Will the US Forest Service rise again?
  By Heisaburo Tezuka, Advisor, Forest Policy Research Institute  

1.     What happened under the Clinton administration

 Having traced for the past ten plus years the annual report of the US Forest Service, I am watching with keen interest to see if any significant changes in national forest management will be brought about by the new Republican administration.

The Forest Service has distanced itself gradually from active timber management since 1992 while spending time and energy on exploring the methodologies of ecosystem management, leaving the increasing deficit (expenses over revenues) to be taken care of by taxpayer's money. Shelving the issue may be a better word than exploring the methodologies.

The foresters having been somewhat resigned and the newly infused environmental advocates not capable of forest management, preparation of systematic manuals for ecosystem management has been in a stagnant state without definitive clues.

 With regard to the financial state, the expenses over revenues under the normal timber harvest regime in 1988 (including 25% payment to counties where national forests exist) was $942 million but in 1998 it increased to $2,540 million.

The harvest volumes in 1988 and 1998 were 63.0 million m³ and 18.7 million m³ respectively. Since both old growth and second growth forests are off limits to final harvest, what took place were high intensity thinning and salvage/improvement cutting of forest damaged by insects, climate and fire.

While touching old growth forests became a taboo for the sake of wildlife protection, second growth forests have not reached the determined final cutting ages. Although timber production dropped drastically, the number of employees (full-time equivalent) in 1998 was 32,000 which was roughly 90% of that in 1988.

The administrative setup of 9 regional offices and 123 supervisor's offices remain unchanged. 

It was Dale Robertson, Chief of the Forest Service in 1992, who announced the policy shift from the long-exercised timber management to ecosystem management. He had worked in regional offices and was appointed Chief in 1985 jumping over departmental heads at the headquarters from the division director's post.

He was a very able forester and shouldered great expectations of the staff members. He proposed the policy shift only in an attempt to appease the mounting public opinions in favor of nature protection and, therefore, did not have a clear idea on how it could be translated in real terms to forest management.

I had that impression when I met with him in Washington D.C. in the summer of 1993. He would have produced a prototype of an ecosystem forest management manual but was removed from the post in the autumn.  

2.     History of the National Forest

 The situation described above was when the National Forest, after one century since its inception, was under aggressive pressure from environmental movements.

Let us review briefly the historical background. The National Forest was established in response to the public outcry in the late 19th century for prevention of land devastation and conservation of forests which was a backlash of frontier development mindset since the nation founding.

Following the National Parks Act of 1872, the foundation of the National Forest was laid out by the Creative Act of 1891 and the Organic Administration Act of 1897, and its administration was transferred from the Department of Interior (DOI) to Department of Agriculture (DOA) in 1906, when the name was changed from Forest Reserve to National Forest.

Since then, supported by the Weeks Law of 1911 and the Clarke-Mcnary Act of 1924, the Forest Service purchased publicly and privately-owned forests of headwater conservation value in danger of devastation and the total area reached about 75 million ha.

It was under President Theodore Roosevelt in the early part of the 20th century when the area of the National Forest expanded substantially. In 1916 the National Park Service was created to administer the forests remaining under the DOI and the total park area increased gradually and now covers about 32 million ha.

The first law concerning forests, the Creative Act of 1891, was subtitled as forest reserves law but the reason the name had been changed to National Forest and transferred from the DOI to DOA reflected the policy change: not solely preserving natural forests but pursuing both conservation and forestry production.

That policy shift owed a great deal to Fernow who is regarded as the founder of American Forestry and his successor Pinchot who built the foundation of the Forest Service as the first Chief. Since then, a number of forestry colleges and faculties were established one after another, which sent a good many graduates to the Forest Service.

The fundamental management policy was Sustained Yield, which was to harvest old forests and establish on logged-over lands second growth forests which had about a 100-year rotation.

