Introduction: The Context for Land Stewardship in the 21st Century

The First Round of Land and Resource Management Plans Back to Top

During the next 10 to 15 years, the national forests struggled mightily to complete the first set of plans under NFMA. As the Chairman of the first Committee of Scientists stated, however, "no one paid the slightest bit of attention" to the Committee's plea to allow the planning process a chance to work. In hindsight, it is doubtful that the process ever stood a chance of succeeding. With timber production the dominant objective and with an inherently divisive process of public participation and decision making, there was little incentive for any stakeholder to patiently await the mysterious machinations of the land and resource planning process. Individuals and groups pursued whatever forum would give them the greatest advantage; seldom did this advantage lie within the NFMA process. Appeals and lawsuits were used to gain leverage over the planning process or to preempt it. Some of these appeals and lawsuits prevailed, causing major changes in national forest planning and management, the Northwest Forest Plan for federal forests within the range of the northern spotted owl being the outstanding example.

Others used the Congressional budgeting process to tilt implementation toward specific resources and outputs. As a result, many land and resource management plans were never implemented or were only partly implemented because of the lack of budgets. Even when budgets were forthcoming, funds were some times allocated in a manner that did not reflect the priorities articulated in the plan. Thus, the budgets often negated the "balance" that had been carefully crafted into many plans, a balance that was essential to any meaningful implementation of those plans.

Still others attempted to push for new legislation to correct the imbalances that they found in management. Here the record is meager. Congress has shown little inclination to address, with new authorizing language, the appropriate uses of the national forests in the 23 years since NFMA.

Recent Trends and Developments Back to Top

As the national forests and grasslands have begun to revise their NFMA land and resource management plans, a number of trends and phenomena have developed that may not have been foreseen by the developers of NFMA:

1) Deep divisions remain over the management of the national forests and grasslands. Planning for these lands must proceed, even in the face of legitimate, yet divergent, interests and often in many forums simultaneously. Some have called for Congress to step in and end the disputes by decreeing the dominant uses of the national forests. Rather than seeking a method to reach final accord on these issues, it might be more realistic and productive to put into place a process that recognizes the reality of divisions within a society. People's values differ; neither Congress nor fairy godmothers will ever be able to do away with this fundamental truth.

2) Ecosystem management, with its emphasis on management across broad landscapes and sustaining ecological processes, has become the management paradigm of the national forests and grasslands, raising questions about the traditional focus on a single owner and single ownership in planning and on an even flow of commodities as the measure of sustainability.

3) Protection and restoration of fish and wildlife has become a major focus of the National Forest System under both the statutes of the Endangered Species Act and the NFMA. Similarly, protection of water resources is a major focus under the Clean Water Act

4) The public has become increasingly interested in sharing stewardship responsibilities for the national forests, breaking down the traditional division between the Forest Service as stewards and members of the public as users.

5) A multitude of federal, state, and local statutes have been promulgated that mandate planning processes relative to protection and use of the environment. As a result, federal, state, and local agencies often collide as they implement their mandates.

6) The Forest Service and Congress have continued to budget by programs, such as timber and recreation, undermining the ability of forests to fully implement balanced plans.

Developing New NFMA Regulations and a New Committee of Scientists Back to Top

For the past five years, the Forest Service has attempted to develop new planning regula- tions to address some of these emerging issues and trends and to reflect the lessons learned from land and resource management planning during the past 20 years. Enough controversy has been raised by this effort that the Secretary of Agriculture commissioned a new Committee of Scientists to provide technical and scientific guidance for improving land and resource management planning. This advice will provide a basis for the development of new NFMA regulations by the Secretary of Agriculture.

In some ways, the new Committee of Scientists is like the last one. Both had to be composed of scientists outside the Forest Service; both focused on the NFMA. However, the previous Committee had nearly three years to complete its work; this Committee did the bulk of its work in 16 months. The first Committee was helping to invent land and resource management planning; this Committee has the advantage of being able to draw on the experience of the past 15 years to reshape planning to the changing times.

Dreams and Practicality

The NFMA Regulations as One Piece in the Planning and Management Puzzle Back to Top

In the mid 1970s, the Forest Service was able to focus on the regulations implementing NFMA to the exclusion of almost anything else, in terms of guidance for planning the management of the national forests. That situation is no longer true. Planning processes under other statutes, such as the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, can have as large an impact on the national forests as the NFMA mandated planning processes. Other forums, such as the annual budgeting process in Congress, can also have as large an impact. State, local, and tribal governments play important roles. Directives from the courts or the White House can upset the best laid plans of a carefully constructed planning process. Finally, the continued deep disagreements over management of these forests makes consensus and stability in their management difficult.

Congress could, of course, pass laws to straighten out this "crazy quilt" of influences. However, if the past 20 years is any guide, it will not do so. Nor is it likely that congressional action would sufficiently cure the current malaise. Much of the debate is not about the merits of existing legislative policies or mandates, but rather how such policies and mandates might most effectively be pursued and implemented.

Thus, we are left with administrative change and reform as the mechanism for recognizing and harmonizing these many influences on planning the future of the national forests and grasslands. Our assignment, as Committee members, deals centrally with one part of this legal and administrative puzzle, the regulations implementing the National Forest Management Act. Our mission is to develop a planning framework that can guide the writing of these regulations. We undertake this mission with an attempt to reach an understanding of the broader context of these regulations; we must look outward to the other processes and forums that influence the planning and management of these forests and rangelands. We regard our work as one piece in a larger puzzle, and we realize that events elsewhere can undermine the results of planning. Still, these regulations provide the organizing mechanism for land and resource management planning for the National Forest System and, as such, must be the foundation on which planning for the future uses of our public lands is built.

The Social and Organizational Context of Planning Back to Top

The Committee of Scientists recognizes that it would be doing the Forest Service a disservice if it proposed a new planning template that failed to recognize the context to which it would be applied. We are not proceeding with a blank slate. Instead, there are some very real challenges, as well as important opportunities, that must be recognized, accommodated, and capitalized upon if this second round of planning is to be given the greatest chance of succeeding. In this respect, we are at a distinct advantage relative to the first Committee. Not only do we have almost 20 years of 5

experience from which to draw regarding on-the-ground consequences of the first round of planning, we also have almost 20 years of experience that provides insight into how the Forest Service as an organization functions within the context of a comprehensive land and resource management planning process. Furthermore, we have 20 years of experience that has very vividly defined the social context of planning. The Forest Service does not function in a vacuum but in a very diverse, dynamic, and engaged social context that must be acknowledged and accommodated. Recognizing the context (both social and organizational) has grounded our expectations and the care with which we have structured the proposed planning process. It has also given us an opportunity to recognize important opportunities that can facilitate a more effective and meaningful second round of planning.

The Social Context of National Forest Planning

The history of NFMA planning, while creating a base of knowledge and data about each national forest, has at the same time contributed to a social context that must be considered as this second round of planning proceeds. Several factors within the social context constrain effective planning and must be acknowledged in the development of a different process:

· There is pervasive distrust of the agency and the process.

· Many public participants are burned out, wary, fatigued, and disillusioned.

· The incentives of the previous planning efforts often promoted adversarial behavior by encouraging extremist positions and discouraging collaboration and problem solving

At the same time, there are numerous opportunities inherent in the social context that provide a foundation upon which more effective planning may be fostered:

· An increasing number of people are willing and anxious to have an active hand in the management of their national forests.

· Effective and innovative models of collaboration and public involvement do exist.

· There is a wealth of expertise, knowledge, and skills within society that can provide great assistance to national forest management.

· Human communities are demonstrating a growing understanding and appreciation of the critical importance of well managed forest and range watersheds to their economic and social vitality.

· Increasing recreation is both an added demand on forest resources and an opportunity to educate and engage the American people in the management of resources they clearly care about.

The Organizational Context of National Forest Planning

What these social contextual factors highlight is that national forest planning and management neither can or should be the sole preserve of the Forest Service. To bridge sources of knowledge and capabilities, to effectively educate and learn, to resolve disputes, to credibly solve problems, and to foster and restore trust so that management of the National forests and grasslands is a common endeavor rather than a battlefield, planning for our public lands must be structured in a manner that meaningfully and openly engages the American people. Such a process, however, must also be developed recognizing the challenges and opportunities presented by the Forest Service as a large bureaucratic organization.

Numerous challenges are posed by the existing organizational context of planning:

· Planning is disdained by many in the agency.

· Tensions exist between "managers" and "scientists."

· Linkages between planning and management are unclear. (Planning is often viewed as an entirely separate function from management.)

· A customer service orientation within the Forest Service ["our public and the people we serve"] reinforces an "us versus them" relationship with the nonagency world.

· Common personnel issues (e.g., transfers and retirements) undermine the maintenance of productive working relationships.

· Integrative and innovative planning approaches are difficult when budgeting continues by program.

· Few rewards or incentives encourage more effective and adaptive planning behavior.

· Learning from problems and failures, as with most organizations, is not a strength of the Forest Service.

While these challenges represent important obstacles to effective planning, numerous opportunities are inherent in the organizational context that provide a foundation upon which more effective planning may be fostered:

· Forest Service employees, for the most part, are driven by a profound commitment to the resource; inherent in this commitment is a general desire to do "the right thing" for the resource and to capitalize on up-to-date knowledge and understanding.

· Some models of effective planning do exist; innovative, risk-taking Forest Service employees have tried new approaches and have succeeded; their efforts provide insight, direction, and hope.

· Many have a strong desire to approach planning differently given their intense frustration with the current process.

· An organizational structure is in place that can accommodate and support planning at different levels: large-scale assessments, landscape level plans, etc.

· Other resource agencies are facing similar challenges and hence are at a point in their histories where they are more willing to engage in greater coordination, communication, and collaboration that will improve their ability to achieve their objectives while, at the same time, enhancing management of national forests and grasslands.

· Tools, such as GIS, remote sensing, and spatial models, are now available that can accommodate planning and coordination at varying spatial scales.

· Historical and ongoing research efforts are providing an improved understanding of the productive capacity of national forests and grasslands and the effects of different practices.

Historical Uses and Current Conditions as a Context for Planning Back to Top

The Committee of Scientists recognizes that the management history of the national forests and grasslands, as well as their current conditions, need to be understood to fashion effective planning regulations.

The National Forests and Grasslands:

A Long History of Use

The long-term economic contributions of the forest reserves were recognized from the very beginning. Approximately three-fourths of the runoff in the West originates on the national forests and grasslands. Irrigation districts in the West, wanting to be assured of reliable flows for their fields, pressed Congress for protective legislation, which was achieved in the Creative Act of 1891. Today, farmers, cities, and industries continue to rely upon clean, reliable flows from national forest watersheds, which comprise most of the high country in the West.

In the Organic Act of 1897, commercial timber production was recognized as the second purpose of the reserves after watershed protection. Timber harvesting in the national forests remained low until World War II, soared during the post-War boom, and has receded since the late 1980s (Fig. I-1).

Past harvest fluctuations were largely the result of market forces; the decline since 1990 is largely caused by the increased emphasis on protection of species and ecosystems combined with the realization that intensive timber management is not always compatible with other values.

The national forests and grasslands have many uses. Like timber harvests, recreation use of the public lands and waterways increased dramatically after World War II (Fig. I-2), has continued to grow, and is now the focus of a multibillion dollar industry. Most of the nation's ski areas are located in the national forests.

Grazing of domestic livestock takes place on more than half of all National Forest System lands. In many cases, the use predates establishment of national forests. Grazing use, measured in animal unit months (AUMs), peaked early in this century and then declined to lower levels over many decades (Fig. I-3).

Hardrock mining and oil and gas produc- tion are found on nearly every national forest. Hardrock mining proceeds as a priority use under the 1872 Mining Law, while mineral leases for oil and gas function under another set of statutes that gives the Forest Service more control over the development of these energy resources. Like timber and recreation, the number of leases on the national forests expanded greatly after World War II.

Fig. 1-1. Total timber harvest on the national forests over time.

Fig. 1-2. Recreation use on the national forests over time.

Fig. 1-3. Grazing on the national forests over time; upper curve: sheep; lower curve: cattle.

The economic value produced by the different uses of the national forests is the subject of some dispute. Recent analysis by the Forest Service suggests that recreation produces the most economic value from use of the national forests and that downstream water use provides the second most significant amount. Most of that value is implied from the use levels because recreation on the national forests generally occurs with only a nominal charge and downstream water use occurs without charge. For a long time, timber harvest provided by far the most revenue to the government from national forest use. That revenue has declined as the overall sale level has declined and the harvest, in support of ecosystem management, has shifted to smaller, less valuable trees. The Forest Service has acknowledged that the cost of timber sales, including the in-lieu payments to counties drawn from the sales, has recently exceeded the revenue they provide. Total revenue has declined with the loss of timber receipts. Unfortunately, the revenue from other uses (e.g., from recreation) has not increased sufficiently to offset this loss.

The reduction in timber revenue has been felt throughout the agency. Because the national forests have traditionally funded much of their operation with the timber management budget, a major contraction in funds and national forest workforce has occurred throughout the West in the past few years. As discussed above, Congress has not been disposed to fund other activities, such as wildlife, stream improvement, or recreation, at anything approaching the funding levels that previously went into timber sales. Without an alternative revenue source from use of the national forests, such as from charges for recreation use, or agreement by the major interest groups on funding needs, it is difficult to visualize adequate funding in the near future.

At the same time as revenues are falling, the costs of undertaking actions on the national lands are increasing. Implementing ecosystem management has raised the expense of activities because it requires more analysis and monitoring, along with the involvement of more specialists. Also, as interdisciplinary teams search for acceptable ways to meet the tenets of ecosystem management, they often have to take a number of runs at any particular action before they "get it right." In sum, the Forest Service is caught in a revenue/cost squeeze that will, most probably, be a fact of life for the foreseeable future.

Current Conditions

Much debate has occurred recently about the condition of the national forests and grasslands. Some argue that these lands have been much improved by use or, at a minimum, that such use has been largely neutral to their well being. Others argue that such use has imperiled the ability of these lands to provide the goods and services that we count on them to provide. We will briefly summarize these arguments here to set the context for our discussion and recommendations in the rest of this report.

The state of forests has often been de- scribed through the balance of growth and drain. The National RPA Assessment (Haynes et al. 1995), as an example, reports on the state of the forest resource in terms of the volume of removals (harvest), growth, and inventory over time. Cubic feet are used as the volume measure. Information is reported on both softwoods (conifers) and hardwoods (broad-leafed trees). We will use softwoods here because they dominate the national forests and have been the focus of harvest for a very long time. The 1995 RPA Timber Assessment Update estimates that growth in softwoods on the national forests has exceeded removals for the period of reporting (1952 to 1991) and will increasingly exceed removals during the next 40 years (2000 to 2040). See Fig. 1-4.

During the period of reporting, national forest softwood inventory on lands available for harvest went down slightly, in spite of the excess of growth over harvest, because of reclassification of forest lands to purposes that preclude timber harvest. On the stable land base used in the projection of the next 40 years, softwood inventories are projected to increase almost 50% in the future. Thus, projected future harvests of about 1 billion cubic feet (roughly 4 to 5 billion board feet) would be associated with an increasing inventory over time.

(Fig. 1-4. Historical and projected growth and harvest in cubic feet of softwood on the national forests. (Source: Haynes et al. 1995.)

Nationally, across all owners, cubic-foot growth and harvest of softwoods has been roughly equal for the 40 years while cubic-foot growth of hardwoods has greatly exceeded their harvest. As a result of these trends, we have seen a substantial increase in total inventory volume during the past 40 years, with most of the increase in hardwoods. The RPA projections suggest that, in the future, softwood inventories will build substantially while hardwood inventories level off. In sum, these projections suggest that, nationally, we will have 35% more inventory volume in softwoods in 2040 than we had in 1952 and 100% more inventory volume in hardwoods.

From an ecological standpoint, though, we see a somewhat different picture, especially in the West. The western national forests, by and large, were reserved from the public domain and became national forests before much activity occurred, except the general grazing of livestock and concentrated activities in certain areas, such as the mid Sierras during the gold rush and the Black Hills during the building of the transcontinental railroad. The rangelands and eastern forests, on the other hand, were, by and large, purchased by the Forest Service between 1910 and 1950 after sod-busting or logging by private landowners. The discussion below applies most directly to the West, where most of the national forests exist. In the East, by comparison, much of the land is in better ecological condition than it was when it was acquired.

Numerous recent studies have suggested that past practices have had a substantial ecological impact on our western national forests. These studies include FEMAT (Pacific Northwest), ICBEMP (Interior Columbia Basin), and SNEP (Sierra Nevada). Some of the findings of these and other studies are summarized below.

There are now more trees on the national forests, but the number of large trees has declined significantly because they have been a focus of timber harvest until recently. Large trees, standing live or dead or as logs on the forest floor, play a crucial role in the functioning of forest ecosystems. This diminution of old-growth stands has caused a loss of essential habitat for many species and of the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of these ancient forests, which are valued by many people. Under the projections reported above, however, growth should substantially exceed harvest in the future, which could allow the rebuilding of large trees and old-growth forests over time.

Management activities have had a number of other effects on the ecological condition of the forests and rangelands. Replanting after timber harvest has been generally successful, but the plantations so created often lack the diversity of tree species now sought under ecosystem management. Policies to suppress all fires, along with timber harvest practices, have altered the natural disturbance regime with a resulting change in the mix of tree species in many places and a buildup in stand densities. These changes in vegetation have, in turn, often increased the risk of catastrophic fire along with a number of other effects.

The agency's extensive road system, much of it built to facilitate timber harvest, has taken a toll in terms of erosion, landslides, and the destruction of riparian habitat. Remaining roadless areas have assumed increasing importance as refugia for some fish and wildlife.

As the national forests have increasingly become the nation's playground, recreational activities have left their mark. The vast road network has allowed significantly increased traffic and opportunities for off-road use, with many and varied impacts on wildlife and ecological processes. The proliferation of "unofficial" roads may be one of the most egregious problems facing the Forest Service. Further, the clustering of recreational use in stream corridors and lakes often puts pressure on fragile resources.

Rangelands, overall, are recovering from the severe degradation suffered at the turn of the century. Still, problems remain. Nonnative plants have taken over some upland range and riparian areas. Many riparian areas and aquatic systems are degraded and not functioning properly. Cattle use of streamside areas, often accompanied by adverse environmental impacts, remains a flashpoint in the debate over grazing on public lands and the protection of water quality.

Reservoirs and water diversion, grazing, and mining have affected streamflow patterns on many streams and rivers within the national forests and grasslands. Mining has been an especially nettlesome cause of pollution.

Perhaps the most unsettling development in the past few decades has been the identifica- tion of a number of species whose continued presence on the national forests is no longer secure. Many causes can be invoked to explain this situation, including the uses mentioned above, settlement of adjacent lands, and introduction of nonnative species. The seriousness of the situation is compounded because the federal lands are now expected to form the first line of defense in protecting endangered and threatened species, yet there has been a continuing need to invoke the Endangered Species Act. This loss of biological diversity is a matter of considerable concern in evaluating the current state of the national forests and grasslands.

Although ecological diversity has declined across large areas of the national forests and grasslands, according to many measures, those lands generally remain less disturbed by human influence than the surrounding areas. Settlement, ranching, farming, logging, and development during the past century have transformed the private forests and rangelands of the United States. Rapid development continues in much of the country. Many rural areas near national forests and grasslands have also experienced population growth, with a sharp increase in second homes and a corresponding surge in recreational use of the adjacent public lands. We expect these trends to continue and to intensify as human population growth fuels the competition for scarce resources.

Conclusion Back to Top

In 1979, the Forest Service embarked on a journey that no other resource agency had ever undertaken. It began a comprehensive planning approach for the 191 million acre estate of national forests and grasslands that was to look to the future but to provide for the multiple resource needs of the present. The effort was to involve the public in planning to maintain the long-term sustainability of the resource base. There were theories about how the agency should proceed; yet many of these were developed without consideration or full knowledge of political, social, and organizational realities.

Regardless, well intentioned Forest Service employees joined the fray, doing their utmost to make the regulatory guidance work. It has not been easy for them, and it certainly has not been fun. But this Committee of Scientists has been humbled by the continued devotion of so many on-the-ground employees of the Forest Service who have persevered despite the shortcomings of the process and the conflict it engendered.

Nevertheless, the Committee of Scientists is optimistic. Yes, there are problems to address and history to overcome; there is no question that the Forest Service needs a significantly restructured and redirected planning process. At the same time, however, it is also clear that the Forest Service has the capabilities to follow through. The people are well meaning and dedicated, and most within the agency and among the American public are anxious for direction as to what they might do differently in the future. The Committee of Scientists is honored to have been asked to help with this task.

Sustaining the Land, Economies, and Human Communities

Today, sustainability is widely recognized as the over arching objective of land and resource stewardship. In its simplest terms, sustainability means to maintain or prolong. The 1987 Brundtland Commission Report (The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future) elaborated upon the shorthand definition by articulating both the need for current productivity and the physical imperative of intergenerational equity: the goal of sustainability is to "meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Further, sustainability in this modern sense has three aspects: ecological, economic, and social. These different aspects of sustainability are interrelated: the sustainability of ecological systems is a necessary prerequisite for strong, productive economies; enduring human communities; and the values people seek from wildlands. Most basically, we compromise human welfare if we fail to sustain vital, functioning ecological systems. It is also true that strong economies and communities are often a prerequisite to societies possessing the will and patience needed to sustain ecological systems.

Sustainability is sometimes criticized as being so vague that it eludes definition. To be sure, it is impossible to define sustainability in a generic fashion that applies across the board to all natural systems. That is not, however, how we approach the term in this report.

We view sustainability as operating on two levels. First, sustainability has great appeal as a broad societal objective, as a symbol of the fundamental values we hold as a people. The concept has this acceptability because it possesses at once the philosophical force of fairness to future generations as well as the practical edge of being necessary for our economic and social well being. Thus, sustainability embodies a shared national goal, as do democracy, freedom, and equality. Such formulations, idealistic and never fully attainable, yet undeniable in their essential truths, are critical to setting an agreed upon context for making public policy on difficult and complex issues.

Sustainability also operates on a much more concrete level. While it may be a futile exercise to try to define sustainability in a way that would apply to all lands, it is entirely realistic to apply the principle to the specific circumstances of a particular geographic area. Thus, we view sustainability, in addition to its value as a broad societal aspiration, as applying in varying and particular ways to real places, to actual communities, economies, forests, watersheds, and rangelands. Different areas will have different ecological, economic, and social touchstones and different attributes to sustain. The key is to develop land stewardship policies and practices, applying the principles of sustainability, to fit the needs of each place.

Significantly, the application of sustain- ability to a specific place will change with time. Policy will evolve according to natural dynamics (fires, floods, landslides, or other natural phenomena) and societal events (economic upturns or downturns, technological innovations, population patterns, or changing values). Thus, a working policy of sustainability must be adaptable to change depending upon actual changes in the land and in human communities.

Seen in this light, sustainability (which will vary according to the place and time) becomes tangible, definable, and measurable.

We have seen recent examples of the concrete application of sustainability. In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, plans have been put into place that seek to sustain, among other things, grizzly bears, wolves, and bison; the lodgepole pine forests; magnificent geothermal resources; and the economies of local tourist communities. In the Pacific Northwest, where citizens and their governments have engaged in perhaps the most ambitious natural resources program ever undertaken, the application of sustainability is different because the place is different. The goals in the Northwest Forest Plan and other programs have included sustaining the Northern spotted owl, the Pacific salmon, the hydropower generated by dams on the Columbia and other rivers, the splendor of the region's ancient forests, and the economies of timber and fishing communities by trying to assure a lower, but reasonably reliable, level of timber production and salmon harvests important to the well being of those communities. This report will allude to other examples of sustainability as a working, real-world policy goal.

The term sustainability has come into widespread use in relatively recent times, but the core value of intergenerational equity, providing for current economic use while assuring the productivity of the land for future generations, has long played an important role in natural resource law and policy. This statement is especially true with respect to the National Forest System.

From the beginning, the laws and policies governing the national forests and grasslands have evidenced dee running currents of the policy of sustainability. When Congress first authorized presidents to set aside forest reserves, it acted in response to petitions from local farmers and townspeople that wanted to be assured of reliable water flows. Thus, watershed protection was the dominant purpose behind the Creative Act of 1891. In the Organic Act of 1897, Congress decided to permit logging in the forest reserves and provided that a purpose of the reserves was to "furnish a continuous supply of timber" (16 U.S.C. ¤ 475). The first listed purpose in the 1897 Act remained watershed protection, or "securing favorable conditions of water flows." (Id.)

Those early, formative years of the na- tional forests were idealistic, forward looking times. The creation of a system of natural lands, removed from homesteading and permanently dedicated to the national interest, was itself a dramatic act. Legislators and administrators looked for guidance to the work of the rising scientific community, especially George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature, published in 1864, where Marsh expounded at length on the dangers of soil erosion and the importance of forest lands as watersheds. Senator Algernon Paddock, one of the most influential legislators during the passage of the 1891 and 1897 acts, emphasized that "the laying waste of the forests of a country rudely disturbs that harmony between nature's forces which must be maintained if the earth is to be kept habitable for its teeming millions" (Senate Report No. 1002, 1892). President Theodore Roosevelt championed the conservation cause, which emphasized the needs of tomorrow, and directed his attention to the national forests. His executive orders reserved nearly three-fourths of all land in the National Forest System today. In discussing the timber reserves, Roosevelt wrote:

[O]ur entire purpose in this forest reserve policy is to keep the land for the benefit of the actual settler and home maker, to further his interests in every way, and, while using the natural resources of the country for the benefit of the present generation, also to use them in such manner as to keep them unimpaired for the benefit of the children now growing up to inherit the land. (Quoted in Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, 1961)

The idealism that so characterized the conservation movement burned hottest in the Forest Service itself. In 1905, Congress transferred the forest reserves to the Department of Agriculture, establishing the national forests and placing them under the supervision of Gifford Pinchot, one of the most influential figures of the 20th century in natural resources policy. Pinchot was utilitarian and believed that the forests should be used for the benefit of the American people, especially local communities. Yet the level of development under his watch paled in comparison to the magnitude of extraction, especially in timber harvesting, that the National Forest System would see in the post-World War II era.

Pinchot was adamant that the national forests, while they should be used, must be managed conservatively (sustainably in today's terms) for the future. He declared that every federal land manager was "a trustee of the public property" (The Fight for Conservation, 1910). In words that presaged the notion of intergenerational equity embedded in the Brundtland Commission Report, Pinchot wrote that conservation "recognizes fully the right of the present generation to use what it needs and all it needs of the natural resources now available, but it recognizes equally our obligation so to use what we need that our descendents shall not be deprived of what they need." (Id.)

The theme of obligations to the future was woven through the influential Pinchot Letter of 1905, still considered one of the Forest Service's organic documents. Pinchot exhorted all Forest Service employees that "the permanence of the resources is therefore indispensable to continued prosperity, and the policy of this Department for their protection and use will invariably be guided by this fact, always bearing in mind that the conservative use of these resources in no way conflicts with their permanent value." (The Principal Laws Relating to the Forest Service, 1964). The Pinchot Letter concluded with his admonition that "where conflicting interests must be reconciled the question will always be decided from the standpoint of the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run." (Id.)

The official commitment to sustaining lands in the National Forest Systems continued. The Weeks Act of 1911 authorized the acquisition of national forest lands in the east for watershed protection. The purposes of the 1944 Sustained Yield Act speak directly to sustainability when they promote sustained-yield forest management to (1) stabilize communities, forest industries, employment, and taxable forest wealth; (2) assure a continuous and ample supply of forest products; and (3) secure the benefits of forests in regulation of water supply and stream flow, prevention of soil erosion, amelioration of climate, and preservation of wildlife (P.L. 78-273).

A series of acts in the 1930s started the federal requisition and rehabilitation of tax- delinquent land, most of it 160 acre parcels of unsuccessfully homesteaded land. Under a series of statutes enacted between 1935 and 1953, a program was established for permanent federal management of the rehabilitated lands.

The Multiple-Use, Sustained-Yield Act of 1960 also emphasized conservation for the future by providing for the "achievement and maintenance in perpetuity of a high-level annual or regular periodic output of the various renewable resources of the national forests without impairment of the productivity of the land" (16 U.S.C. ¤ 531(b)). 16

The National Forest Management Act of 1976 included several requirements protecting watersheds and wildlife and provided for the protection of the diversity of plant and animal communities. In the NFMA, Congress found that the Forest Service has "both a responsibility and an opportunity to be a leader in assuring that the Nation maintains a natural resource conservation posture that will meet the requirements of our people in perpetuity" (16 U.S.C. ¤ 1600(6)).

In addition to these statutes, which apply specifically to the National Forest System, there are many general laws that also bear upon the Forest Service's stewardship. They, too, regularly evoke the theme of sustainability. Thus, the National Environmental Policy Act declares it the policy of Congress to "fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans" (42 U.S.C. ¤ 4331(a)) and to "fulfill the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations" (42 U.S.C. ¤ 4331(b)). The Clean Water Act provides that "the objective of this Act is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation's waters" (33 U.S.C. ¤ 1251(a)). The National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act protects rivers "for the benefit and enjoyment of present and future generations" (16 U.S.C. ¤ 1271), and the Wilderness Act announces "the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness" (16 U.S.C. ¤ 1131(a)). The Endangered Species Act, which has become a central part of the day-to-day work of the national forests and grasslands, evidences a profound national commitment to the sustainability of animal and plant species. In recent years, federal sustainability policy has evolved in concert with the policies of other nations. The 1992 Earth Summit (The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development), which took place in Rio de Janeiro, recognized the importance of sustainable management of natural resources. In 1995, the Santiago Declaration, of which the United States is a party, outlined criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management. One goal of the present report is to recommend procedures that are consistent with the criteria and indicators that may be integrated into the stewardship of the national forests.

Our country then, has been committed to sustainable management of our public lands for more than a century. In a 1995 message to Forest Service employees, Jack Ward Thomas, one of the nation's conservation leaders and Forest Service Chief, encapsulated this long development and demonstrated the leadership role that the Forest Service has played and should continue to play in achieving sustainability:

Our land ethic is to: Promote the sustaiability of ecosystems by ensuring their health, diversity and productivity.

This ethic provides the constancy of purpose and direction that permeates all we dream, do and say. Our land ethic has evolved through the thinking and experience of Forest Service pioneers such as Gifford Pinchot, Arthur Carhart, Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold, and others. Growing understanding of the complexity of ecosystems has expanded thinking on sustainability from emphasis on sustained yields of products to sustaining the ecosystems that provide a variety of benefits. Increased understanding of ecosystem function will demand rigorous research and continuing evolution on management concepts and actions.

Through ecosystem sustainability, present and future generations will reap the benefits that healthy, diverse, and productive ecosystems provide. Our ethic includes the active use of ecosystems, through both preservation and manipulation to gain these benefits so long as this use does not unduly impact ecosystem sustainability. ("Message from Jack Ward Thomas," 1995).

The complex framework of statutes that governs the Forest Service has many strands that speak directly to ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Yet the Forest Service retains broad authority to articulate its mission and set priorities, as Pinchot and later chiefs did. Even now, more than a century after the passage of the Organic Act, perhaps the fundamental charge to the agency is the expansive grant in the 1897 Act to regulate "occupancy and use" on the national forests and grasslands (16 U.S.C. ¤ 551). The courts have always given the agency latitude, under that statute and the Multiple-Use, Sustained- Yield Act of 1960, to chart the course that policy should take to achieve the goals in the multitude of laws governing the national forests. With respect to the critical idea of sustainability, we must ask, what actions has the agency taken in the past? What has been the role of science? How can a Committee of Scientists best offer advice and encouragement on the courses to be taken in the future?

Originally, the Forest Service administered the national forests conservatively. The timber harvest remained low, averaging about one billion board feet annually. In his first year as administrator of the national forests, Pinchot adopted a grazing code to reduce overgrazing and soil loss. Considerable research was done on silviculture and watershed protection. In 1924, the Forest Service, spearheaded by Aldo Leopold, created the first government established wilderness area in the world. In the 1930s, under Robert Marshall's leadership, the agency expanded its wilderness system and recreation policies.

After World War II, administration of the national forests changed radically. By the mid- 1960s, the allowable harvest reached 11 billion board feet, 11 times the historical level, as the Forest Service responded to the huge increase in demand for softwood products. It is important to appreciate that the Forest Service viewed its policies during this era as achieving sustainability. The annual harvest, high yield though it may have been, was premised on "even flow." In spite of the intensive logging, the reasoning went, the forests could grow more board feet than were being harvested. This high yield timber production endured well into the 1980s and dominated policy in the National Forest System.

Almost unnoticed, beginning in the 1960s, scientists had begun digging deeper. What are the ecological effects, they began to ask, of the level of commodity production that the Forest Service had committed itself to?

Various scientific disciplines examined the ways in which fundamental ecosystem processes were being changed. Hydrologists studied streamflow patterns and the effects of increased silt loads. Range scientists researched the impacts of grazing, logging, and water diversions on riparian zones. Foresters increasingly looked at the whole forest, not just timber harvest volumes. The research of fire ecologists showed how fire suppression policies had altered the natural disturbance cycle. Spotted owl research began in the early 1970s, and wildlife biologists conducted many other studies on species extinction and viability. In this respect, the original Committee of Scientists in 1979 made a historic contribution through its regulation protecting species viability, which implemented the NFMA's provision on diversity of plant and animal communities.

A new and deeper way of looking at natural systems emerged. No longer would the productivity of natural systems be defined solely by their commodity outputs: board feet of timber, animal unit months of grazing forage, acre-feet of water diverted, and kilowatts of electricity. Today, in addition to those measures, productivity is measured in terms of ecosystem services, including clean water and air, fertile soils, and diversity of plant and animal species. Further, a new respect for the natural dynamics of ecological systems developed: land management should account for uncertainty by acknowledging that planning and implementation will be influenced by natural but unpredictable events, such as wildfires, droughts, floods, hurricanes, wide spread occurrences of insects and disease, and the introduction and spread of nonnative species. The focus of the scientific community (and, increasingly, of on-the-ground land management) has become maintenance of overall ecosystem processes.

In a complementary set of developments beginning in the 1970s, the public became involved in forest and rangeland policy as never before. Citizens insisted upon greater recognition of recreation, wildlife, and the beauty and spirituality that are also a part of whole forests and rangeland systems. The public concerns and scientific advances became embodied in such statutes as the National Forest Management Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act and in many agency regulations.

These changes were fundamental. They amounted to a redefinition of watersheds, forests, and rangelands, a new conception of what we as a society are trying to sustain. By digging deep, scientists of the past two generations had helped to redefine the approach to land stewardship. Importantly, in the process, they brought an understanding of the fundamental ecological processes that make possible the multiple-use benefits and community values that the public now expects from its public lands.

