A New Mission for Changing Times
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In 1989, while working on the first spotted owl lawsuit, I visited the Willamette National Forest’s Blue River Ranger District. I was touring every district within the spotted owl’s Oregon and Washington range to determine which timber sales proposed logging old-growth forests. As I sat grinding my way through environmental assessment after environment assessment—a dull task to be sure—a U.S. Forest Service employee asked if he could talk to me during his lunch break. “Sure,” I replied. After we found a quiet place outside where we would not be overheard, he asked me, “How can I start an organization of Forest Service workers who want to protect our national forests?” That’s when I first met Jeff DeBonis, the founder of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. We chatted about charitable foundations that provide funds for start-up environmental groups, how to incorporate a nonprofit and other nuts-and-bolts matters. Three things about DeBonis struck me during our brief conversation. He was passionate in his belief that the Forest Service had lost its soul and become the timber industry’s handmaiden. He was equally convinced that the agency had to stop old-growth logging. And he was confident that other Forest Service employees shared his heretical views, but were afraid to speak out. This issue of Forest Magazine takes a look at the twenty years following our chat. It chronicles where the Forest Service and FSEEE have come from in order to reach where we are today. History is instructive, but today’s challenges are not going to be solved by reflecting upon the past. Three issues—climate change, forest fires and wilderness—will define the next twenty years of public forest policy much the same as old-growth forests and the spotted owl defined the last. Public land managers are no strangers to climate change. My old forest ecology textbook, published in 1973, states that “major and continued climatic change is by now a well-established fact and must constantly be kept in mind in any study of forest succession.” What is different today is that forest managers can no longer simply anticipate and respond to climate change; they have an ethical imperative to ameliorate the potential for abrupt and catastrophic change. Our public lands must be managed to store the greatest sustainable amount of carbon possible. Forest ecosystems can help save our planet. The second issue defining forest policy is fire, and almost everything the public thinks it knows about forest fires is wrong. Fire is not bad, wrong, evil or inherently destructive. For 10,000 years millions of people lived in North America, and not one was employed as a firefighter. Fire is indifferent to our competitive zeal to “win” the fight against it. Fire will always be with us, and ecologists know that learning to live with fire will make or break our efforts to use forests to sequester climate-changing carbon. Research has confirmed that a natural fire cycle is necessary to achieve the greatest level of forest carbon storage. Fire gives the advantage to large, thick-barked trees that store lots of carbon by thinning out smaller, thin-barked trees that store little carbon. The third component is wilderness. Forty-five years ago, Congress sought to secure for the American people the “benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.” The threats to wilderness cited then, including “an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization,” are even more pressing today. The need and the opportunity for major additions to our wilderness system have never been more congruent. Climate change, forest fires and wilderness—that’s an agenda to keep FSEEE busy as we enter into our next twenty years. |