4/28/97

KUFM / KGPR

T.M. Power

Forest Service Jujitsu

The US Forest Service has released its preliminary plans for the Upper Columbia River Ecosystem , a huge area the size of the entire nation of France, stretching from the Continental Divide in Montana to the Cascade range in Washington and Oregon and from the Canadian border down into Utah and Wyoming. The Forest Service’s preliminary proposal is, in the agency’s words, to aggressively manage the federal lands in this sprawling area, to improve ecosystem health. The explanation and justification for this focus is entirely environmental: many parts of the natural landscapes in the interior Pacific Northwest, the Forest Service tells us, are deteriorating and action is required to stop and reverse that decline.

There are two competing explanations for the energy and dollars that our federal land management agencies have put into this effort. One is that they have heard the message coming from the American people that management of these public lands primarily for commercial commodity purposes, timber, cattle and sheep forage, and metal mining, is no longer acceptable. Americans see these federal lands as a part of their natural heritage to be managed for wildlife, recreation, and scenic beauty not managed as commercial warehouses for the benefit of private businesses. The ecosystem management approach, from this point of view, represents a shift to looking at the whole forest rather than just the harvestable trees and asking what steps need to be taken to preserve healthy forests, streams, and mountains.

The alternative explanation for this new planning effort is that it simply represents a Forest Service effort to dodge the environmental constraints that have increasingly limited the quantity of trees that the Forest Service has been able to harvest. The impacts that past timber harvests have had on endangered species, fisheries, water quality, wildlife habitat, and scenic beauty have increasingly imposed limits on further timber harvests. That is why timber harvests from our National Forests in the Pacific Northwest have plummeted during the 1990s.

As timber harvests in the Cascade region’s ancient forests have been drastically downsized by federal court orders, the political pressure to make up some of the difference by increasing harvests in the interior Pacific Northwest, eastern Washington and Oregon, Idaho, and Western Montana, has increased. One explanation for the Interior Columbia River Ecosystem study is that it was intended to lay the basis for increased timber harvests in a region not yet protected by federal court orders.

Congressman Foley of eastern Washington was explicit about this tradeoff of increased interior harvests in exchange for decreased Cascade region harvests. But the Forest Service could not engage is such explicit political log rolling. It needed a public policy justification for boosting harvests from this region.

Forest Service skeptics see "ecosystem management" as providing this justification: We will no longer harvest trees in order to feed commercial lumber mills or to directly or indirectly feed the raw log export market to the Far East. We will no longer harvest trees as part of an effort to "stabilized" communities. We have a new reason to harvest trees: The forests need us to do so; the forests’ health demands increased timber harvests; without an ongoing, aggressive harvest program, our forested mountains will continue to deteriorate environmentally. Even though roaded timber harvests have negative environmental impacts, not harvesting, apparently, has even greater negative environmental impacts. From now on, roaded timber harvests will be part of a necessary environmental rescue effort.

Of course, at the very broad level of planning that the Upper Columbia River Ecosystem Management effort represents, we have no idea what the Forest Service actually plans to do. What we do know is that it proposes aggressive human intervention into almost all parts of the forest not officially protected by wilderness designation. Since forest health and environmental protection will be the objective, not commercial timber harvest even though commercial timber harvest will take place, normal business accounting need not apply. If a particular management plan and timber harvest involves large losses to the tax payer, well, that is a small price to pay for forest health. The increasingly effective objection to timber sales in the interior West, that they are below cost, can be bypassed by justifying the roads and timber harvests as environmental protection measures.

The Forest Service may be in the midst of an amazing piece of public policy jujitsu: taking the environmentalists’ concern about the destruction of ecosystems and converting ecosystem concepts into a justification for ongoing uneconomic timber harvests throughout all of the forested lands not explicitly set off limits to timber harvest by Congress. This would be particularly perverse given that the Forest Service’s own studies point out that the areas with natural systems that are the least damaged or degraded are the unroaded, unlogged areas of the Pacific Northwest. The Forest Service may be on the verge of using ecosystem health to enter and degrade the last remaining healthy wildlands in the Pacific Northwest. That would indeed be by an amazing feat of public policy jujitsu!