Based on the above considerations, the Committee would propose that the two guiding stars of stewardship in the national forests and grasslands are sustainability and the recognition that these are the people's lands. The remainder of this report is dedicated to a discussion of what sustainability means in the context of stewardship of the National Forest System and how the Forest Service might, in practical ways, organize planning and management to achieve it.

Implementing Sustainability

One challenge of stewardship of the national forests and grasslands is to translate the broad gauged policy of sustainability into specific planning and management practices that will provide long-term ecological, economic, and social benefits. This chapter defines the characteristics of these three aspects of sustainability. It also explores the ways in which the three are interrelated. Ultimately, it suggests ways in which we can measure sustainability, determine when the objectives of sustainability have been attained, and fully incorporate these concepts into decision making.

3A. Ecological Sustainability Back to Top

The Elements of Ecological Sustainability Ecological sustainability means maintaining the composition, structure, and processes of an ecological system. The National Forest Management Act (NFMA) goals of maintaining species diversity and ecological productivity should therefore be broadly viewed in terms of ecological sustainability. That is, species diversity and productivity can be preserved by maintaining the composition, structure, and processes characteristic of an area.

Processes Back to Top

Ecological processes include photosynthesis, energy flow, nutrient cycling, water movement, disturbance, and succession. These processes are fundamental to the functioning of ecological systems. Disturbances such as wildfire, floods, or windthrow, for example, are natural and integral processes in many systems. Organisms that make up the biotic component of such systems have evolved in response to environmental changes triggered by disturbances. Disturbances often move ecosystems towards earlier successional stages, stimulating renewal processes (e.g., stand replacement forest fires followed by primary plant succession) and short-term increases in productivity. Large-scale disturbance may move an ecosystem to a new system state from which it may, or may not, return to its predisturbance condition (e.g., conversion of prairie grasslands to agricultural fields and channel incision).

Often, one goal of management is to mimic those natural disturbance processes that either allow the system to return to its original state or move it to a more desirable state. The similarities and differences between human induced and natural disturbance processes are poorly known and constitute an active area of scientific research. Despite this uncertainty, managing lands to mimic the disturbance processes that sustain ecosystems through time, without surpassing the adaptational limits of the plants and animals, is an important goal.

By sustaining the main components of an ecological system, composition, structure, and processes, the system gains resilience, the ability to renew or maintain and propagate itself after disturbance. The continuing productivity of an ecological system, including its ability to produce desirable "outputs," such as clean water, wood, fertile soil, riparian habitat, or viable wildlife populations, depends upon potential renewal.

The concepts of composition, structure, and process can be viewed as a triangle, with a particular corner receiving greater emphasis, depending on the management at hand (see Sidebar 3-1). In focusing on one corner of the triangle, however, the other corners cannot be forgotten, and the focus may shift as the management situation changes. This perspective on ecological sustainability is entirely consistent with other approaches that categorized attributes of sustainability (such as the Santiago Criteria; see Table 3-1).

Sustainability must be evaluated along a continuum rather than viewed as a single target value. The range of composition, structure, and processes required to sustain an ecosystem must be interpreted in light of the natural and historical variation of the region. The knowledge that a threshold level may exist, below which a "threatened" component of the system is at risk, means that sustainability must receive stewardship emphasis at all times and locations.

Assessment activities must balance short- term gains and losses against opportunities that provide for long-term benefits. These tradeoffs become a concern when a system is near a sustainability threshold or when impacts accumulate over time. Difficult decisions may be necessary when a system nears the point where its composition, structure, or processes are at risk of undergoing fundamental changes that may be repairable only over the long term. In these cases, attention must be paid to that part of the triangle that may have the greatest long-term effects on sustainability. An example occurs in the southwestern forests, where fire suppression has resulted in extensive areas with massive fuel loads. The risks are high that a large-scale fire may cause long-term loss of species and significant changes in ecosystem properties. Therefore, in the near-term, steps should be taken to move the system closer to one that can retain the full suite of ecological components that are more typical of this forest system. In some cases, to achieve sustainability goals may require management actions that upset the short-term stability of the system.

Factors to Consider in Implementing Sustainability Back to Top

Implementation of national forest plans is not a precise process; there are many unknowns and potential pitfalls that are not under the control of resource managers. Therefore, planning must acknowledge scientific and social uncertainties, be cognizant of the inherent variability of natural processes, acknowledge adverse cumulative effects of management actions, and preserve options for future generations. This is the daunting, but essential responsibility that falls on the shoulders of the Forest Service.

Acknowledge the Dynamic Nature of Ecological Systems

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3-1. Structure and Function in Ecosystem Restoration

All ecosystems have elements of composition and structure that arise through diverse ecological processes. Achieving a desired future condition of a landscape depends on sustaining key ecological processes whose functions then produce valuable compositional and structural elements. If the linkage between underlying processes and explicit compositional and structural elements has been broken in some ecological systems, restoration maybe difficult and complex. One example is the introduction of large woody debris into forest streams to improve aquatic habitat where current levels of wood are well below historic norms. Such structure is an essential component of many streams; however, if large woody debris is added to a stream without considering the riparian processes of that specific site, the restoration effort may ultimately fail. A general focus on structure cannot substitute for improved riparian management practices that will allow future natural inputs of coarse woody debris, seasonal inputs of particulate organic matter, amelio-ration of stream temperatures, stable riverbanks, and, ultimately, the restoration of key riparian processes. Thus, both structure and process must be addressed in such restoration projects. Another example is the restoration of natural processes without sufficient attention to structure. In dry-forest types of the western United States, fire exclusion or suppression has historically occurred over large areas. To meet restoration goals, the use of fire has been proposed for forests where it historically was an important process. However, the altered structure and composition of current forest conditions makes the reintroduction of fire and its expected outcomes problematic. In the current situation, a fire during the normal season may burn too intensely. An out-of-season fire may not be the appropriate intensity and may burn too long because of the accumulated fuel loads on the forest floor. Through some of these situations, even large trees may be killed. Thus, fire reintroduction without some prior forest treatment (e.g., thinning or understory removal) may have unintended effects on ecosystem composition unless structure and process interactions are addressed.

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Table 3.1. Relationship between the criteria from the Santiago agreement and the three elements of sustainability: composition, function and structure

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The classical paradigm of ecology has been the stable state ecological system, sometimes referred to as the "balance of Nature" or "Nature at equilibrium." As our understanding of ecological systems has evolved, that view has been replaced by a nonequilibrium paradigm that recognizes the inherently dynamic nature of ecological systems. Ecological systems are regularly subject to episodic, natural disturbances that change their states (that is, they lead to changes in composition, structure, or process).

Contemporary with this shift in thinking was the recognition that ecological systems are hierarchical structures best evaluated at a variety of spatial scales. The traditional ecological hierarchy includes genes, populations, species, communities, ecosystems, and biomes.

The combination of these two ideas on nonequilibrium and hierarchical structure of ecological systems leads to a complex view of those systems from both local and landscape perspectives. A large landscape may be in compositional equilibrium even though individual patches in the landscape are in a variety of states that may change through time. An example is the distribution of forest seral stages across a large landscape. The relative proportion of the different stages may stay approximately constant through time, even though the seral stage of specific areas is dynamic.

The new, nonequilibrium paradigm in ecology has the potential to be misused. If nature is often in a state of flux, then some people may wrongly conclude that whatever changes occur to ecological systems are acceptable. Yet, ecological systems are not infinitely resilient, and rates of change are bounded. Human impacts must be constrained because ecological systems have adaptational limits that, if surpassed, will lead to undesirable conditions. For example, timber harvest on steep slopes may lead to loss of soil and a permanent reduction in the productive potential of that part of the landscape. Such degraded ecological systems will be severely limited in their ability to provide those critical goods and services required by current and future human generations.

Sustaining ecological processes so they operate within their expected bounds of variation is the only way to sustain ecological diversity and productivity for future generations. Even though we now recognize the nonequilibrium nature of ecological systems, we also recognize that the concept of stability of large-scale landscapes is well founded. Ecological systems have historically changed sufficiently slowly that there was apparent continuity in landscape processes across multiple species lifecycles and human generations.

Acknowledge the Significance of Natural Processes

National forests and national grasslands contain a variety of natural resources that change over time and space. Over long periods, natural catastrophic events (e.g., widespread fire, landslides, floods, droughts, hurricanes, or volcanic eruptions) are certain and important impacts in most ecological systems. Chronic but important changes also may occur that alter the character of the vegetation and associated resources. These changes include succession (i.e., the sequential changes in vegetation composition and structure through time), long periods of high or low precipitation, temperature changes, loss of site productivity via soil compaction or erosion, outbreaks of insects or disease, establishment and spread of nonnative species, and loss of native species diversity. Although many natural processes have a dynamic and often unpredictable aspect, an appreciation of the expected intensity, frequency, and duration of those disturbances must be factored into planning efforts.

In the past, the Forest Service often did not adequately acknowledge the dynamic nature of natural resources. Notions like "the regulated forest" and "maximum sustained yield" that guided the level of timber harvest generally assumed that natural disturbances (fire and insects, especially) would be suppressed and, therefore, could be ignored in planning. When at least temporarily successful, these suppression policies often created new problems, such as fuel buildups. When fires and insect epidemics occurred anyway, the calculated timber harvest level generally proved to be overestimated. As mentioned above, future planning and management efforts must recognize and acknowledge disturbance processes.

Previous management practices have changed the composition and structure of forests and rangelands such that a simple return to more natural conditions is difficult or impossible in the near term. For example, widespread harvesting of large diameter trees in many ponderosa pine forests, coupled with long-term fire suppression, has resulted in relatively dense stands of regenerating trees. These stands are more prone to catastrophic wildfire. How they should be managed is an ongoing debate. Similarly, in unconstrained river-valley systems throughout much of the American West, historical grazing and other practices have affected watershed conditions and riparian plant communities; stream widening and channel incision have been a common result. Even under the most enlightened future stewardship, the recovery of many streams and flood plain functions is not possible in the short term. In some instances, the direct effects of increasing human populations near and within protection boundaries of national forests and rangelands may limit future stewardship options.

The attempt to "acknowledge natural processes" is a desirable attribute of the planning process and its implementation. An example of such an attempt is the current effort to try to identify "historical ranges of natural variability," which is discussed in more detail below. The knowledge being gained is providing Forest Service personnel with opportunities to use their professional understanding of site characteristics and processes to develop stewardship practices most appropriate for attaining ecological sustainability. However, the scientific knowledge base is often limited with regard to specific ecosystem processes and their interactions. Much previous research has focused on specific management practices (e.g., timber harvest and road construction) or cause-and-effect at specific sites. Thus, our ability to generalize and extrapolate the results of individual studies to a wide range of ecosystem conditions remains limited.

Acknowledge Uncertainty and Inherent Variability of Ecological Systems Back to Top

Uncertainty arises from numerous sources and occurs during many stages of the planning process. Most important to our discussion here is the scientific uncertainty that arises from incomplete understanding of how ecological systems work or insufficient information to determine the relationships between processes. Often, there is incomplete information of the relevant ecological processes, the connections among ecosystem components, and incomplete knowledge of the impacts of management.

In addition to being subject to uncertainty, ecological systems are often highly variable, and processes may operate differently above and below some thresholds. Analysis of management alternatives must consider the lack of complete understanding of relationships within ecological systems, confidence limits on projections into the future, and the inherent variability of ecological systems. Uncertainty and variability are primary ingredients of nearly all stewardship decisions. However, previous planning efforts generally did not acknowledge natural variability, or the risks associated with decisions made under uncertainty. For example, estimates of future annual timber harvest in a forest plan are usually presented as a specific value. If nothing unanticipated happens over the implementation period of the plan, that value may indeed represent the most probable outcome of a specific plan. However, without including some measure of uncertainty and variability, that number may falsely imply that the projected outcome is fairly certain and has a narrow range. Given the inescapable variability of ecological processes, planners have the responsibility to explicitly incorporate stochastic processes into their analyses. It is critical that the Forest Service learn to make decisions and manage in a highly variable and uncertain environment and to fully inform the public of the risks associated with its decisions.

Acknowledge Cumulative Effects

To aid implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), regulations issued by the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in 1978 defined cumulative effects as

the impact on the environment resulting from the incremental impact of the action when added to other past, present, and reasonably foreseeable actions regardless of what agency or person undertakes such actions.

Implicit in this definition of cumulative effects is the concept that a specific cause-and-effect response to a management action can be identified. Also, the CEQ definition implies a simple additivity of effects, a phenomenon that seldom occurs because of multiple and nonlinear environmental responses to change in ecological systems.

The CEQ definition of cumulative effects is even less clear regarding how to incorporate the role of future natural disturbance. Natural disturbances are a fundamental feature of both managed and unmanaged ecological systems within a national forest or rangeland. However, many types of potential cumulative effects from management practices may not actually become apparent until disturbance occurs. For example, a decision not to thin a dry-site forest that has high fuel loads may result in catastrophic watershed conditions only if a wildfire occurs; a poorly designed road may not be a problem until after a large storm, when numerous road related landslides occur; overgrazing in riparian areas may not manifest itself in a loss of woody species unless the area suffers an extended drought.

Because of the wide variation in site-specific practices and local environmental conditions (e.g., vegetation type, topography, geology, and soils) across a given national forest or rangeland, the direct and indirect effects of management practices may not always be well understood or easily predicted. Even when general patterns of cumulative effects become evident at watershed and bioregional scales (e.g., basin-wide and regional patterns of channel incision, reduced abundance or extent of specific plant or animal species, or altered water quality), the effects on smaller sites may be difficult to estimate.

There are few standard analytical methods available that effectively address cumulative effects. The field of integrated assessment is striving to provide the analytic framework in which to consider feedbacks and cumulative effects; however, the field is just being formalized, and the approach is generally applied at broader scales than a national forest. Assessments of early cumulative effects on the national forests have often focused on issues related to water resources and fisheries. Although watershed analysis procedures have been developed during the past decade to better represent the spatial distribution and temporal occurrence of watershed effects, the diversity of watershed conditions and management activities occurring in a given area may preclude widespread use of standard analytical methods.

Neither the NFMA (1976), nor its subsequent regulations, makes direct mention of cumulative effects or cumulative effects analysis. However, the regulations recognized the need to coordinate planning with local, state, and other federal agencies as well as with private landowners whose lands are intermingled with National Forest System lands. The regulations also required monitoring and evaluation of the effects of management on national forest lands that may be affected by planning decisions, including the effects of activities occurring on nearby lands. Preventing potentially adverse cumulative effects to watershed conditions, water quality, aquatic habitats, or other resources from land-use practices has been largely dependent upon NEPA and CEQ regulations and the evolution of associated case law. Unfortunately, NEPA documents often focus primarily on the direct effects of proposed action, without fully assessing the cumulative effects.

When new NFMA regulations are written, specific language is needed directing that cumulative effects analyses be incorporated into planning efforts to the degree possible. These analyses should focus on relevant issues at both bioregional and watershed scales. As difficult as it is, we must focus attention on cumulative effects in planning.

Preserve Options

Preservation of future stewardship options is rarely possible when current rates of resource exploitation are high. Preserving options assumes that an acceptable range of choices will be available to address the environmental problems confronting future human generations. However, many American forest and range ecosystems have been intensively used and managed with adverse effects on their productivity. The most significant changes in these systems in the West have occurred during the past 100 to 150 years. For example, in forested systems, much old growth has been harvested in response to demand for softwood timber and the desire to convert to faster- growing young growth, and extensive road systems have been built with technologies that we now consider obsolete. In rangeland areas, alterations to riparian systems and stream channels have been extensive, a consequence of historical watershed and riparian management practices. In all of these situations, future stewardship options have been reduced or, in some cases, essentially eliminated. Current management practices can potentially change (reduce or sometimes increase) future options, but if these practices significantly and adversely affect other resources or values, then they are also likely to limit future options significantly. If current practices result in such impacts as species becoming threatened or endangered, water quality standards being exceeded, or public values and trust being violated, then dramatic readjustments to those practices are clearly needed.

Preserving options is also a way of explicitly acknowledging our incomplete knowledge of complex ecological systems (that is, our ignorance of how they function and their interactions with natural and human influenced disturbance regimes) and of our responsibilities to future generations of humans. This philosophy is, perhaps, best encapsulated by focusing first on what we leave before focusing on what we take from ecological systems.

How Ecological Concepts Affect Planning Back to Top

Assessing and Monitoring Sustainability

Assessment and monitoring to characterize sustainability are indispensable parts of land and resource stewardship. To date, they have not been integrated into the planning and implementation process. Yet, including assessment and monitoring within the planning process is, perhaps, the single most important shift that can happen in forest stewardship. Assessments inform decisions regarding the current status of land and resource stewardship. The assessment and monitoring processes create the information necessary for future decisions, can save costs of future inventory analysis, and reduce the likelihood of management mistakes. Monitoring is the means to continue to update the baseline information and to determine the degree of success in achieving ecological sustainability. Monitoring involves not only collecting relevant information in an appropriate manner but also maintaining and updating the databases that contain the original data and their syntheses. Including these activities in land stewardship means both that the most up-to-date information will be used to guide management decisions and that information relevant to those decisions will be collected.

Assessment and monitoring are meant to form an evolving process. The focus may change over time or space as concerns change. Whether the current emphasis is on composition, structure, process, or some combination of these features depends on pending decisions, characteristics of the system, and features most at risk. Furthermore, ongoing technological developments and advances in the scientific understanding of sustainability will lead to additions and refinements in the ways that sustainability can be measured. For example, concurrent developments in geographic information systems (GISs) and the field of landscape ecology have allowed a broad-scale perspective of land stewardship to be implemented. Thus, management should be viewed as a learning process that contributes to our current knowledge and affects the way sustainability is measured and provided for.

Assessments must recognize the hierar-chical organization of ecological systems. A hierarchical approach to the assessment of ecological systems recognizes that smaller subsystems change more rapidly than do the larger systems to which they belong. At a landscape scale, processes operate so as to constrain faster and more local processes at smaller spatial scales (e.g., forest canopy structure affects local understory species composition and rates of photosynthesis). Given this perspective, current scientific understanding suggests that sustaining ecological diversity and productivity over multiple human generations requires stewardship policies set initially at a landscape scale. This idea is relatively new in management. Therefore, the initial goal of a sustainability policy should be the retention of those ecological structures and processes that support and retain ecological diversity and integrity at a landscape scale. After assessment and monitoring at the landscape scale are addressed, the value of the regional information for finerscale analysis can be considered (Table 3-2).

Given the lack of well established theories that specify which level of the complex hierarchy of ecosystems is most appropriate for sustainability, guidance to assess at a particular scale is imprecise. For the foreseeable future, managers will have considerable latitude in choosing the boundaries, and thus scale, of the systems they manage. This indeterminacy is appropriate as long as managers realize that the ultimate goal of management and stewardship is to retain those dynamic processes that provide for biological diversity at the landscape scale. One major difficulty in landscape management is that any one manager usually has authority over only a portion of the landscape.

Although approaches to stewardship should begin by considering the large landscape scale, that scale may not work for resolving some management problems. Therefore, choice of boundaries and spatial scale will remain an essential part of assessing a system and proposing solutions to specific problems. Small landscape assessments, however, must be able to be aggregated upward and be consistent with large landscape analyses (as is discussed in Chap. 4).

A Hierarchical Approach to Planning

For pragmatic reasons, only a limited number of measures can be used to infer the sustainability of complex ecological systems. Therefore, it is useful to apply a hierarchical assessment to identify the most relevant spatial and temporal scale for a particular management problem. A hierarchical approach to assessment allows planning to simultaneously consider sustainability needs at various spatial scales. This approach acknowledges that some characteristics of sustainability are best viewed from a regional perspective while others are more appropriately considered at watershed or local, site-specific scales. The planning process needs to identify the issues that are relevant at each scale (Table 3-3). Assessments then use these issues to drive

Table 3.2. Example sustainability attributes by scale.

Table 3.3. Example of a hierarchical assessment for aquatic ecosystems.

their inquiry. It is useful to establish terminology for discussing the hierarchies involved in an assessment process. The nation is the broadest level (coarsest scale) of assessments for the Forest Service. Regional assessments, for areas such as the Southern Appalachians or the Sierra Nevada Range, may be based on bioregional characteristics or planning regions. At the middle level of this scale are such areas as watersheds, which follow hydrologic boundaries, or conservation areas, which focus on habitats that cut across hydrologic boundaries. Because watersheds can range from subbasins to smaller scales, watersheds are also represented at the fine scale of resolution; project- level management represents the finest scale.

Broad Regional Issues

Regional-scale information typically is derived from a combination of remotely sensed and ground-based data. Both satellite imagery and aerial photographs can provide complete spatial coverage of an area. The availability of this information should be fully exploited for landscape-scale analyses. The ecological value of this information, if carefully interpreted, arises from the information it provides on vegetation composition, pattern, and context at the large landscape scale.

Processes that are particularly important at a regional scale include fragmentation and connectivity. Fragmentation is the process by which habitat is broken up into smaller, separate patches. Habitat fragmentation can and often does result from human land-use dynamics, including forestry, agriculture, and settlement, but also can be caused naturally by wildfire, wind, flooding, outbreaks of pathogens, increased abundance of herbivores (such as elk), and other disturbances. Land management decisions can alter habitat fragmentation patterns of natural forests and rangelands by adding fences and roads or by producing changes in vegetative cover.

The pattern of habitat fragmentation and the resulting connectivity of the remaining habitat can constrain the spatial distribution of species by making some areas inaccessible. Connectivity is a threshold dynamic, meaning that incremental reduction of habitat may have only gradual effects on the presence or abundance of a species until the threshold is reached. At that point, the adverse effects on species viability tend to be dramatic.

Changes in the abundance and distribution of land cover, along with changes in connectivity and fragmentation, are more likely to have substantial effects when habitat for a given species is near its threshold abundance. The threshold of connectivity varies among species and depends on the abundance and spatial arrangement of the habitat and the movement or dispersal capabilities of the organism. For example, species may become isolated in small patches of habitat, and thus become vulnerable to local extinction, if they are separated by intervening habitat that is hostile to their movement.

Subregions: Watersheds and Conservation Areas Back to Top

Subregions provide a middle scale (between regions and sites) for assessment and monitoring. Often, information relevant to a specific management issue is best represented at the subregion scale. Examples of subregions are watersheds and conservation areas.

3-2. Measuring Ecological Integrity in the Interior Columbia Basin

The Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project (ICBEMP) utilized the concept of ecological integrity to describe the state of ecological systems in the Interior Columbia River Basin of the Pacific Northwest. According to the ICBEMP, ecological integrity refers to the presence and functioning of ecological components and processes. For its assessment, the ICBEMP evaluated the integrity of five systems: forestland, rangeland, hydrologic, aquatic, and terrestrial community types. For each of these systems, scientists developed a definition of high integrity. A terrestrial system that exhibits high integrity, as an example, is a mosaic of plant and animal communities consisting of well connected, high quality habitats that support a diverse assemblage of native and desired nonnative species, the full expression of potential life histories and taxonomic lineages, and the taxonomic and genetic diversity necessary for long-term persistence and adaptation in a variable environment. Generally, conditions before Euro-American settlement (pre-1800s) provide the standards for evaluating the presence and functioning of ecological components and processes (as described in the next sidebar).

The ICBEMP scientists developed measures of integrity for each component, some of which are listed below.

Rangeland Integrity

Grazing influences on vegetation patterns and composition

Expansion of exotic species

Changes in fire severity and frequency

Woodland expansion into herblands and shrublands

Note: Map of Composite Ecological Integrity Ratings did not convert

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3-3. Using the HRV to Assist Land and Resource

Stewardship in the Interior Columbia Basin

The Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project (ICBEMP) extensively used the historical range of variability (HRV) to characterize native ecosystems and serve as a benchmark for understanding the effects of human induced changes in the Pacific Northwest systems. They simulated the HRV by developing pre-Euro-American settlement succession/disturbance models for each vegetation type in the Interior Columbia Basin and estimating change over a 100-to-400-year period from a historical vegetation map.

In this analysis, the ICBEMP scientists make a number of points: (1) They used a time period characterized by relatively consistent climatic, edaphic, topographic, and biogeographic conditions that would enable them to describe contemporary ecosystems. They concluded that the present macroclimate emerged approximately 2700 years ago and that the present plant communities endemic to temperate climates have been in equilibrium with the environment for the past 2000 years. While the Little Ice Age of a few hundred years ago shifted the equilibrium of species' ranges and disturbance regimes, it did not result in extinctions or substantial changes in ecological relationships. (2) They recognized Native American peoples' use of fire as a disturbance process that influenced the HRV, as these cultures have had an integral role on the landscape for at least the past 2000 years. (3) They did not consider human disturbances of post-Euro-American settlement as part of the HRV because those disturbances were of a type, size, and rate that were not typical of disturbances under which the endemic plant and animal species and ecosystems had developed. (4) While HRV provides a means of referencing the current conditions and differences among land management scenarios, scientists noted that land managers may not wish to target them as management objectives for a number of reasons. These reasons include other human values for the landscapes; the high cost of restoring some heavily altered systems; and the fact that some natural disturbance events are of a size, intensity, and pattern unacceptable to society. (5) The ICBEMP scientists pointed out that action may be needed to return the landscape to conditions within the HRV. As an example, fuel buildups through the development of understory thickets have resulted in conditions that, in some cases, seem outside the historical range of variability. Prescribed fire and/or timber harvest could be employed to address these problems.

The ICBEMP scientists believe that HRV is valuable in a number of ways for assessing and monitoring the effects of land management relative to departure from historical conditions. These departures can be used as a reference against which to evaluate change and help identify risks to ecological sustainability. Also, understanding the HRV for different resources can help managers design actions that produce goods and services in ways that contribute to ecological sustainability.

An estimation of broad-scale habitat departures from historical ranges of conditions can thus provide an early warning of broad-scale vegetation changes that may result in risks to species persistence. Such an estimation can therefore serve as a reliable coarse-filter assessment of the efficacy of current management practices. As an example, ICBEMP scientists compared the current broad-scale habitat availability within a region or landscape to HRV. It was assumed that a species' persistence within a geographic area was not at risk if the current area of that species' primary habitat fell within the medium 75% of the historical data.

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In simplest terms, a watershed comprises a land area that drains to a common point. The use of watersheds as the planning unit focuses assessment on a physically connected portion of the landscape, unambiguously delineated by topographic features at the margins (i.e., ridges and watershed divides). Implicit in a watershed perspective is the crucial role of gravity in the general movement of water, nutrients, sediment, organic matter, and other resources in a downslope direction. The movement of various ecosystem outputs and products to lower elevations provides for process "connectivity" within the watershed, whereby downslope areas are "connected" or influenced by activities and processes occurring on upslope areas. For example, altered water quality in a headwater stream may contribute to downstream changes in water quality or aquatic habitats. In similar fashion, a landslide initiating along a ridge may carry far enough downslope that it significantly changes the character of a stream. It is this "connectivity" of various products and processes within watersheds that can provide an important ecological basis for undertaking watershed-based planning efforts.

Although ecosystem products within a watershed most commonly move from higher to lower elevations, there are mechanisms by which materials and processes are transferred in an upvalley direction. For example, the return of adult salmon from the ocean to their natal streams can represent a significant influx of nutrients. After the adults spawn and die, their carcasses provide nutrients for a wide variety of aquatic and riparian biota. Alteration of a stream channel at a specific location, either by natural or human causes, may cause upstream migration of channel gullying and widening. The ecological impact of channel incision and widening can cause more than an increase in local sediment production. In some situations, these channel adjustments may represent a major alteration to riparian and aquatic habitats; in others, they may result in undercut toeslopes of hillsides with subsequent increases in hillslope erosion rates.

From a human perspective, watersheds represent a prominent component of our culture. We commonly name human communities after the streams and rivers or other landmarks that arise within their topographic divides. Thus, there is strong sense of place and identity associated with specific watersheds that people can, and do, relate to. In many instances, this "sense of place" may transcend other cartographic or political boundaries that society has developed (e.g., township, county, or state). Part of the human connection with specific watersheds is related to each watershed's having unique features by consequence of its position in a larger landscape, by its size, by the character of its streams and rivers, by the spatial distribution of vegetation types, by the types and abundance of animal species, or by any combination of such factors. The underlying geology, topography, climatic patterns, plant communities and their distributions, drainage patterns, and other attributes differ for each watershed. This uniqueness not only contributes to the appeal for using watersheds as a basis for planning efforts, but also challenges managers of the national forests and grasslands to understand and consider these unique qualities in the development of plans and management decisions.

Although there are often distinct advantages of using watersheds to address various types of ecological and regulatory concerns (e.g., fisheries, riparian management, and clean water) on national forests and rangelands, there are also situations in which a different perspective of ecosystem conditions and issues may be more useful and appropriate. Watersheds where topographic relief is indistinct may not have well delineated watershed divides. For example, in the north-central states, streams and lakes abound, but the topographic relief is not large, and thus watershed divides are not pronounced compared to what we see in mountainous terrain of the west. Where watersheds have significant relief (e.g., prominent hills and mountains), the distribution of specific forest types and plant communities are typically arrayed along specific elevation bands; those vegetation types usually connect with those of adjacent watersheds. Because many animal species frequently range across watershed divides, relatively large-scale ecological assessments addressing wildlife, recreational use, and other issues may best be addressed by using planning areas that involve multiple watersheds or components of them (e.g., the southern Appalachian physiographic region). Similarly, the range of the northern spotted owl covers many watersheds in their entirety and portions of others. For wide-ranging terrestrial species (e.g., wolves, bears, raptors, and ungulates) the connectivity of habitat across the landscape may be a prime determinant of their viability. In sum, when considering planning areas, it is important to choose boundaries that enclose the geographic extent of the issues to be addressed.

Site-Specific Information

The requisite information on composition, structure, and processes needed at fine spatial scales largely depends on the specifics of the management issue. Compositional information typically focuses on the status of species (plants, animals, or fungi) that are rare, endangered, or used for economic or recreational purposes (e.g., timber or game species). Structural features include topography and land form, but most often relate to the age and seral stage of the vegetation. Process information at the fine scale usually relates to the contributions these species provide to critical ecosystem functions. Examples include pollination, soil processes, nutrient cycling, and energy flow across trophic levels. Processes also include disturbances, such as fire, windthrow, and flooding, that affect the structure and composition of biogenic and geologic elements at a local scale.

Ecological Integrity: An Integrative Measure of Ecological Condition Back to Top

Because of the unprecedented rate of change in ecological systems in the United States and the accompanying loss of biological diversity, environmental scientists have sought a way to measure or characterize the state of these systems. Such a metric would allow managers to assess the efficacy of their management practices in moving ecological systems toward, or maintaining them within the bounds of, sustainability. The concept of ecological integrity has been put forth by a wide variety of scientists as a way to encapsulate appropriate metrics, and measurable definitions have been proposed.

According to the dictionary, integrity is "the state of being unimpaired, sound" or "the quality or condition of being whole or complete." A variety of definitions of ecological integrity exist, most differing in the scale of the assessment. A fine-scale approach stresses the structural and compositional aspects of ecological systems, focusing on individual species and their dynamics within specific ecosystems. A coarser-scale approach focuses on macroscale processes (i.e., primary productivity, nutrient cycling, and hydrologic systems) and pays less attention to the local composition and structure of the systems from which these processes emerge. It is important to recognize that the concept of ecological integrity is relatively new and the scientific foundations underlying it are not fully developed.

Previously in this chapter, we stated that NFMA's goals of maintaining species diversity and ecological productivity should be viewed in terms of ecosystem composition, structure, and processes over time and space. Therefore, we propose that an ecosystem has ecological integrity when it can maintain characteristic compositions, structures, and processes against a background of anthropogenic changes in environmental conditions. Ecosystems with high ecological integrity continue to express the evolutionary and biogeographic processes that gave rise to the current biota; they have a species composition, diversity, and functional organization expected from natural habitats of the region; and they are resilient to environmental change and disturbance occurring within their natural range of variability.

Some important considerations in imple-menting the concept of "ecological integrity" include the following:

1. Given the complexity of this concept, it will be difficult to assess with a single indicator, but rather will require a set of indicators measured at different spatial, temporal, and hierarchical levels of ecological systems. As an example, the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project (ICBEMP) used a wide variety of measures to describe the ecological integrity of the interior Columbia River Basin. Scientists were able to aggregate these measures to evaluate ecological integrity overall and by major ecosystem component (see figure in Sidebar 3-2).

2. Because ecosystems are inherently variable, managers need some guidance about the amount of environmental variation that is acceptable and is within the biota's ability to respond adaptively to it. Estimates of an acceptable range of variability in compositions, structures, and processes provide reference distributions or conditions against which competing management scenarios are compared and ecological integrity is assessed. These reference conditions may be, in fact, the "coarse filters" within which the current physical landscape and biota evolved. To the degree that future management scenarios can achieve these conditions, the more likely it is that the "coarse filter" will achieve the objectives for ecological sustainability and the less likely that "fine-filter" strategies will be needed for individual species.

Reference conditions are rarely character-ized as uniform "snapshots" of the past. Considerable variability caused by climate change and disturbance by fire, flood, insects, disease, and other natural factors typically affects these reference conditions. Reference conditions vary within an ecosystem over time, and the proportions of old-growth forests or early seral conditions are never in a true equilibrium state. These conditions also vary between ecosystems. For example, in Washington state, old-growth forests may be common in both wet, coastal, Douglas fir forests and dry, interior, ponderosa pine forests. Pine forests that burned frequently from natural fires were composed of wide-spaced large trees with a grassy understory. When fire was removed from these systems, they developed a multistoried canopy structure much like old growth in coastal Douglas fir, but this condition is neither natural nor sustainable. The old-growth structures of these forests are inherently different.

In general, it is easier to reconstruct disturbance regimes (e.g., fire frequency and intensity) than the effect of those regimes on the landscape, so reference conditions are rarely precise. Nevertheless, they play a key role in evaluating the "coarse filter" proposed by future management plans.

Historical Range of Variability Back to Top

The historical range of variability (HRV), roughly equivalent to the natural range of variability concept, refers to the expected variation in physical and biological conditions caused by natural climatic fluctuations and disturbance regimes (e.g., flooding, fire, and windthrow). It is derived from an ecological history of a landscape and is estimated from the rate and extent of change in selected physical and biological variables. Because HRV is derived from a historical analysis, its value is dependent on the time interval evaluated. Often, disturbance events have low predictability, but are usually bounded in space (extent) and time (recurrence interval); that is, small-scale disturbances occur more frequently, and large-scale disturbances more infrequently. As a consequence of this relationship, the longer the time interval considered, the greater the estimated HRV. Therefore, the HRV concept is only meaningful when a time interval has been specified and justified.

