U.S. Forest Service Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The U.S . Forest Service is the federal agency responsible for the management of 155 national forests and 20 national grasslands in the United States. A chief forester provides broad policy direction and oversees budgetary matters for the entire Forest Service. The chief reports to the undersecretary of natural resources and environment in the Department of Agriculture, and works closely with the presidential administration and Congress over budgetary and policy matters. The national forest system is divided into nine regions, usually encompassing several states. Within each region, a regional forester oversees management plans, budgetary issues, and coordinates various activities with the forest supervisors for each of their national forests. Each national forest is further divided into districts that vary in size from 50,000 to more than 1 million acres. Each district is run by a district ranger, who oversees a staff of 10-100 persons with specialized training in forestry, range conservation, travel management, resource economics, and anthropology.

The agency’s mission consists of five parts: 1) to protect and manage natural resources on national forest system lands; 2) to conduct research on all aspects of forestry, rangeland management and forest resource utilization; 3) provide community assistance and cooperation with state and local governments, forest industries, and private landowners to help protect and manage nonfederal forests; 4) to achieve and support an effective workforce that reflects the full range of diversity of the American people and; 5) provide international assistance in formulating policy and coordinating U.S. support for the protection and management of the world’s forest resources. Despite this diverse and broadly defined mission, much of the agency’s history concerns the dominance of timber production and the challenges of bringing conservation management issues to the forefront.

The Forest Service was created in 1905 when the Forest Division in the General Land Office of the Department of the Interior was transferred to the Department of Agriculture. Management priorities included protecting water resources and providing an efficient and continuous supply of timber for the nation. The first chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, argued that the nation’s resources could best be developed to serve the “greatest good, for the greatest number, in the long run” by replacing the short-term profit motives of unregulated industrial development with rational scientific management, carried out by state and federal agencies.

For the first four decades, the Forest Service worked closely with and realized mutual interests from players in timber, livestock, and mining interests. This arrangement (touted by some as a “iron triangle” or subgovernment), when coupled with athe acency’s ideal of scientific objectivity in management decisions, presented a significant barrier to the adoption of new management priorities, constituencies, and interests.

Parallel Growth of Interests

However, just such new constituencies, and concomitant tensions, emerged in the post-World War II era. On one hand, rapid economic development, urban expansion, and the rise of new export markets created new demand for timber products. Timber production, which had already doubled during the war to approximately 4 billion board feet (bbf) per year, rose to 9 bbf by 1962, and reached 12 bbf by 1970. On the other hand, the newly expanding middle class increasingly looked to national forests as sites for recreation and relaxation. Environmental and outdoor recreation organizations, many pre-dating the creation of the Forest Service, gained renewed popularity and new political influence.

Concerned that proponents of a wilderness bill might succeed in removing lands from the national forests as wilderness areas, the Forest Service and timber interests promoted the 1960 Multiple Use and Sustained Yield Act. Hoping to pacify wilderness advocates, the act stated that the national forests “shall be administered for outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, wildlife and fish purposes.” It implied that each use, including recreation and wildlife protection, would have equal priority in Forest Service management decisions. However, by leaving the interpretation of the law to individual forest managers, it resulted in little actual change. The passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act set aside 9 million acres of national forest land as wilderness and required the Forest Service to conduct a review of all unlogged, roadless areas for potential wilderness designation.

New laws such as the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and 1973 Endangered Species Act also affected the Forest Service by requiring environmental impact statements that mandated public input (in the case of NEPA) and including citizen suit provisions. The latter allowed individuals to challenge federal agency management decisions in court, as evidenced in the 1971 report of the Forest Service’s first Roadless Area Review Evaluation required under the Wilderness Act. The Sierra Club sued, arguing that the Forest Service study, which recommended that 6 million acres be set aside as wilderness, failed to examine millions of other potential acres. In response, the Forest Service conducted a second, 1977 study, which identified an additional 9 million acres for wilderness designation.

Public Outcries

In the mid-1970s, public concern over the continued high volume of timber production on national forests, along with practices such as clear cutting and even age stand management, led to the passage of the 1976 Forest Management Act. The act authorized clear cutting, but regulated its use. Most significantly, it required long-term management plans for each national forest, once again mandating public input into the planning process.

Meanwhile, environmental organizations uncovered new problematic managerial practices, including below-cost timber sales. Tensions between ecological preservation and commercial timber production divided the Forest Service, as evidenced in the creation of Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (AFSEEE). The groups’ publication, Inner Voice, raised critical questions about some Forest Service management priorities and policies.

These tensions reached a head in the conflict over the northern spotted owl and old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest, where environmental organizations promoted listing the northern spotted owl as endangered. The timber industry framed the debate as a choice between jobs or the environment, although the local industry was already in decline. Nonetheless, the Northwest Forest Plan of 1994, brokered by President Clinton, sought to integrate habitat protection, forest restoration, and economic aid to local communities as part of a collaborative, ecosystem-wide approach to national forest planning and management.

A significant step toward adopting an ecological preservation management priority for the Forest Service occurred with the signing of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule in 2001, prohibiting road construction and timber harvest on over 58 million acres of national forests. The rationale was to protect the ecological integrity of these lands, which hold value as sites for recreation, wildlife habitat, and water resources. It also sought to halt the problematic situation of creating new roads for timber sales, whose proceeds would address a small fraction of an $8.4 million backlog in maintenance costs for 386,000 miles of existing roads.

The George W. Bush administration put the Roadless Area Rule on hold, passing decisionmaking authority back to local forest managers. In the wake of large wildfires in the early 2000s, the administration also promoted the 2003 Healthy Forests Restoration Act, which called for renewed increases in logging levels in order to reduce fuel for wildfires, applying to the entire national forest system. Because much of the timber is small diameter with little commercial value, the act encourages the inclusion of larger, more commercially valuable trees within restoration timber sales to help defray the costs. Critics see this as evidence of the continued priority of timber production.

Bibliography:

N. Clarke and D.C. McCool, Staking Out the Terrain: Power and Performance Among Natural Resource Agencies (SUNY Press, 1996);
P.W. Hirt, A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests Since World War Two (University of Nebraska Press, 1994);
A. Kohm and J.F. Franklin, eds., Creating a Forestry for the 21st Century (Island Press, 1997);
A. Sedjo, ed., A Vision for the U.S. Forest Service: Goals for Its Next Century (Resources for the Future, 2000);
K. Steen, The Forest Service: A History (University of Washington Press, 1976).