Mike Dombeck, Chief of the United
States Forest Service
Missoula, Montana
February 3, 1999
A few months ago, I met with the senior leadership of the Forest Service at Grey Towers, the home of Gifford Pinchot. Surrounded by so much history and tradition, it was impossible not to be impressed by 100 years of Pinchot's rich legacy.
How will the decisions we make on the land today influence what we are remembered for one hundred years from now? That should be the question that guides every decision we make. What made Pinchot's young Forest Service unique was a set of conservation values that were not necessarily popular but were always made in the long-term interest of land health. For decades, the Forest Service followed those conservation values and argued, for example, against wasteful clearcutting practices that devastated the watersheds of the Appalachians, and northeastern and Great Lakes area forests.
Following World War II, another set of values came to the forefront - helping to fulfill the national dream of providing families with single family homes - good and important values. Our timber harvests escalated for nearly a quarter of a century. Along the way, social values changed. Many people ceased viewing national forests and grasslands as a warehouse of outputs to be brought to market and instead began assigning greater value to the positive outcomes of forest management. Wildlife and fish habitat, recreation, and clean water, wilderness, and cultural and spiritual values became more and more important as national goals.
The result is that today, we often find ourselves caught in the middle between competing interests. Some look to Congress to ``fix'' our organic mandate. Others push to limit the number of citizen appeals. Still others ask courts to resolve land use policies through litigation. Too often we find ourselves waiting for someone else to resolve our issues for us.
The fact is that the roadless areas, wilderness, recreation and old growth issues of today are no different than the 100-year old debate over clearcutting. Our obligation is to exercise leadership over the most vital conservation issues of our generation.
Over time, our leadership capacity to assist those who manage the more than 500 million acres of forests outside of the national forest system has diminished. Our greatest value to society in the future will be to bring people together on the land and to provide technical assistance and scientific information to states, private landowners, and other nations of the world.
Consider, we are spending about two billion dollars per year managing 191 million acres of national forest yet contributing only about $200 million toward the 500 million acres of state managed and privately-owned forests. Are our best efforts as conservation leaders spent trying to build roads in roadless areas? Or, in helping a wealthy nation to protect and restore its natural resource wealth through research, technical assistance, and providing international examples of ecologically sustainable forest and grassland management?
As the President noted in his State of the Union address, 7,000 acres of farmland and open space are lost every day. The number of tracts of forestland of 50 acres or less doubled from 1978-1994. In other words, as we lose open space, forest tract size is diminished, and the land's health is compromised. These facts sound a clarion call to action.
Pinchot himself said, ``we must everywhere always prefer results to routine.'' No support exists for a process-oriented and labor intensive bureaucracy. History is replete with agencies and businesses that could not, or would not, adjust to changing times and consequently became obsolete. The giants such as Pinchot, Leopold, Bob Marshall, Carson, and Arthur Carhart set another far higher, far more memorable, and far more forward thinking standard - helping communities develop a more harmonious relationship with the land and water that sustain us. Our challenge is to measure up to their legacy.
We are making progress.
We must accelerate the pace. Society demands clean water, species conservation, more outdoor recreation opportunities, conservation education, eradication of non-native invasive species, landowner and community assistance programs, and new research and technologies on forest inventory and analysis, wood conservation and more efficient wood utilization.
Our challenge today is to ensure that the incentives that drive all aspects of our programs promote ecological sustainability. We have proposals, and a few successes that, with the funding of Congress, will help ensure that future forest management decisions are driven by the long-term interests of the land and the people that depend on it. For example:
We must bring greater accountability, more public scrutiny, and transparency to all our processes. For example, we are financing a significant percentage of our costs through timber related ``trust funds'' that are not subject to annual appropriations or public scrutiny. Given that timber production on national forests has declined by 70% in less than a decade, such an approach is unsustainable. This year, we will begin to implement administrative reforms to our trust funds while we consider more permanent legislative solutions. For example, we propose to revise the definition of salvage to reduce if not eliminate "associated green" timber often taken in salvage sales.