Selecting a time frame for estimating HRV is difficult and often limited by the availability of information on past landscape patterns. One approach is to select a time period characterized by climate, species composition, and distur-bance regime similar to those of today. The rationale is that this benchmark HRV will encompass the climatic fluctuations and disturbance regimes that influenced the biota over their evolutionary history and to which they are adapted. Other time intervals and rationales are, of course, possible. The deciding criterion is that the HRV chosen will result in future conditions that sustain ecological integrity.

The concept of an HRV of an ecological system is appropriately understood as a set of frequency distributions of physical and biological conditions, distributions with both dynamic shapes and dynamic ranges. It would be inappropriate to consider HRV solely in terms of the upper or lower value of the range of any given distribution. Equally important as a management goal is the shape, as well as the range, of these distributions.

The concept of HRV as a characterization of reference conditions for management of the national forests and grasslands is based on the common sense notion that the environmental conditions most likely to conserve native species are those under which they evolved. Given vast numbers of species and the uncertainty about their habitat needs, we seek management strategies aimed at creating the conditions for conserving the suite of species without examining them one at a time. In addition, ecological states that exceed the HRV can provide an early warning system for landscape conditions that may reduce ecological sustainability. Recent assessments, such as the ICBEMP, have used HRV in their evaluations of ecological integrity and in the design of management strategies. (See Sidebar 3-2.)

The HRV concept has become controver- sial in a very short period of time. Some people worry that it means taking landscapes back to their "pre-Columbian condition" (i.e., to their condition before Columbus discovered America). We would like to offer some observations about the concept and its use:

HRV does not imply a particular condition, rather it implies a distribution of conditions for each resource of interest. For example, if the amount of old-growth forest in Oregon's Coast Range varied from 25 to 60% during the past few thousand years, the HRV approach would argue for management strategies that attempted to keep the current distribution of old-growth conditions within that range in the future.

Using the HRV concept does not prohibit humans from the landscape. First, actions are often needed to shift altered systems back within the HRV, as described in Sidebar 3-3. Second, the HRV provides a target distribution of environmental conditions within which human action can operate without significant risk to the integrity of species and ecosystems. Conditions that exceed the HRV provide a set of warning signals when landscapes are beyond the bounds of evolutionary experience.

HRV is best applied to coarse attributes of the landscape: the condition of streams; the distribution among seral stages of different forest types; the amount and distribution of large dead trees; and the size, frequency, and intensity of disturbances.

Some dimensions of HRV are difficult to reestablish within some landscapes. As an example, the forests of the Western Cascades in Oregon and Washington will not be managed for the large, infrequent, high-intensity burns that created them. It is just not socially acceptable. Such burns may occur, but not through purposeful public policy.

By many measures, much of our current standard of living is based on converting landscapes to conditions outside the HRV. The cities and farmlands of much of America are examples. Much nonfederal land around national forests and grasslands is also outside of HRV. Given that we wish to retain our native species, though, maintaining at least a significant portion of the landscape within HRV would seem prudent. With the continued

3-4. Cross-Scale Issue: Population Viability Analysis in the Northwest Forest Plan

The species viability assessment conducted by the Forest Management Assessment Team (FEMAT; 1993) used expert panels to assess the likelihood of four possible outcomes for habitat conditions on federal lands. The panel process was designed to elicit expert opinion and professional judgment relative to these outcomes:

Outcome A

Habitat is of sufficient quality, distribution, and abundance to allow the species population to stabilize and to be well distributed across federal lands.

Outcome B

Habitat is of sufficient quality, distribution, and abundance to allow the species population to stabilize, but with significant gaps in the historic species distribution on federal land. These gaps cause some limitations in interactions among local populations.

Outcome C

Habitat only allows continued species existence in refugia with strong limitations on interactions among local populations.

Outcome D

Habitat conditions result in species extirpation from federal land.

Options were compared by assessing whether a species (or group) attained an 80% or greater likelihood of achieving outcome A. This likelihood and outcome combination were selected, based on the collective judgement of the scientists involved, to represent a relatively secure level of habitat and an appropriate criterion for comparing options. The charge to FEMAT (from the Forest Conference Executive Committee, which was composed of the relevant cabinet offices) was to present alternatives that provided a medium-to-very high probability of ensuring species viability.

The authors pointed out that options other than attaining an 80% likelihood of Outcome A to achieve viability may be acceptable for some species. For other species, irreversible gaps in their historical distributions may have already occurred, and Outcome B may be their most likely future, under even the most protective options. If a species is already restricted to refugia by its own natural history or past management actions, some combination of outcomes A, B, and C may result.

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Cross-Scale Issue: Species Viability

The emphasis on composition, structure, and processes within ecological systems directs the focus to broad spatial scales and large landscapes. A systems approach gives equal emphasis to the components of the system (i.e., the individual species).

The desire to ensure species viability is an expression of both the intrinsic and instrumental value of biological diversity. Diversity is sustained only when individual species persist; the goals of ensuring species viability and providing for diversity are inseparable.

A viable species is defined as consisting of self-sustaining populations that are well distributed throughout the species' range. Self-sustaining populations are those that are sufficiently abundant and have sufficient genetic diversity to display the array of life history strategies and forms that will provide for their persistence and adaptability in the planning area over time.

Because of the inescapable uncertainty of environmental events, the likelihood of a species persisting indefinitely across time is always uncertain. Because it is impossible to ensure the viability of a given species, it is necessary to be clear about the goals of a viability requirement and the process of viability analysis. Some important principles related to viability are:

1) The short-term viability of a species is influenced by many factors, including its size, sex ratio, age structure, reproductive and survival rates, and geographic distribution. In addition to total population size, the spatial distribution of local populations, and of individuals within populations, can have profound effects on the likelihood of persistence.

2) Any statement about the likelihood that a species will be viable under a management strategy should explicitly incorporate probability and time; that is, the likelihood that a species will be viable under a management strategy is measured along a continuum, in terms of some projected likelihood of persistence over a specified time period.

3) The purpose of a viability assessment is to gain insights into how resource management can influence the probability of persistence.

4) A first step in providing for species viability is to assess the likelihood that a species will be viable over specified periods. Such an assessment should be based on a current understanding of how populations change in space and time as a consequence of internal and external factors. Since viability can never be ensured with 100% certainty, whether a population is deemed viable is a decision based on an acceptable risk of extinction. Ultimately, this is a value-based, not a science-based, decision.

5) Given that habitat loss and fragmentation are often major factors that put species at risk, the Forest Service planning process should stress the quantity, quality, and distribution of habitat necessary for species viability.

An example of species viability assessment is provided by the work done for the Northwest Forest Plan.

Focal Species

Because monitoring the status and assessing the viability of all species is impossible, studies must focus on a smaller subset of species. The Committee proposes the generic 39

term "focal species" to allow a variety of approaches to selecting those species to monitor and to assess for viability. The key characteristic of a focal species is that its status and time trend provide insights to the integrity of the larger ecological system. The term "focal" includes several existing categories of species used to assess ecological integrity:

1) Indicator species: species selected because their status is believed to (1) be indicative of the status of a larger functional group of species, (2) be reflective of the status of a key habitat type; or (3) act as an early warning of an anticipated stressor to ecological integrity. The presence of fish in a river is an indicator of water quality.

2) Keystone species: species whose effects on one or more critical ecological processes or on biological diversity are much greater than would be predicted from their abundance or biomass (e.g., the red-cockaded woodpecker creates cavities in living trees that provide shelter for 23 other species).

3) Ecological engineers: species who, by altering the habitat to their own needs, modify the availability of energy (food, water, or sunlight) and affect the fates and opportunities of other species (e.g., the beaver).

4) Umbrella species: species who, because of their large area requirements or use of multiple habitats encompass the habitat requirements of many other species (e.g., deer).

5) Link species: species that play critical roles in the transfer of matter and energy across trophic levels or provide a critical link for energy transfer in complex food webs. For example, prairie dogs in grassland ecosystems efficiently convert primary plant productivity into animal biomass. Prairie dog biomass, in turn, supports a diverse predator community.

6) Species of concern: species that may not satisfy the requirement of providing information to the larger ecosystem but because of public interest will also be monitored and assessed for viability. Such species include some threatened and endangered species, game species, sensitive species, and those that are vulnerable because they are rare.

Available knowledge of species' ecologies and their functional roles in ecological systems is so limited that it is not always possible, a priori, to unambiguously identify focal species. Therefore, the selection of focal species, based on existing information and the criteria for inclusion, should be treated as a hypothesis rather than a fact. Given this uncertainty, the assumption that a specific species serves a focal role must be validated by monitoring and research.

An emphasis on focal species, including their functional importance or their role in the conservation of other species, combines aspects of single species and ecosystem management. It also leads to considering species directly, in recognition that focusing only on composition, structure, and processes may miss some components of biological diversity.

Spanning Ownership Boundaries in Assessments

Monitoring on national forests and range- lands must relate closely to assessment efforts of other agencies. At broad scales, land is composed of multiple-agency ownerships, and in many places, private ownerships are inter-mixed with federal lands. It is therefore imperative that assessment opportunities are coordinated with private, state, and other federal landholders. An example of issues that may arise as a result of multiple ownerships is the management of wideranging species, such as grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem or the red-cockaded woodpecker in the southeastern states. Where management issues cross ownership boundaries, there is a clear need for common assessment information at regional and subregional scales. Uniform data collection and documentation standards are necessary for the agencies to collect, map, and share data across boundaries.

An example of such cooperation was accomplished by the Southern Appalachian Assessment, which involved specialists from both federal and state natural resource agencies to describe the ecological, economic, and social characteristics of the multistate region. In that case, an interagency cooperative was formed, which directed the scope and depth of analysis. By avoiding the duplication of work that might have been necessary had each agency acted independently, the scope and depth of analysis were significantly broadened. The breadth of the Southern Appalachian Assessment allows for opportunities to further expand the analysis, depending on the general availability of the data. (See Sidebar 3-5.)

Planning for Ecological Sustainability

What are the implications of planning for sustainability on national forests and grasslands? First, ecological sustainability should be interpreted broadly. Planners must look at the land in a large-landscape context, including lands and communities beyond the boundaries of the national forests and rangelands.

Second, the characteristics of the land, the ways in which people interact with it, and what they expect from it must be assessed. For example, watersheds provide a link to social and cultural issues, and most people develop a sense of place that relates to a watershed and its defining geographic features. The planner first asks whether the human uses of the land appear compatible with a goal of sustainability. To reliably answer this question requires an emphasis on assessment and monitoring.

Third, national forests and rangelands are open systems, affected by land use outside their boundaries. Therefore, assessment and monitoring must be consistent with the programs of other agencies. Attaining this consistency requires a high degree of interagency collaboration, consistency in documentation and measurement standards across public and private lands, and a spirit of collaboration to solve shared environmental problems.

Fourth, for the foreseeable future, decisions on appropriate management of natural resources will be made in the context of considable uncertainty about the outcome of those actions. Where risks are high and uncertainty about outcomes is great, active adaptive management (discussed in Chap. 4) will be needed. Implementation of adaptive management approaches will speed up the process of learning how ecological systems function and will decrease the likelihood of large-scale management errors.

Fifth, perhaps the single best metric of sustainable use of land is the persistence of species over time. The public needs to understand that the productivity of an ecosystem can be sustained over the long term only if species persist.

Finally, the Forest Service must recognize the need to regain the trust of the American public and to reestablish its credibility as a competent steward of the nation's natural resources. To regain this position of leadership will require extensive public input to the planning process and an independent review of Forest Service decisions by outside reviewers. The Committee therefore recommends that the Forest Service establish a standing advisory board to ensure that it is making use of the best available technology and scientific knowledge. (See Chap. 5A for more discussion of this proposed board.)

3B. Economic and Social Sustainability Back to Top

The Forest Service, as trustee and steward of our great national treasure, the national forests and grasslands, has a legal obligation to preserve opportunities and choices for future generations while providing for the economies, communities, and people of today. Although the Forest Service cannot and should not be expected to single-handedly sustain existing economies, cultures, and communities, the National Forest System lands nonetheless contribute many values, services, outputs, and uses that allow economies and communities to persist, prosper, and evolve according to their own wills. This charge, contributing to the well being of people today and tomorrow, is at the heart of the Forest Service's role in economic and social sustainability.

Over the ages, the use and treatment of land and resources has shaped the opportunities for generations that followed. Around the world, places once rich and productive, teaming with plants and animals, now lie barren because of the actions of people. The capacity of human society to destroy the ecological integrity of the land places a high responsibility for stewardship on how society uses and protects its land and resources. In the case of the public forests and rangelands, this stewardship responsibility means that, in promoting the economic and social sustainability of communities and economies, the Forest Service must first ensure the ecological integrity essential to long-term sustainability.

The Forest Service's role in promoting economic and social sustainability has four dimensions, and each is inextricably linked to ecological sustainability. First, the forests and rangelands provide many and diverse contributions, through which economies and communities define and sustain themselves. Whether these contributions are the timber for local mills, clean water for downstream farms, spiritual resources valued by Native American tribes, or the scenery and solitude sought for recreation, they are important elements that, in turn, contribute more broadly to the achievement of sustainability in our society.

Second, an effectively structured planning process can build society's understanding of the interconnectedness of communities and economies with sustainably managed forests and grasslands. In so doing, it encourages people to act in a manner that does not undermine ecological sustainability and their own long-term sustainability. In other words, by promoting an understanding of the linkages between human and ecological systems, establishing realistic expectations about the nature and scope of contributions from the public lands over time, and providing opportunities for active stewardship, the planning process for the national forests and grasslands can contribute to society's ability to progress in a sustainable manner.

Third, planning processes with continous, open public deliberation can enhance society's ability to make sustainable choices. The planning process can provide mechanisms and fora that provide focus for societal and community decision making that is realistic, informed, and sustainable. Planning is the logical process through which linkages among the many different organizations, businesses, and community groups that care about an area can communicate, address shared problems, articulate a common vision for the future, and craft strategies for pursuing that future that are compatible, if not complementary, and that are consistent with the goal of sustainability.

Fourth, assessment and planning identifies and assists communities in need. When natural or policy influences disrupt the economic or social fabric of a community, planning can highlight where assistance is needed for economic transitions. The federal government can identify key opportunities for such communities

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3-5. The Southern Appalachian Assessment

The Southern Appalachian Assessment (SAA) summarized the status of atmospheric, social/ cultural/economic, terrestrial, and aquatic conditions in the Southern Appalachians of the United States. This assessment was a collaborative effort among federal agencies, state agencies, universities, special-interest groups, and private citizens. All played a role in the development of the assessment, and all have benefitted from the results. A first task of the assessment process was to determine what questions were appropriate for the seven state region of the Southern Appalachians. The process also identified information and research needs for the future. Five published reports are now available as is a web site, and much of the data is available on CD- ROM. Although there was no specific statutory requirement for the assessment, its production has been very beneficial to forest planning as well as to planning at other administrative levels. The assessment process also recognized the limitations of what could be done within the year and-a-half timeframe in which the process was completed. Three constraints were very useful in organizing the task: (1) existing data were used, (2) a tight time constraint existed, and (3) a financial constraint existed in that no new funding was provided by the assessment process.

The SAA now serves as both a useful reference and as a benchmark for future analysis. In addition, several indirect outcomes have developed from the SAA:

· The use of GIS technology and training have spread throughout the region.

· The key resource inventories have been improved, and information has been provided for planning and management.

· The process built cohesion among different levels of the Forest Service organization.

· An esprit de corps was created among the science-based personnel within the Forest Service.

· The familiarity among the different agencies was increased, and this increased the legitimacy and prominence of the Southern Appalachian Man in the Biosphere (SAMAB) organization, which was the umbrella group for the multiagency project.

· Leadership attributes were developed and recognized as part of the process.

· The process proved the value of public participation in that the public helped define the questions to be studied in the assessment, provided information, helped with the outside scientific review of the drafts, and gave political support at key junctures.

· An adaptive management style was adopted as part of the process.

· The assessment focused on describing existing conditions; it did not attempt to make administrative decisions and generally avoided overt policy recommendations related to the revision of specific forest plans.

One of the principal objectives of the SAA was to develop more consistent information for forest plan revisions. The results of this assessment have already been used directly to formulate the major issues that are being addressed in plan revisions for national forests in Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. SAA results also will be used in each forest plan revision EIS to address cumulative effects across the broader landscape, including both public and private lands, in the SAA region. The open meeting process and interagency technical peer review process introduced by the SAA teams has been continued through the forest plan revision process to date. Largely as a result of the SAA, there has been an unparalleled degree of coordination on issues and management prescriptions and alternative development among the southern Appalachian forests. In fact, several team leaders for the SAA (wildlife, aquatics, and recreation supply/demand) continue to provide coordination and leadership roles in the development of more consistent approaches to plan revisions for each of the SAA forests.

One challenge remaining, however, is the need to put into place a mechanism for an inter-agency approach to maintaining and updating the SAA database. Forest planners are developing considerable amounts of additional GIS-based data for individual plan revisions, but a mechanism has not yet been established for coordinating this effort with USGS/BRD and other SAMAB agencies to keep the SAA database unified, up to date, and shared among all agencies and the public. Meetings are scheduled to partially address this concern. Also, federal agencies are seeking additional funds to hire someone to continue the task of updating the SAA database on an ongoing basis.

All in all, the Southern Appalachian Assessment serves as a useful example of a way to describe existing conditions. The next step for the Forest Service is to integrate such an assessment process into planning. In doing so, the region recognizes the importance of conservation areas as planning units (see figure). These conservation areas are defined by their ecological attributes and typically have a diversity of ownerships within one area. Managing the ecological attributes of each area would benefit by a common stewardship plan.

Note: Map did not convert.

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In short, effective management of National Forest System lands provides important material, aesthetic, and spiritual contributions to society and promotes the ability of people in society to make sound and sustainable choices by building understanding, maintaining public dialogue, enhancing capabilities to act in a sustainable manner, and identifying and assisting with the community transitions brought on by disruptive natural or policy influences.

National Forests: Places Where People Work, Live, Worship, and Play Back to Top

The long-term economic contributions of the forest reserves were recognized from the very beginning. Residents of irrigation districts in the West, wanting to be assured of reliable flows for their fields, pressed Congress for protective legislation, which was achieved in the Creative Act of 1891. Today, farmers continue to rely upon the clean, reliable flows from national forest watersheds, which comprise most of the high country in the West and a significant proportion in the East. Second to watershed protection was commercial timber production, which was recognized as an official use of the National Forests in the Organic Act of 1897. Timber harvesting in the National Forests remained low until World War II, soared during the postwar boom, and has receded since the late 1980s. The timber volume is unlikely to return to 1980s levels, but a steady supply of wood products from the national forests will continue to provide significant economic benefits.

The national forests and grasslands benefit the economy in many other ways. Grazing of domestic livestock takes place on more than half of all National Forest System lands. Extractive activities, such as hardrock mining and oil and gas production, are found on nearly every national forest. Recreation on the lands and waters of the national forests, ranging from world-class ski areas to blue-ribbon trout streams to hiking trails used mostly by local residents, is a multibillion dollar industry.

National forests and grasslands provide numerous benefits and services to adjacent towns and cities. For millions of Americans, their connection to the forest is tangible. The watersheds that bring green life to irrigation fields also serve the critical function of providing drinking water to towns and cities. Grocery stores, motels, restaurants, guides and outfitters, and other businesses in hundreds of communities depend in whole or in part on tourism revenues from nearby public lands. These economic enterprises help knit communities together. Indian tribes have treaty-based hunting, fishing, and gathering rights within many national forests, and watersheds on the national forests provide essential habitat for salmon to fulfill tribal fishing rights downstream. Traditional Indian people also revere sacred sites within national forests and grasslands. For centuries, Hispanic communities in the Southwest, with origins dating back to Spanish land grants hundreds of years ago, have relied on public lands for firewood gathering, grazing, subsistence hunting, and water supply for their family farms.

The national forests and grasslands give essential definition to day-to-day life in many local communities. People hunt, fish, boat, and hike in them. Perhaps even more fundamental, the people's lands are the backdrop to many towns and communities, the ridge lines in the distance that each year go from green to white and back to green again. The forests and grasslands are places to daydream about and to seek refuge in. Sense of place is a deep, intimate emotion. These lands create it and sustain it through the force of their grandeur and the comfort of their constancy.

Nearby communities have a special role in providing stewardship for these resources.

People who work on the land often have a rich knowledge of it and of its history, knowledge that is accumulated through experience and passed down through generations. This knowledge is an important contribution to understanding social and ecological processes over time. Also, these communities are often the first line of defense when wildfire strikes on the national forests, and they provide much of the workforce and equipment for fighting unwanted fires.

The economies of many towns and cities are materially dependent on both resources and environmental services from the watersheds, forests, and rangelands. For example, when siltation levels increase in streams, fishing and coastal communities are affected by reduced fish populations and increased harbor dredging costs. When timber harvest levels decline in response to changes in economic organization or public policy, small communities with little economic diversity can experience sudden high unemployment. Even in nearby urban areas, high-tech industries dependent on clean water can be affected by increases in siltation or declines in water supply. The national forests and grasslands must serve all of the nation's people; nevertheless, local residents deserve particular attention when the contributions of the forests to economic and social sustainability are being considered. So, too, should the stewardship responsibilities of adjoining human communities be addressed in planning for ecological sustainability of the national forests and grasslands.

Variability and Uncertainty: The Realities of Economic and Social Sustainability in a Dynamic Landscape Back to Top

The notion of economic and social sutainability does not imply the persistence of the status quo. The health and vitality of economic and social systems lies in their diversity and in their ability to adapt and evolve as conditions and needs change. The same diversity that characterizes an ecological system characterizes a human system. The idea that an ecological system seeks a stable equilibrium was once popular in ecology, as was the expectation that communities and societies could be stabilized through economic and social policies based on equilibrium models. Today, ideas of stability and equilibrium have been replaced with a new appreciation for the dynamic and emergent qualities of biological and social systems. Ecological sustainability, from this perspective, assures that conditions are maintained that allow and promote natural processes of change and adaptation at any time or place, while the overall essence of the ecological system remains. The same understanding applies to human systems and economic and social sustainability; human systems change through time, and sustainability is based on the capacity of human systems to adapt and evolve. Sustainable social systems learn to self-organize to further their own well-being within the context of opportunities. To support and enhance social and economic sustainability, public planning processes can illuminate the range of contributions available from a sustainably managed forest or grassland, and they can facilitate society's ability to make informed and wise decisions.

Assessing the Contributions of National Forests and Grasslands to Society Back to Top

The land and resource planning process for National Forest System lands provides an important opportunity to better understand and define the many connections between forests and rangelands and their associated economies and communities. Because forests contribute in numerous tangible and intangible ways to the spiritual, cultural, social, and economic well-being and identity of many communities and individuals, the planning process must actively consider and engage the different cultures, communities, and economies that give these contributions value. It is not always possible to quantify or rank diverse uses and values to determine such elusive concepts as highest and best use, just as it is impossible to identify, count, and value all plants and animals in an ecological system. It is, nonetheless, essential that important uses and values be recognized, assessed, and accommodated as practicable and appropriate. The process must also consider values that have been given specific legal or historical protections (such as Indian treaty rights and wilderness) and ensure that these values are provided for and protected and that other management activities do not detract from them.

Assessments of the contributions of national forests and grasslands to communities and economies must be a dynamic process, tracking changes in social values and resource definitions along with changes in knowledge and understanding. A dynamic planning process recognizes that the value of uses, products, and services from resources changes with time. For example, areas that are highly valued for timber harvest or minerals extraction may assume higher value to society, both locally and nationally, as sources of clean, reliable water or recreation. Furthermore, as new knowledge becomes available, the full worth of some contributions will be better recognized and more fully assessed.

Assessing the Social Consequences of Changes in Federal Land-Use Policy to Rural Economies and Communities Back to Top

Rural communities often bear the brunt of changes in agricultural and natural resource polices. This impact has been especially apparent in recent years in small communities centered around wood products, ranching, mining, or agriculture. In many cases, these small communities are isolated from transportation corridors and lack alternative employment opportunities.

In the case of wood production, logging and milling communities often grew up with the encouragement of the Forest Service, as the agency attempted to assist economic development in the West. Especially during the exodus from homesteads in the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, potential mill owners were often assured that a supply of raw materials, such as timber, would be available forever from the federal forests in the area. As a result, current residents, employees, and owners were taken by surprise when concerns for environmental protection led to sudden, significant reductions in timber harvest on the national forests. While these communities were accustomed to temporary, market-driven boom-and-bust cycles, the notion of timber harvest reductions as an instrument of federal policy was new and troubling to many people in these communities.

Across the interior west, livestock grazing on the public domain occurred long before permanent settlement. In many places, grazing predates the establishment of the national forests, and some ranchers with federal grazing permits are the descendants of the pioneer families who settled the area. As with the timber industry, ranchers have learned to survive market ups and downs, but limiting the area available for grazing to protect species and ecosystems is somewhat new. Today, with both market prices for livestock low and grazing allotments limited, many ranchers are selling their land to private developers for subdivisions and recreation development, creating a whole new set of environmental and land-use problems.

Social Assessments

Understanding the local, national, and international forces affecting communities, economies, and natural resource policies is the first step in making decisions about resource management policies and management activities. A social assessment can help policy makers and managers understand the regional and community level consequences of changes in land-use policy and can help identify particular places and people that will most feel these consequences. In so doing, it will provide a base of knowledge from which to assess whether or not changes in policy or management are necessary and, if so, what those changes might be.

A good social assessment uses quantitative, qualitative, and participatory methods for gathering data and analyzing it. First, a social assessment analyzes and interprets available quantitative demographic, economic, and social information, such as the census data and employment sector data at the county level. This information must be used carefully, however, because counties often have both towns and large, sparsely populated rural areas; in such cases, average effects across a county may not tell the whole story.

Second, a social assessment undertakes a qualitative analysis of the economic and political history of the region, the culture of groups and communities and how they have changed with time, the organization and leadership of local communities, the political and religious organization of the area, and other dimensions of social life. However, to adequately understand any particular community or place, it is critical that a participatory social and economic assessment process be organized and conducted by each individual community in these rural areas. Some assessments refine the quantitative demographic, employment, and social data for the specific place by using a qualitative approach to estimate actual levels and trends. A participatory assessment also engages communities in a learning process about their identity, their history, the forces for change affecting them, and the opportunities for collective action. Thus, the social assessment is both a strategy for developing site-specific information useful for policy makers and a collective learning process that enhances community capacity by encouraging common understanding of shared problems and opportunities for community leadership and action.

Assessment Methods

A social assessment attempts to inform policy makers of the social, political, economic, and cultural context prior to the development of options or alternative courses of action. It is used to inform decision making about approaches that might minimize or avoid unnecessary disruptive influences and maximize the value of contributions from National Forest System lands to local communities and economies. In general, social assessments provide a regional context for understanding community level conditions, but most of the methodologies use the community as the primary unit of study. This distinction is important because regional trends typically are not characteristic of conditions in rural, small communities largely because economic growth generally occurs in the larger, metropolitan areas or in recreation and second home developments. Thus, the social assessment provides a foundation of baseline data from which to evaluate the likely consequences of different policy options. "Social impact analysis" is the term for the analysis of the specific consequences likely to follow from a specific policy option or management alternative.

A social assessment provides the informtion base from which policy makers can estimate the magnitude of the changes in land-use policy and the ability of rural communities to respond. The community is the basic unit of analysis, defined in a place-specific sense. In some analyses, that place is the county, and in others, it is a particular town or census unit. It has long been recognized that there are many different kinds of communities, such as communities of interest, communities of place, and others. Still, geographic communities are important from an economic and policy standpoint, especially for relatively isolated areas whose fortunes are linked to their location.

Local and regional economies are strongly and directly affected by distant forces found in national and international capital markets, economic trade policies, and environmental polices. As a result, communities engaged in primary resource production (e.g., timber, grazing, mining, or recreation) are especially sensitive to national and global economic and political changes. This sensitivity can lead to a boom-and-bust economy: times are either very good or very bad. This vulnerability is two-dimensional. One dimension is that primary production economies generally export their products without doing much secondary processing or manufacturing. The second is that these communities are often small and isolated and have undiversified economies.

To understand both dimensions of vulnerability, social assessments employ a variety of methods. First, economic and social analysis of quantitative data sources is an excellent basis for regional comparison and for the identification of communities with the factors associated with economic and social vulnerability, isolation and lack of diversity.

Second, while communities of place are generally the basic units of analysis, there are cross cutting communities of interest, occupation, and value. This multiplicity of communities means that aggregate measures of community trends based on the geographic community are inadequate to assess the specific social and economic sectors most likely to be negatively affected by changes in policy. For example, some occupations are often more directly affected by changes in timber or grazing policy than others, even though the effect might be community wide. Policy options need to recognize these differential effects both at the community level (often adjacent communities are different enough to have very different consequences from the same policy changes) and at the individual level (some occupational groups will be more affected than others). Clearly, the negative effects on both communities and individuals call for public policy consideration as people seek to adapt to broader social changes.

Third, the land-ownership and management patterns of an area are a critical factor in understanding the limits as well as the opportunities for social and economic activity. Understanding the federal importance in the area requires understanding the broader land ownership and supply picture of the region: the percentages of land in federal, state, and private ownership; the percentages of resource supply (timber, forage, recreation, and minerals) from federal, state, and private lands; the percentage of budget from federal revenue sharing; and the percentage of the economy supported by transfer payments (social security, pensions, welfare, etc.). These and other variables provide the context within which the magnitude of change in federal policy can be estimated.

Fourth, the consequences to communities that result from federal policy and management changes are often measured in terms of likely effects on capital availability, employment opportunities, wage levels, local tax base, federal revenue sharing, and the ability to support public infrastructure and social services, factors important to maintaining a vital community. These economic effects are complex; each decision has positive effects on some people and negative effects on others. A full economic analysis examines the net consequences of decisions. Several factors make estimating the net effects of decisions difficult. Some examples are:

· economic trends that would have occurred independently of the management decision need to be identified (for instance, investment in capital may lower employment in sawmills independent of changes in wood availability);

· normal variation in product prices caused by international market fluctuations have to be separated out from local events (for instance, an economic downturn in Asia has recently reduced wood prices); and

· interest rates affect the number of housing starts, which in turn affects demand for wood products.

In a particular area, the effect of amenity values on the location decisions of "high-tech" industries may have to be contrasted to the effects of reductions in commodity outputs on employment in directly forest related industries.

Fifth, and the crux of a social assessment, is estimating the adaptive capacity of communities. Several concepts and approaches to developing integrated measures have been developed to estimate community adaptability. The essential feature of all of these concepts is the ability of the community to mobilize its members to collectively respond to the need to change and to develop the leadership, organization, and resources needed to carry out common goals.

Concepts

The social assessment work done in both the FEMAT and ICBEMP bioregional assessments points to the urgent necessity of refining concepts and measures as well as greatly improving the existing data available for analysis. Two concepts are of particular importance:

1) Community capacity: the ability of residents and community institutions, organization, and leadership (formal and informal) to meet local needs and expectations. It includes physical and financial infrastructure (roads and capital availability); human capital (occupational skills and educational levels); and civic responsiveness (leadership). Community capacity focuses on the internal dynamics of specific communities and their particular history, location, and identity. This concept was used in FEMAT (Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team) along with the concept of community stability, an equilibrium-based concept of community adaptability, to identify how specific communities might respond to anticipated drops in federal timber harvest, increases in watershed protection, and increases in scenic quality. All these changes were associated with the management options under analysis and were linked to specific social and economic factors.

2) Economic and social resiliency: the adaptability of human systems at the more macroscale. Since adaptiveness is defined as directly correlated to diversity, resiliency is measured by population density and cultural diversity, lifestyle diversity, and economic diversity. High resiliency ratings imply that these systems are highly adaptable. In areas where high in migration has been occurring and new economic sectors have been developing, this measure captures a dynamic of change in even small communities that the capacity measure would miss. Since low ratings suggest that communities will have difficulty in adjusting to rapid change, the less diversified communities are identified for further analysis.

Integrated Measures Back to Top

Integrating ways to assess community risk and vulnerability stand in contrast to past planning processes. In the past, it was assumed that analyses of commodity supplies (e.g., timber, water, and forage) provided sufficient information to project regional and local economic conditions and effects.

1) Communities at risk. A risk analysis estimates the likelihood that a particular community has sufficient internal capacity50

to respond to the magnitude of an anticipated policy change. The FEMAT attempted to use a risk analysis approach but did not develop a conceptual description of risk. Rather, a ranking of communities based on the level of "risk" (a matrix of community capacity and likelihood of successful adaptation from an expert panel rating exercise) identified those communities most likely to be strongly and negatively affected by reductions in federal timber supply, those with generally neutral responses, and those that would benefit from increased watershed protection and scenic quality. A risk approach is a good integrated measure of adaptive capacity of specific communities and the projected magnitude of change. However, before such analyses are widely used, it is critical that a conceptual definition of risk be developed. (See Sidebar 3-6.)

2) Community vulnerability. Vulnerability analysis works from the concept of resiliency and estimates the likelihood that there is sufficient resiliency in the system of communities and associated economies to adapt to expected changes in federal land-use management and policy. To estimate the potential effects of policy changes, a resiliency measure looks at the dynamics within the area and estimates the adaptive potential of communities based on their diversity. This approach was applied in the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project. (See Sidebar 3-7.)

Pursuant to the requirements of NEPA, environmental impact statements previously included only a brief section on community demographics and employment but little other social information. Social values for recreation, water, scenic, and spiritual qualities were not assessed. Occasionally, a brief introduction to the history and culture of the region was included.

It is also important to note that the economic values of ecological services have never been assessed in the traditional NEPA document. Systems with ecological integrity provide critical ecological services. Examples include the cycling and purification of water, sustaining the productive capacity of the soil through decomposition and mineral cycling, and control of local and regional climate mediated by vegetation structure and composition. Technological replacements for these essential functions are either impossible or expensive.

Recent bioregional science assessments have included some of the features discussed above. In the case of FEMAT, a social-science team used census and employment data, public participation records, and research results found in the literature. However, the lack of social assessments as part of the planning process meant that there was not a base of information to work from. As a result, the FEMAT team had to use an expert-panel approach to develop comprehensive, regional and comparative information about rural communities throughout the region. (See Sidebar 3-6.) In addition, it also used expert panels to evaluate the effects of the management options on a wide range of resource values. In the Columbia Basin assessment, social scientists conducted baseline studies to understand the potential economic and social resiliency of different communities in the region and many other economic and social relationships. (See Sidebar 3-7.) In the Southern Appalachian assessment, local communities developed series of questions about themselves and the region and participated in gathering the data to answer them.