This policy was initially implemented based on internal regulations but was legitimized by the Sustained Yield Forest Management (SYFM) Act of 1944.

Public functions of forests other than timber production such as land and water conservation and recreation were matters for additional consideration and the concept of meeting management cost by generated timber revenue did not exist.

It is a continuing nature to date of the National Forest. It is a good contrast to the Japanese National Forest, which was demanded of excess revenue every year and contributed substantially to the national coffer.

I would like to add that in 1946 during the time of the US military occupation it was the intention of the forester group within the GHQ Natural Resources Department to place a forester as head of the Japanese Forest Bureau.

They could not accept the Forest Bureau to be headed by a non-forester official since they had been used to working in the Forest Service in the US lead by a forester chief. 

After the War, reflecting the increasing demand on national forests for enhanced public functions along with the improving quality of life style, the SYFM Act of 1944 was transformed as the Multiple Use Sustained Yield (MUSY) Act of 1960.

Multiple use means timber, watershed, outdoor recreation, range, and wildlife and fish. The principle of this legislation pre-empted 30 years in advance the sustainable forest management concept launched at the 1992 Earth Summit as something brand new. 

Understanding the difficulties of attaining compatibility of both wildlife protection and economic activities on a same forest stand led to the need for putting aside areas to be excluded from timber management.

As a result, the Wilderness Act was enacted in 1964 and Wilderness areas were to be designated by congressional resolutions. It cannot be denied that the purpose of the National Parks and the theoretical boundaries between the Parks and Wilderness became rather blurry.  

In 1991, when I visited a Wilderness area under the Mt. Baker National Forest in Washington State, I asked about the differences. Satisfactory answers were not given to me as to how the two practically differ with regard to recreational uses by the general public.

I had an impression that a Wilderness area within the National Forest is tantamount to a quasi-National Park. As of 1985, the total area of forests managed by the Forest Service was 75.604 million ha, of which timberland occupies 34.488 million ha and wilderness area 12.911 million ha.

The remainder is other types of land such as range, shrub and rocky areas, which are in the Japanese terms other non-stocked land.

 Even with the creation of the Wilderness area system, protection of wildlife never ceased to be a matter of consideration for the management of other forests in general. This fact carried a great wight in legal interpretation by federal courts at a later date which judged the self-admonitory principles to be regarded as obligations of the National Forest.

  3.     Formulation of Management Plan

 In 1976, the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) was enacted which accommodated procedures for incorporating public opinions in the process of preparing a forest management plan.

This act stipulates in detail how timber management should be done.

For example, final cutting age of second growth forests was to be determined so as to maximize mean annual increment. Accordingly, it is currently set for 90 - 100 years.

Therefore, there are very few second growth forests which reached a harvestable stage.

There is an appeal system built in the Act as a means of incorporating public opinions on a government's draft of management plan. The original intent was not to disregard the wishes of direct stakeholders but ,since it was stipulated that any US citizen has a right to appeal, it virtually gave very good opportunities for environmental campaigns to thrust wildlife protection.

 Nevertheless, the Act paved the way for the 123 National Forest management units to formulate management plans. The plan making since progressed and in 1985 there were 25 plans finalized and 67 in draft forms.

It appeared to be a smooth sail until then and in 1986 all the plans were scheduled to be finalized.

In 1985, however, a small incident that occurred in the plan making process in the Pacific Northwest (PN) Region developed into an event that shook the entire management policy.

  4.     Spotted owl issue

 Against the draft Regional Guide (which gave plan making directions to the National Forest offices) the PN Region made public in 1984, four environmental organizations i.e. National Wildlife Federation, Oregon Wildlife Federation, Oregon Natural Resources Council and Lane County Audubon Society filed an appeal in 1985 according to the stipulation of the NFMA. Of the nine regions in the country only the PN Region received an appeal against the regional guide.

 The contention of the appeal was that protection measures of birds called the northern spotted owl that inhabited the timberland in the region were inadequate.