Historically, the agency's success was often measured, and consequently funded, by outputs from the national forest system such as board feet of timber produced or the amount of grazing on forests and grasslands. This year we will develop and begin to implement new land health performance measures that evaluate such things as clean water, wildlife and fish habitat, forest ecosystem health, and soil productivity and stability. We will still track traditional outputs of goods and services but they will be accomplished within the ecological sideboards imposed by land health . These new measures will be consistent with international sustainability criteria and integrated into employee evaluations, budget development, forest planning, and agency priorities and accountability.
For the second year, we will propose to Congress separating timber harvest on national forests from the funds that counties receive to maintain schools and roads. Why should the richest country in the world finance the education of rural schoolchildren on the back of a controversial federal timber program? Collaborative stewardship implies an obligation to help provide communities with economic diversity and resiliency so they are not dependent on the results of litigation, the whims of nature or unrelated social values to educate their children and pave their roads.
The Committee of Scientists will issue their final recommendations on forest planning soon. I expect that they will suggest that we:
1. Focus our planning efforts on the long-term sustainability of watersheds, forests, and grasslands and the ecological, economic, and social benefits they can provide.
2. More effectively link forest planning to budget and funding priorities.
3. Practice collaborative stewardship through use of diverse and balanced advisory groups and adaptive management through monitoring.
Taken together, these efforts will demonstrate to Congress and the American people the imperative of making investments in the land. Investments that may not yield year end profits but whose dividends will be plain when:
The cleanest and largest amount of surface water runoff in the nation comes from forested landscapes. Mindful of this fact, a year or so ago, Jay Cravens, a retired Forest Service employee offered me some advice. He said, ``Mike, just take care of soil and water and everything else will be OK.'' That sage counsel guides our approach to watershed management.
Multiple use does not mean we should do everything on every acre simply because we can. We must protect the last best places and restore the rest. Many areas are simply not appropriate for certain activities, such as hard rock mining. For many years, Congress has been unable to reach consensus on updating the 1872 Mining Law. Their inaction does not, however, diminish our responsibility to use the best science to protect the most scenic, the most diverse, the most special places. One such place is the Rocky Mountain Front.
I have asked the Secretary of Interior to withdraw the Rocky Mountain Front from hard rock mining for two years while we evaluate the long-term future of the area in an open and public process.
The Forest Service has a long and storied history of working to protect the incredible fish, wildlife, cultural, and scenic resources of this area. From Bob Marshall's efforts to protect the wilderness memorialized by his name to Gloria Flora's decision last year to prohibit oil and gas leasing in the area, I intend to continue that tradition.
The Rocky Mountain Front, is only one of the hundreds of thousands of great places under our care and supervision. Within the next five years, over 65% of our forest plans, representing over 150 million acres of land, are scheduled for revision. In keeping with Clean Water Action Plan commitments, likely recommendations from the Committee of Scientists, and consistent with our mandates from the Organic Act through the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water acts, watershed health and restoration will be the overriding priority in all future forest plan revisions.
Forest Service managed lands truly are the headwaters of America, supplying river systems, and recharging aquifers. They contain riparian, wetland, and coastal areas that are essential for the nation's water supply and prosperity. Our forested landscapes contain the coolest and cleanest water in the nation. We must protect these precious resources. Future forest plans will develop strategies and document how we will:
All future forest plans will prioritize specific watersheds for protection and restoration. Accomplishing these priorities will be linked to annual budget requests and employee performance evaluations. We will develop priorities of protection and restoration based upon:
In the State of the Union, President Clinton announced new initiatives to protect open space, benefit urban forests, and improve the quality of life for the 80% of Americans living in urban and suburban areas. The Forest Service will play an essential role in their accomplishment.
With proposed increases to our budget, we plan to:
Even as we extend the benefits of conservation to the millions of Americans who do not live adjacent to national forests and grasslands, we must recognize the changing face of our national forest management and the benefits and challenges that follow.