Given that one purpose of the national forests and grasslands is to contribute to social and economic stability, it is essential to describe the social and economic context in which plans are developed. Bioregional assessments, such as FEMAT, ICBEMP, and the Southern Appalachian Assessment, have contributed significantly to the development of methods and concepts to achieve this goal. Future assessments of, and planning for, the national forests and grasslands should use and build upon these approaches.

Developing an adequate methodology for conducting social assessments at different scales is not conceptually difficult. Rather, ideas for how to conduct adequate social assessments abound and have been tested in other policy arenas over the past decades. What is needed is for the Forest Service to convene the best social scientists in the country and to explore different conceptual approaches. An ideal result would be a flexible methodology that is sensitive to scale, drawn from many analytical traditions (ethnography, qualitative analysis, demography, organization theory, quantitative analysis, and political science to name a few), capable of developing a foundation of data amenable to many different kinds of analysis, and able to be maintained over the long term. Given the experience available and the importance of understanding social and economic sustainability, this is a high priority and can produce near-term results.

Considering the Economic and Social Impact of Land-Use Change in Setting Federal Policy Back to Top

Federal policy can consider the potential social consequences of land-use change in three major ways: (1) in setting the overall land-use policy, (2) in tailoring the policy for specific geographic areas, and (3) in delivering resources to help the communities and individuals adapt. We will use the President's Plan for the federal forests of the Northwest to illustrate a recent application of these concepts.

The Committee has emphasized ecological sustainability as a fundamental goal in the management of the national forests and the roles of species viability and ecological integrity in this quest. It has also pointed out that the degree of risk to take for the achievement of species viability and ecological integrity is, in part, a social decision. Consideration of the economic and social consequences of different levels of risk can influence the alternative chosen. In the President's Plan for Northwest Forests (see Sidebar 3-4), instructions included the requirement that species should have at least a medium chance of persisting, and the attainment of this goal was assessed by requiring an 80% likelihood of achieving viable populations over the planning period. Each of the ten options was rated by expert panels on various groups of wildlife species. Of all the alternatives, Option 1 was unanimously viewed as providing the greatest assurance of long-term viability because it allowed the least amount of disturbance based on timber harvesting. However, this alternative was not chosen. The reason was largely because of the anticipated impacts on communities and economies. As a result, an option was chosen that provided somewhat greater risk to wildlife species but reduced the risk to communities dependent on federal timber for processing and milling.

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3-6. FEMAT: Community Capacity and Communities at Risk

The Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team (FEMAT) examined the effects of alternative forest management plans on more than 300 small, rural communities in the northwest coastal states. Through an expert-panel approach that used local and state officials, county commissioners, and extension agents, FEMAT estimated the capacity of communities to adapt to large, sudden reductions in federal timber harvest levels. By examining the magnitude of the change compared to historical variation and the capacity of specific communities to respond to such changes, FEMAT was able to provide policy makers with a framework for assessing the risk to rural communities associated with an array of options for ecosystem management. "Most-at-risk" communities were defined as having low or medium-low capacity and negative to moderately negative consequences. The percentage of communities so classified varied from 22 to 33%, depending on the forest management alternative considered. Because such site-specific information can affect the future of human communities, this information was analyzed and presented in aggregate form (percentages) and with a regional distribution (i.e., a part of a county). The sensitivity of social data must always be considered in the analysis and presentation of results, a concern seldom understood by those who are not social scientists. Yet those data can be of immediate and direct concern and importance to community residents and public officials.

However, this analysis was used to design several policy strategies for mitigating the economic and social impacts of reductions in federal timber harvest. These policies included federal money allocated to job retraining, community economic development, and a new office of rural community development to identify and work with people and communities at risk.

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3-7. ICBEMP: Economic and Social Resiliency and Vulnerability to Land-Use Change

The Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project (ICBEMP) assessed economic resiliency in the northwest United States by measuring the diversity among employment sectors. The assumption is that people in high-resiliency counties have ready access to a range of employment opportunities if specific firms or business sectors experience down-turns. A generally high level of economic diversity was found at the scale of large multicounty areas with relatively little variation from area to area. Estimating economic resiliency at the county level based on employment diversity provides a different picture: a lower average level of resiliency and more variation.

Social resiliency was measured at the community scale with four factors: 1) civic infrastructure (that is, leadership and preparedness for change), 2) economic diversity, 3) social/ cultural diversity (population size and mix of skills), and 4) amenity infrastructure (attractiveness of the community and surrounding areas). Communities varied considerably in social resiliency.

A composite measure of socioeconomic resiliency was developed at the county level that combined three factors: 1) population density, 2) economic diversity, and 3) lifestyle diversity (see figure). While 68% of the area within the Columbia River Basin is rated as having low socioeconomic resiliency, 67% of the people of the Basin live in areas with high socioeconomic resiliency. Clearly, counties with low resiliency are of special concern because they often lack sufficient population to sustain existing services or develop necessary social services, such as medical clinics.

Recently, social scientists have refined the work of ICBEMP to allow more specific identification of particular communities that may be especially vulnerable to land-use change. They first identified three sources of economic and social impacts: lower timber harvests, lower livestock grazing, and reduced federal payrolls. They then identified communities that are especially dependent on one or more of these sources of employment and income. Finally, they identified those communities that are relatively isolated. Through such a screening, they believe they have identified those communities especially vulnerable to likely land-use changes that may emerge from ICBEMP.

Note: Map of Socieoeconomic resiliency ratings by county did not convert.

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In addition to consideration of social and economic consequences in the selection of policies, the adverse effects of a broad policy framework can be mitigated by creating a subpolicy tailored to reduce the impact on the most vulnerable communities and individuals. The President's Plan for Northwest Forests attempted to achieve this result, in part, through the placement of adaptive management areas (AMAs), where approaches to technical, administrative, and social issues could be developed and tested. The AMAs were intended to represent major ecological communities in the planning area to allow experimental approaches to forest management. Option 9, the selected option, specifically ensured that the AMAs were located so that strong ecological protections surrounded them to allow managers to risk failure without risking the integrity of the larger system. The location of particularly hard-hit communities was one of the location criteria that led to several of the AMAs being associated with adjacent timber-based communities. To make AMAs of immediate benefit to these adjacent communities, several specific requirements were added to the list of "experiments" expected in AMA areas: information sharing strategies, such as ensuring the availability of resource databases; training local residents for technical support, especially in monitoring programs; and encouraging local processing of timber harvested from AMAs. The proposed AMA program called for expanded funding in these areas for research, demonstrations, monitoring, training, and capital investments.

Unfortunately, the AMAs have not fulfilled their potential, in part because of inadequate budgets but also because of a lack of agency commitment to ensuring their success. On a hopeful note, the Applegate AMA, which was established because it had a strong, community-based partnership dedicated to reducing conflict over natural resource management, has become the center of activity on federal lands in Southeast Oregon, but it still lacks coordinated agency support and funding.

Finally, the federal government can use other programs to deliver resources to help the affected economies and communities cope with the change. The Clinton administration worked with Congress to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars to mitigate the negative economic and social impact of the President's Plan for Northwest Forests. First, they guaranteed that the counties would receive, for a number of years, payments covering much of the revenue that had previously been received from in lieu payments associated with timber sales. Second, they made available funds that counties that were certified as "timber dependent" could obtain to support projects that would help them diversify their economies. Third, they provided earmarked funds for federal job retraining and education programs for displaced workers.

National Forest System Contributions to Social Sustainability: The Importance of Establishing Realistic Expectations Back to Top

Stability and Fluctuation

As conceived in the Multiple-Use, Sustained-Yield Act of 1960, within the limits set by ecological sustainability, land and resource management planning was to seek the achievement and maintenance in perpetuity of high levels or regular periodic outputs of the various renewable resources of the national forests. (See Sidebar 3-8.) Two realities make this goal difficult to reach. First, the uncertain dynamics of ecological systems make it difficult to schedule a regular, predictable output of a single product (e.g., timber or forage) because productivity varies through time. Second, an even flow is difficult to sustain under variability, because it often comes by over-exploiting the system's productivity in some years (harvesting more than is produced annually) or by impairing other elements of the system (e.g., grazing under conditions that cause erosion).

When they are managed to provide regular outputs, national forests and grasslands may appear to promise stable commodity flows, but it is difficult for them to deliver such flows for extended periods. Unfortunately, public expectations have been raised about the long-term capability of the land and likely future resource flows, based on limited estimates of maximum yields for a few resources. At the extreme, forests and rangelands managed this way become subject to catastrophic surprises when infrequent, but natural, events occur (e.g., catastrophic fires or drought). Human communities that grow dependent on commodity flows kept artificially high and constant can eventually suffer the same catastrophic surprises, often losing all semblance of economic or social sustainability.

In fact, economic fluctuations and disruptions are minimized and economic vitality is enhanced when ecological systems are sustainably managed. Contrary to earlier assumptions, social sustainability and sustained outputs are not synonymous. By focusing attention on a short list of commodity outputs from a forest, many other uses and values (and thus the communities dependent upon them) were overlooked and undervalued. The overall productive capacity of the ecological system rather than single measurable outputs should be sustained over the long term so that the land, water, and resources continue to contribute to the many and diverse values, services, outputs, and uses valued by people. In this sense, the flow of any product, whether a commodity like timber or an amenity like recreation, will not necessarily be constant or regular. Indeed, over the past centuries, we have learned that expecting an ecological system to deliver stable and high outputs of any single product has eventually had disastrous effects on human systems.

Clearly, prosperous communities and economies only remain healthy and vibrant if their foundation is ecologically sustainable. Thus, the Forest Service must be cautious and avoid making resources available in a manner that establishes unrealistic expectations for economies and communities that cannot be fulfilled over the long term within the context of ecological sustainability. Doing so will only lead to hardship when abrupt changes become necessary to restore the ecological system to a sustainable path.

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3-8. The Legal Mandate for Multiple Uses Consistent with Ecological Sustainability

The following are key phrases from the laws that govern the national forests, specifically, phrases that relate to the contributions that the national forests make to the economies that invigorate our communities and cultures.

Organic Act: This 1897 law gave three purposes for the Forest Reserves: (1) to preserve and protect the forest within the reservation, (2) to secure favorable conditions of water flows, and (3) to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of the people of the United States.

Sustained Yield Forest Management Act of 1944: While this act was largely intended to provide for the creation of cooperative units of public and private forest land, it also contains a clear statement of the economic and social contributions of forests. "Sec. 1. In order to promote the stability of forest industries, of employment, of communities, and of taxable forest wealth, through continuous supplies of timber; in order to provide for a continuous and ample supply of forest products; and in order to secure the benefits of forests in maintenance of water supply, regulation of stream flow, prevention of soil erosion, amelioration of climate, and preservation of wildlife."

Multiple-Use, Sustained-Yield Act: This statute called for the "achievement and maintenance in perpetuity of a high-level or regular periodic output of the various renewable resources of the national forests without impairment of the productivity of the land." It named the multiple uses as: outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish. It stated that "the establishment and maintenance of areas of wilderness are consistent with the purposes and provisions of the Act" and that "the purposes of this Act are declared to be supplemental to" the provisions named in the Organic Act.

National Forest Management Act: "The Forest Service ... has both a responsibility and an opportunity to be a leader in assuring that the Nation maintains a natural resource conservation posture that will meet the requirements of our people in perpetuity."

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Increasing the Predictability of Resource Use

The difficulty of obtaining stable resource flows from the national forests creates a dilemma in terms of achieving ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Achieving ecological sustainability may require active management to achieve desired conditions. Without predictable outputs, though, the needed capital may not be invested to created the capacity for the needed actions. Thinning to reduce the accumulation of fuels in the Inter-mountain West, as an example, may be an important part of a strategy to return forested ecosystems to conditions within the historical range of variability. Yet, without some predictability to the timber output, it will be difficult to justify investments to harvest and process the small material from the thinnings. And without some predictability, the potential of the national forests to contribute to ecological, economic, and social sustainability will be unfulfilled.

How can this predictability be increased? On the national forests and grasslands, it can generally be expected that actions contributing to long-term ecological sustainability have a higher probability of occurrence than actions working against attainment of this goal. Actions that produce outputs while contributing to ecological sustainability tend to have broad agency and public support. The Siuslaw National Forest, as an example, is finding it much easier to thin stands in reserves than to clear cut in areas dedicated to timber production. (See Sidebar 3-9.) While it is easier to say than do, finding strategies that simultaneously contribute to ecological, economic, and social sustainability is the key to increasing predictable resource flows from the national forests and grasslands.

Contributions to Communities with Specific Protections Under the Law Back to Top

Resource management is inherently a process of allocating scarce resources among competing, yet legitimate, interests within society. Tradeoffs occur. Because some uses have particular values to society that may be overlooked in short-term decision making, Congress has bestowed specific protections to ensure that these values and obligations are not forgotten or undervalued. National forest planning must recognize and accommodate these protected values and uses.

Indian Tribal Rights

In the American federal system, American Indian tribes have a special position that has evolved over two centuries of policy develoment. As tribes ceded territory, they retained reservations and certain protected activities outside of the reservations. This section summarizes the key points that Forest Service planning must incorporate: treaty and other reserved rights, the trust responsibility, the government-to-government relationship, and other federal laws that affect tribal rights.

Treaty Rights

Many American Indian tribes, especially in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest, have rights to hunt, fish, trap, and gather on national forest lands. Courts have upheld these off-reservation rights, particularly since the landmark decisions United States v. Washington and United States v. Oregon, which enforced provisions in treaties that allowed access to salmon fisheries in all usual and accustomed places. Courts uphold similar language in other treaties to protect fishing, hunting, and gathering rights on ceded aboriginal lands that include national forests.

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3-9. Achieving Predictable Timber Harvests on the Siuslaw National Forest

The Northwest Forest Plan allocated more than 4/5 of the Siuslaw National Forest in western Oregon to reserves, either riparian reserves or late-successional reserves. The rest was allocated to "matrix" in which timber harvests were to be regularly scheduled. Reserves have ecological objectives, and timber harvest can proceed after analysis if it is needed to meet these objectives. Thinning in plantations appears to be the major timber harvest activity likely to occur in these reserves, but no timber harvest volume was assumed to come from the reserves in the Northwest Forest Plan to make sure that there was no pressure for timber harvest from these areas. The matrix has both ecological objectives and timber production objectives. The Northwest Forest Plan estimated that approximately 25 million board feet a year would come from the matrix, largely from clearcutting in mature stands.

Ironically, it has been much easier for the Siuslaw National Forest to harvest timber in the reserves than in the matrix. Once a broad suite of people became convinced that thinning plantations would enable more rapid creation of late-successional conditions, barriers within and outside the agency to the actions largely melted away. On the other hand, the Siuslaw National Forest has been very slow to undertake harvest of mature forest in the matrix for a number of reasons. First, the scientific analysis underlying the Northwest Forest Plan clearly points out that cutting mature forest increases the risk to late-successional species. Option 9 was a compromise in terms of the amount of risk to take, but the risk exists nonetheless. Few professionals can be enthusiastic to implement actions with those results. Also, public protest is likely. Second, laying out timber sales that may negatively affect spotted owl and murrelet habitat requires a number of years of examination and review. Forest personnel have chosen instead to focus their energies on the reserves, where they are not removing habitat suitable for threatened and endangered species.

Yes, the Siuslaw National Forest can be expected, under the Northwest Forest Plan, to offer at least 20 million board feet a year and, yes, these levels will likely continue for at least a decade because of the acreage of plantations that exist on the forest. But, by and large, those 20 million board feet will not be coming from clearcutting in the matrix, where the regularly scheduled timber harvest was supposed to occur. Rather, they will be coming mostly from thinning in the reserves (and the intermixed matrix land). One important point, though: the actions in the reserves will be based on the amount of treatments needed to move toward the desired future condition of late-successional forests. While timber harvest volumes from these efforts continue to be reported, they are the result of applying the needed actions, not the driver of them.

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During the past decade, the Forest Service has made impressive progress on Indian issues. The agency has created several liaison positions, held training sessions on the subject, developed a useful sourcebook, and established a working relationship with many tribes. The Forest Service should continue to expand these promising efforts, always being careful, when Indian rights are asserted, to evaluate such assertions objectively rather than resisting Indian rights on the implicit ground that they infringe on Forest Service perogatives. An open recognition of Indian rights and a fully cooperative government-to-government relationship with tribes is one of many examples of how Forest Service stewardship should be outward looking and broadly cooperative with other governmental agencies that have authority and rights within the national forests.

Trust Responsibility

The entire federal government, not just the Department of the Interior, is responsible for carrying out the government's trust responsibilities, which include recognition of treaty-based and other legal rights of American Indians on lands outside and inside of reservation boundaries. Current operative regulations for carrying out the NFMA do not provide explicit recognition of treaty rights and the affirmative responsibility of the Forest Service to protect trust resources. In addition, the handbook, Principal Laws Relating to Forest Service Activities does not inform Forest Service officials that treaty obligations apply in some regions. Nor are there requirements to work cooperatively with tribes in the protection of trust and treaty resources. This situation should be changed in new regulations.

The Forest Service is obligated to recognize and to avoid adverse effects upon tribal rights to use national forest lands. For instance, the court in Klamath Tribes v. United States Forest Service (D. Or. 1996) found that the Forest Service has a "duty to manage habitat to support populations necessary to sustain Tribal use and non-Indian harvest, including consideration of habitat needs for any species hunted or trapped by tribal members." In carrying out this duty, tribal rights are to be protected "to the fullest extent possible." The court found that these standards had not been met, and issued an injunction in favor of the tribes regarding challenged timber sales in the Winema and Fremont national forests in Oregon.

The Forest Service must consider the effects of its actions on rights that may be exercised outside of national forest boundaries. Protection of salmon harvest is a prime example. Tribes with treaty and reserved rights to salmon have, in some cases, argued that management of such species should assure a harvestable surplus in addition to conserving the population. Arguments over this concept are continuing in the courts. A decision in the Indians' favor would affect forest management where spawning grounds and habitat used by salmon are impacted by forest management activities.

Sovereignty and the Government-to-Government Relationship

Effective cooperative relationships between the Forest Service and tribal governments is essential. Carrying out the fiduciary responsibilities of the trust relationship and enforcing other federal laws that recognize tribal rights require that the Forest Service and other federal agencies work to develop cooperative relationships with tribal governments. Executive Orders require adequate consultation.

The principle of the government-to-government relationship requires personal contact and establishment of ongoing cooperative relationships; sending a letter to the tribal council is not enough. In the Klamath case, for instance, the court found the government had a procedural duty to consult with tribes. Tribes are particularly interested in cooperative relationships in the planning and monitoring processes. Some issues to address are access, land exchanges, interaction between national forest lands and tribal lands regarding disease and insects, traditional knowledge, protection of sensitive information, and adequate monitoring for protection of trust resources.

The flow of information and management policies should be bidirectional in such cooperative relationships. Despite receiving less funding than federal agencies, many tribes have established excellent records in unevenaged forest management and in recognition of the multitude of values that people have for forests. As tribes took over reservation forest management from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, harvests typically fell as concerns for the protection of nontimber resources in the forests were recognized. These reductions were not as controversial within Indian communities

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3-10. Planning Coordination on the Urban Fringe

The San Bernardino National Forest is located just 50 miles from downtown Los Angeles in one of the fastest growing suburban areas in the United States. The forest is bounded by 26 cities and numerous, smaller, unincorporated bedroom communities. Because of rapid growth in the region, the forest is increasingly threatened by residential and commercial developments near its borders. These developments are of particular concern to the forest because of the topography and ecology of the area; the forest and surrounding towns are located in the San Bernardino Mountains, in extremely steep, unstable, and fireprone chaparral canyons. Poorly planned and executed development near the forest borders contributes to fires, erosion, flooding, and overuse of recreation facilities, all of which ultimately degrade the forest's fragile and rare chaparral ecosystem.

The threats to the forest from development are greater than from any other single factor, so mitigating the effects of development is of the highest priority. Gary Earney, the Cajon District's Lands and Recreation Officer, decided that the best way to encourage responsible development in the area, and thereby protect the ecological systems of the forest, was to get involved in the planning processes of the local governments. He works directly with municipal planners and private developers to minimize or mitigate the potential impacts of development on the forest, particularly to avoid the threat of fire damage. According to District Ranger Elliott Graham, helping these adjacent communities understand ecological systems and make their planning and development decisions in an informed manner "is the most critical thing we can do to protect the forest ecosystem." And such communication can be easily initiated simply by responding to requests for comments or participation by local communities and by paying closer attention to the planning processes of forest neighbors, activities that are often overlooked by the agency. As Earney commented, "In many cases agreements are made that actually improve the quality of natural resource management on the lands of all involved, make the on-the-ground jobs of our field personnel easier, and improve the quality of our forest visitors' experiences."

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as has been observed in other situations; many tribes had criticized the Bureau of Indian Affairs' high harvest levels for some years. Interestingly, tribes often are able to handle salvage operations after fire and windthrow without long delays. Part of the reason is some shielding from the National Environmental Policy Act; but another major reason is that reservation forest planning processes, supervised by tribal councils, lead to plans with broad support. Flexibility in implementation, with the approval of tribal councils, is easily attained in most cases. The Forest Service can learn from these successes.

Tribal stewardship of forests and range- lands can also learn from experiences and approaches on the national forests and grasslands. The Forest Service has pioneered interdisciplinary planning and development of strategies for the conservation of species and ecosystems in providing for multiple use. Also, the innovative strategies for increasing the compatibility of grazing and protection of riparian areas developed by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management provide many valuable lessons for tribal management of rangeland resources on reservations.

Other Federal Laws

Important tribal prerogatives have been recognized by such laws as the Antiquities Act, Archaeological Resources Protection Act, American Indian Religious Freedom Act (as amended), the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and Executive Order No. 13007 on Indian Sacred Sites. The current NFMA regulations refer to the core of many of these directives: the recognition of sacred sites and sites of archaeological and historic importance. Of the many concerns listed above, only this one receives explicit attention in the regulations, although only in the principles section. In planning and implementation, the Forest Service must comply with these laws, and in doing so must seek meaningful consultation with tribal governments.

Tribal treaty rights and federal laws create distinctive rights that are different from, and sometimes stronger than, those of the general public. Regulations must recognize that the Forest Service needs to forge strong government-to-government relationships. In addition, development of the capacities of tribal governments through the Indian Self-Determination Act has enabled tribes to become true cooperators. Many tribes have a strong record in sustainable forest management, and many tribal concerns regarding the values that forests provide communities are the same concerns that the Forest Service is now learning to address. The Forest Service should actively seek the cooperation of such tribes in planning.

Hispanic Communities

The circumstances of rural Hispanic communities in the Southwest present another compelling example of how the Forest Service can make important contributions to local communities.

For many years before the War of 1848, most of the Southwest was controlled by Spain, succeeded by Mexico. In the United State-Mexico War, the United States annexed New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The United States promised in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that it would respect the land rights of Mexican citizens. Yet, through a well documented pattern of fraud and deceit by many parties, Hispanic landowners and communities lost millions of acres.

Today, many of those former Spanish and Mexican grant lands are within national forests. Especially in the Rio Grande watershed in northern New Mexico and parts of southern Colorado, traditional Hispanic communities remain tied to those lands, both economically and emotionally. These communities, many of them poverty-stricken, use the national forests for many purposes critical to their land-based lifestyle, including firewood gathering for residential heating and cooking, grazing, subsistence hunting, and, in a few instances, commercial timber harvesting. Those communities can be greatly aided or severely disadvantaged by land management practices within the national forests. Most notably, acequias, the traditional Hispanic irrigation cooperatives, suffer when the national forest watersheds fail to provide steady flows of clean water.

Unlike Indian tribes, whose rights stemming from treaties and federal statutes remain in force, Hispanic communities generally do not possess explicit legal rights in the former grant lands of the national forests, however much the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo might have intended otherwise. Nevertheless, these communities have powerful historical and contemporary equities that should be reflected in Forest Service policies. The first duty in the stewardship of the national forests and grasslands must be to protect the integrity of the ecological system. Once that is assured, however, the Forest Service should plan and manage land-grant national forest lands to contribute to the traditions and needs of local Hispanic communities. That has been the policy (announced but not always followed) of the Southwestern Region since 1972, as set forth in its Northern New Mexico Policy. The Forest Service should also give priority to watershed protection and to the personal uses of community members for firewood gathering, grazing, and hunting.

Economic and Social Sustainability: When Are the National Forests and Grasslands Fulfilling Their Responsibilities? Back to Top

The notion of economic and social sustainability speaks to the very capacity of a society to ensure the long-term well-being of people and the communities they inhabit. National forests and grasslands play important roles in building this capacity (1) when assessment and decision-making processes recognize, appropriately consider, and act upon the wide range of products, values, services, and uses contributed by the national forests and grasslands; (2) when they meaningfully involve the many communities that give voice to the value of these contributions; (3) when they foster an understanding of the linkages between social and ecological systems; (4) when they recognize the differential capacity of communities to respond to policy changes and work to reduce the negative economic and social impacts of these changes; and (5) when they foster responsibility for stewardship behavior that directly or indirectly enhances ecological, and, thereby, social sustainability. In other words, the Forest Service promotes the long-term economic and social well-being of the nation through both the tangible and the intangible contributions of the national forests and grasslands as well as by enhancing the ability of communities to make sustainable choices.

Human and ecological systems are highly variable, characterized by dynamic processes, and often uncertain in terms of their future natures and structures. Just as a few static measures of plant or animal abundance are not representative of the dynamic and process-oriented components of ecological sustainability, measuring economic and social sustainability is equally complex. Simple measures of employment or income levels or numbers of recreation visitor days, while important as descriptors of current conditions, reveal little about whether conditions are improving; whether conditions are sustainable; and whether communities have the capacity to pursue their desired futures. Consequently, it is more appropriate and realistic to ask, "Are the processes in place that will accommodate and encourage sustainability?" or "Do the communities and economies have the ability to persist over time through innovation and adaptation to new conditions?" than the question, "Has social sustainability been achieved?"

Objectively assessing economic and social well-being, and in particular their relationship to the contributions of National Forest System lands, is not a simple task. For the Forest Service to do so in a manner that the American people find meaningful and acceptable is an added challenge. Regardless, it is essential that the planning process dynamically assess the connections between the National Forest System and associated economies and communities, the consequences of differing planning choices, and ways in which to minimize disruptive influences. Effective assessments are best informed when undertaken in a participatory manner, involving the people and communities that can reflect upon their own history, current status, and desired future.

To determine whether the planning process is fostering the assessments, connections, and actions needed to contribute to economic and social sustainability, a number of questions could be asked:

· Does the planning process illuminate and consider the broad range of values, uses, products, and services of a national forest or grassland and the communities that rely on these contributions for their identity, well-being, and livelihood?

· Is the process open and accessible? Do people know about it? Do people feel welcome to actively participate in it? Are people able to meaningfully participate? Is it transparent and easily followed and understood?

· Does the process recognize and accommodate the diverse needs, knowledge, and capabilities of all participants?

· Does the process fit the organization, communication, and decision-making styles that characterize the community?

· Does the process recognize the differential capacity of communities to respond to policy changes and work to reduce the negative economic and social impacts of land-use change?

· Does the process facilitate understanding and learning? Is it enhancing understanding about the capabilities of the national forests and grasslands? Is it enhancing understanding of the wide-ranging values associated with the contributions of the national forests and grasslands and the communities who hold those values? Are people's concerns and interests effectively expressed? Is information readily accessible and in meaningful forms for the diverse individuals and groups who are, or might be, interested in it?

· Is the process serving as a catalyst for diverse and dispersed communities to organize, reflect, and constructively contribute to the planning process and to the stewardship activities that are identified through this process?

· Does the process recognize future Forest Service needs for stewardship activities provided by nonagency sources? Does it explore mechanisms for ensuring that these needs will be met? Are groups and individuals actively involved in providing stewardship services to the forests and rangelands that are appropriate and necessary within the context of ecological sustainability?

Recommendations Back to Top

Assessments

Recognizing that economic and social sustainability relies partly on all participants' understanding the economic and social conditions in which decisions are made, the planning process should include an assessment of economic and social conditions and trends as a precursor to large-scale landscape planning. The nature of the assessment should be designed for each landscape to account for the specific nature of the local economic, social, and cultural community and the broader regional or national values and interests in the landscape. This assessment should highlight the role of specific contributions of the national forests and grasslands to the well-being of the social systems contained in the landscape and the capacity of communities across the landscape to accommodate land-use change.

Adequate social assessments require concepts, approaches, and methods developed specifically for bioregional and watershed level assessments. At both levels, quantitative, qualitative, and participatory methods are required to adequately understand the past, present, and possible futures. Experiences from recent science assessments are a useful starting point for future assessments and plans.

Planning

The planning process should foster the meaningful involvement of diverse communities that can most effectively speak to the value of the many contributions of the national forests and grasslands and ensure that they are fairly considered in planning. At the same time, the planning process must foster a sense of community responsibility for achieving social sustainability and enhance the capability of individuals and communities to act knowledgeably and wisely in pursuing a sustainable future.

Within the framework of ecological sustainability, planning should consider the potential economic and social consequences of land-use change in setting overall land-use policy, in tailoring the policy for specific geographic areas, and in delivering resources to help communities and individuals adapt. The planning process must also consider values that have been given specific legal or historical protections and ensure that these values are provided for and protected and that other management activities do not detract from them.

Planning should take care to avoid setting unrealistic expectations about future outputs from the national forests and grasslands. At the same time, the process should minimize dramatic fluctuations in contributions and, if possible, provide some measure of predictability about future contributions to society. As part of this effort, planning should encourage actions that simultaneously contribute to ecological, economic, and social sustainability.

Ecological, social, and economic sustain- ability are inextricably linked. Impairing the sustainability of any one aspect affects the entirety. Stewardship speaks to the responsibility of the human community to protect the ecological system that supports life. Balance speaks to the inevitable weighing of specific actions intended to promote ecological sustainability with the social and economic consequences of that action.

3C. Building the Stewardship Capacity for Sustainability

The Eight Essential Building Blocks of Stewardship Capacity Back to Top

Hindsight is often 20/20, benefiting both from an understanding of the actual consequences of specific actions and from new knowledge that is subsequently acquired. It is not surprising, therefore, that after twenty years of experience, we now have greater clarity about the necessary elements of an effective forest planning process. National forest and rangeland management has traditionally been approached with a fairly narrow view of the nature of the task at hand, the range of factors to be considered, and the scope of responsibility. Consequently, in the past, the capacity for land management was most often equated with the presence of specific capabilities; that is, the manpower, skills, resources, equipment, time, and authority to get the job done. And, although those capabilities are essential to the task of public-land stewardship, we now know that, by themselves, they are not enough. Several other critical components of stewardship capacity must also be present within the Forest Service and within society. Capability is but one of eight core building blocks of stewardship capacity. The others are trust, collaborative relationships, understanding, joint fact-finding, dealing with conflict, will, and a learning organization. Capacity is created and enhanced when linkages are made, connecting these building blocks of stewardship capacity. It is the function of the planning process to construct these linkages.

Trust

Trust in the Forest Service and among the many groups and individuals that care about the national forests and grasslands has diminished after years of a planning process that has been both divisive and disillusioning for all involved. This lack of trust has heightened conflict over national forest planning and has brought many planning efforts to an impasse. While it will be some time before trust in the actions of the Forest Service can be restored, trust in the process by which forest and range-land management decisions are made is an essential component in building stewardship capacity. And for the planning process to be trusted, it must be perceived to be legitimate, credible, and fair to the diverse groups, individuals, and communities who care about national forests and rangelands. To be legitimate, it must satisfy legal mandates, be sanctioned by administrative procedure, have the support and commitment of agency officials, and recognize other rights and authorities. To be credible, the base of knowledge informing decisions must be widely perceived as sound and complete. To be fair, the process must be inclusive and representative, with mutually agreeable criteria for decision making and equal access to information. If there is no trust, there is little capacity for working together. Hence, the first step in building stewardship capacity is to begin rebuilding trust.

Collaborative Relationships

Effective stewardship demands that people begin working together in ways that the previous approach to planning did not recognize or accommodate. Some of these people reside within the Forest Service, and must work together, linking researchers and policy-makers, managers and scientists, and leaders and managers. Some of these people reside in other government agencies, and the Forest Service needs to establish constructive working relationships with them. Others reside in communities of interests and communities of place that care about the national forests and grasslands, and they, too, are essential to sustainable stewardship. They must be brought into the planning process in productive and meaningful ways.

The ability of the Forest Service and other individuals, organizations, agencies, and governments to work together toward common purposes is the foundation of collaborative stewardship capacity. To effectively pursue sustainability, stewardship of National Forest System lands must engage

· Those who have the information, knowledge, and expertise to contribute to developing courses of action (i.e., other agencies, governments, universities, tribes, national and regional nongovern- mental organizations, and community organizations)

· Those who have sole control or authority over lands and activities adjacent to national forests and rangelands (i.e., other public and private landowners)

· Those who have the skills, energy, time, and resources to carry out stewardship activities (i.e., communities, individuals, organizations, and other agencies)

· Those who can help monitor and assess on-the-ground consequences of management actions to better inform future decisions (i.e., communities, individuals, organizations, and other agencies)

· Those who can independently validate the credibility of stewardship decisions and the reality of achievements (i.e., scientific experts and knowledgeable people)

In short, many and diverse collaborative relationships comprise a core building block of stewardship capacity. The planning process must provide opportunities and incentives for people to work together, establishing these collaborative relationships.

What Is Collaboration?

Collaboration, quite simply, is based on the old adage that "Two heads are better than one, and one by itself is simply not good enough." Two heads can be better in many different ways. They bring more issues, perspectives, and ideas to discussions. They bring more resources, time, and energy to the resolution of issues and the implementation of plans. They foster better decisions, decisions that are better informed, better understood, better accepted, and more apt to be implemented.

With such a simple premise applied to so many varied contexts, it is not surprising that collaboration is not a uniformly structured process. Instead, collaborative processes work precisely because they are tailored to fit the particular situation of concern. Consequently, there are many varied shapes, sizes, functions, and outcomes of collaborative processes in resource management. What is important is not the precise formula or the rigid structure, but rather that each is guided by some fundamental principles. Collaborative processes strive to be inclusive, open, representative, and flexible; guided by clear expectations and objectives; linked to a scientific basis and to existing law and procedures; and having clear decision rules and authorities. They build on current scientific understandings and knowledge and seek out relevant expertise as needed.

There is no magic to collaboration, but two key ingredients must be present: individuals who share a concern about a place, an issue, or a problem and a commitment to working together. In many of the promising approaches to resource management, the Committee found a common element: the individuals involved viewed what they were doing as an experiment and learned and adapted accordingly. They were "in it together." Consequently, expectations and behaviors within the process were very different from those of traditional planning processes. Views of responsibilities differed; the Forest Service planner's role was more flexible and adaptive; and those involved seemed more open, forgiving, and motivated by the process. Collaboration is about: working together on issues of mutual concern in a manner that best fits the needs of the people, place, and issues of concern.