It was in 1973 when the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was enacted but the spotted owls were little known to the general public at that time.

A graduate student at University of Oregon named Forsman conducted a study on spotted owls under the guidance of Professor White who also worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service and a dissertation he produced in 1972 shed some light on the distribution and behaviors of spotted owls.

They were found in old growth forests in Washington and Oregon along the Pacific Coast west of the Cascade which are rich in soil and major timber producing areas, and those in the northern part of California.

The body is about 40 cm long and when wings are fully extended it measures about 1.5 m. According to the survey results when they were listed under the ESA, the total number of pairs in the three states were 2,022, of which 1,387 were in National Forests, 413 in the BLM forests, 109 in state/public forests and 113 in private forests.  

The Forest Service decided to reject the appeal on the grounds that the Wilderness area in the PN Region had already been increased by 762,000 ha in 1984 in response to the growing public opinion for nature protection.

That measure made the area of timberland 7.064 million ha whereas that of Wilderness 1.861 million ha. If 0.73 million ha of the adjacent National Park is added to the calculation, the protected are covered 2.591 million ha and the Forest Service considered the two figures well-balanced.

If the government was forceful enough, the issues may have been settled at that time.

There were only 4 organizations appealing any way and the Wilderness area had been considerably increased.

The environmental groups might have been trying to be a little pushy.

When I visited the PN Regional Office in 1987 during the time the issue was starting to grow bigger, several officials shared this view in regretful retrospect.  

"A great deal has happened since 1985" according to an annual report of the Forest Service written at a later date.

The upset started when the then Secretary of Agriculture ordered a review of the draft PN Regional Guide despite the will of the Forest Service.

Environmental groups gained two large points by this: one is that if the circle of appeal is expanded more can be attained, and the other is that in order to achieve the original goal of old growth protection it is more effective to push for protection of spotted owls rather than demanding expansion of Wilderness areas.

It turned out that the redraft of the Forest service's Regional Guide received 40 thousand appeals from all over the country for the reason of insufficient protection of spotted owls.

A series of concessions offered by the Forest Service did not appease the opponents and same patterns repeated with added sensationalism of the press.

It urged the government in 1988 to reject all the appeals of a similar nature and decided to adopt the Regional Guide backed up by the consent of relevant government authorities.

Draft forest management plan for the 19 National Forests in the PN Region were subsequently made public. This hard-line measure was somewhat off a good timing.

During the preceding three years spotted owls had become too well-known nationally.

 Environmental groups filed a lawsuit to the federal district court at Seattle and the battle ground moved to court rooms since then. Judge Dwyer always sided with environmental advocates and once suit was filed he ordered injunction of timber sales.

Voices of forest industries who filed counter suits were not taken up with significance.

Timber harvest volumes dwindled sharply in the ensuing years since timber sales were stopped if the court judges protection of spotted owls is insufficient. The background of this picture was that old growth forests in private ownership had been nearly entirely cut over and converted to young second growth by that time and the only remaining ones were in the National Forest.

Another picture was that there was excessive number of lawyers in the U.S. 

There were about 15,000 lawyers in Japan at that time but in the U.S. the number was more than 600,000.

As nicknamed as a suing society, there are rampant public and private lawsuits in the U.S. and there exists a sense of superiority of judiciary over executive.

The rich funding sources of environmental groups offer opportune working fields for lawyers to tackle the government.

Environmental groups seized a perfect stage to demand listing of spotted owls as endangered when the government was plagued by lawsuits.

Pressed by these movements, the Fish and Wildlife Service listed spotted owls as endangered under the ESA.

Protection of owls became more than a simple agreements concerning forest management between the Forest Service and environmental groups but developed into a matter of legal procedures, which made the Forest Service more constricted.

On the other hand, savoring the victory, environmental groups started moving further to stop harvesting of old growth forests outside the spotted owl zones for the protection of other wildlife such as marbled murrelet.  

