation in the agency’s process of creating land-management strategies. Reflecting on the Forest Service’s actions at that time, former Chief Dale Robertson confessed in The Greatest Good that while “silviculturally it made a lot of sense…to the public it was like a poke in the eye.”
The agency’s leaders in the 1960s lacked Robertson’s retrospective insight, assuming instead that their technical expertise and professional ethics were unquestionable. Their knowledge was power, the power to do what they—and they alone—thought best for these public lands. They were shocked to discover that Montana ranchers and West Virginia turkey hunters disagreed with this assumption; they were staggered when the courts and Congress opened up the Forest Service’s decision-making process, forcing it to withstand public scrutiny. The reverberations have been so profound that the agency has been wandering in the wilderness ever since in search of a mission to replace its post-World War II purpose: to harvest logs from national forests to feed the domestic marketplace.
Just how hard it has been for the Forest Service to adapt to a new mission is illustrated by the shifting array of terms it has used ever since to re-brand itself—from Multiple Use in the 1960s to New Perspectives of the 1980s; from Ecosystems Management in the 1990s to the Four Threats early in the new millennium. Today, on the brink of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it looks like we might be seeing some genuine change.
To be fair, the Forest Service’s decades-long confusion is understandable; since the 1940s, its objective had been quite clear—to accelerate the flow of saw logs heading to mills and markets. To accomplish this, the agency began clear-cutting the national forests in the 1950s. The technique met production targets but damaged sensitive ecosystems and produced a backlash from the public, who wanted its national forests to be green and inviting, not marked by cutover ridgelines, scoured streams and debris-littered open spaces.
The new science of ecology, moreover, garnered practitioners whose studies helped them understand the dark side of clear-cutting. Armed with defensible knowledge, this generation made its demands felt in Congress. Some advocated for the Wilderness Act; others championed the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. They also helped pass the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, which transformed the legal environment in which the Forest Service operated.
Alas, agency leadership tended to ignore this transformation, rebuffing demands for a different form of stewardship on the national forests, rejecting constructive criticism and operating as if it could evade or finesse the law. Not until the spotted owl controversy erupted in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s—swiftly followed by Clinton’s Forest Conference and the Northwest Forest Plan—was it forced to more fully comply with the National Forest Management Act.
The Forest Service mishandled internal matters, too. The new environmental regulations required it to employ professionals in nontraditional fields, among them law, hydrology, wildlife biology, archaeology and sociology. Some of those hired were women and minorities, whose increased presence diversified an agency that since its creation in 1905 had been a white-male preserve. Integrating this complex workforce proved difficult, and in the 1980s and 1990s, it was hit with a wave of lawsuits alleging racial discrimination, gender bias or reverse discrimination. Yet another marker of this tumult was the 1989 launch of the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, which has promoted whistleblowing to compel the agency to abide by the law and to embrace a more ecological perspective in forest management.
The agency has tried on different mission statements to replace its former timber production mantle, but none has met the bewildering challenges that lie before us in the twenty-first century, with gyrating climate regimes; intensifying and lengthening fire seasons; explosive population growth in and around national forests; and the rapid loss of habitat and the wildlife it has sustained. But the emerging concept of “ecosystem services,” currently gaining traction in upper echelons of Forest Service leadership, may provide some much needed vision for the future of the agency. Certainly this concept is radical enough to compel a substantial reconfiguration of its managerial ethos.
Ecosystems services refer to the processes that natural systems provide human beings, which are often taken for granted and rarely considered in financial terms. Examples include clean drinking water, crop and native vegetation pollination and the maintenance of livable climates (think carbon sequestration). Even though the idea that we should establish an economic value for these environmental resources was broached in the mid-1880s, it did not penetrate contemporary discourse or public land-management strategies until the late twentieth century. With the publication of Hawken, Lovins and Lovins’ Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution in 1999, we have become much more aware of the critical need to pay the real costs of the resources we consume, making the environment an integral part of any bottom-line calculation.
This valuation has already had a profound influence on the behavior of some communities and corporations, and it has seeped into the Forest Service’s deliberations over the past decade. I first learned of Natural Capitalism during discussions in 2001 with the agency’s senior leadership at a workshop held, appropriately enough, at Grey Towers, the home of the agency’s first chief, Gifford Pinchot.
In the last decade, Forest Service researchers have launched experiments to assess their ability to evaluate the costs of maintaining soil nutrients, maximizing biodiversity, calibrating rates of carbon sequestration within tree species and measuring the real cost of clean water. All of these steps are crucial for the creation of transparent markets by which these and other services will be valued.
None is more critical to the West than water, however. Upwards of 60 percent of the region’s precipitation falls first on a national forest. “Forests are nature’s sponge, storing and filtering vast amounts of water and slowly releasing it in summer when it is most needed,” says Rick Cables, Rocky Mountain Region regional forester. “When we turn on our faucets, we tap into our forests—so our water supply depends on the health of our forests and their streams.” Putting a price on this complicated relationship is difficult, but Cables is among those pushing for a user fee for the water that flows through urban water systems to help underwrite upstream watershed-restoration projects.
This example is but one of the ongoing policy discussions that signal a dramatic shift in the Forest Service’s function away from timber production and fire suppression and toward habitat regeneration. Yet for these on-the-ground transformations to succeed, it requires a parallel change in rhetoric. Sally Collins, former associate chief of the agency and now the inaugural director of the Office of Ecosystems Services and Markets, says: “Much of our vocabulary for speaking about the growing and tending of forests came from the production forestry era. It’s not very suitable for talking about how to provide ecosystem services. At best, it is confusing; at worst, inaccurate.” From her new bully pulpit she will be in a strong position to press the Forest Service to reformulate the words it employs and thus the actions it takes. This is how new paradigms take root.