Instituting Opportunities for Collaboration

As the United States has come to acknowledge the growing fragmentation of its forested ecosystems, the fragmentation of the institutional structures affecting those ecosystems has also become apparent. The institutional structures seldom accommodate effective collaboration. For example, a single watershed (e.g., the Applegate area in Oregon) can have a checkerboard of private, state, and federal land ownerships, each of which has its own distinct objectives for land use and management. Without strong relationships among agencies and meaningful community engagement in identifying issues and solving problems, effective forest management is virtually impossible. The forest planning process should be a key avenue for organizing fragmented institutions and communities to foster the communication and coordination essential to sustainable forest management.

Multiple mechanisms of public dialogue need to be devised to enhance the capacity of the American people to effectively engage in the planning process. People are diverse in their conceptions of which forest and rangeland contributions hold the highest value and, therefore, what social choices should be made concerning the stewardship of National Forest System lands. They are diverse in their cultural practices and values. They are diverse in their willingness to engage in participatory public processes (some like meetings, others prefer face-to-face discussions, still others need to be in the woods to address the issues). And, they are diverse in their economic activities. Regardless, people with different back-grounds often share at least one common ground: they care about and/or want to live near or visit these lands. The national forests and grasslands have significant meaning to many people in many places. The process of forming a land and resource management plan is a critical avenue for people of differing cultures and interests to find commonality and community through their mutual concern for their lands. In so doing, they build the capacity of that community to effectively assist the Forest Service in pursuing sustainable ecosystem management instead of undermining collaborative efforts through protracted conflict. However, an enabling mechanism must first be present. No single "public participation" process will accomplish this end; rather, multiple opportunities are needed that capture the diverse array of people and issues at play on our national forests and rangelands.

Engaging the American public in deliberating the future of the national forests and grasslands is more than just talking to people living near those lands. Gifford Pinchot, first Chief of the Forest Service, set forth the principle that local decisions should be made on local grounds. At that time, local people meant "people living nearby." Today, people who live great distances from the forests and rangelands feel strong attachments to them and want to participate in making decisions about them. Just as transportation systems have changed the meaning of "local" in decision making, so have information technologies transformed the ability of people living far from the public lands to join in deliberating the future of those lands. New approaches and technologies should be considered in drawing more geographically dispersed, yet equally committed and concerned, individuals into the planning process.

Understanding

A lack of broad-based understanding pervades the current planning process. Groups, including the Forest Service, do not fully understand the issues of concern to each other; the constraints that circumscribe the agency's considerations; and the realm of possible, realistic outcomes. The National Forest System planning process is currently structured only to solicit input and then criticism from nonagency groups and individuals; it provides no incentives for constructive development of ideas and solutions to problems. Hence, people involved in the process do not have to grapple with the very real legal, financial, ecological, social, and resource constraints that confront the Forest Service or with the very real concerns and interests of others. Moreover, there is little incentive for people involved in the process to develop proposals that recognize these realities; in fact, the incentive is just the reverse. The current process has the Forest Service positioned like an arbiter in the middle of the fray, providing each group with the perverse incentive to argue for as much as possible in the hope of maximizing what it receives in the end. There is no incentive for reasoned or fully informed proposals, and there is no ownership in or commitment to the resulting decisions.

Many factors and issues of concern (to both Forest Service and non-Forest Service entities) bear on management decisions regarding the national forests and grasslands. For stewardship capacity to be enhanced, the broad array of issues, interests and concerns, legal and administrative constraints and possibilities, and budgetary realities must be understood across the spectrum of individuals, agencies, and groups who are a part of the process. It is only through working with an informed and realistic understanding of the complexity of the stewardship task at hand that people will be both encouraged and enabled to make reasoned and reasonable contributions to the process. While planning documents are not the path to providing this understanding, the planning process must facilitate it.

Fostering understanding also implies an expanded conception of the Forest Service's role in education, one that encourages people to become aware of their connection to the forests and rangelands and their responsibility to assist with stewardship. Many natural resource benefits are taken for granted in daily life. For example, the waters that flow from the national forests and grasslands have a significant economic value to large urban populations, to agriculture, and to other highly profitable industries. Many of these users are not even aware of their connection to the watershed that supplies a vital ingredient of their lives and livelihoods; hence, they do not actively assist the Forest Service in ensuring that these critical watersheds are sustainably managed. The planning process must be structured in a manner that builds broad-based understanding and engages those who can provide a voice for the interests that must be recognized and understood if effective stewardship is to be realized.

Planning and assessment processes are critical opportunities for building and strengthening the understanding and relationships necessary to work toward sustainability. These processes can enrich and broaden agency understanding of the country's economic, social, and institutional environment at the same time that they help build community capacity. By engaging in meaningful public dialogue, citizens and interest groups can learn about one another and develop a deeper appreciation of different points of view. They can begin identifying shared issues of concern and envisioning mutually agreed upon approaches to deal with these issues. A central function of the planning process is to facilitate community building by providing the opportunity and incentives for people to come together. Such opportunities can help strengthen a community's ability to chart and pursue a common future course, to be vibrant and healthy, and to be able to assist in the pursuit of sustainability for the public lands.

Joint Fact Finding

The current planning process is plagued by "advocacy science." Different groups, individuals, agencies, and communities, working with different sets of information and assumptions about the resource base, challenge Forest Service decisions. Different "experts" reach different conclusions about what is and what should be. As different groups rally around their experts, they deepen the chasm between the agency and society and undermine our ability to achieve sustainability. Joint fact finding (jointly conducted assessments and analyses) is essential to establishing a credible and common base of information from which all who care can draw. Conducted in an inclusive and collaborative manner and building broad-based understanding and concurrence on the facts, joint fact-finding provides the opportunity for science to shed light on issues and possibilities rather than cloud them as currently is the case. Joint fact-finding, if conducted in an open and credible manner, also provides the first and critical step in building productive collaborative relationships between the many people who care about and can contribute to stewardship.

Information is a key element in building an accessible planning process and an honest relationship between the agency and communities. Where key information about the resources and management of national forests and grasslands is readily available in a range of locations and formats, open information policies can provide any interested individual the ability to understand, critique, and participate in planning processes. Involving diverse groups in acquiring and analyzing this information has several advantages. It forces the groups to come to grips with and articulate their true issues of concern as well as the assumptions on which they are basing their decisions. It forces them to listen to the concerns of others, to test each other's assumptions, and to have a legitimate forum within which to make adjustments to accommodate each other's needs. It allows them to understand and account for the legitimate concerns and needs of other groups. And it places everyone on an equal footing, understanding the full resources at stake, the ramifications of different decisions, and the constraints bounding the realm of possible outcomes. Moreover, it promotes each group's ability to contribute meaningfully to the process, make creative suggestions, articulate their different assumptions, and jointly develop a mutually satisfactory outcome, when possible. When planning and assessment processes are viewed as joint inquiry processes between the agency and the public, then the attitudes of both are aimed toward mutual learning, issue identification, and problem solving, thereby enhancing the ability of the process to promote effective stewardship.

Dealing with Conflict

The demand for the many uses, values, and products of the national forests and rangelands has dramatically increased, while ecological integrity has declined. Restoring ecological integrity while continuing to contribute to economies and human communities is not an easy task. The challenge for the Forest Service within the planning process is to meaningfully and credibly illuminate the nature of and rationale for decisions, as well as the inevitable tradeoffs implied by these decisions. Rather than serving as the lightning rod, the planning process provides the catalyst that helps society both understand the range of options and make reasoned and reasonable choices that are ecologically sustainable and of significant value to society. An important role for a revised planning process is to build the linkages, forums, and understanding needed to make difficult decisions and resolve conflicts.

The planning process must recognize the inevitability of legitimate, yet competing, values in National Forest System management. It must encourage divergent interests to collectively deal with their differences while pursuing shared goals for the national forests and grasslands. Conceptually, it is quite easy to talk about balancing competing interests and pursuing mutually agreed upon paths. Consensus is a compelling concept. Practically, however, achieving consensus when so much is at stake and in the face of such divergent claims is a difficult task. None know this challenge better than the men and women of the Forest Service. Nonetheless, conflict can be a source of tremendous opportunity. A critical building block of stewardship capacity is the ability to recognize and capture those opportunities. Differences in values, perspectives, and experience can all provide opportunities for learning and critique. Getting an alternative perspective on things that have become "routine" over time is difficult without someone with a different viewpoint. Conflict brings these perspectives and energy to the forefront.

Capabilities Back to Top

Traditionally, capabilities would have been the primary, if not sole, focus in a discussion of stewardship capacity. Capabilities are the skills, resources, people, equipment, time, and authority to get work done. Many of the capabilities to undertake on-the-ground stewardship activities already exist in varying forms and places. These capabilities are found, for example, in the devoted, hard-working employees of the Forest Service as well as in the many and diverse groups and individuals who care so deeply about National Forest System lands. They reside in the agency and in academic and government research communities, in budgets, in legal mandates, in institutional structures and administrative procedures, and in individuals' ability to access and use information or to operate equipment. The critical aspect of these capabilities is not their presence or potential but how they are linked to affect action; this is an important function of the planning process. An additional function is to recognize particular capabilities that are needed and to facilitate their development. Community organization and leadership, for example, are important capabilities for facilitating the involvement of communities in stewardship of the public lands.

Traditionally, the relationship between the national forests and grasslands and the broader society was treated as a one-way street. Public and private goods flowed from federal lands to numerous beneficiaries, and public servants made choices based on their own beliefs about what was best for the resources as well as society. Sustainability, however, requires a two-way relationship between the Forest Service and society. To build this two-way relationship requires engaged communities with sufficient leadership capability to coalesce resources for action. "Community" speaks to the quality of relationships among diverse and dispersed groups of people, not the geographic location of where they live. One goal of forest planning is to enhance the capability of diverse communities and facilitate their ability to constructively contribute to national forest management. Moreover, doing so will help create and enhance the leadership, institutions, and informal networks within communities that, in turn, help the Forest Service to interact more effectively with these communities.

Forming management partnerships is one way to harness the potential of dispersed capabilities. In many places, sustainability depends on contributions from communities and economies beyond a national forest or rangeland's border. The Forest Service has always relied on individuals, organizations, industries, and communities to provide resources for society and to protect the forests from fire, insects, and disease. This list includes volunteers who help address the needs of a burgeoning number of recreational users [see Sidebar 3-12]; nongovernmental organizaions who have unique knowledge and expertise about particular resources or ecological attributes; and local industries that can provide the labor and services necessary for restoring or harvesting the commodity outputs of a forest (see Sidebar 3-13). Today, the American people are more interested than ever before in actively participating in providing stewardship support for the national forests and grasslands. Actively cultivating this public commitment and capacity can significantly improve the Forest Service's stewardship capabilities.

The capability to undertake protective management, for instance fuel reduction in fire- prone ecosystems, requires adequate financial resources, a skilled workforce, and entrepreneurship. Current policy often assumes that finances, skilled labor, and entrepreneurship are provided by normal economic institutions. We argue here that maintenance of these capabilities is important to ensure ecological sustainability in many places. For example:

· A viable timber industry will be needed for vegetation treatments to achieve ecological goals; otherwise the public expense of these treatments could be much higher.

· Local stewardship will often be necessary for watershed restoration.

· Entrepreneurs must be interested in organizing resources to undertake needed management activities.

· The regular implementation of projects helps ensure that a sufficient workforce will be available when needed.

· A strong and locally enforced legal and institutional infrastructure is necessary to protect ecological resources from degradation or over exploitation. Strong and stable communities, along with a sense of personal responsibility, help provide this infrastructure.

Today, the Forest Service needs to take an active role in considering what kinds of community and business capability are necessary for effective stewardship and developing both the awareness of this relationship and local entrepreneurship though the planning process. Achieving this goal may mean placing individuals in positions where they are responsible for maintaining these linkages and fulfilling these tasks. It also means using the planning process to forecast future needs and taking the steps necessary to ensure that key industries are present and intact to meet those needs as they arise.

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3-11. Dealing with Conflict: The Beartree Challenge

The Rocky Mountain Ranger District of the Lewis and Clark National Forest in northern Montana abuts the southern border of Glacier National Park and stretches for 100 remote miles along the east side of the Continental Divide. With an area population of around 6,000, the density of human beings seems only slightly higher than that of the 80 to 100 endangered grizzly bears who also inhabit the region. The presence of grizzly bears is considered a significant problem in the surrounding ranching communities, for both economic and personal safety reasons. A Forest Service employee explains: "We had a problem of deteriorating ecological habitat. Buffaloberry bushes and whitebark pine were disappearing due to fire suppression. This meant less food for grizzlies on National Forest lands, which meant they spent less time feeding there, which meant they spent more time eating on ranchers land. ... It's easy to see how this ecological problem became a social problem."

The situation was exacerbated by the fact that the Rocky Mountain region features ranches of 20,000 to 30,000 acres that provide an abundant supply of sheep, cattle, and pigs, which are vulnerable to hungry bears.

Not surprisingly, the conflict became quite heated. Ranchers, upset about not being able to kill a federally protected species that preyed on their livestock, focused their anger on federal land managers. Wildlife groups, on the other hand, opposed any disturbance of the bears. Seth Diamond, a Resource Assistant in the District, decided to try to deal with the conflict head on. As he explained: "The grizzly bear has the ability to stimulate great interest. Let's transform it into something positive ... and use it to bring people together."

Diamond's solution was the Beartree Challenge, an innovative partnership among a broad array of cooperators, timber interests, environmentalists, ranchers, and educational institutions, on behalf of the grizzlies. The program has dual purposes. One goal is to improve the ecological habitat of the grizzlies by fostering the growth of the nuts and berries they eat, as a way to encourage them to stay on National Forest lands and not stray onto private ranchlands. The second is to improve the bear's "social habitat," minimizing and resolving the conflicts surrounding grizzly management by, as Diamond described it, "breaking down the barriers that polarize people over the grizzly bear issue." The ecological goal was to be achieved by improving 1,000 acres of bear habitat over a five-year period through the use of controlled burns, plantings, and limited tree harvesting with the use of low-impact logging machinery. The many cooperators who donated their time and equipment were essential to the project's success. Explains Diamond: "We worked hard to build strong relationships with cooperators. Without cooperators, we could not have done the project."

The program worked to improve the social habitat of the grizzly bear by creating a partnership among the diverse set of interests involved in the controversy and by undertaking extensive public education and media campaigns. Diamond solicited the endorsement of environmental organizations, such as The Nature Conservancy and Defenders of Wildlife, to help the project achieve "wide-based support." The District also held on-the-ground tours of the project's habitat improvement projects. The high-tech timber harvesting equipment, which featured robotics and had never before been used in the United States, was especially popular, drawing visitors from all over the country. The project also featured "community links" with Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, elementary and high schools, and universities, as well as ties with environmental education programs, such as Project Learning Tree and Project Wild. Some 40 to 50 presentations were made in Montana and in Washington, D.C., to educate a wide array of people, from congressional members to school children. Forest Service staff also collaborated with state and federal agencies, San Francisco State University's Wildlands Studies, the University of Montana, and the Intermountain Research Station, using their scientific expertise in designing and implementing the project.

Diamond's approach was patient, open, and determinedly inclusive. As he noted: "We marketed the program aggressively ... not so much to say that this was the answer, but to show people what we were doing. We didn't wait for people to come to us. We sought out all segments of the public [including] people who are not traditionally positive about the Forest Service ... politicians [and] ranchers, ... not just people interested in wildlife." Once that hurdle was overcome, another one was waiting. Diamond recalled, "I got a fair amount of bad press in the proposal planning stage. Mainly from wilderness groups skeptical about any logging on the District. ... There was distrust of the Forest Service, distrust of the Forest Service/timber company alliance, distrust of our use of the media. People thought it was just a PR move." Diamond overcame this skepticism by "directly confronting it. Not like typical bureaucrats who say nothing. I let them know what we were doing." He also noted that it was "helpful to use other groups as go-betweens." The support of environmental groups, such as Defenders of Wildlife and The Nature Conservancy helped educate and allay the concerns of other environmental groups. There is, commented Diamond, "a much more collaborative atmosphere surrounding grizzly bear management. Much more positive. ... Ranchers used to have a Ôshoot, shovel, and shut up approach' and now they have a Ôwait and see' approach."

Diamond encouraged other Forest Service staff to deal directly with the conflicts they confront: "Look at where you have conflict. Identify the root of the conflict. Then think of some middle ground, some positive way to engage the different parties." And his formula for dealing with conflict: "Listen to people. Listen closest to the people most opposed to what you're doing. ... Think of new ways to frame the problem so that more interests get engaged and addressed. Change does not come about quickly or easily, but it nonetheless can be accomplished."

Diamond believes that one of the primary reasons for Beartree's success was simply that they were willing to try something new. As Diamond noted: "Three years ago, the District was at a crossroads. We could continue to manage grizzly habitat by reacting to conflicting demands, or we could grab the reins and develop a program that made the grizzly the focus of collaboration, not conflict. We chose the latter approach, and the Beartree Challenge is the realization of that vision. With the Beartree Challenge, we have seen the grizzly bear transformed from a symbol of controversy to a symbol of cooperation."

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3-12. The San Gorgonio Volunteers Association

The San Gorgonio Ranger District of the San Bernardino National Forest in southern California has found a very resourceful way to stretch its thin budget: harnessing the dedication and energy of the San Gorgonio Volunteer Association (SGVA). This 120 member organization donated more than 9,000 hours of volunteer time to the district in 1992, and made more than 17,000 visitor contacts during volunteer patrols of the San Gorgonio Wilderness Area. Its volunteers also provided all the staffing for the district's Barton Flats Visitor Center and conducted more than 100 interpretive programs, which together reached another 13,000 forest visitors.

The Volunteer Association has filled a neglected niche within the San Gorgonio District. According to the district's interpretive specialist, there was a "need for a Forest Service presence" in the forest because of its popularity as a recreation site. The San Gorgonio is one of the most visited wilderness areas in the nation and was being "loved to death," with certain popular areas being trampled into "dustbowls." In addition to wilderness patrols, naturalist and interpretive activities, and staffing the visitor center, SGVA also performs trail maintenance and it rebuilt the visitor center. The association provides programs to the 26 children's camps within the forest boundaries; 30,000 children, primarily from innercity areas in southern California, pass through these camps each summer. The SGVA also periodically helps pay for district projects, such as interpretive exhibits and repair of the water system and toilets at the visitor center, from money collected selling books and maps at the visitor center.

The San Gorgonio District has invested the essential time and energy into cultivating and training these volunteers. Three Forest Service employees, the interpretive specialist, the recreation manager, and the wilderness coordinator, attend the SGVA Board's monthly meetings. They also train Association members for all activities that volunteers perform for the wilderness area. The efforts of the San Gorgonio volunteers highlight the fact that many national forests and rangelands have a constituency of groups and individuals who care about them and are motivated to act in their support. Simply realizing that this volunteer resource exists and asking people for help can reap tremendous rewards for National Forest System lands.

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3-13. The Clifton-Choctaw Project

The Clifton-Choctaw Tribe is small, not federally recognized, and located on a 4.7 acre reservation in Gardner, Louisiana. A partnership between the Tribe and the Kisatchie National Forest of North-Central Louisiana has been a long-term success because it was structured to meet both the needs of the Forest Service and those of the Tribe. The partnership enables each to provide a critical service to the other that, in isolation, would not have happened.

The partnership came about when the local timber industry stopped processing "short wood" and the Clifton-Choctaw Tribe suffered adverse economic effects, including unemployment. According to District Ranger John Baswell, tribal members were disadvantaged by a "lack of education and training that they could transfer to another type of employment; ... they are a very marginal community with little political power." Consequently, they were having difficulty making a living. At the same time, Baswell noted that the Forest Service was "realizing that we needed to do something with the long-leaf pine source and here was a tribal group that had long-leaf pine as part of their cultural tradition and it was a natural for them."

Through a cost-share partnership arrangement with the Forest Service, the Tribe constructed a small tree nursery to grow long-leaf pine seedlings and started a pine-straw-baling operation. At the outset, the district silviculturist assisted the tribe with the seedlings, informing them of proper planting and care procedures. In the first year of operation, the tribe sold more than 900 bales of straw for mulch to local nurseries. In addition, they set up a small tree nursery adjacent to a gift shop where they had already been selling pine-straw baskets, quilts, beaded earrings, and other handmade items.

The Tribe now has a contract to supply the Forest Service with 100,000 long-leaf pine seedlings. The Forest Service supplies the Tribe with seeds and buys the seedlings at the end of the growing season. Local Forest Service staff helped the Tribe obtain a second grant to increase production in order to supply private and state forests, as well as the National Forest, with long-leaf pine seedlings. Forest Service staff are currently helping the Tribe increase its water supply so that it can increase production of seedlings. The Clifton-Choctaw partnership represents a simple cooperative arrangement that gave the Forest Service a much needed local supply of long-leaf pine seedlings and members of the Tribe an opportunity to improve their quality of life in measurable ways.

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Will The old maxims, "Where there's a will, there's a way," coupled with the converse wisdom "Where there's no will, there's no way," speak volumes about a critical building block of stewardship capacity: the will to do what is necessary to be effective stewards. While a well structured process is essential to effective stewardship, without a willingness to engage in that process and a commitment to see it through to fruition, success is not assured. And although the many physical capabilities supporting stewardship may be present, they will amount to little without the organizational and public will to use them in pursuit of the purposes and principles articulated in the planning regulations.

To some extent, the will of the Forest Service is currently stymied by a lack of public trust. Within the agency, it is stymied by a perceived lack of broad-based support for pursuing the core elements of a reformed planning process. Why should the public engage in a new planning process after devoting considerable time and energy to the last round of forest planning with little apparent effect? Why should Forest Service planners embark on a new process if support for it is not forthcoming from within the agency's own hierarchy?

Forest Service leaders must provide a supportive agency environment through which internal capacity can be fostered and internal will enhanced. Agency leaders can create this fundamental will within the agency by providing encouragement, flexibility, support, resources, skills, training, and rewards; by evidencing the will themselves; and by providing opportunities to experience and contribute to a new planning process. The will must exist and be acted upon by the leaders to be followed by those on the ground. Only if the will is in evidence on the ground can it be recognized and embraced by the American people.

A Learning Organization Back to Top

The internal capacity for stewardship within the Forest Service cannot be effectively established without an organizational context that promotes ongoing learning and appropriate change. An openness to learning is predicated in humility, in recognizing that there is yet much to learn about the ecological systems of the National Forest System lands and about 75

ways to work more effectively as an organization and a society. It means acknowledging that someone else, at times, might know more and should be consulted and listened to. It means acknowledging that there are different ways of knowing and different sources of knowledge that contribute to understanding the full context of stewardship.

Organizational learning is a process that relies on the ability of an organization to experiment, recognize the lessons of experience, and use an adaptive approach to developing and carrying out policies. In many ways, this type of behavior is anathema to the functioning of any large bureaucratic organization, and the Forest Service is no exception. Large bureaucratic organizations in both the public and private sectors are notoriously poor learners. They exhibit several characteristic problems: contrary information rarely makes it to the top, bearers of bad news are punished, and essential risk-taking and creative problem solving are blocked by organizational norms and the professional paradigms that are challenged by them. Humility is not a strong suit. Regardless, if the Forest Service chooses to pursue the purposes and principles articulated in the planning regulations, then it must recognize, confront, and overcome these organizational hurdles.

Together, incentives and disincentives (carrots and sticks) can provide a boost to the Forest Service's ability to learn and pursue the purposes and principles underlying effective stewardship. Carrots can tease, encourage, and support the necessary efforts for sustainability; sticks can dissuade inappropriate behavior and identify inadequate or inappropriate practices. Organizations that recognize the imperative to learn, particularly in times of significant change, adopt a diverse set of strategies. Some provide internal incentives and rewards; others institute systems of checks and balances that externally validate the assumptions and actions of the agency. External reviews provoke two learning impulses: (1) to be up-to-date, informed, and honest in order to "pass muster" in the external reviews and (2) to be open to hearing a different perspective, one that is less apt to be constrained by organizational norms and professional paradigms and hence more likely to raise issues and questions that may otherwise be left unseen. At the same time, external reviews add credibility to agency actions, something that is essential to effective stewardship.

Organizational learning and change require a supportive and open environment in which the organization, both its leadership and its members, want to learn and are willing to change. This desire to learn and willingness to change cannot be forced from the top down, nor acted upon at lower levels without approval and support from above. An organizational desire to learn comes from a common understanding of the need for change and a shared perspective on the direction that change should take. In other words, it needs a vision that all involved find compelling and motivating. And people will only rally around a vision and a process that they have ownership in, preferably through their own experience and assessment.

Learning organizations share several key characteristics:

· They recognize that they need to be learning and acting on that learning.

· They view their task as an experiment and recognize that the point of an experiment is to learn from its results and modify successive steps accordingly.

· They encourage team approaches that bridge skills, expertise, and interests.

· They lend helping hands and share ideas and responsibilities.

· They provide the flexibility that prompts creativity and innovation.

· They learn from what has not worked.

· They highlight endeavors that have worked.76

· They provide skills, training, resources, and similar kinds of support.

· They employ constructive feedback loops.

· They have champions who provide the leadership and enthusiasm for the learning process.

· They support and encourage but seldom dictate.

· They institute mechanisms for external review.

Change is seldom a smooth and seamless process, even in the best of times and with the best of plans. Few would dispute that the Forest Service is in a time of great change. Although it is an understandably frustrating time for Forest Service employees at all levels of the organization, it is a time of tremendous opportunity as well.

Connecting the Building Blocks of Stewardship Capacity Back to Top

The Committee of Scientists recognizes that pursuing a planning process constructed of these building blocks will not be easy. Many of these approaches contradict long-held professional paradigms and organizational norms that have focused on commodity outputs. Therefore, they may not be readily accepted and adopted. People who have not worked together constructively in the past and who distrust one another (e.g., scientists and managers; interest groups; Forest Service and other agencies; agencies and communities) will not suddenly begin collaborating. However, if the Forest Service adopts sustainability as its fundamental goal, then these new perspectives and behaviors must also be adopted. It is important to be realistic about the inherent challenges and to remain committed if progress is to be made. And, although the building blocks apply to everyone, the Forest Service must recognize its particular responsibility to provide leadership, through commitment and opportunities, for stewardship to be realized.

The Forest Service is a large organization, with its own internal mix of knowledge, values, skills, experiences, creativity, and attitudes towards change. The adoption of new approaches to planning will not occur overnight. As one Regional Planner commented to the Committee, "We can't turn on a dime." Consequently, building this internal stewardship capacity to achieve sustainability will only be brought about by an organizational willingness to adopt this perspective, followed by structures that link the essential knowledge and energies to produce action.

Proposed Recommendations Back to Top

The Forest Service should recognize the necessity to develop and enhance both internal and external stewardship capacity to facilitate its efforts to achieve sustainability.

· Organizational structures should be developed that provide a ready forum and mechanism for the collaboration, information sharing, and linkages between people and resources that are internal or external to the agency. This interaction can be assured by routine planning procedures that provide opportunities for ongoing and meaningful involvement, as well as by formal structures that better connect National Forest System stewards with agency and academic research communities, formal advisory councils, and external review panels.

· Internal stewardship capacity will be enhanced by improved communications between on-the-ground resource managers and agency and academic research communities. These linkages are essential to promote the application of up-to-date knowledge and understanding by managers and to inform the research community of problems and needs that warrant examination.

· External review panels should be employed to verify the soundness of management accomplishments and provide incentives for managers to seek out knowledge that will better inform their actions.

· Partnerships should be encouraged that provide linkages to the skills, resources, knowledge, and capabilities of nonagency entities essential to accomplishing stewardship.

· The Forest Service should recognize that achieving sustainability will require ongoing learning and experimentation, both within the agency and within society. Flexibility and support should be provided to encourage effective approaches to enhancing stewardship capacity and to diffuse what is learned throughout the agency.

· The planning process should include a participation strategy that would allow interested parties living away from the area can participate in planning. Working analyses and discussion papers should continually be made available and contributions invited.

· Agency leaders should provide multiple opportunities for dialogue among and contributions by Forest Service employees. Ways must be found to foster the understanding, experience, and ownership of the eventual process and, thereby, the will to pursue it.

Proposed Actions Regarding Formal Advisory Boards Back to Top

The process for communication with the public and other agencies, organizations, and interested parties needs to be institutionalized so that it is continuously and easily accessible to people living both nearby and far away from the planning area.

Section 14 of RPA/NFMA includes clear requirements for public participation, including authorization for the convening of advisory boards as part of the overall processes for public participation:

(a) In exercising his authorities under this Act and other laws applicable to the Forest Service, the Secretary, by regulation, shall establish procedures, including public hearings where appropriate, to give the Federal, State and local governments and the public adequate notice and an opportunity to comment upon the formulation of standards, criteria, and guidelines applicable to Forest Service programs.

(b) In providing for public participation in the planning for and management of the National Forest System, the Secretary, pursuant to the Federal Advisory Committee Act (86 Stat. 770) and other applicable law, shall establish and consult such advisory boards as he deems necessary to secure full information and advice on the execution of his responsibilities. The membership of such boards shall be representative of a cross section of groups interested in the planning for and management of the National Forest System and the various types of use and enjoyment of the lands thereof. (16 U.S.C. 1612)

The statute makes clear that the Forest Service should develop relationships with other federal agencies, state and local governments, and the public that are directly related to effective participation in developing the policy framework for its programs. The specifically named elements, standards, criteria, and guidelines, are key decision points in that they are the basis for making choices. For the public, including other governments, to effectively and wisely participate in these key decisions, the public participation process needs to be explicitly organized as a learning process, not merely a "review and comment" process.

To develop good policy standards, criteria and guidelines, everyone involved needs to have a broad understanding of the ecological, social, and economic context and the kinds of strategies needed to achieve sustainability. This kind of public participation process rests upon the development and deliberation of substantive resource and social/economic information. It requires the long-term engagement of the entire community of interested and affected parties and needs to result in collaborative stewardship capacity. At the same time, the process must always be open to new people, new ideas, and new problems.

Gifford Pinchot was an early proponent of advisory boards and formed many of them to contribute to the national and local management of the federal forests and grasslands. The use of advisory boards became a common administrative mechanism for ongoing participation, especially when technical information was know best to those using the land and resources. Early advisory boards were often formed for specific resources, especially timber and range, but concerns with public representation in the 1970s led to the passage of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) in 1972. FACA requires all formal groups formed by government agencies for providing advice on public policy and decisions to be representative, to have a clear charter, to be appointed for a specific period for a specific purpose, and so on. In the late 1970s, efforts to "downsize" the federal government led to the disbanding of many advisory boards working with national forests. Today, a major concern is determining when public participation involves giving advice on public policy choices, the point at which a FACA charter is necessary. This point raises concerns about the appropriate mechanisms for public participation in land and resource management planning.

Because the Forest Service cannot carry out the mission of sustainability alone, the Committee believes the Service should develop both formal and informal collaborative structures that engage the broader community of interests and responsible governments to work together. Mechanisms for ensuring ongoing, long-term, broadly inclusive public relationships that build the capacity for creating effective collaborative stewardship are necessary for effective planning. It is the obligation of every line officer to build and maintain strong relationships with members of the public, interested organizations, other governments, and appropriate federal agencies. In some areas, especially when communities are spread over a large areas, multiple, informal, localized networks can be a useful approach to maintaining these relationships. In other cases, especially when large landscape plans cross multiple social communities and other political boundaries, formal advisory boards may be the appropriate mechanism for ensuring full and representative participation.

Formal advisory boards, chartered under the Federal Advisory Committee Act and appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture, can provide an immediate, legitimate, representative, and predictable structure within which public dialogue can occur so that Forest Service relationships with a broad and dispersed community of interests can be efficiently maintained. The RPA/NFMA recognizes this potential and authorizes the formation of such advisory committees. These groups should contain representatives of the diversity of interested institutions and individuals, as currently required in the law. Thus, when they are the appropriate mechanism, the Forest Service should not hesitate to formally charter advisory boards at the individual national forest level or at the large landscape level, whichever provides the greatest opportunity to gain representative, structured, and focused public interactions through which the key issues can be most effectively and meaningfully addressed.

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3-14. Building Stewardship Capacity for Sustainability: The Applegate Example

The half-million-acre Applegate Watershed in southwestern Oregon and northern California includes Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), state, county, and private lands. Frustrated by the polarization created by resource management issues in their valley, neighbors (residents, community groups, BLM and Forest Service officials, local industry representatives, and local environmental organizations) decided to begin working together to make the Applegate Watershed a model for ecologically sound and economically and socially responsible resource management.

The group's vision statement captures their philosophy and objectives:

The Applegate Partnership is a community-based project involving industry, conservation groups, natural resource agencies, and residents cooperating to encourage and facilitate the use of natural resource principles that promote ecosystem health and diversity.

Through community involvement and education, the Partnership supports management of all land within the watershed in a manner that sustains natural resources, which, in turn, contributes to economic and community stability within the Applegate Valley. Their purpose is to make future land management "ecologically credible, aesthetically acceptable, and economically viable." The Partnership uses a three-pronged approach: First, in their words, they "provide leadership in facilitating the use of natural resource principles that promote ecosystem health and diversity." Second, they "work with public land managers, private landowners, and community members to promote projects which demonstrate ecologically sound management practices within the watershed." And, third, they "seek support for these projects through community involvement and education."

More than 100 individuals in the community are involved in some way in the Partnership. They have met weekly for more than five years, persevering despite the skepticism of outsiders, the reluctance of some federal partners, and the complexity of their task. The imperative to continue comes from the recognition that the alternative is a return to divisiveness and gridlock, which will undermine any hope of a sustainable future for the community.

Since its inception, the Partnership has conducted or supported many projects, some implemented through cooperation with private landowners and some administered and carried out by the Forest Service and BLM. With private foundation and university support, the Partnership helped sponsor a community assessment to better understand the communities within the watershed. In turn, the Forest Service and BLM worked with the Partnership to conduct several ecological assessments of the Applegate watershed. The Partnership and Forest Service and university researchers have also developed a GIS system that integrates BLM, Forest Service, and county tax-lot information. According to Su Rolle, BLM liaison to the group, the GIS system provides, "probably the greatest amount of integrated information for a half-million acre area in the whole western U.S." This system has been an invaluable tool for conducting ecological and watershed assessments. And, perhaps just as significantly, it has affected people's perceptions and willingness to work together. As Rolle explains, "Having the whole watershed pop up [on a screen] with all the lands seen as a whole, has increased people's sensitivity and understanding that we really have to work together. We are all in this together."