The emphasis of our forest management continues to shift from commodity timber sales to management activities to meet stewardship objectives. For example, in FY 1989 ``green'' timber sales made up primarily of saw log dimension wood, comprised 80% of our timber program. Today, such sales represent just over half of our program. Additionally, the amount of wood fiber harvested from national forests has fallen by 70% in less than a decade.
These changes demonstrate our responsiveness to shifting social values, public demand, and our evolving understanding of how to best manage for ecological sustainability. As we strive to manage healthier, diverse, and more productive forests, the focus on our forest management program - as measured in short term financial losses or profits - becomes less meaningful as a measure of agency performance.
Providing a steady supply of wood fiber remains an important multiple use goal of the Forest Service. Some would ignore increasing rates of national wood consumption and argue for a ``zero-cut'' approach to managing forests. Until we stop importing wood to meet the nation's demands from countries with more lax environmental restrictions than ours, I think this position both irresponsible and misguided. Forest Service research will expand efforts to improve wood recycling, conservation, and increased wood utilization. National Forests themselves should be a model for ecologically sustainable forest management. The more timber harvest contributes to ecological sustainability, the more predictable timber outputs will be.
Our understanding of sustainability and sustained yield have changed over time. Today, we recognize that if we do not harvest trees in an ecologically sustainable manner we may not have forests in the future. For example, thinning of the under-story to reduce fuels, restore forest function, and improve forest ecosystem health is often a far more effective way to maintain stability for local communities dependent on timber harvest than are controversial harvests of old growth in areas where such stands are scarce.
In the future, research and monitoring information will be essential to validating our assumptions about how ecological systems respond to management activities.
We will protect the basic soil, water, and biotic resources of our forests and accelerate the restoration of forest and rangeland ecosystem integrity. To help accomplish these objectives, our proposed 2000 budget requests funding to:
1. High-risk wildland/urban interface areas where homes and personal property are at risk.
2. Threatened and endangered species conservation and recovery.
3. Accumulated fuels within and adjacent to wilderness areas, and
4. Areas that help to lower long-term costs of suppressing wildfires.
As we seek to restore forest and grassland integrity and return them to their natural range of variability, new tools are needed.
Stewardship contracting authority will help managers more efficiently accomplish restoration needs through forest management. Our challenge will be to avoid financing restoration on the back of timber harvest.
Our budget proposes funding forest health restoration for activities that cannot be accomplished through traditional timber sales such as road maintenance or obliteration, thinning of overly dense forests in the urban-wildland interface, and riparian area restoration. We must be willing to make investments in land health that may not yield short-term profit but will result in long-term ecological dividends.
The natural resource agenda highlights the strategic importance of recreation as a priority for the agency. Increasingly, outdoor recreation is the way an urbanized society interacts with the natural world. In 1997, national forests accommodated more than 40% of all outdoor recreation use on public lands in the United States.
An estimated 75% of the nation's recreation takes place within a quarter mile of a river, lake, or coast. Our job is to try to meet people's demands in a manner that does not impair the health, diversity, and productivity of our land and waters.
Our recreation strategy focuses on providing customer service and opportunities for all people. As part of that strategy we are using new technologies to assist in trip planning, expanded interpretative services, and seamless delivery of the myriad outdoor recreation opportunities that help families to reconnect with each other while they connect to the land that sustains them. We will strengthen our relationships with communities adjacent to forests so that they may more fully reap the economic benefits of tourism and recreation.
The outdoor recreation industry and other recreation user groups are approaching a crossroads. I liken recreation to the timber industry twenty years ago. Who would have thought that timber harvests across the national forest system would decline by 70% in less than a decade? It is my belief that if we agree to abide by some basic principles, the recreation community can avoid what happened to the timber industry.
In the end, recreation use - all uses of national forests and grasslands are about limits. Talking about limits to growth is very difficult for such a prosperous culture as ours. We are a nation of optimism, where we attempt to use technology and wealth to find solutions to resource dilemmas. Unfortunately, such growth even with the best technology often carries consequences.
