Ghosts of Forest Service past

President Obama just appointed a new chief of the US Forest Service, Tom Tidwell, and hopefully will soon appoint the chief’s boss within the leadership of the Agriculture Department. With new leadership comes an opportunity to explore new directions for the agency and the land it manages, perhaps even the Restoration Marshall Plan I have previously proposed.

Along these lines, I highly recommend an article by Doug MacCleery on reinventing the Forest Service (abridged version). It’s a thorough examination of the history and direction of the agency, and perhaps gives more props to my thoughts than I'm due. MacCleery is a prominent figure in the history of the Forest Service. He was deputy assistant secretary for natural resources and the environment of the USDA from 1981-87. That means that MacCleery was to Ronald Reagan’s Forest Service what Mark Rey was to George W. Bush’s.

While I have never met Mr. MacCleery, and am therefore reluctant to judge, conservationists have regarded him as the archetype of a timber beast. His agency was logging Westside old growth at a rate measured in square miles per week. His policy response to emerging science on the habitat needs of the northern spotted owl compares to Iran’s Supreme Leader calling for partial election recounts in a few districts. The only reference to these circumstances within his article is a fascinating, if brief, accounting for the decisions of that era as occurring within the "fog of war."

Mr. MacCleery’s exploration of the Forest Services future centers on my 2006 treatment of that subject. Of course it aroused in me some discomfort to be aligned with the purposes of Reagan’s Rey. Sure enough, MacCleery took some liberty with my message to better advance his. He attributed to me the phrase that environmentalists should “push to thin overgrown stands before it gets charred,” which he actually pulled from a photo caption the publisher used to spice up my narrative, rather than from my essay itself.

Nevertheless, MacCleery is largely on target. I want to see the Forest Service reinvented and reinvigorated to recapture its foregone espirit d’corps, and I want the agency disentangled from procedural red tape to more efficiently pursue a new mission of ecological restoration. I have called for a Restoration Marshall Plan for this purpose. The distinction is that MacCleery paraphrases me to advocate restoration in the limited context of forest fire danger. But fire is not the point. What we need is a Forest Service broadly able to fix the damage caused by decades of excessive road building, logging, and timber-oriented management. Moreover, we need the agency to help prepare our terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to adapt to the effects of human-induced climate change (a term mentioned not once within his article’s 77 pages) through scientifically-rigorous landscape analysis and action.

This is not hair-splitting. While it’s true that Conservation Northwest and I have evolved to be far more collaborative and pragmatic in our approach to federal lands management, neither this evolution nor our message equate in any way to an abdication made in the fog of war.

Here are some of the areas in which I have come to see and pursue common ground with scientific, timber, and rural community interests:

• Thinning and burning of certain dry forests to restore old growth structure and function and reduce the danger of wildfire to existing (and, sadly, rare) large old trees,
• Thinning and other means to reduce wildfire risk and increase defensible space within the wildland-urban interface,
• Thinning of certain plantations on the wet Westside to move these stands onto a more accelerated path towards old growth structure to provide habitat for rare and dependent species,
• Collaboratively focusing the agency on the efficient execution of the above by also agreeing where timber projects are not appropriate, including roadless areas and old trees,
• Restoring watersheds by reducing and fixing the road system, avoiding damaging work on steep slopes and sensitive soils, and conducting in-stream rehabilitation work as needed,
• Helping ecosystems to be able to adapt to a changing climate by increasing the ecological resistance and resilience to withstand more intense disturbances; providing landscape connectivity for wildlife; and reducing invasive species,
• Finding ways to reduce the time and cost burden of the agency to carry out the above at scale and within the reasonable limits of a strained federal budget,
• Providing reasonable incentives to utilize the by-products of restoration for biomass energy production,
• Providing jobs and sustainable forest products that are useful to society and help maintain a skilled labor force in proximity to our public lands,
• Keeping private forests, farms and ranches in operation in lieu of conversion to development,
• Sustaining a market and infrastructure for processing large (but not old growth!) logs so that longer rotation forestry remains viable on private lands.

While the pursuit of such common ground has built strong relationships with former adversaries who I have come to like and respect, the overarching goal and framework for each of these areas of common ground is ecosystem and biodiversity conservation. That is quite different than being driven by the motive of preventing the reach of wildfire.
I dream of a future Forest Service that is empowered enough to effectively pursue ecological objectives at scale, wise enough to not be distracted by the controversial and ecologically-damaging pursuits of its past, and trustworthy enough to operate without undue process or citizen micromanagement. I can’t tell whether Mr. MacCleery agrees with that vision.

Far more important is whether the vision is shared by President Obama, his new Chief Tidwell, and his upcoming appointee to the post that Mark Rey and Doug MacCleery used to hold. If so, I stand ready to work with these leaders in every possible way to move us in that direction.