Recognizing its essential role in education about issues, problems, and opportunities in the watershed, as well as in promoting ongoing and inclusive involvement across the community, the Partnership publishes a newsletter that is mailed to all 8,000 valley households. In addition, the Partnership formed the Applegate Watershed Council. The Council has received more than $400,000 in grants to conduct projects in the community, including a number of active aquatic and riparian restoration programs. Finally, the Partnership has been actively involved in projects on Forest Service and BLM lands. According to Rolle, agency projects "have improved significantly with the huge increase in dialogue with community people."

Part of the Partnership's success is due to federal agencies' responsiveness to this community. Forest Service and BLM participants are convinced that the partnership approach will produce more creative solutions to natural resource problems, more consistency, and better followthrough on projects, which will lead to improved environmental quality in the watershed. Successful projects, including a nonappealed timber sale, a Forest Service broad-based management program funded through state and local cost-sharing, and many watershed restoration efforts on private land, have added to the sense of hope in the community and in the promise of sustainability across the watershed.

The Applegate Partnership highlights the opportunities and challenges facing a community pursuing the goals of ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Pursuing sustainability requires a different community organization than that currently prevalent across the American landscape. It requires a shift in thinking about relationships to the land, to each other, and to the future. The change required is fundamental in nature; public-land agencies must serve as catalysts, facilitators, educators, partners, and assistants in this process. The Applegate community began by collaboratively crafting a vision of a desired future that recognized the imperative to reside sustainably within the ecological landscape. Public agencies recognized their key role in assisting this effort, acknowledging the diverse contributions that the public lands made to this community and, at the same time, the essential contributions that the community made to the public lands. In other words, by helping the community, the agencies were also helping themselves. The Applegate Partnership effectively links the many people, organizations, and resources that comprise or can help this community (e.g., in agencies, governments, universities, and private foundations). Partners work together to identify and understand the divergent needs and concerns that define the community. Through their ongoing dialogue, they have been able to contend with differences, make difficult choices, and remain focused and committed to the place they all share, the Applegate Watershed. Not all individuals in all agencies have acknowledged their critical role in assisting this effort, and their reluctance is the source of greatest frustration to the group and may, over time, cause the effort to unravel. Nevertheless, the Partnership provides an excellent example of one community's efforts to pursue social and economic sustainability within the context of ecological sustainability. It illustrates the type of community organization and public agency involvement that is critical to defining, then pursuing a future vision rooted in the notion of sustainability.

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3-15. Assisting Communities in Transition: Adams County, Idaho

Adams County, Idaho, is a small county with just 3000 residents. Its communities are quite isolated from the state's economic centers and are located roughly a three-hour drive from Boise. In 1990, Forest Service District Ranger David Spann helped organize the Adams County Development Corporation, an organization designed to identify needs within the county and to gather information on various funding sources that could potentially be tapped to address these needs.

Spann served as president of the Adams County Development Corporation for two years and was instrumental in linking the local communities with state and federal offices in Boise. He facilitated many community meetings, arranging his work schedule over a two-year period to work four ten-hour days for the Forest Service and then devote the fifth day working as a volunteer on rural development.

The Forest Service provided flip charts and pens for these meetings and use of the District's office computer by community members writing the group's strategic plan. The Forest Service also donated staff expertise to help the community with required environmental assessments. According to Spann, this type of assistance "may not sound like a lot, but it's meaningful for a small group that has no funding." These efforts produced several successful projects, including the renovation of a city water system, acquisition of fire department equipment, and remodeling of a local museum, all in the town of Council, and the development of a senior citizen center and a recycling enterprise in the town of New Meadows.

In 1994, the Development Corporation faced a major challenge when the Council sawmill, one of the area's major employers, closed. This closure had the potential to devastate the community, but the Corporation was there to help out. With the assistance of a new District Ranger, Pete Johnston, well over 200 community residents met to revisit and update the Corporation's four-year-old strategic plan in light of this new challenge. Their new strategic plan for economic development was approved by the governor, who then requested assistance from the Idaho congressional delegation to facilitate the delivery of federal grants to the town of Council. The community has since developed a stronger economic development plan, improved their outreach for businesses, and attracted three new businesses to the town.

As District Ranger Spann commented, "in the case of a small community like Adams County, the professionalism that the Forest Service brought to the table in supporting people and helping them with their plans" was essential to helping this county deal with a significant disruption to their economy. "It took using our contacts statewide and with other federal agencies in the area for grants and other support." Spann's observation that "I was not doing a lot, but what I was doing was integral" is both an understatement as well as an indication of the tremendous value contained in the small, but critical, assistance that the Forest Service can provide to help enhance the economic and social sustainability of such communities.

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Collaborative Planning for Sustainability

4A. The Purpose of Planning Back to Top

Fundamentals

Key Elements of the Planning Process Back to Top

Outward Looking

The planning process is outward looking. It considers the larger landscape in which the national forests and grasslands are located.

Sustainability of ecological, economic, and social systems is not and cannot be the sole responsibility of any single agency, organization or landowner. Ecological systems transcend public and private land ownerships; they do not recognize or conform to geopolitical boundaries. The resources upon which human communities and economies depend are located both on public and private lands. And, what happens economically or ecologically on one parcel of land will invariably affect what is possible on adjacent lands. Hence, planning for the national forests and grasslands must be outward looking, recognizing the broadersystems that affect, and are affected by, stewardship decisions on National Forest System lands.

In the past, planning boundaries were generally based on political/social boundaries: states, national forests or grasslands, or timber sale boundaries. During the past 20 years, it has become increasingly clear that assessing and planning for ecological sustainability must use ecological boundaries (e.g., the areas used by wide-ranging or key wildlife species), often defined by major watersheds, mountain ranges, or vegetative types. Using ecologically meaningful planning boundaries will enable not only the development of comprehensive plans for the conservation of species and ecosystems but also the ability to measure the cumulative effects of current and future management actions. These boundaries should also have social meaning. Thus, the planning process must be outward looking with the goal of understanding, influencing, and proceeding in a manner that is consistent with the broader landscape in which the national forests and grasslands are located.

An outward looking planning process is enhanced through improved coordination across other federal and state landowners. Harmonizing and coordinating the different statutory priorities, geographic areas of consideration, and implementation time frames of the various federal agencies is essential to developing integrated strategies for ecological and social sustainability and for adapting these strategies to changed conditions over time. It also enables state and local governments, tribes, nongovernmental and private organizations, and the public who are currently overwhelmed by the multitude and complexity of federal land and resource planning processes to more meaningfully and effectively contribute to these processes.

Assessments

The planning process is built upon assessments. It initiates a joint public-scientific inquiry that provides the knowledge base for planning and the relationships for stewardship. Independent information that is considered an objective and realistic portrayal of conditions provides a critical and credible foundation upon which planning can proceed. Assessments, the assembling of a shared and scientifically grounded body of information, provide the foundation of information from which policies, strategies, and decisions can be built, evaluated, and changed. Assessments are conducted as a joint inquiry undertaken by scientists and other knowledgeable people from the federal agencies, other governments, relevant nongovernmental or private organizations, and the public.

The purpose of assessments is to understand the current conditions and trends regarding the land, resources, and people in an area in light of their history and the forces of change. Assessments should address all lands within the geographic area being studied. Considered within the Forest Service's legal framework, these assessments should meet the expectations of the RPA by creating "coordinated public and private research" relationships to "promote a sound technical and ecological base" of information. Two primary scales are needed: bioregional assessments are essential for defining desired future conditions and developing broad conservation strategies, and small-scale assessments provide the site-specific information needed to design effective management activities that fit the history and conditions of the place as well as the social and cultural characteristics of the area.

As part of the assessment process, scientists should help develop strategies for determining and measuring all aspects of sustainability: ecological, economic, and social. In addition, they need to suggest measures of ecological integrity, procedures for obtaining these measurements, and ways to assess whether ecological systems are being sustained. Social and economic assessments are also critical elements in the assessment processes at both large and small scales. The assessment of social, cultural and economic conditions and trends should provide a useful synthesis of current information regarding demographic changes and migration patterns, economic patterns and relationships, social organization, current institutional arrangements, and historical context relevant to national forests and grasslands. Such an assessment will allow planners to have an independent "picture" of the social environment, which can be refined and become more "place-based" in the planning process.

Scientific Base

The planning process is grounded in science. It enables policies, strategies, and management decisions to be informed in a scientifically credible manner.

In the first round of forest plans under NFMA, scientists, by and large, sat on the sidelines as managers and interdisciplinary teams developed the plans. A series of lawsuits and a growing realization of the necessity of basing management decisions on credible scientific information led the Forest Service and other federal agencies to call for "scientifically credible conservation strategies" for species and ecosystems. As a result, the Forest Service has embraced the notion of planning based on credible scientific information, including a peer-review process, as one of the tenets of resource management. The Committee of Scientists concurs.

Effective planning develops a foundation of credible scientific information through assessment processes and other consultations with agency and independent scientists. Scientists can participate in planning in a wide variety of ways including: creating knowledge relevant to forest planning, working on the integrative science of bioregional assessments, helping managers understand the application of this scientific and technical knowledge to management problems, and designing effective monitoring procedures and the experiments needed under adaptive management. One consequence of the involvement of scientists in planning is that managers can learn through this interaction about how to treat management actions as "experiments" with varying levels of uncertainty rather than fixed prescriptions.

Collaboration

The planning process is collaborative in nature. It provides incentives for people to work together and to contribute to forest planning in meaningful and useful ways.

Effective stewardship of National Forest System lands must engage those who have the information, knowledge, and expertise to contribute; those who have sole control or authority over lands and activities adjacent to national forests and grasslands; those who have the skills, energy, time, and resources to carry out stewardship activities; and those who can independently validate the credibility of stewardship decisions and the reality of achievements. In short, many and diverse collaborative relationships between and among the Forest Service and other agencies, governments, organizations, communities, and individuals are central to stewardship. An important function of the planning process is to build these relationships, and it does so by making collaboration a core characteristic of all phases of the process.

Collaborative planning engages other agencies, governments, businesses, organizations, communities, and citizens in planning for and contributing to the stewardship of the National Forest System, including consideration of how other public and private lands are managed and used with respect to achieving sustainability. This collaborative effort uses a participatory approach to assemble informa-87

tion, build decisions, implement the decisions, and monitor the results. The planning process must provide mechanisms for broad-based, vigorous, and ongoing opportunities for open dialogue. These dialogues should be open to any person; conducted in nontechnical terms readily understandable to the general public; and structured in a manner that recognizes and accommodates differing schedules, capabilities, and interests. The participation of citizens should be encouraged from the beginning and be maintained throughout the planning process, including assessments, issue identification, implementation, and monitoring.

Desired Future Conditions

The planning process is focused on desired future conditions: It fosters understanding and concurrence on the conditions of the land and resources that will meet the broad strategic goals.

The link between developing assessments and building decisions is defining the desired future condition. It is the first step of any planning process. (See Table 4-1.) The NFMA planning process should start by collaboratively defining desired future conditions along with long-term management goals for the public lands. Defining desired future conditions requires public dialogue because it is a social choice affecting current and future generations. As a future-oriented choice, a desired future condition seeks to protect a broad range of choices for future generations, avoid irretrievable losses, and guide current management and conservation strategies and actions. Visualization of the future landscape through pictures, maps, and computer simulations will be a crucial element in this work. Furthermore, retrospective analyses that help establish the historical range of variability and changes in resource conditions that have occurred over time are a fundamental component of this process.

From an ecological perspective, desired future conditions are those that will sustain ecological integrity over the long term. From a social perspective, desired future conditions are those that will sustain the capacity for future generations to maintain cultural patterns of life and adapt to evolving societal and ecological conditions. Given the dynamic nature of ecological and social systems, a desired future condition must also be dynamic and thus must be revisited in the decision making process during monitoring, external review, and evaluation of performance.

Independent Review

The planning process incorporates independent scientific review. It validates the use of technical and scientific information in planning and the consistency of management proposals with current knowledge.

The credibility of the planning process rests in part on the routine application of an outside check on the use of technical and scientific information. Independent reviews can provide verification that plans and their implementation are consistent with current scientific concepts. There should be an evaluation of consistency of strategic goals and objectives with scientific and technical understanding at critical spatial and temporal scales. Independent reviews can also promote adaptive management and learning. For example, reviews can highlight and reward creative approaches to challenging management issues. The review process can, by its very presence, encourage collaboration among managers, specialists, and scientists at all stages of the planning process. In addition to the scientific and technical role of independent review, the review should also evaluate the process itself to identify information bottlenecks and to evaluate whether there is adequate interdisciplinary representation, coordination of planning and management across administrative boundaries, and opportunities for discussions with scientists.

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Table 4-1. Proposed planning levels and purpose.

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One model for this type of review is the science consistency check recently pioneered in the Tongass National Forest Land Management Plan (Everest et al., 1997). This technique evaluates whether the information transferred from scientists to policy makers and planners was understood and used appropriately. Independent field review of projects can also be used to ascertain whether implementation would meet the goals of the plans from a scientific and technical viewpoint. The interagency PACFISH reviews could serve as a model for this effort, assuming that the inter-agency committee was broadened to consider all the values recognized in the plans.

Stewardship

The planning process builds the capacity for stewardship. It develops the relationships and capabilities through which stewardship can occur.

Achieving ecological, economic, and social sustainability is a formidable task that the Forest Service cannot accomplish alone. The capacity for stewardship of the national forests and grasslands must be fostered both within the Forest Service and within the other agencies, governments, communities, groups, and individuals who must be a part of this endeavor. The planning process is the vehicle for building this capacity. Capacity is the ability to get work done. Stewardship capacity is the ability to bring about effective stewardship, including on-the-ground activities as well as the potential to conceive and analyze new ideas and to effectively solve problems. Stewardship capacity is found in the amalgam of relation- ships, organizations, processes, skills, resources, understandings, knowledge and expertise, legal mandates, and institutional structures that accommodate, encourage, and implement stewardship activities.

The planning process must shift the emphasis of the Forest Service and other participants in the planning process from "creating documents" to "building the capacity for stewardship." Just as the Forest Service can help the American people learn about the limits and capabilities of the national forests and grasslands through the planning process, so too can the agency learn from the knowledge, perspectives, and values of the American people. Citizens and other agencies can contribute a wide array of stewardship services, ranging from volunteer work on trail crews to participating in collaborative efforts aimed at resolving disputes over specific projects. The Forest Service can build the capacity for stewardship by drawing on this knowledge, wisdom, and energy for building relationships, dialogues, and partnerships.

Monitoring, Evaluation, and Adaptation Back to Top

The planning process incorporates mechanisms for monitoring, evaluation, and adaptation. It ensures that ongoing learning will occur that will inform future decisions and enhance implementation of current decisions

Monitoring is crucial if performance evaluations are to provide accurate and useful information. It also serves as an early warning system against unforeseen risks involved in management activities. Monitoring procedures need to be incorporated into planning procedures and should be designed to be part of the information used to inform decisions. Adaptive management and learning are not possible without effective monitoring of actual consequences from management activities.

Collaborative planning should estimate a schedule of management actions needed to reach desired future conditions along with the intermediate conditions, outcomes, and learning expected along the way. The correspondence between management actions and expected results should become the performance measures for achievement of strategic goals. Measurement of performance would be

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4-1. Elkhorn Mountains: An Example of Interagency Cooperation

The Elkhorn Mountain Range of Montana is small and isolated by western standards, containing 250,000 acres surrounded by low-elevation flatlands. Though it contains several different types of ecosystems, including mountain grasslands, various forest types, and riparian zones, the entire range is considered one contiguous landscape. Despite its distinct nature, the mountain range is managed by a variety of landowners: the Forest Service oversees 160,000 acres in two national forests and three ranger districts; the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages 70,000 acres; and private landowners hold the remaining 20,000 acres. The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (FWP) has jurisdiction over wildlife in the entire region.

According to Jodie Canfield, Elkhorn Coordinator for the Beaverhead, Deerlodge, and Helena national forests, this mix of land ownerships has led to conflicting management practices, even within the Forest Service: "The three ranger districts all operated on their own, with little cooperation or even communi- cation between them." Communication between the other agencies was even less common, she added, and the agencies often worked at cross-purposes. With each agency operating under different mandates and working toward different goals for the land, holistic and consistent management of the mountain range had been impossible.

A bold attempt to change this situation began in August 1992, when the Forest Service, BLM, and FWP signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) entitled "An Agreement on Working Together." The MOU designated the entire Elkhorn Mountain Range as a "Cooperative Management Area" and set forth a process for substantive management goals and interagency cooperation.

The goals of the MOU are based entirely on ecosystem management principles, stated as follows: "Sustaining ecological systems is the umbrella concept in management of the Elkhorn." The document further states that native species management will be emphasized and that "wildlife values are a strong consideration in evaluating all land use proposals." The MOU contains a vision statement, which captures, as those involved put it, "a picture of the desired future." The vision statement reads:

The Elkhorn Cooperative Management Area is a unique, cooperatively administered geographic area, where management of all lands within public ownership emphasizes sustainable ecosystems. ... On public lands, a sense of "naturalness" is the pervasive quality of the landscape. Mining, timber, grazing and other land use occur, but are mitigated such that they do not appear dominant. ... There is a diversity and abundance of wild animals.

Along with the MOU, the process involved the creation of several interagency teams and committees and two new positions in the Forest Service:

Elkhorn Steering Committee: This committee is composed of the Deerlodge and Helena forest supervisors; BLM's Butte district manager, and the FWP Wildlife Division administrator and regional supervisor. The committee meets at least four times a year; its purpose is to "provide coordinated and cooperative management direction, provide leadership for progressive resource management and development of policy, [and] facilitate implementation of management activities and resolution of issues."

Implementation Group: Group members, who come from various professional disciplines within the agencies, are responsible for overseeing on-the-ground management and developing a landscape analysis, land management implementation plan, and program of work. They make specific management plans based on the general directions and goals of the MOU and the Steering Committee. 91

Extended Team: This team carries out the directions of the Implementation Group on the ground.

Elkhorn Ranger: This Forest Service ranger is responsible only for the Elkhorn Mountains. The ranger, currently George Weldon, serves as liaison between the Implementation Group and the Steering Committee. He ensures that all actions are consistent with the implementation plan and program of work.

Elkhorn Coordinator: The coordinator, currently Jodie Canfield, works for the Elkhorn Ranger, serving as "a public and internal contact person as well as staff to three district rangers." In addition, the coordinator serves as chair of the Implementation Group and coordinates all activities of those involved in Elkhorn management. As Canfield, notes, "I work for all the agencies. The Forest Service pays my salary, but I consider all the agencies to be my employers."

Although this organizational structure might appear complex and confusing, Canfield comments that having a coordinator in place makes all the difference: "It works okay because everything goes through me." In addition, according to Canfield, "having the MOU is the difference between night and day in the way we are operating. ... The MOU gave us the framework to work together across agency boundaries. It defines the roles of different groups and individuals that are involved in the Elkhorns and how communication and coordination will flow." However, Canfield noted, "I don't think it is so much the document as the ideas behind it that really make it work."

The interagency groups have completed several major projects under this MOU and are currently working on an updated MOU to move the agencies out of the planning phase and into an implementation phase. Among the major joint initiatives completed so far are the following:

Landscape Analysis: An analysis of the Elkhorn Range that looks across agency boundaries to examine the existing condition of wildlife, water, soil, vegetation, and natural disturbance regimes in the area's three major watersheds. It also establishes goals for the desired future condition of resources in the three watersheds, compares existing conditions with those goals, and identifies management opportunities for reaching the goals. The analysis is used to develop an annual work plan that guides the three agencies' management activities in the Elkhorn Range.

Travel Plan: A joint travel plan for the whole Elkhorn Range that determines which roads will be available for public motorized use and in what seasons the roads will be open.

Bighorn Sheep Reintroduction: An initiative to reintroduce bighorn sheep into the Elkhorn Range. Sheep were exterminated from the range around the turn of the century.

Updated Forest Service Plan: The Forest Service released an updated plan in 1997 for the entire Elkhorn Range, instead of developing plans for areas scattered across Forest Service land within in the range. BLM and FWP contributed to the analysis for the updated plan.

Ongoing Management: The agencies are updating allotment management plans, grazing prescriptions, and vegetation treatments based on the management options identified in the joint landscape analysis. They are also completing prescribed burns to improve bighorn sheep habitat, eliminating roads, and implementing new grazing allotment management plans that better protect riparian resources.

The approach to assessment, planning, and management of the Elkhorn Range has been successful for four key reasons: the development of a shared vision; a formal structure in which all agencies have ownership; clear responsibilities with a designated ranger and coordinator for the entire landscape; and, across all agencies, the commitment of the both line officers and field employees to ensuring sustainable and coordinated ecosystem management. Furthermore, there has been a noticeable change in attitude among Forest Service employees regarding their management role. Ranger Weldon commented that, before the agreement, managers asked, "How do we manage Forest Service lands in the Elkhorns?" Now the question is, "How do we participate in the management of the Elkhorns?" 92

accomplished through (1) annually comparing the expected outcomes to actual results and (2) every five to ten years comparing the rate and degree of movement towards the desired future conditions and intermediate outcomes. Either of those measures might have three possible outcomes: (1) concluding that management actions are moving the landscape toward the desired future conditions and outcomes; (2) concluding that treatments must be adjusted to more efficiently achieve those conditions (i.e., passive adaptive management); or (3) reevaluating the possibility of achieving the desired future conditions in light of the actual conditions (i.e., active adaptive management), which would require reexamination of the targeted future conditions and the proposed pathways to reach those conditions.

Adaptive Planning

The planning process embraces an adaptive planning approach. Adaptive planning creates incentives for innovations in planning to be systematically evaluated to ensure continuous organizational learning.

Adaptive management focuses on the learning produced by testing management approaches against actual results, but this is not sufficient to ensure the kind of organizational learning necessary for planning to be effective. An adaptive planning approach is also necessary to ensure that innovative approaches to assessments are evaluated and shared; new ways of working within a collaborative context are evaluated and shared; and, perhaps most importantly, new roles, responsibilities, and ways of organizing agency staff are also considered and effective ones shared.

To ensure that plans are implemented within both an adaptive management framework and an adaptive planning framework, the Forest Service must ensure that incentives exist for managers and staff to dedicate themselves to the purposes, goals, and strategies developed in the course of the planning process, but treat management activities as opportunities to learn. Personnel performance evaluations must rest on the effectiveness of management strategies in terms of actual results. However, performance must also rest on the willingness of managers to experiment with new approaches, consider new information, and embrace new constituencies interested in contributing to the stewardship of these lands. Adopting an adaptive planning approach by the Forest Service can go a long way toward creating an organizational culture characterized by diversity, learning, responsiveness, and openness.

Our emphasis on adaptive management and adaptive planning seeks to ensure that a commitment to "continuous learning" about how to do planning, how to develop stewardship capacity, and how to ensure desired on the ground results will come to define the culture of the Forest Service. A critical first step for the Forest Service is to not search for a single approach to collaborative planning but to embrace a diversity of approaches. By approaching planning not as a cookbook for making decisions but as an opportunity to learn, test new ideas, and continuously evolve, the Forest Service can meet the expectations for "conservation leadership" set forth in the National Forest Management Act.

4B. The Structure of a Collaborative Planning Process Back to Top

This section proposes a structure for a collaborative planning process for the national forests and grasslands. The proposed process is intended to integrate the strategic vision and goals of the Forest Service into bioregional policies and strategic plans that can then be realized through operational decisions. The process is collaborative at all stages, linking the ideas, energies, knowledge, and capabilities of other agencies, governments, communities, groups, and individuals. The process is also focused at different spatial scales (bioregional, large-landscape, and small-landscape/watershed levels) as relevant to the objective of each stage of the process.

The foundation for this planning process is collaboratively conducted assessments of the land, resources, and people of the planning area. The assessment process provides the context and knowledge through which desired future actions can be identified and selected. Overarching bioregional guidance is then established for pursuing these desired future conditions. With this guidance in place, plans can be developed: the strategic plans needed at the large-landscape level and the site-specific operational plans needed at the small-landscape/watershed level. The process is dynamic because knowledge is ever expanding, policies and priorities change, and natural and social events occur. The process is also flexible, recognizing that a "one-size fits all" approach is not compatible with the range of issues and opportunities posed by the various national forests and grasslands. Ongoing monitoring and evaluation is a core element of this process, informing future decisions at the same time that it validates or modifies current strategies.

The Existing Approach to Forest Planning Back to Top

The purpose of this section is to compare our proposed approach to the planning regulations now in effect, which were proposed in 1979, revised, and approved in final form in 1982. The current regulations resulted in three subnational planning and decision-making levels in addition to the National Assessment and Program. Each planning level is considered a NEPA action because it makes decisions guiding the commitments of land, resources, and money and thus has an Environmental Assessment (EA) or an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) associated with it (see Table 4- 2). The NFMA specifically required that planning "form one integrated plan for each unit of the National Forest System" (Sec. 6(f)1).

While this outline is based on the existing regulations, it is critical to note that the process has not worked in practice as designed. Indeed, recent critiques of forest planning are all based on the difference between what was expected of the planning process and the actual outcomes. Nonetheless, the Committee provides this overview both for comparison to its proposed approach and to remind our readers that a hierarchical policy and management framework is a familiar concept.

At all levels, the forest planning process is inwardly focused on National Forest System lands and resources to the exclusion of consideration of other federal or public lands, much less current or expected conditions on private lands. Public participation is generally limited to "notice and comment," wherein the public is involved in the initial issue identification stage and during the comment period on the EIS. While the 1979 draft regulations required the agency to demonstrate how the alternatives responded to public issues, this requirement was dropped in the 1982 final regulations. As a result, the nexus between public issues and alternatives with different management goals and emphases are difficult to trace.

The current planning process has ten steps, to be followed in order, because they mirror the process requirements for developing an EIS. The initial steps identify public issues and management concerns, define planning

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Table 4-2. Current planning structure and purpose.

criteria, and develop an assessment of the current conditions and management of the national forest or grassland. This assessment is called the "analysis of the management situation," and it includes demand-and-supply conditions for resource commodities as well as their production potentials on the National Forest System lands. To date, these analyses are production oriented, calling for benchmark analysis of the minimum and maximum physical and biological production capabilities of significant goods and services, along with their associated costs and benefits. These analyses are monetary benchmarks that maximize present net value of major commodity resources, estimate current production of these goods and services, and develop projections of demand. Although the current regulations require protection of soil and water resources as well as assurance that viable wildlife populations will persist across their usual range, these aspects are usually considered only after meeting timber harvest targets in most plans.

Although the RPA expected that "the new knowledge derived from coordinated public and private research programs will promote a sound technical and ecological base for effective management, use and protection of the Nation's renewable resources" (RPA Sec. 2(4)), the 1982 regulations reflected the commodity production orientation of the time. As a result, the information developed for and used in forest planning did not sufficiently address the ecological issues of increasing concern to scientists and the public and therefore led to underestimated or downplayed environmental effects of commodity production in EIS analyses. Repeated appeals of forest plans and projects as well as lawsuits continue to raise this inconsistency with legal requirements.

The collaborative planning process detailed in this section evolved from a recognition of the strengths and shortcomings of the existing forest planning process, the lessons embedded in the experiences of planners who have experimented with different approaches, the numerous formal critiques of the current planning process, and an understanding of the fundamental objectives of any planning process as described at the beginning of this chapter.

The Assessment Process Back to Top

Independent information that is an objective and realistic portrayal of conditions is required for policies, strategies, and decisions to be built, evaluated, and changed in a scientifically credible manner. In the past, the analysis of ecological and social conditions and trends was performed as part of regional guidance and forest planning. The Committee believes that assessments have such an important role in providing a credible information base for policy development and decision making that they should be organized as a separate task. Most critically, assessments do not produce decisions and, therefore, should not be made to function under the NEPA processes associated with decision making. When assembling information is distinct from decision making, everyone involved focuses more easily on conditions, trends, problems, and risks instead of on the options for decisions (see Table 4-3).

Assessments are not just "buckets of facts." Rather, assessments provide the context for proposing ways to achieve long-term goals of sustainability. To inform the development of desired future conditions and develop potential strategies and pathways of management to achieve them, one necessary result of the assessment process is the identification of elements for conservation strategies along with scientifically credible procedures for evaluating the effectiveness of strategies in achieving sustainability. Since sustainability demands an integrated understanding of the ecological, economic, and social conditions and prospective changes, collaborative planning will also require integrated information. Information is needed at two primary scales: bioregional assessments are essential for defining desired future conditions and developing conservation strategies; smale-scale assessments are necessary for choosing treatments and activities to achieve desired goals and conditions.

These assessments need to be timely and so should be completed in a relatively short period of time: within a year or two for a bioregional assessment and within six months to a year for a small-scale assessment. In addition, the trust of participants and nonparticipants alike is enhanced when the assessment process includes independent review as a normal part of the process. For example, in the case of the Southern Appalachian Assessment, a multi-stakeholder group reviewed the scientific and technical adequacy of the assessment. This group included professionals from local and national nongovernmental organizations, which greatly contributed to the perception of independence and openness. Summary infor-

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Table 4-3. Proposed assessments.

mation produced by assessments should be made widely available.

Bioregional Assessments Back to Top

Bioregional assessments are driven by our need to understand the historical conditions, current conditions, and trends on forests, rangelands, and watersheds with respect to sustainability. Bioregional assessments are the foundation of independent information necessary for collaborative planning. The Southern Appalachian Assessment is an example of an assessment designed to inform the planning processes on five national forests, so that each of them could address issues of regional concern in context, as well as more clearly understand their unique and important contributions to the larger region (see Sidebar 4-2). The science assessment of the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Plan (ICBEMP) provides an assessment of species and ecosystems in the Columbia Basin as the foundation of bioregional guidance and planning. Thus, bioregional assessments are directly linked to bioregional guidance and to large-landscape planning processes.

These assessments are collaborative problem-based analyses of issues of public and scientific concern regarding what is known about the lands and resources within a large geographic area. Bioregional assessments should develop an integrated and synthetic analysis of the best scientific and technical information about the historical and current diversity of native plant and animal communties, the productive capacity of ecological systems in the bioregion, the social and economic context, existing institutional arrangements, and current stewardship capacity. To achieve this goal, assessments should at least:

1) Define the focal species for use in the analysis of species diversity in planning and develop procedures for estimating the viability of focal species, threatened and endangered species, and sensitive species. Apply these procedures to estimate the viability of these species under likely management in the region while allowing, to some degree, for uncertainties that may develop (e.g., changing levels of funding, natural disturbances, and competition from exotic species). As a result of this analysis, highlight risks to species viability.

2) Define measures of ecological integrity and develop procedures for estimating the level of integrity in different ecosystems in the bioregion. Apply these procedures to estimating ecological integrity under the likely management in the region. As a result of this analysis, highlight risks to ecological integrity.

3) Suggest elements necessary for developing conservation strategies for species and ecosystems during the policy and decision making processes.

4) Perform a historical analysis of forest, rangeland, and watershed conditions. Suggest major issues and problems arising from the current condition of these resources relative to their historical conditions. Make estimates of the range of historical variability for a number of resources, including the composition and structure of the different vegetative types in the region and the size, intensity, and frequency of natural disturbances.

5) Analyze the demographic changes and migration trends of human populations, economic patterns and trends, social organization, and stewardship capacity of existing institutional arrangements.

6) Compile or develop information on the contribution of the national forests to the economic and social well-being in the bioregion, identifying those uses, products, values, and services of special significance to the communities and economies of the region and the nation. 98

7) Respond to questions developed through public participation processes to ensure that the assessment is relevant to people's concerns.

Small-Scale (Watershed)

Assessments

Small-scale assessments, commonly called watershed assessments in many parts of the country, develop integrated information for small, ecologically identifiable geographic areas. One function of these small-scale assessments is to apply the findings of bioregional assessments along with the definition of the desired future conditions from the large-landscape, strategic planning process to a defined geographic area. Boundaries for these assessments range from small river basins, mountain tops, or other landscape units that nest within area of the relevant bioregional assessments and large-landscape planning areas.

Like bioregional assessments, all federal agencies with responsibilities within the area should use a coordinated effort to address all lands within the geographic area being studied. Similarly, small-scale assessments need a collaborative approach to create a mutually understood base of information regarding a specific area, involving relevant federal, state, and local agencies as well as tribes, various organizations, local associations, and citizens. People often think and care about lands and resources at the scale of watersheds or other identifiable geographic places. This "sense of place" makes it easier to meaningfully engage people in small-scale assessments. A participatory process should be used whereby communities and groups assess their social and economic well-being with the larger regional social and economic assessment as a base of information for comparative analysis. When successful, these assessments will also have a collection of stories and reflections from the people of the area in addition to quantitative and qualitative analyses of resources and conditions.

Small-scale assessments generally come after the development of a strategic direction for a larger landscape. They interpret the implications of the large-landscape strategies for specific watersheds or other small landscapes:

1) They develop a "place-based" analysis that provides context for small-landscape planning and the actions to implement decisions.

2) They refine the estimates of desired future conditions and current conditions for the watershed that were developed during large-landscape planning by using detailed information for the watershed. Fitting the desired future conditions from large-landscape planning to the uniqueness of individual watersheds is an important first step in bringing the landscape strategic direction home to the local area. Developing improved estimates of the current conditions of important ecological, social, and economic relationships sets the stage for identifying the management necessary to move toward the desired future conditions.

3) They refine the estimates of management opportunities made during large-landscape planning to move the current conditions in the watershed toward the desired future condition.

Defining Desired Future Conditions Back to Top

The link between developing assessments and building decisions is defining the desired future condition. Defining a desired future condition requires extended public dialogue because it is a social choice affecting current and future generations. As a future-oriented

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4-2. Coordinated Forest Plan Revision in the Southern Appalachians

The national forests in Alabama, the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forests, the Cherokee National Forest, the Sumter National Forest, and the Jefferson National Forest are currently revising their forest plans.

As these forests in the southern Appalachians were conducting their forest-level efforts to describe the analysis of the management situation (AMS), they were also using information for the larger-scale analysis in the Southern Appalachian Assessment. The SAA then provided information that fed back into the AMS for each of the forests, putting each into the context of the larger Southern Appalachian Area.

SAA teams provided current, scientifically credible data for other required planning steps, including evaluating and reconsidering roadless areas in public lands within and adjacent to national forests for wilderness designation and the review of lands designated not suited for timber production in the plan. Both of these are high-profile public and agency issues.

Early in the process, the preliminary issues were developed out of the findings of the SAA. These evolved into the 12 common issues around which the plan revisions are being built. The forests, working with their local publics, then identified additional issues more specific to each national forest. Alternative development has been an iterative process, moving between the subregional level and the local level, bringing in comments and viewpoints from both levels to build themes around which the alternatives will be formed.

Public involvement was an integral part of the SAA and has contributed to its credibility. In the forest plan revisions, the public involvement has been carried on at two levels or scales. The local level is mainly guided by the forests, while the subregional level involves frequent, five forest meetings of planners and resource specialists. Meetings at both levels have been open for public attendance and comment.