At this juncture, the last-resort idea of Robertson on ecosystem management as mentioned earlier was floated. However, as the Democratic Party candidate Clinton won the presidential election in the fall of 1992 and Gore who was a lobbyist for environmental groups became vice-president, the Forest Service was pressed down from the top and lost ground to continue legal battles.

The Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan as an outcome of the Seattle Conference in the spring of 1993 was intended to alleviate damage to local economies premised on a large reduction of harvest volume. It was as Gore planned it to be.

It is not hard to imagine the impact of PN Region's harvest reduction on the whole National Forest.

Of the total National Forestfs harvest volume of 63 million m³ in 1988, 28 million m³ was from the PN Region, and of the total sales value $1.25 billion the PN Region generated $0.82 billion.

Environmental groups thus stabbed both in terms of quality and quantity the heart of the Forest Service's timber production section.

Spotted owls played a role of its strangulation by inhabiting the revenue sources.

The policy of hardly touching old growth forests was not contained within the PN Region but extended to all National Forests in the country. 

 

5.     Collapse of a forester-headed regime  

When I visited with Chief Robertson in the summer of 1993, he showed me three newspapers and said boastfully "Every newspaper is saying I should be let go quickly. It's been six years since I met you last. If you come six years from now you will still find me here."

He must have been confident that balancing of timber management and wildlife protection could not be done by anyone else but Gore probably did not care and replaced him in the fall.

And the successor was Jack Thomas, a bird specialist at a research station in the West.

If we were to think of a Japanese equivalent, it would be something like a division director of Forest & Forest Products Research Institute suddenly being appointed Director General of the Forestry Agency.

It was blatant and daring personnel management. It was practically a declaration to change the character of the Forest Service by discontinuing the forester-headed regime which had been observed since its founding days.

Thomas was probably used as a symbol of the declaration. It resulted in eight years of chaotic situation since then: it was not clear as to what kind of mission the National Forest administered by the Forest Service would hold, if forest management would be actively pursued, and if it would move toward quasi-National Park or not.  

Thomas stayed on the post for three years. He proposed a employee reduction plan but left the post without realizing much. He was replaced by Michael Dombeck in 1996, who was working for the Fish and Wildlife Service. He, too, was incapable of building a forest management system at field levels.

Watching the ever-increasing expenses over revenues, the Government Accounting Office(GAO) submitted reports to the Congress in 1997 and 1998 criticizing the decision-making mechanism of the Forest Service as unclear and making recommendations for improvement.

Nonetheless, apart from the introduction of an admission fee program to Wilderness areas and the preventive measures against forest fires, not much improvement has been made.

Republican congressmen tried intermittently to increase contingent harvesting in the National Forest but these too faced opposition of environmental groups who took them to court. 

Under the circumstances, environmental groups thought hard on how to assure continued protection of old growth forests even if political leadership changes.

In 1999, they came up with a strategy to preserve Roadless Areas and started pressing the Forest Service.

The meaning of the Roadless Areas is literally those areas where forest roads are yet to be built for timber production. Fixing Roadless Areas and banning road building would virtually prevent harvesting activities.

If forests are to be precluded from harvesting, they should be in principle designated as Wilderness. It requires approval of a state and Congress and it would not be possible when the Republicans held the majority. Environmental groups thus urged the Forest Service to fix Roadless Areas and ban harvesting.

Before the Roadless Area Rules were finalized there was the presidential election in the fall of 2000. The Rules would have been implemented as written and that would have led the National Forest to become quasi-National Park.

Fortunately or unfortunately, it did not turn out that way. The lame duck Clinton administration issued the final Roadless Area Rules in January 2001 and scheduled them to take effect in March, but a change of guards took place.

The new Secretary of Agriculture Venneman extended the review period by two months, and in may she stated that the Rules would be kept but revisions would be made to their implementation aspects.