Wild places and natural areas are of increasing importance to a society that can afford to protect them. We are all too familiar with the battle between protection and development. The writer, T.H. Watkins recently said, ``in natural regions, as in public libraries, we should not be allowed to do everything we can merely because we can do it.'' A decade ago, the timber program on national forests ran up against a buzz saw of changing social and environmental values in the Pacific Northwest. And just as surely as a river will find its flood plain, social values will prevail in such debates.
Most Americans value public lands for the sense of open space, wildness and naturalness they provide, clean air and water, and wildlife and fish. Other uses, whether they are ski developments, mountain biking trails, or off road vehicles have a place in our multiple use framework. But that place is reached only after we ensure that such activities do not, and will not, impair the productive capacity of the land. That is the essence of our recreation strategy.
Representing nearly 20% of the National Forest System and over 60% of the entire Wilderness Preservation System in the lower 48 states, the Forest Service's wilderness legacy is a crown jewel. When you consider the contributions of former agency employees' Bob Marshall, Arthur Carhart, and Aldo Leopold it would not be an overstatement to say that the Forest Service practically invented the wilderness concept.
In recent years, I have become concerned that our national commitment to the Wilderness Act has diminished and the resources to protect and manage the wilderness have not kept pace with our needs. Five years ago, my predecessor Jack Ward Thomas asked the question, ``when I think of wilderness, I wonder who will be the next ones to step up, lead, and sacrifice for this precious resource? Who will see that the Wilderness doesn't get inched away from us, one compromise at a time?''
Jack, we are taking up your challenge. I am pleased to announce two specific actions to lend greater emphasis to our wilderness management.
Our interim suspension of road construction in roadless areas will be finalized very soon. We should now turn our attention to the issue of how we will manage our existing forest road system over the long-term. That does not mean that after the road construction suspension expires we will simply resume road construction into these areas. It is my expectation that in the future, we will rarely build new roads into roadless areas, and if we do, it will be in order to accomplish broader ecological objectives.
A personal source of frustration is that few people or interest groups are focussed on the issue of our existing road system as opposed to the roadless area issue. Yet if we care about restoring the ecological fabric of the landscape, the health of our watersheds, we must address already roaded areas.
Many roadless areas have become refugia - areas of high biotic integrity where remnant populations of many native species persist. The irony is that roadless areas are historically among the least biologically productive portions of the landscape - typically higher elevation with steep slopes, unstable soils, and often areas of low productivity.
If we ever hope to reconnect the tattered fabric of individual watersheds to an entire landscape, we must look to the areas along valley bottoms and main stem rivers - in other words, the already roaded areas.
With roads that could encircle the globe many times over, our road system is largely complete. Our challenge is to shrink the system considerably while still providing for efficient and safe public access in a manner that protects the land's health. Over the next 18 months or so, we will develop a long-term road policy with three primary objectives:
It is my expectation that the long-term road policy will significantly limit, if not eliminate costly new road construction in sensitive areas that can cause erosion, imperil rare species, or fragment habitat. We will also move aggressively to close, obliterate, or otherwise decommission unauthorized and unneeded roads. We will need the help of Congress to maintain needed roads while decommissioning the others.
I expect decisions about local roads to be made by local managers working with local people and others who use or care about our road system. Recognizing that forest roads are often the backbone of the rural transportation network, we will obviously continue to provide access to and through forests. The fact, however, is that we simply cannot afford our existing road system. New information documents that we have a reconstruction and maintenance backlog of approximately $8.5 billion. Just our annual road maintenance is approximately $500-600 million per year. Moreover, we have found that only 18% of our road system is maintained to our own standards. This is unacceptable.
We will not delay in taking immediate action to stabilize or decommission roads that pose public safety or environmental problems. With proposed funding from Congress, we will:
It seems appropriate to close with the well quoted, but not often enough listened to, words of Aldo Leopold. ``Examine each [land use] question in terms of what is ethically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends to otherwise.'' In this the 50th anniversary of Aldo Leopold's seminal work, A Sand County Almanac, let us recommit ourselves to an invigorated national land ethic.
Submitted by: Alan Polk
Contact: Chris Wood
Modified: 2/3/98