The final decision on these forests will be five separate decisions documented in separate EISs. However, the coordination identified above will ensure that the needed consistency occurs across administrative boundaries.

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choice, a desired future condition seeks to protect a broad range of choices for future generations, avoid irretrievable losses, and guide current management and conservation strategies and actions. Nonetheless, given the dynamic nature of ecological and social systems, a desired future condition is also dynamic and thus is always revisited during monitoring, external review, and evaluation of performance. (See Fig. 4-1.)

An Ecological View

From an ecological perspective, desired future conditions are those that will sustain ecological integrity over the long term. Under-standing how disturbance events have influenced the distribution of terrestrial and aquatic habitats provides a basis for representing expected landscape conditions relative to potential management strategies. Assessment

Fig. 4-1. Defining desired future conditions and monitoring results.

[figure did not convert]

procedures that address the dynamic aspects of ecological processes in the context of spatial and temporal disturbance history can provide a framework for establishing target ranges for desired future conditions.

The concept of desired future condition is less meaningful at small spatial scales because it explicitly considers the mix of habitats (type and seral stage) generated by processes that are only observable at the large-landscape scale. To sustain ecological systems and preserve ecological integrity, management must allow for the dynamic processes that accompany disturbance recovery cycles and protect essential energy and material transfers that take place during disturbance events. When these ecological processes are operative at a landscape scale, a mosaic of habitats occurs in various stages of postdisturbance recovery. Given the dynamic nature of ecosystems, the distribution of terrestrial and aquatic habitats constantly changes. As a consequence, desired future conditions must include variability as an integral and essential component of habitat and population objectives.

Attainment of desired future conditions could be assessed by comparing the distribution of terrestrial and aquatic habitats following management to that expected under natural disturbance regimes. The management challenge is to ensure that human activities do not significantly alter the frequency, severity, or distribution of disturbance events to such an extent that they shift them to a different level or that they surpass the capacity of the ecosystems to recover. To ensure resilience, management practices must not disrupt those energy and material transfers that promote habitat maintenance or recovery. An appropriate goal for management activities would be to mimic, to the extent possible, natural disturbance events in terms of their severity, spatial extent, and recurrence interval.

A Social and Economic View

From a social perspective, desired future conditions are those that will sustain the capacity for future generations to support cultural patterns of life and adapt to evolving societal and ecological conditions. Understanding how past patterns of social life in historical and prehistoricl times and how economic uses have changed over time provides a context for assessing current conditions. However, different parts of society and different stakeholders will offer different interpretations of both the past and possible future, reinforcing the importance of the deliberative process of collaborative planning.

Assessments offer independent information about social, economic, and cultural conditions against which differing perspectives can be compared. This process will provide a mosaic of explanations and perspectives. However, while choosing a particular desired future condition is a social choice, this choice is bounded by the necessity of ensuring ecological sustainability. Thus, the desired future condition represents common goals and aspirations, not private wants and needs.

Choosing a Desired Future Condition

Information produced by assessments can contribute to our understanding of processes of the natural and social worlds, but it cannot determine which choice is right. Rather, informed expert and public dialogue is essential to guide what should be done. The first step for decision making is to use a public forum for defining desired future conditions.

A Spatial Approach to Decision Making Back to Top

Just as assessments are conducted at large and small geographic scales, so do planning issues vary by geographic, social and political scales. As indicated in Table 4-4, decision making can occur at the bioregional scale when necessary, and always at the large and small-landscape levels. Decisions at each of these levels would come under the requirements of NEPA. Since the geographic size of a planning area would vary according to the physical, ecological, social, economic, and political context, the Committee chose to use these generic delineations to indicate this flexibility.

Table 4-4. A spatial approach to collaborative planning.

The following discussion outlines all three possible planning and decision levels. However, the need for bioregional guidance for large-scale conservation strategies will vary by region. One result of bioregional assessments will be the identification of the need for bioregional guidance for conservation strategies. Examples today would be the conservation strategy for the red-cockaded woodpecker across the Southeastern states, the northern goshawk in the Southwest, the northern spotted owl, and anadromous fish in the Pacific Northwest.

Bioregional Guidance

The bioregional guidance has three purposes. The first is to develop strategies for conserving focal species as well as threatened, endangered, and sensitive species. These strategies apply the procedures for estimating species viability developed in the bioregional assessment. The second is to develop strategies for conserving system integrity, again relying on procedures for estimating the level of ecosystem integrity in different ecosystems in the bioregion developed in the assessment. The bioregional assessments also identify elements for developing these strategies. The third is to develop strategies for promoting sustainability across the region, including consideration of the current and expected trends in social values, needs for environmental services (like water quality), and changes in economic relationships.

Given that strategies to ensure sustainability depend upon adequate stewardship capacity, bioregional guidance is ideally jointly developed by the relevant federal agencies along with state and local government partners, tribes, and others having jurisdiction over the area's land and resources. This capacity can be enhanced by developing institutional arrangements, government programs, and community-based conservation organizations. Focusing upon the stewardship capacity of a region will greatly enhance the capacity of the National Forest System to achieve its goals.

Large-and Small-Landscape Planning

At the large-landscape level, collaborative planning develops goals for different parts of the landscape and crafts strategies to ensure the sustainability of species and ecosystems along with proposed pathways of activities to achieve these goals. At the small-landscape level, planning determines the mix of activities and projects likely to meet the goals of the strategic plan.

Collaborative planning at both the large- and small-landscape scales needs to address all lands within the geographic area. Whenever possible, existing plans, including current forest plans and the plans of other agencies and governments, should be used as beginning points along with the requirement to respond to issues and problems identified in the assessment process. The likely management of nonfederal lands (state, tribal, and private) must be considered to help understand the context and likely cumulative effects of federal land management. Coordinated decisions affecting all federal lands within the planning area would ideally result at both levels.

Strategic Planning for Large Landscapes

The purpose of strategic planning is to set a clear course of action for a specified period of time. A strategic plan answers the questions: "What are conditions and outcomes (desired future conditions) that we should seek on the national forests and grasslands to provide for ecological sustainability and to contribute to economic and social sustainability? How will their accomplishment be measured? What kinds of actions do we need to take to achieve them? And what will it cost?"

Large-landscape planning focuses on developing an integrated set of conservation strategies to achieve ecological sustainability along with opportunities for resource use and management to contribute to economic and social sustainability. Of critical importance is that the management of the National Forest System is placed within a regional context based upon the bioregional assessments as well as other information. The strategic planning level is the "large-landscape planning" because the ecological scale of resource issues generally extends beyond the boundaries of a single national forest. Measuring the capability of management activities to conserve the species and ecosystems of interest can occur only when the implications of decisions at different levels for these species and ecological systems can be added up. Yet, the total value is often greater than the sum of its parts. The decisions must logically fit together in this regard. If bioregional guidance is available, it will be used to make sure that these decisions, in aggregate, provide the needed protection for species and ecological systems.

In large-landscape planning, an analysis of the management situation is part of the process of defining the desired future conditions and, thus, is done early in the process. It should cover the historical development of landscape conditions and outcomes along with current problems. This analysis should realistically portray likely landscape conditions and outcomes over time without active management, including the effect of natural disturbance. This analysis then becomes the basis for discussing the need for, and type of, actions

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4-3. Red-Cockaded Woodpecker

The Forest Service has been involved in red-cockaded woodpecker (RCW) management since the bird was listed in 1970. National Forest System lands are critical because 12 of 15 recovery populations identified in the Fish and Wildlife Service's 1985 recovery Plan depend on national forests. In the late 1980s, 67% of Forest Service recovery populations were experiencing serious population declines.

The Southern Region's management strategy uses an ecological approach to management and established habitat management areas (HMAs), set management intensity levels, mimics natural/historic fire regimes, established longer timber rotations, and provides for a full range of vegetation management options ranging from single-tree selection to clearcutting.

The HMAs are a landscape-level strategy designed to overcome the past effects of habitat fragmentation and demographic isolation. Approximately 2 million acres of pine and pine-hardwood forests have been included in 26 HMAs scattered across 11 national forests. The RCW strategy applies only to land within HMAs.

The strategy will be implemented in two steps. First, the affected forest plans were amended to designate tentative HMAs and establish tentative population objectives. In these tentative HMAs, timber harvest will be restricted to thinnings, irregular shelterwood, unevenaged silvicultural methods, or clearcutting for restoration of desirable pine species until forest plans are revised in one to three years to fully incorporate the strategy. Then the strategy will be incorporated into the individual forest plans through scheduled plan amendments or revisions, including a forest-level analysis of effects. A full range of management options will be considered through this process, and permanent HMAs tailored to individual national forests will be designated.

The regional forester chose this two-step approach because it meets the recovery needs of the RCW across its range while allowing individual national forests flexibility to integrate the strategy with other resource uses, social needs, and economic factors specific to their geographic areas. Decisions, such as delineation of final HMAs, allowable (timber) sale quantities, timber harvest rotation lengths, and the mix of forest regeneration methods used to perpetuate RCW habitat are best made at the local level.

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4-4. Northern Goshawk

The goshawk was listed as a sensitive species by the Southwestern Region in 1982. After reviewing the status of northern goshawk in early 1990, the regional forester established a task force and a separate scientific committee to review northern goshawk management needs. The scientific committee, with representation from the Southwestern Region, Rocky Mountain and Intermountain stations, and Colorado State University, took an analysis approach that examined northern goshawk biology and the habitat needs of 14 of the goshawk's major prey species in its food web. Past president of The National Wildlife Society, Clait Braun, said that this was the first example of a food-web-based management strategy in North America. This information was synthesized to develop a set of management objectives, desired forest conditions, and management recommendations. Many members of federal, state, private organizations, and academia offered input during the preparation of the recommendations. The development process was sometimes difficult and confrontational, but helped build a common understanding of the complexities of managing habitat for both goshawk and prey populations. Scientific credibility was critical to the Committee. The management recommendations developed by the committee were peer reviewed by government agency personnel and academics. The National Wildlife Society and the American Ornithologists Union put together a blue ribbon task force to review the recommendations and gave them very high marks. The committee's final report was published by the Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station as a general technical report in 1992. The recommendations represented a shift in emphasis from even-aged, evenly spaced forests to uneven-aged and irregularly spaced forests with:

· Longer rotations between cutting entries

· Fewer roads, with fragmentation kept to a minimum

· More downed logs and woody debris left intact

· Thinning primarily done from below to maintain mature trees

· Retention of three to five reserve trees in created openings for future snags/downed logs

· Management for a diversity of vegetation components, such as oak and aspen

· Reduction of densities to a more open forest similar to presettlement patterns

Input from both the task force and scientific committee were used to establish interim guidelines for the goshawk, with an environmental assessment completed in October 1991 to evaluate the effects of implementing the interim northern goshawk management direction. After the expiration of the interim guidelines, a supplement to the original environmental assessment was prepared, and another set of interim guidelines published in June 1992 to guide specific project design. At this time, a notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact statement to amend the forest plans for all national forests in the Southwestern Region to include new standards and guidelines for both the goshawk and the Mexican spotted owl was issued. In the summer of 1996, the record of decision amending all forest plans was signed.

Implementation of the recommendations has progressed beyond a single-species approach. Particularly on the Kaibab National Forest, where the largest known concentration of goshawks in the Southwest is found, the goshawk guidelines are being integrated into desired conditions for the landscape to sustain as much mature forest matrix across the landscape as possible to maintain the flow of ecosystem functions and interactions across the landscape through time. The public is involved in the development of desired conditions. While complete consensus is not typically possible, particularly with respect to how dense the forests need to be within the context of sustainability, much common ground has been identified.

Forest users support a more clumpy landscape with a mix of age classes of trees; the use of prescribed fire and some thinning to reduce dense forest conditions; more diversity in tree species; and having large, old trees present in the ecosystem. Public involvement is not limited to the development of desired conditions. In one demonstration area, the Forest Service is working collaboratively with the Southwest Forest Alliance in the development of prescriptions for the area.

The Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station is in its eighth year of intensive monitoring of the northern goshawk on the Kaibab Plateau. Research topics include population trends, reproduction, food habits, occupancy, and fertility and mortality rates at a landscape scale. Monitoring will be used to evaluate current management strategies for the goshawk and to identify any needs for change.

Has management for the goshawk been successful? The purposes of the plan amendment was to incorporate the latest information on habitat needs and to contain clear standards and guidelines to guide project design, which the amendment provided. However there is the larger question of whether the management will lead to stable or increasing goshawk populations, whether management will sustain ecosystem processes, and whether management is socially acceptable. For these larger issues, success is typically "in the eyes of the beholder." Forests have not been able to move towards desired conditions as rapidly as they would like because of injunctions against timber sales, which have prevented desirable thinning operations related to forest health issues. Monitoring is providing insights into population dynamics. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has not listed the northern goshawk as a threatened or endangered species after three listing attempts. While complete public acceptance has not been achieved (and is unreasonable to expect), much common ground has been laid for current and future management of the forests.

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that may be needed to move landscape conditions and outcomes toward the desired states.

Strategic planning for large landscapes should:

1) Set goals for different parts of the landscape expressed in terms of the desired future landscape conditions necessary to achieve ecological sustainability along with expected uses, benefits, services and products available to contribute to economic and social sustainability. Given the likely conditions that will occur on nonfederal land in the future, the federal agencies need to develop a vision of the future condition of publicly owned forests, rangelands, and watersheds to ensure ecological, economic, and social sustainability.

2) Compare the current condition of the landscape, derived from the bioregional assessment and other information, to the desired condition.

3) Develop a strategy for moving to the desired condition. Make an estimate of the suite of actions (type, amount, and budget) needed to move from existing conditions to a desired future condition in the context of likely unplanned disturbances.

4) Estimate likely effects of pathways of treatments and management actions on species and ecosystems as well as on economies and communities over time. This work would estimate the viability of focal, threatened and endangered, and sensitive species and of the level of system integrity. It would also analyze the potential effects of strategies and pathways of activities on the social and economic systems at regional and local scales within the context of anticipated external influences on these systems.

Generally, these decision processes should be completed within one year, and policies and decisions should be revisited as issues arise or conditions demand.

In the large-landscape planning, an analysis of the management situation should be done early in the process. It should cover the historical development of landscape condition and outcomes and current problems. This analysis should realistically portray likely landscape conditions and outcomes over time without active management, including the effect of natural disturbance. This analysis then becomes the basis for discussing the need for, and type of, actions that may be needed to move landscape conditions and outcomes toward the desired states.

Operational Planning for Small Landscapes

The purpose of operational planning at the small-landscape scale is to determine the mix of activities and projects needed to meet the goals in the strategic plan. The distinctive quality of operational planning for small landscape is the development of projects and activities in combination to consider cumulative effects, propose implementation schedules, specify measurable performance standards, and prepare budget and staffing plans. Proposed suites of activities and projects are generally developed in six months and remain in effect for the duration of the activities. New activities can be added at any time with consideration of cumulative impacts and consistency with the general strategic intent. A technical field review process helps evaluate effectiveness of the projects in meeting the goals. This is the planning level that is the linchpin of adaptive management in that it is a continuous cycle of implementation, monitoring, evaluation, adaptation, and change.

From the process of defining activities to meet long-range goals, planning teams should estimate the kinds of staff needed to accomplish these activities, the budgets necessary to carry them out, and the kinds of cooperative actions necessary to build sufficient implementation capacity. Once there is a relatively clear set of proposed activities at the field level of the organization, the planning analysis then goes through the structure of the agency, always focused on how the next level up in the organizational hierarchy can best help achieve the proposed activities. In this way, the resource planning process is integrated with the management planning that includes the staff and budget resources required to carry out the specified projects and activities.

It is difficult to estimate the budgets, resources, and outputs that will be forthcoming at the strategic planning level. Only in the proximate activities of a site-specific implementation plan can estimates of inputs and outputs be established, accountability measures applied, and links to budgets for multiple-purpose projects be defined.

The need to consider connected actions and cumulative effects and to enable the public to understand the geographic context within which the actions will occur argues for an approach to project planning that considers a larger geographic area than that usually covered by a single project. These areas of interest will rarely follow national forest boundaries and cover from 10,000 to 150,000 acres.

There are times when controversial projects or decisions threaten to derail a small- landscape planning process. Sometimes these issues are controversial because of their immediate effects (e.g., a decision to close part of a campground because of the presence of bald eagle nesting sites). Sometimes the controversy stems from strongly different perspectives on the issue or resource. And other times, there are extremely important but very site-specific issues, as in the case of a location sacred to several Indian tribes but also of important local interest. In all such cases, it is reasonable to allow for highly site-specific planning processes to emerge from the nature of the problem. Decisions made in these cases can be added to the small-landscape plans. In such cases, it would be appropriate to evaluate them separately, but the cumulative effects of the project must be analyzed with other projects before including them in the small-landscape plan.

Because planning is a creative, educative, and learning process, effective problem solving at the level of the site-specific small-landscape scale depends on allowing local managers to recognize and work within local conditions in achieving the desired conditions of the landscape. This approach relies on the creative powers of national forest managers and the collaborative group planning the management of these complex systems to improve the reliability and effectiveness of policies at the local level.

At the same time, issues of trust, the ability of local managers to develop local actions, and the success of implementation all become greater as the amount of discretion increases. Consequently, part and parcel with this discretion is the need for independent evaluation of how well site-specific implementation plans achieve the strategic goals, including highlighting creative solutions and innovative approaches. The credibility of the planning process rests in part on the routine application of an outside check that can independently verify that plans and their implementations are science-based. These outside checks can highlight and reward creative approaches to the challenging issues faced in the management of the national forests and rangelands. The knowledge that an evaluation will be held at the end of the planning process should, by its very presence, encourage collaboration between managers, specialists, and scientists as the plans are developed. Without the independent evaluation of the specific projects and their implementation, it is difficult to justify flexibility at the local level.

Specifically, small-landscape planning should:

1) Identify management activities that will be undertaken to achieve the desired future conditions based on management opportunities suggested in the watershed assessment.

2) Estimate the effects of these activities on the path to achieving desired future conditions.

3) Estimate cumulative effects based on "real-time" analysis, not simply hypothetical projections, using information from small-scale assessments as well as bioregional assessments. Whenever activities are added at the small-landscape level, cumulative effects analysis should always be performed as part of the decision process.

4) Determine how management activities will be monitored, or whether special monitoring will be needed (e.g., whether large-landscape monitoring questions are sufficient).

5) Determine budget and staffing needs and ensure that both are adequate before activities are undertaken.

6) Provide for independent field review as part of the monitoring process.

7) Use an adaptive management approach of continuous planning, action, monitoring, and change.

Monitoring and Evaluation Back to Top

Just as defining the desired future condition is the link between information and decision making, so monitoring and evaluation link decisions and implementation. The general purposes of monitoring are to evaluate the effectiveness of management approaches (are expected outcomes resulting from management activities?), ensure the reliability of implementation (have the policy standards and guidelines adequately controlled management actions?), and validate the assumptions used in predicting the consequences of different management approaches (have social, economic, or ecological conditions and assumptions changed?). An adequate plan contains the methods and proposed measurements for monitoring at the bioregional, strategic, and operational levels.

It is important to note that what to measure in a monitoring protocol will vary by the scale of the planning process. At the bioregional level, monitoring focuses on largescale ecological processes as well as large-scale social and economic processes. In this way, bioregional monitoring can both indicate when strategies are leading to the desired conditions at the system level and provide benchmarks for strategic and operational level evaluation. At a strategic planning level, monitoring needs to allow managers to assess the effectiveness of strategies and complex pathways of treatments and actions in achieving desired future conditions. At the operational planning level, monitoring is more focused on the effectiveness of specific management activities or suites of activities in achieving specific goals. Depending on the degree of uncertainty related to whether a suite of activities is likely to achieve desired goals, the monitoring approach needs to support a passive or active adaptive management approach, as discussed below.

In addition to evaluating the effectiveness of actions in meeting goals, performance reviews of individuals, organizational capacity, adequacy of budgets and staffing, and stewardship capacity are also critical components of a monitoring plan. Performance evaluation needs to assess whether the agency and administrative unit are effectively organized to carry out management activities, to learn through adaptive management, and to build and maintain stewardship capacity.

A monitoring plan sets forth the specific characteristics to be measured over a sufficient period of time to assess status or trends related to performance. In monitoring ecological sustainability, the monitoring protocol includes (1) what characteristics of the ecological system to measure, (2) how to link changes in these characteristics to elements of ecological integrity, and (3) how to use information produced by this analysis to improve future management decisions. In monitoring social and economic sustainability, the protocols can draw from the assessments and identify sensitive factors that were identified along with measurable indicators related to integrated measures of risk and resiliency. Critical to effective monitoring will be a clear delineation of the characteristics to monitor at the bioregional, large-landscape, and small-landscape levels.

Four types of monitoring can be considered: (1) Implementation monitoring asks the question, have the management standards and guidelines been used as anticipated to guide strategic and operational decisions? (2) Effectiveness monitoring asks, are the standards and guidelines producing the desired future conditions as anticipated at both the large-landscape and small-landscape planning levels? (3) Validation monitoring asks, are the basic assumptions about cause-and-effect relationships used to predict the outcomes of strategies and pathways of treatments valid? (4) Anticipatory monitoring asks, what factors (human induced or natural stressors) could compromise the attainment of sustainability in the near and long terms?

Given the importance of monitoring for ecological sustainability, a critical step will be to broadly define ecological attributes to include any biotic or abiotic features of the environment that can be measured. The convention has been to refer to the measured attributes as "indicator variables" under the assumption that their values are indicative of the integrity of the larger ecosystem to which they belong. The Committee adopts this definition and extends it to include the concept of focal species. These are species that fulfill the indicator criterion and provide specific insights into the biological diversity of the ecological system at different scales.

Because it is impossible to monitor and manage every aspect of ecological sustainability, shortcuts to monitoring are needed. Elsewhere, this report discusses the value of focal species as surrogate measures to the integrity of the larger ecosystem and to biological diversity in general. In addition, it is prudent to measure attributes that act as early warning signals to loss of ecological sustainability before unacceptable losses occur. One way to narrow the list of candidate indicators is to first list those factors that may compromise sustainability. Given this list of stressors, the aspects of the environment that

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4-5. Focal Species

Resources are inadequate to assess the viability of all species occurring on national forest lands. This observation led the Committee to propose the use of the focal species concept, a comprehensive term referring to a species whose measurement provides substantial information beyond its own status. The proposal is that the Forest Service monitor those species whose status allows inference to the status of other species, are indicative of the soundness of key ecological processes, or provide insights to the integrity of the overall ecosystem. This procedure is a necessary shortcut because monitoring and managing for all aspects of biodiversity is impossible.

No single species is adequate to assess compliance to biological sustainability at the scale of the national forests. Thus, several species will need to be monitored. The goal is to select a small number of focal species whose individual status and trends will collectively allow an assessment of ecological integrity. That is, the individual species are chosen to provide complementary information and to be responsive to specific conservation issues. Thus, the Committee proposed for consideration a broad list of species categories reflecting the diversity of ecosystems and management issues within the NFS.

The task is difficult. No body of knowledge currently exists to unambiguously guide the selection of focal species. Because of this uncertainty, the selection will be controversial and subject to change as new knowledge accumulates. Pragmatism, however, requires that a reliable assessment of overall biodiversity be attainable without assessing each species individually.

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will be most indicative of stressor action can be selected and monitored. This form of monitoring is anticipatory, and it also provides insights into cause-and-effect relationships between stressors and expected ecosystem responses.

Particularly relevant to the Forest Service planning process, however, is the value of monitoring as a tool to assess attainment of the sustainability goal. In a sense, a plan is a hypothesis of how an ecological system may respond to management actions. The only way to determine the outcome of the hypothesis is to observe and measure the system. A lack of concordance between expectation and observation could lead to a revision of the plan or to changes in management standards and guidelines. Thus monitoring is much more than just measurement; it must include analysis and an assessment of current management assumptions and methods.

The following list summarizes the key components of an effective monitoring program for those lands dependent upon Forest Service stewardship.

· 1) Specify the goals of ecological sustainability in measurable terms.

· 2) Characterize the threats and stressors that may compromise ecological sustainability.

· 3) Develop conceptual models that outline the pathways from stressor action to ecological effects.

· 4) Select the indicators of sustainability that are responsive to anticipated stressors.

· 5) Determine the necessary detection limits for the indicator variables.

· 6) Establish critical values (or distributions) for the indicator variables that will trigger management intervention to prevent a loss of sustainability.

· 7) Establish how the monitoring results will inform the management decision-making process.

Adaptive Management Back to Top

Within an adaptive management framework, the key challenge for managers is to identify when changes in management activities are needed because of either lack of effectiveness or changes in external conditions. The concept of adaptive management begins with this kind of learning: Is what we are doing achieving the goals we think it is, and, if not, what changes need to be made? Considered within an adaptive management perspective, a strategy or decision is considered a hypothesis about how ecological, social, and economic systems can be expected to respond to planned management actions.

Most public land management agencies assert that they are managing the nation's resources according to an adaptive management paradigm. In general, this suggests a structured process of reducing uncertainty about environmental responses to management by viewing management actions as experiments. The term experiment is important here because it suggests a degree of scientific rigor based on explicit principles of experimental design. It is the Committee's opinion that this rigor is, in fact, currently absent from most management practices, and these actions are incorrectly portrayed as adaptive management.

Adaptive management views management actions as experiments and accumulates knowledge to achieve continual learning. There are three ways to do adaptive management: (1) trial-and-error learning, in which initial management choices are made based on current understanding and successful prescriptions are made routine; (2) passive adaptive management, in which existing data are reviewed and used to inform decisions within a given management approach; and (3) active adaptive management, in which different management approaches are tested in similar circumstances, the results are evaluated, and the information is used to select approaches and decisions. Of these alternative ways to learn, passive and active adaptive management accelerates the rate of learning how to best manage ecological systems.

Monitoring the extent to which management strategies and actions achieve expected goals is clearly necessary, but it is also important to monitor whether expected social, economic, ecological, budget, staff, and political conditions persist. Indeed, monitoring "external environmental conditions" is an essential management role and a defining feature of strategic planning. Such monitoring is anticipatory because it focuses attention on factors that may stress or change the system and it seeks explanations for the cause-and-effect relationships between these stressors and expected responses.

The managerial role is not only to undertake monitoring activities and analyses but also to respond to findings to promote continuous learning. That is, the only way in which learning is possible is to observe if the system responds as envisioned or if social and economic conditions meet expectations. A lack of concordance between observation and expectation would lead to a revised model of how the ecological systems function and respond to management or to a reassessment of how social and economic systems respond to change. Thus, monitoring should be viewed as an ongoing process and an essential component of responsible stewardship.

Active adaptive management can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. The challenge arises from the requirements of experimentation, including (1) replication and randomization of management treatments and the need for control areas, (2) the formulation of competing models (or hypotheses) of how the system will respond to management, (3) an initial assessment of the "truth" of the different models (model likelihoods), (4) a statement of each hypotheses (model) in terms of measurable variables, (5) monitoring the results of the experiment to determine which model is most parsimonious with the results, and (6) updating model likelihoods based on an analysis of experimental results. The next round of management decisions is then based on the results of the previous experiment, with greater weight given to the model best supported by the existing data. The process is iterative, continuing until uncertainty about system response has been reduced to an acceptable level.

Given the involvement of scientists and the need for a clear experimental protocol for active adaptive management, it is not possible to cast all management actions as active experiments. The Committee suggests that the adaptive management paradigm be adopted when the environmental consequences of the action are highly uncertain or when the management action may result in significant or irreversible loss. This linkage between science and management presents an obvious opportunity for collaboration between the management and research branches of the Forest Service.

The difficulty and expense of intensive monitoring for active adaptive management makes routine monitoring even more important. Routine monitoring can be structured as an early warning system to alert managers if expected outcomes are not regularly occurring and if key assumptions made about the external forces and stressors are no longer valid. Such information can alert managers to the need to involve field specialists and scientists in evaluating the information. At times, it will be important to have independent field reviews of management activities and monitoring processes both as a check on the adequacy of monitoring approaches and as a means of enhancing public trust in management.

The Integrated Land and Resource Management Plan Back to Top

The NFMA calls for development of an integrated land and resource management plan for each unit of the National Forest System. How does that fit with this proposal? In the approach presented here, the integrated land and resource management plan for each administrative unit of the National Forest System is the repository of policies, strategic directions, implementing decisions, and adaptive management plans made at all levels of the planning and decision process. As a foundation of administrative policy and guidance, it includes budget and staffing needs for implementation as well as procedures and timing for monitoring and review. It includes monitoring processes as well as ongoing results and subsequent changes in both implementing and strategic decisions.

As critiques of past "forest planning" acknowledge and the Committee's analysis confirm, when the administrative units were also the planning units (e.g., under the 1982 regulations for planning), cross-boundary and multi-jurisdictional issues related to large-scale ecological processes were neglected. Partly, this inattention was caused by a lack of information produced by limiting the scope of information to the administrative unit by having the "analysis of the management situation" one of the steps of forest planning. Partly, however, it was the result of competitiveness among line officers and an inward looking approach to information, analysis, and planning. Nonetheless, what resulted were forest plans that took little account of neighboring national forests and seldom considered management issues that crossed administrative lines (unless mandated to do so, as in the case of wilderness planning).

We envision the forest plan as a living document, holding in its covers the current agreements and strategies affecting a particular national forest or grassland. The boundaries of national forests may not be appropriate as planning units, but they are the primary administrative unit for carrying out the management of these lands. Each of the three levels in the planning and decision-making process described above would probably need a NEPA document (an EIS or EA). As described here, the forest plan would probably not be part of a NEPA process because it serves as a mechanism for compiling the results of a set of large-landscape strategic policies and small- landscape proposed actions.

Thus, the land and resource management plan should be in the form of a loose-leaf notebook that contains all of the policy directions, strategies, and implementation proposals from decisions that have been made at all levels of the planning process. It should be the official repository of decisions big and small that have been made and reviewed in the strategic and landscape-level planning processes. It must also contain the monitoring methods that will be implemented as well as the evaluation results from monitoring. Because this model of the land and resource management plan is different than that employed during the first round of NFMA planning, the process of plan amendment is also different. Rather than a formal process involving review and comment, these loose-leaf plans are dynamic and evolving, readily reflecting and accommodating the outcomes of adaptive management. Thus, as decisions are revisited and revised in response to changing social understanding, natural and social events, and policy priorities, the loose-leaf notebook can immediately reflect those changes. Consequently, any amendments made to these plans reflect decisions that have been made and reviewed elsewhere.

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4-6. What Is Your Long-Term Plan and How Will It Make the World a Better Place?

People find it difficult to support what they do not understand. Furthermore, most people have little time for in-depth analysis of any particular public policy issue, such as the management of the national forests and grasslands.

With that in mind, the Committee of Scientists conducted a survey of the regional offices and ranger districts of the national forests. As part of the survey, we asked the following questions: What simple, straightforward explanation do you have of your long-term plan for the lands you administer? How will your plan make the world a better place?

We wanted to learn whether explanations of long-term plans for the national forests and grasslands were readily available to the general public. We were interested in information that a citizen could quickly obtain and easily understand, not only about the long-term plan for a particular forest but also about the future landscapes and outcomes that were the goals of that plan. We also were interested in explanations about why each plan was wise public policy.

The Committee was surprised at the responses received. Few such explanations exist. None for the President's Plan for Northwest Forests, despite its importance and the millions of dollars spent to construct it. Few, if any, for the current land management plans for the national forests across the country. None that give an image of the future landscape that is the goal of a particular plan.

The responses did include some explanations of what Forest Service managers would like to achieve at a project level as well as lots of discussion about ecosystem management. Nevertheless, a simple explanation of an existing long-term plan was rare indeed. We did see some glossy picture books about the National Forests that looked remarkably like those created to showcase our national parks. And we received many detailed, voluminous documents, mostly associated what that purported to explain the long-term plans. Although those tomes may be useful for court cases, we believe they have little to offer the general public.

Why are readily understandable, long-term plans for our national forests and grasslands unavailable to the American people? What are the implications of this void? We believe that if the Forest Service expects to gain public support for its policies, it must make a far greater effort to explain those policies to the people. Rebuilding trust and confidence in the Forest Service would seem to require connecting the management plans containing the Forest Service vision of the future to the people whose lands these are.

New employees in the Forest Service would also benefit from a ready source of information about the larger goals and future conditions that they will be helping to achieve. We realize that the Forest Service has been undergoing a transition in management over the past few years. Still, a short, straightforward explanation of the existing long-term plan and the vision for the landscape it will create, should soon be in every national forest and ranger district in the land. And it should reflect the variety of values, conditions, and actions in the plan. Numerous other public and private organizations have prepared such explanations; it is time for the Forest Service to do so.

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Adaptive Planning

4C. Other Considerations Back to Top

The Roles of the National Assessment, RPA Program, and Annual Report

Integrating Budgets into Planning

The Opportunity of NEPA

4D. Summary Back to Top

The collaborative planning approach outlined here reflects the knowledge gained through experience during the past 20 years. The basic spatial structure of the planning process is consistent with innovations tested over the past decade. The principles for collaborative planning emerged from scientific study of planning and managerial experience.

The Committee attempted to weave these current innovations into an overall conceptual framework for planning. The process outlined here, which ultimately seeks to achieve the overarching objective of sustainability, uses the dynamic elements of (1) defining desired future conditions and (2) monitoring and adaptive management to link the hierarchical assessment and decision-making processes. It is not possible for collaborative planning to be successful without a strong monitoring and adaptive management approach. Similarly, without the independence of the assessment process from decision making, the trust needed to collectively define desired future conditions is undermined. Relationships are the basic medium of collaboration, so this planning framework seeks to build and strengthen the relationships necessary for effective stewardship of the national forests and grasslands.

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4-7. Multi-project NEPA Documents: Benefits, Problems, and Chances for Success

The Committee has argued for small-landscape plans to develop in a coordinated fashion the projects needed to achieve the goals outlined in the large-landscape plans. The Forest Service has some experience with this approach through an approach called a multi-project environmental assessment (EA) or environmental impact statement (EIS), in which a number of projects for an area are addressed in one NEPA process. Harriet Plumley, Planner on the Siuslaw National Forest helped the Committee conduct a study of recent attempts at the multi-project approach to understand their benefits and the problems with their development, when they worked, and when they did not.

The following benefits of multi-project documentation:

1. It provides a way to analyze cumulative effects of all activities planned for an area, especially a watershed. (NEPA regulations require that cumulative actions that have cumulatively significant impacts should be discussed in the same impact statement.)

2. It addresses connected actions, as required by NEPA regulations

3. It allows for analysis of similar actions planned for a geographic area. (NEPA regulations require that similar actions be analyzed together if combination is the best way to assess their combined impacts or to display reasonable alternatives.)