In the meantime, a forest products company and the state of Idaho which has large area of National Forests filed a lawsuit against the Roadless Area Rules. Having received no counter arguments from the Forest service under the new administration, a federal judge named Lodge supported the plaintiff's assertion that proper procedures were not followed in the Rules making process.

The Rules were up in the air. Environmental groups appealed to a higher court but it is not clear when a decision will be made.

 The above is a brief description of what happened during the past eight years.

Aside from the details, I observed it as an American phenomenon in which forestry technologies were ignored under the name of environment.

Without having a heavy-handed Vice-president Gore who was an environmental advocate, it is interesting to see where the Forest Service is going from here. 

 

6.  Salient points to watch out 

 In March, 2001, the Bush administration replaced the incumbent Chief with regional forester Dale Bosworth.

Does it mean reinstatement of the traditional forester-led personnel regimen?

The second point is whether sustainable harvest of timberland will be resuscitated in order to contribute to local economies and forest industries.

The third point is whether the new administration will appeal to the public the fact that the U.S. wood consumption is heavily dependent on Canadian old forests and raise awareness that sustainable timber production is the responsibility of the U.S which is rich in forest resources.

 I remember the conversations I had in 1991 and 1993 with Dave Stere, who was deputy director of the Oregon Department of Forestry and had deep professional insights.

According to him, when one justice is emphasized in the U.S. it tends to go extreme with out due consideration to other implications as illustrated by the Prohibition Law and the McCarthy campaign, but after some time lapses it usually swings back to a well-balanced position.

There is a view widely accepted, however, that as far as environment is concerned, even if some excessive reactions were observed, it is a strong historical current and although there may be some modifications it is basically difficult for the National Forest to return to the former timer management mode.

 The Bush administration replaced Chief of the Forest service as a fist step and, as mentioned above, with regard to the pending issue of Roadless Area Rules adopted a position to accept them as written but make revisions as to the implementation aspects.

It seems to be a tactic to avoid being labeled as anti-environment and at the same time act flexibly.

The forest industries are dissatisfied that overall negation was not expressed and environmental groups are worried that the Rules would be practically ineffectuated.

There will still be various developments over this issue.   

 

7.    Lessons to be learned

 I sincerely hope that the Forest Service will return to the traditional state when it was appreciated by the public as a fine government agency and that the leading role of forest technologies will be reestablished based on the balance of environmental and economic policies.

I also hope that the US National Forest will be a good object of observation and cooperation and provide lessons to be learned for the Japanese National Forest which had a new start toward the new century to place more importance on public functions of forests.

The objective of the fundamental reform of the National Forest in Japan in the last hour of the 20th century was to enhance public functions.

It naturally includes protection of wildlife, which will be focused within the co-habitaion zone. Protection of wildlife will be relatively easy in the areas excluded from timber production but preparation of a manual to attain that goal will be difficult inside or outside the zone.

Eight years have been spent at the U.S. National Forest without drawing conclusions. 

After all, it will be appropriate and reasonable to prepare a manual somewhat self-admonitory to the effect that those working in the field should enrich their knowledge of and affection toward wildlife and try to protect them to the extent possible.

I think it important to make the mechanism clear to both insiders and outsiders in order to avoid confusion in the future.

 It is still unclear how and if the U.S. National Forest will rise again.

It is nonetheless expected that it will move toward the direction of demarcating admonitory control and legislative enforcement with regard to wildlife protection.

 Note:

1)      Annual reports of 1999 and after have not been published at the time of this writing.

2)      It is a prorated estimate since the number of employees by departments were not reported after 1992.

3)      The National Park's budget for the year 2000 was $1.45 billion and the number of employees was 17,000.

4)    Episode 31 from "The path of forests" by author

5)     The number of lawyers in the U.S. was 612,000 in 1983 and 921,000 in 1999 where as that in Japan in 2001 is 18,000.