3/16/98
KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
The Battle for Control of the US Forest Service
The US Forest Service is caught in a vicious political cross-fire as it seeks to go about the business of redefining its mission for the beginning of the 21st century. Since the end of the Second World War the Forest Service has been focused upon extracting wood fiber from the National Forests. This, it was hoped, would keep housing costs low and help a nation recovering from both the Great Depression and a world war achieve one part of the American Dream: home ownership. This shift to commodity extraction represented a rather dramatic shift on the part of the Forest Service. For the first half-century of its existence, the Forest Service had primarily played a custodial role, protecting forests, watersheds, and wildlife while letting private industrial timberlands provide the wood fiber our growing economy demanded. For the last half-century, the Forest Service lands themselves largely became industrial timber lands and private and public lands competed with one another to see who could accelerate harvests the fastest.
During that last half-century, however, American’s environmental sensitivities changed dramatically. The gigantic clearcuts and parade of loaded logging trucks that the Forest Service once viewed with pride became symbols of environmental destruction. The idea that National Forests, public lands, were being mangled in this way outraged many of the American people. The demand for a different type of US Forest Service grew louder and louder.
The Forest Service appears to have heard those angry objections to commercial extractive values dominating public lands. The last two Forest Service Chiefs had backgrounds in biology, not commercial timber management. The current chief, Mike Dombeck, has made explicit that the Forest Service is returning to its roots, emphasizing watershed health and restoration and sustainable forest ecosystem management. He recognizes that what the American people demand of the Forest Service has changed, as it has over the Forest Service’s 100 year history, in a "gradual unfolding of a national purpose" for these lands.
This explicit shift away from primarily emphasizing commodity extraction to active stewardship of a much broader range of forest values has angered the timber industry. The anti-environmental Republican leadership on the various congressional natural resource committees have respond with a serious attack on the Forest Service. Craig and Chenoweth from Idaho and Murkowski and Young of Alaska have written the Forest Service threatening to slash its budget to a level that would only allow it to fight fires and provide other necessary health and safety services. This "Gang of Four" Western Republican leaders says, in effect, "since you cannot provide the flow of natural resources from the forests to the mills, you have failed in your mission and should be defunded almost completely."
The Gang of Four label the reduced level of funding they have in mind "custodial management." There is a perverse historical twist in terminology here. Many environmental groups want the Forest Service to return to the mission that occupied the agency during its first half-century of its existence which they also label "custodial care."
The role of a custodian is not a passive one. Custodians have the responsibility of assuring that the basic facilities for which they have responsibility can provide a full flow of services indefinitely into the future. A custodian has to invest in protecting and maintaining the physical facilities so that users can continue to enjoy their services. Just as the custodial staff of a school or factory has to repair the roof or repair the plumbing so that the facility can continue to be used, so too do the custodians of our National Forests have to protect the health and vitality of the forest, its watersheds, its fisheries and wildlife habitat, and its recreation potential.
Maybe it is time for a little political jujitsu here. Maybe the environmental community should join with the Gang of Four in demanding that the Forest Service primarily shift to a custodial role for our national forests. Of course environmentalists would recognize the full range of valuable environmental services that our forested mountains provide. Environmental interests would focus on the forest, not just on the harvestable trees and would support funding the full range of Forest Service custodial responsibilities. What they would agree with the Western Gang of Four on is that commercial roading and logging on National Forest lands would no longer be a major focus. It would take place only when the logging assisted in the pursuit of other forest values. That approach might actually boost overall timber harvests on public lands because it would put the environmental objectives up front rather than treating them as afterthoughts or constraints that later trip-up planned timber sales.
In any case, it would be fun to watch Helen Chenoweth and the Zero Cut folks working out the details of their agreement to return the Forest Service to the role of National Forest custodian.