4. It provides a better opportunity to identify and prioritize activities needed for protection of resource sustainability and balance of resource use.

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5. It provides an opportunity to work with local public/community interest groups to design a landscape plan and to perform any subsequent environmental analysis needed to implement recommended projects.

6. It provides an opportunity to save time and money by focusing on one comprehensive NEPA project.

The problems that were identified were:

1. Multi-project NEPA documents become too cumbersome, including too many purpose and need statements, leading to too many issues and too many alternatives to be addressed sufficiently for NEPA; it is difficult to provide all the site specificity required by NEPA for all the alternatives and issues; and it requires too much documentation for "white-hat" projects.

2. Preparation of the document takes too long and is too expensive. Several focused EAs and CEs could be prepared and implemented more quickly.

3. For projects that are highly controversial, it is risky to combine too many projects in one NEPA document. All the projects could be delayed because of the appeal of one controversial project.

4. NEPA documents should focus on projects with a 1-to 2-year planning horizon. New information about species habitats and other environmental issues changes too quickly to ensure that a multiproject plan could last longer than 2 years.

Overall, if there are any controversial projects in the analysis area and agreements have not been worked out with concerned parties ahead of a NEPA decision, (1) the decision could be appealed on process points (e.g., lack of site specificity, lack of adequate public involvement, and lack of adequate range of alternatives); (2) the NEPA decision will be difficult for the Appeal Deciding Officer to uphold; and (3) the forest will withdraw the decision or extract the appealed portion of the project from the decision and handle it later in a separate NEPA analysis.

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Challenges of Collaborative Planning

5A. Building Decisions on a Strong Foundation of Scientific Information Back to Top

Public land management has always rested on scientific and technical knowledge, not simply the desires of the public or the preferences of managers. Today, that commitment to scientific credibility has grown inside and outside of the Forest Service. Managers seek it, interest groups call for it, and the public expects it. For this reason, the collaborative planning process outlined in this report integrates scientists and researchers within that process.

Recent experiences with bioregional assessments and science policy processes in which scientists played a significant role suggest that new institutions, new funding support, and new roles for scientists and researchers are emerging. Partly, these requirements have resulted in response to legal challenges. Partly, however, they have resulted from the recognition that monitoring, adaptive management, and the complex system-level analysis necessary for sustainability simply demand expertise beyond the capacity of most managers and specialists. Research and technology are moving so quickly that scientists and researchers must themselves patici- 122

pate in developing and evaluating the information needed for "scientifically credible" conservation strategies and land management approaches.

This section attempts to answer two questions: What does "scientifically credible" mean in collaborative planning? And what institutions and roles must the scientific community and the Forest Service develop to ensure that decisions are based upon credible scientific information and can withstand independent scientific review?

New Roles for Scientists in Land and Resource Planning

Integrating Scientific Information into Collaborative Planning Back to Top

Collaborative planning rests upon a foundation of scientific information developed by scientists and other knowledgeable people in an open, public process. This "assessment" process ensures that current scientific thinking is part of the planning process as well as a sound foundation of credible information. Issues in planning that have a significant scientific content include: whether the temporal and spatial scales being considered are appropriate for the questions being asked, whether all relevant information is being considered, whether that information is intepreted in a manner consistent with current scientific understanding, whether the level of risk to species and ecosystems associated with the alternatives is acknowledged, and whether the uncertainty of our knowledge is recognized.

In the application of scientific understanding to managing large landscapes, we generally are not talking about a classic application of the scientific method. Hypothesis testing at the landscape scale though controlled experiments is difficult. Rather, we are talking about scientific knowledge as a set of working hypotheses that are informed by experiments, demonstrations, argument, and reflection. Over time, those hypotheses are retained, revised, and discarded as needed. Scientists expect them to change; eternal truths are hard to find. Often, their revision occurs at the most inopportune time for managers. Nonetheless, a scientific way of thinking is at the heart of adaptive management.

To further complicate matters, there is rarely complete unanimity among scientists. On some issues, there are a variety of hypotheses having near equal support among different groups of scientists. On other issues, strong support exists for a particular working hypothesis, although a dissenting opinion will almost always exist.

As a result of numerous discussions of this topic, the Committee anticipates that the scientific community can expect to be asked to help with at least five different tasks in collaborative planning: 124

Creating Knowledge of Relevance to Collaborative Planning Back to Top

During assessments, specific problems or issues of concern arise for which inadequate information exists. Sometimes scientists are needed to undertake traditional research (hypothesis testing), and at other times they are asked to summarize the state of knowledge. This second role is very important because many of the practical issues in land and resource management have not been addressed by traditional research. Such issues include: determining the habitat requirements of owls, the effectiveness of fuel breaks in stopping wildfires, the growth and mortality patterns of riparian forests, or the mimicking of natural patterns of cleared areas in forests to make clearcuts more acceptable to the public. Generally, scientists prepare white papers that synthesize the state of knowledge related to issues. Given that these questions relate to expected results of management activities, scientists play an important service in relating theoretical models to actual practices.

Developing the Integrative Science for Bioregional Assessments

The shift to a bioregional and large-landscape scale creates a different sort of challenge for scientists. Understanding large-scale processes requires a new theoretical approach and a new integration across disciplines. For example, in the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Assessment, scientists were asked how to assess the state of different fish stocks in the 160 million acre Columbia Basin, the state of forest health in the northern Rocky Mountains, and the implications of placing roads in roadless areas. What to measure and what scale to use are critical questions that must be answered before scientists can provide a scientific foundation for conservation strategies. Answering these questions requires integration of different types of information across many disciplines and at scales not usually encountered in traditional research. Furthermore, compromises in information quality may result when attempting to answer a wide range of questions.

Helping Managers Understand the Application of Scientific and Technical Knowledge Back to Top

As new policy requirements are issued from Congress, the administration, or the courts, scientists are often called upon to help interpret them from a scientific standpoint and ensure that the resulting instructions to the field have scientific credibility. The regulatory language for implementing ecological sustainability developed by the Committee uses the concepts of "ecosystem integrity" and "species viability" as central concepts. Without a doubt, scientists will be involved in interpreting the meaning of these concepts and working with managers to develop field-tested methods for implementing such rules.

Based on the assessments, the first step in planning is defining the desired future condition across large landscapes and bioregions. As resource specialists, planners, and managers undertake these tasks, they will have a multitude of questions about how to define the desired future conditions in terms that lead to measurable strategies for achieving them. They will need scientific assistance in translating conservation strategies derived from the assessments into practical management approaches that can be expected to achieve the desired goals. Answering these questions, as vital as they are to the planning effort, is not the traditional domain of research scientists.

As specialists and managers begin to implement strategic plans for large landscapes, they will need the assistance of scientists to help craft creative ways to accomplish the plans' objectives. In recent experience, landscape-scale strategic plans, like the Northwest Forest Plan, have relied upon "default prescriptions" developed by scientists within the planning process to implement the conservation strategies with the full expectation that local knowledge developed in the field would lead to more effective, site-specific approaches. As might be expected, these prescriptions often do not fit field conditions very well, yet managers are understandably reluctant to vary the standard prescription without assistance and field review by scientists. Adaptive management simply necessitates a new role for scientists in not only developing ideas for conservation strategies and how to achieve them but also working more closely with technical specialists and managers in applying these ideas and adapting them to field conditions.

Helping to Design Effectiveness Monitoring Procedures and Adaptive Management Experiments

Monitoring is a key component of collaborative planning. Yet, there are few standard procedures to draw upon for designing effectiveness monitoring procedures for the millions of acres in a strategic plan for large landscapes. This deficiency especially holds true with the limited funds available for such work. Selecting an efficient, yet dependable, set of measures will require scientific involvement.

Evaluating the Use of Scientific Information in Planning and Implementation Back to Top

Once strategic plans or sets of projects are proposed (along with estimates of their effects), policy makers, interest groups, and the public often challenge their scientific bases. These "science consistency checks" and field project reviews are just beginning, but are quickly becoming an important new role for scientists in collaborative planning.

New Institutions Needed to Support Scientific Information and Review

5B. Integrating Scientific and Public Deliberation Back to Top

Public issues vary widely. In land and resource management planning, they vary in terms of whether there is sufficient scientific and technical information available to understand them or the implications of alternative strategies and actions. They also vary in terms of their contentiousness: some issues involve multiple goals and diverse social values, and require extended public discussion to define desired future conditions as well as strategies to achieve them. Thus, the nature and quality of public and scientific issues argues for different approaches to deliberation. A collaborative planning process needs have the flexibility to treat issues differently.

The more that multiple goals and diverse social values are involved, the more that stakeholders representing the range of values in contention must be convened in a deliberative process aimed at developing options that reflect those different goals and values. "Stakeholders" are all affected parties, including other federal agencies, state and local governments, tribes, and the public. And the more complex and ambiguous the scientific and technical information concerning an issue, the more that experts must be involved to assist with and provide credibility to the public

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Table 4-1. A typology of information.

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deliberation. Constructing a typology (see Table 4-1), with the state of knowledge as one dimension, and the agreement on values as the other, creates four assessment and planning situations that differ in the need for and type of stakeholder and expert deliberation.

Developing conservation strategies for species and ecosystems as well as treatments and actions that serve as pathways to desired future conditions are generally problems for which no one solution will satisfy all stakeholders or enjoy complete consensus among the scientific communities. In these cases, both assessments and decision processes must bring stakeholders and experts together in an extended deliberative process that involves multidimensional tradeoffs based on tentative knowledge.

In general, ongoing deliberation builds familiarity with public issues, the diversity of public viewpoints, and the complexity of the ecological and social systems. When planning is not an "event" but a continuous activity, then deliberation can build trust and legitimacy for public action. Regular expert and public deliberation also provides a long-term forum for public, scientific, and agency learning.

A Participatory Approach Is at the Heart of Democracy Back to Top

Sustainability connects economic and social welfare with the maintenance of ecological integrity and productivity. Achieving this integration requires democratic processes, in which people participate in designing effective strategies and work together to carry them out. Thus, the simple democratic premise that people should participate in making decisions about issues important to them and which may affect them lies at the heart of sustainability. Indeed, working toward sustainability allows this generation to act as a steward for future generations, as well.

Our proposed collaborative planning process rests on strong principles of democratic participation in planning and decision making. Public deliberation is a concept that expresses the democratic ideal of self-governance. In a collaborative planning process, participants include: other agencies, other governments, tribes, interested organizations, communities and citizens. The terms "public involvement" or "public participation" emerged in the 1960s as correctives for government decisions contrary to the will of the people or affected stakeholders. Today, formal public review processes are now required for nearly all types of government decisions. However, these terms refer to formal and informal administrative processes that allow the public to provide issues for consideration in planning, comments on proposed government actions or expenditures of public money, or comments on proposed government regulations. A collaborative planning process rests on continuous, open participation by all stakeholders, interested parties, and the public. Simply providing issues for consider-

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5-3. Public Participation in the Huron-Manistee National Forest Forest Plan Revision

In 1995, the Huron-Manistee National Forest (HMNF) and the Eastern Regional Office developed a strategy to revise the forest plan. The overall vision was that the revised Forest Plan would be widely endorsed at the end of the process. The process would be open and fair, with employees and the public working in a collaborative and cooperative manner. A brochure, "Invitation to Participate," was developed that explained forest planning and the revision process and invited the public to actively participate.

In June 1996, a forest plan revision "need-for-change" process was initiated.

The public was invited to comment at 13 public meetings throughout HMNF on items that they felt needed to be changed in the forest plan, and on how they would like to participate in the process.

2500 interested public were also contacted by mail and invited to participate, either by writing or by attending the public meetings. During each step of the process, the media throughout Michigan were contacted and informed of events and results.

A content analysis of all suggestions was completed. More than 150 statements were identified as change, no-change, and discussion items. Discussion items consisted of suggestions that were in conflict with each other and highly charged issues, such as early successional habitat, old growth, allowable sale quantity, and roads. Various ideas and suggestions on how the public desired to participate in the process were documented. A common desire was to have public working group sessions that openly discussed the discussion items.

The need-for-change items and the proposal to conduct working group sessions were shared with the public at an open meeting and through mailings. The public commented, and modifications were made based on their feedback.

HMNF identified 12 discussion items (hot topics/no agreement), and briefing papers presenting all aspects of each topic were developed.

The briefing papers were discussed at a two-day public meeting. The purposes of the meetings were to determine whether all aspects of each discussion item had been adequately captured in the briefing papers and to review information about each item. On the basis of feedback at the meeting, the briefing papers were revised.

Twelve one-day public working group sessions were conducted to discuss each discussion item. Prework packets were mailed out two to four weeks prior to each working group session. Experts were invited to present information, and the public debated and discussed the issues at the working group sessions. HMNF documented areas of agreement and areas where there was a diversity of opinion and the reasons. All participants had equal opportunity to participate. HMNF documented each working group session and mailed the results of each session to participants and interested publics.

HMNF completed the need-for-change process by preparing a forest plan need-for-change assessment that visibly incorporated the results of the public participation process. The draft document was reviewed at a public meeting and revised on the basis of the feedback received at the meeting. A finalized need-for-change assessment was mailed to participants and interested publics. Interest group representatives; individuals speaking for themselves and their families; tribal, state, and federal government representatives; and Forest Service leadership team and staff all participated in the process.

In summary, the public participated throughout the need-for-change process in a manner it selected, in equal standing, and in partnership with the Forest Service and other stakeholders. A full spectrum of diversity and diverging opinions were represented throughout the process. Participants got to know and understand each other. Experts participated as a source of information. The Forest Service role was to facilitate, keep the public on course, prepare and present information, be neutral, and listen. After listening, the need-for-change assessment was developed and widely accepted by the public.

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ation or comments on proposals is nowhere near sufficient for a collaborative planning process. Thus, this report avoids these terms to reduce confusion.

Rather, the concept of a "participatory process" is used to refer to democratic decision making and "public deliberation" is used to refer to the ongoing dialogue across multiple stakeholders, scientists, and the public in a participatory process. In addition to dialogue, however, the public has two other important responsibilities: to contribute to wise decision making and to contribute to evaluating the performance of government programs and activities. Thus, there are three primary roles for the public in a participatory process:

· Deliberation of public issues means that people contribute to developing the information needed for planning, join in debating public purposes, and come to better understand the perspectives of others interested in, and knowledgeable about, the lands and resources.

· Coming to public judgment can occur when sufficient deliberation results in wise and considered decisions.

· Public review of performance by federal agencies responsible for developing and implementing policies is an important public duty and needs to become an on-going part of the planning process through monitoring and external review.

Contributing to Building Decisions and Evaluating Performance Back to Top

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Public Participation in Plan Revision on the White Mountain, Green Mountain, and Finger Lakes National Forests

A few years ago, the planners on the White, Green, and Finger Lakes national forests in the Northeast got together to develop a strategy for forest plan revision. Though we needed to write three separate forest plans, we knew we had a large number of "constituents" in common who wanted consistency in our approaches. We also knew we could do a much better job together, harnessing the creative energies of the group. We wanted to create a new process wherein people (the public) would be involved up-front helping develop planning materials, rather than critically reviewing products created by the agency.

We reviewed past planning efforts and research, trying to use the best of each that would take advantage of the collaborative New England culture. There have been a number of successful planning efforts in the past, such as the Northern Forest Lands Council and the New Hampshire State Forest Resources Plan. These endeavors made it clear that the Forests would have to work closely together to accomplish ecosystem sustainability goals and resolve the social issues. It was also clear that people would not tolerate being excluded from the process. This "no-surprises" philosophy evolved into a "plan for the plan" with four basic principles:

1) Nonagency people would be brought into the process from the beginning. They would be asked to help identify issues, determine what information was required, and decide how the public would be involved.

2) Information would be widely shared. Virtually any information developed by the agency would be shared with others. People who are interested in forest plan revision would be urged to bring their data to the table.

3) Participants would learn from one another. Meetings of people interested in plan revision would be, among other things, educational forums. People were to express their views and provide information to support their points. Forest Service employees would be participants rather than controllers of the process.

4) Joint problem solving would be expected. No single organization or individual would be responsible for solving the problem. Everyone would share responsibility for helping devise solutions.

The process design we created divided public participation phases into discrete units so that people could come in and feel productive, whether it was for one of the units or the whole process. We wanted people to understand that we wanted their involvement for the long haul, but we also wanted to give them the opportunity to step out and take a breather instead of burning out.

The units in this pre-notice of intent or "prescoping" portion of plan revision included outreach, public planning groups, local planning groups, technical working groups, and public forums, which culminated in the issuance of a notice of intent and the transition to the more formally defined phases of forest plan revision.

Outreach: The Green Mountain and White Mountain national forests held seven geographically scattered sessions, including a joint session in Boston. The Finger Lakes held two sessions. We asked participants to identify what they thought needed to be revised in the forest plans. We received thousands of comments. The comments were analyzed, summarized, and grouped into issues and subissues.

Public Planning Groups: Sessions were held on each forest. Three weekday sessions were held on the White Mountain National Forest and five were held on the Green Mountain National Forest. We held five sessions on the Finger Lakes National Forest, and varied the times from weekdays to weekends to consecutive weeknights to draw a diverse group of participants. The public planning group on the White Mountain National Forest reviewed issue briefs developed by Forest Service specialists for each of the issues, while the Green Mountain National Forest and Finger Lakes National Forest public planning groups developed issue briefs in concert with Forest Service staff. Those sessions built upon the work of the outreach comments and gave participants a chance to exchange knowledge about the issues. Planning group members also raised questions for the technical working group in the succeeding phase, which they believed needed to be answered in revision.

Local Planning Groups: Originally, we planned to have about a dozen local planning groups established and facilitated in the Northeast, from New York City to Maine. Our intent was to allow interested people to come together in diverse groups for a few hours each month and discuss the issues. The results of these meetings were then to be carried forward to the public planning group on each forest. This effort failed. Funding was insufficient to provide paid facilitators for the discussions. Groups were encouraged to form on a self-directed basis; however, that never really took off.

The next two phases are more theoretical in nature because we have not yet reached them. The Green Mountain and Finger Lakes forests are under the moratorium on revision. Work is proceeding on the White Mountain National Forest in the following two phases:

Technical Working Groups: During this phase, the latest scientific information concerning each issue will be collected. The degree of scientific controversy will be identified, as will relative risks to sustainability. Literature reviews will be provided for each issue area, followed by symposiums to foster interaction between scientists and the public. Further work will follow to answer some of the questions raised. Our emphasis in this phase will be to bring scientific information forward in a manner understandable to the lay public.

Public Forums: Our goal in this phase is to develop a vision for each national forest that, in a few paragraphs, outlines the role the forest will play in sustaining ecosystems and meeting social needs in the Northeast.

Each phase builds upon the results of the previous phase. Our revision efforts will focus on those areas where a need for change has been identified. The public has helped to describe and clarify the issues. In addition, people have been engaged in an effort that allows them to express their values, share information, and build trust. We have focused on partnerships, collaboration, and involvement by all. The knowledge gained and the relationships formed can then be brought forward through the NEPA process and into implementation and annual plan updates. Positive outcomes to this approach have included continuing work, by the public, on the Green Mountain and Finger Lakes forests on nonrevision projects, such as trail maintenance, and an increase in the number of forest partners and volunteers.

Mary Krueger and Chuck Prausa for the Joint Core Planning Team

A reservoir of public understanding that can be drawn upon when difficult issues arise or unexpected events occur, such as hurricanes, floods, and fires. In this way, strong relationships can provide for efficient action by providing the context for considering what to do in light of past decisions. This is the payoff for taking the time to build deliberative capacity.

Engaging the American public in deliberating the future of the national forests and grasslands is more than just talking to people living near the public lands. Pinchot set forth the principle that local decisions should be made on local grounds at a time when local meant "people living nearby." Today, people who live great distances from the forests and grasslands feel strong attachments to them and want to participate in making decisions about them. Just as transportation systems have changed the meaning of "local" in decision making, information technologies have transformed the abilities of people living far from public lands to join in deliberating the future of those lands. New methods of public dialogue need to be invented in order for planning to effectively engage the American people.

In adaptive management, the review and evaluation of performance is an integral part of stewardship. Complex strategies for conserving and managing the resources of the national forests and grasslands necessitate careful, independent review by outside scientists, interested parties, and knowledgeable people. Expert and scientific review is essential, but not sufficient to ensure public acceptability or simple common sense. Incorporating new methods of performance evaluation that are open, inclusive, and independent will be necessary for building trust.

Important to evaluating the strategies and treatments for achieving desired future conditions is a monitoring process designed to measure performance against expected outcomes. While the design of a monitoring process may be as simple as measuring water temperature and water flow and be carried out by school children, it can also be as complex as a research experiment and engage the research community. Without measurement and maintenance of good records for historical comparisons, it is difficult to assess long-term performance. The recent Government Performance and Review Act sets performance evaluation as a high priority for government agencies. Making that process an open and public one can greatly contribute to the restoration of trust in Forest Service management of national forests and grasslands and its commitment to achieving sustainability.

5C. Protests and Appeals of Federal Decisions Back to Top

Federal agencies differ greatly as to if, when, and how their decisions can be appealed or protested by the public. A potential impediment to multiagency planning and decision processes is the differences in timing and approach to resolving protests and appeals. In the case of federal land management, both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management allow the public to protest or appeal their decisions, whereas neither the Fish and Wildlife Service nor the National Marine Fisheries Service allow appeals. These agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency, do not allow administrative appeals after decisions are final, only judicial review.

Several times we have heard reference to the differences between the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service appeals processes. At the level of the Forest Plan, the primary difference is that for the Bureau of Land Management the appeals are predecisional and for the Forests Service they are postdecisional.

For the Bureau of Land Management, this means that after the final EIS is published, but before the ROD is signed, "protest appeals" can be filed. The issues these appeals can raise are limited to those issues raised for the record in the planning process. The ROD is the final agency action. The next step is a lawsuit. For the Forest Service, a postdecisional appeals process means that after the final decision is published in the ROD, an appeal can be filed, and the Forest Service must consider it and respond. The Chief is the deciding officer for appeals of land and resource management plans.

There are several issues that these observations raise regarding our proposed collaborative planning process.

1) In the context of multiple agency planning and decision making, what is the effect of appeals processes that assume single-agency planning and decision making?

2) Should large-landscape planning have an appeals process that is predecisional instead of, or in addition to, the existing postdecisional appeal process?

3) How can small-landscape planning best address the statutory requirements for project-level, postdecisional appeals?

Appeals Process Back to Top

One question that must be dealt with is whether the current appeals processes in the Forest Service and other federal agencies need modification to recognize the multiagency planning processes of the future. The current appeals processes assume single-agency planning processes and single-agency decisions. In one of the only instances of multiple-agency planning and decision making, the Northwest Forest Plan, the decisions were made at the Secretary level to avoid the problem of inconsistent appeals rules, among other reasons. In the case of the Columbia Basin project, the expectation is that regional foresters and the Bureau of Land Management state directors will make the decisions. In that case, the decisions of the Bureau of Land Management would be open to predecisional protest, but the Forest Service decisions could be appealed after the ROD. This makes coordinated planning for large-scale policy decisions very difficult.

Currently, the Forest Service regulations (36 CFR Part 215 and Part 217) create barriers to collaboration with other federal agencies. As generally applied, the existing rules limit the opportunity for other federal agencies to review and comment upon proposed courses of action after the Forest Service has chosen a preferred alternative based on comments on the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS). The current regulations do not allow other federal agencies to raise issues of concern after the final EIS and ROD are published. Unless agency planners and managers make a concerted and successful effort to seek out comment on a preferred alternative after reviewing the comments on the DEIS, concerns of other agencies cannot be raised during the postdecisional appeals process now used by the Forest Service. As a result, significant differences are raised to the highest levels of the agencies for resolution, creating political discord among agencies, or unaddressed issues reduce the success of implementation or threaten future actions.

It is the Committee's expectation that, if the Forest Service works with the other land- management and appropriate regulatory agencies in the early stages of the assessment and decision processes, relationships will be built and problems addressed before they must be dealt with by managers close to the field. Especially because adaptive management will necessarily require the capacity to review, evaluate, and change management activities on a regular basis, the federal agencies will need to become partners rather than adversaries in working toward achieving sustainability. However, the formal rules need to encourage, facilitate, and ensure that strong relationships are built and maintained if stewardship is to maintain or achieve ecological sustainability.

Recommendation Back to Top

Consider developing a consistent approach across federal agencies for addressing protests and appeals. The Committee recommends that the different agencies form a multiagency task group to carefully identify and examine the specific impediments to coordinated planning and decision making, opportunities for developing a more harmonized approach, and the development of an appeals process that is consistent across agencies and encourages participation in collaborative planning. The agencies' differences in experience and perspective on appeals and protests will provide useful comparisons for this effort. The Committee recognizes that legislation currently requires the Forest Service to allow project-level appeals after a final decision is made. While changing legislation requires a greater level of effort than that needed to change agency regulations, the appeal requirements need to be analyzed in the context of the new approaches to planning and recommendations for changes made to ensure that a collaborative planning process can succeed.

Predecisional Appeals

Postdecisional Appeals

5D. Global Commitments Regarding Sustainability

5E. Summary Back to Top

Bringing scientific credibility to the management plans and activities of the Forest Service is essential for a collaborative planning process to work. Trust can be built through mutual understanding and agreement on basic information. Understanding the role of the public in collaborative planning is much more than simply providing "issues" of concern and "comments" on options and should lead to a richer base of information as well as a foundation of commitment and trust. These propositions are not abstract symbols; there are many successful examples around the country both within the Forest Service and involving other highly contentious natural resource policy issues involving other federal and state agencies. The experience is there to address the issues outlined in this chapter; the challenge is to do so with enthusiasm.

Implementing the Laws and Policies Governing the National Forests and Grasslands in the Context of Sustainability

6A. Ecological Sustainability as the Foundation of National Forest Stewardship Back to Top

The guiding star for planning is sustainability. Like other overarching national objectives, sustainability is broadly aspirational and can be difficult to define in concrete terms. Yet, especially considering the increased human pressures on the national forests and grasslands, it becomes ever more essential that planning and management begin with a central tenet of sustainability, that our use today does not impair the functioning of ecological processes and the ability of these natural resources to contribute economically and socially in the future.

A suite of laws call for ecological sustainability, often in terms of native species diversity and ecological processes. The Endangered Species Act calls for federal agencies to undertake all possible means to conserve native species and the ecosystems upon which they depend. The National Forest Management Act calls for maintaining the diversity of plant and animal communities to meet multiple-use objectives, which in the existing regulations implementing the Act have been stated as providing habitat to maintain the viability of vertebrate species, and the protection of streams and watersheds. The Clean Water Act calls for protecting the physical, chemical, and biological integrity of the nation's waters. The Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act calls for ensuring that multiple use and sustained yield do not impair the productivity of the land. The Clean Air Act calls for protecting the nation's air. Individually and collectively, our environmental laws express a profound commitment to the protection of native species and to our air, water, and soil. While considerable discretion is left in interpreting these laws, their thrust is clear.

As we have found in the Northwest and throughout the country, ignoring the letter and spirit of these laws has, time after time, led to lawsuits that have overturned long-term plans for the national forests and grasslands, frustrating the people who have put so many hours into them. (See Sidebar 6-2.) In addition, the abrupt changes that often follow court decisions can be disconcerting to communities and economies. The Committee feels that it would be better for the Forest Service to recognize its responsibilities for ecological sustainability as part of planning rather than to wait for lawsuits to force the issue.

In addition to the suite of environmental laws calling for protection of ecological systems, scientific results and common sense point to the necessity of protecting these systems so they continue providing benefits to society. Lessons from across the National Forest System suggest that the conservation of ecological systems cannot be ignored. As an example, concerns about the effect that declining water clarity will have on tourism in Lake Tahoe have led to an intensive and expensive effort to reverse this trend. More generally, the cost of replacing the watersheds that supply the municipal water for many communities has caused increased protection of these lands. Once ecological systems are pushed to the edge, the costs of recovery can be astronomical, and the ability to apply adaptive management is significantly compromised.

The Committee recommends that ecological sustainability provide a foundation upon which the management for national forests and grasslands can contribute to economic and social sustainability. This finding does not mean that the Forest Service is expected to maximize the protection of plant and animal species and environmental protection to the exclusion of other human values and uses. Rather, it means that planning for the multiple use and sustained yield of the resources of national forests and grasslands should operate within a baseline level of ensuring the sustainability of ecological systems and native species. Such use would avoid impairing the functioning of ecological processes and the ability of these natural resources to contribute economically and socially in the future.

Setting ecological sustainability as a key goal acknowledges that ecological systems provide many outputs that humans require to sustain themselves as living, biological organisms. That is, human health and the integrity of ecological systems are inseparable objectives. Humans are "a part of" not "apart from" their environment. Choices in management still exist, and the level of risk to take is a policy choice. Further, the human values, needs, uses, and ecological condition of each locality will change with time. Policy and management must evolve according to natural dynamics and disturbances as well as social events, economic change, and political values. Nonetheless, it is clear that ecological sustainability lays a necessary foundation for national forests and grasslands to contribute to the economic and social components of sustainability, making contributions to strong, productive economies and creating opportunities for enduring human communities.

The Committee believes that conserving habitat for native species and the processes of ecological systems remains the surest path to maintaining ecological sustainability. We suggest the use of two general approaches in tandem to conserve these key elements of sustainability.

First, we suggest a scientific assessment of the characteristic composition, structure, and processes of the ecosystems. This assessment should provide an understanding of the "ecological integrity" of the planning area.

Ecosystems with integrity maintain their characteristic species diversity and ecological processes, such as productivity, soil fertility, and rates of biogeochemical cycling. Because ecosystems are dynamic and variable, the concept of the "historic range of variability" is used to characterize the variation and distribution of ecological conditions occurring in the past. This concept allows one to compare the ecological conditions that will be created under proposed management scenarios to past conditions. The more the prospective conditions differ from the conditions during recent millennia, the greater the expected risk to native species, their habitats, and the long-term stability of ecological processes.

Second, we suggest focusing on the viability of native species themselves. However, monitoring the status of all species and assessing their viability is impossible from a practical standpoint. Thus, it is necessary to focus on a subset of species called "focal species." The key characteristic of a focal species is that its abundance, distribution, health, and activity over time and space are indicative of the functioning of the larger ecological system. In monitoring, the habitat needs of the focal species are analyzed, and projections are made of the habitat that will be needed for the species to be considered "viable," having self-sustaining populations well distributed throughout the species range. Self-sustaining populations, in turn, can be defined as those that have sufficient abundance and diversity to display the array of life-history strategies and forms that will provide for their persistence and adaptability in the planning area over time. The habitat that will be created under any management scenario is compared to the habitat needed for the viability of each selected focal species. The less adequate the habitat for each species, the greater the risk to native species and ecological processes. Therefore, the Committee suggests a three-pronged strategy: (1) focusing on a set of selected "focal" species and their habitat needs, (2) maintaining conditions necessary for ecological integrity, and (3) monitoring the effectiveness of this approach in conserving native species and ecological processes.

In many cases, national forests and grasslands by themselves are unable to conserve native species and ecological processes. As noted earlier, other landowners and agencies often control key elements of the habitats and ecological systems. Thus, in some cases, the national forests and grasslands can contribute to, but not ensure, the achievement of ecological sustainability.

It is important to note that this approach is similar to the existing regulations implementing the National Forest Management Act. These 1982 regulations have an extensive section on "Management Requirements" that calls for provision of adequate habitat to maintain viable populations of existing native and desired nonnative vertebrate species; protection of soils, streams and watersheds; and many other conservation measures. These requirements were intended to provide a policy framework for sustaining ecological systems within which decisions could be made. In its details of implementation, however, the approach proposed by the Committee for assessing ecological sustainability differs from the existing one, reflecting more than 15 years of experience since those regulations were written. Conserving habitat for native species remains central to ecological sustainability while broadening the focus from vertebrates to all native species. At the same time, the Committee recognizes that ensuring the viability of all native species, through analysis of individual species, is an impossible task.

To ensure the development of scientifically credible conservation strategies, the Committee recommends a process that includes (1) scientific involvement in the selection of focal species, in the development of measures of species viability and ecological integrity, and in the definition of key elements of conservation strategies; (2) independent

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6-1. Public Participation in Forest Planning in the Absence of Scientifically Credible Conservation Strategies: An Exercise in Futility

In the 1980s, Region 6 of the Forest Service undertook a massive public involvement effort as part of the development of land and resource plans under NFMA. Most of the effort was done in a traditional way in which the Forest Service asked the public to react to alternative management plans for each National Forest presented in a draft NEPA statement. Generally, one of the alternatives was proposed as the preferred alternative.

And react the public did. Thousands of people met with the Forest Service and each other to give a reaction to the proposed plan and alternatives to it. Lobbying and letter writing were the order of the day; a national forest that did not get at least 10,000 comment letters and comments felt neglected. Consensus groups were set up on numerous national forests to try and reach some agreement on a plan for the forest. The State of Oregon began an unprecedented effort to develop a state alternative for each national forest in Oregon through the work of state agencies and through the holding of town meetings throughout the state. In total, hundreds of thousands of hours were spent responding to the proposed plans by people in the Northwest and across the nation.

Unfortunately, the massive effort went for naught because the plans were built on an unsound foundation. To protect species and ecosystems, planners on the national forests and grasslands had developed a set of "minimum management requirements" that set limits on resource development, primarily timber harvest. By and large, scientists were not directly involved in developing these requirements although the planners attempted to use whatever scientific literature was available. Upon challenge and review, the strategies to protect species and ecosystems were found to be inadequate and to lack scientific credibility. As this foundation disintegrated, the plans that had been built on them also collapsed.

The planning process in Region 6 gave the illusion of choices that did not really exist under the laws and policies then in effect for the protection of species and ecosystems. Once science teams were empowered to develop scientifically credible strategies for ecological sustainability, a new foundation for planning emerged that strengthened protection for species and ecosystems, dramatically reduced the potential for timber harvest, and withstood court challenge. In retrospect, the public debate about which management alternative in the EIS would best serve the public interest was largely a waste of time and the most profoundly disillusioning event to occur in that region. In sum, effective public participation depends on the assembling of a scientifically credible foundation of ecological sustainability before management plans to meet public needs can be developed.

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6-2. Coarse-and Fine-Filter Approaches to Habitat Assessment in the Southern Region

Coarse and fine filters are currently being used by National Forest System managers to address issues of biological diversity and species viability. As an example, the Southern Region defined their "coarse filter" with elements characterizing the composition and structure of the landscape, with no specific reference to species requirements or habitat associations. The status and trends of the terrestrial coarse-filter elements were assessed for the total Southern Appalachian Assessment area by ecological section, by ownership, and by state. These elements will be used to develop desired future conditions. Some of the elements used to characterize future conditions include broad forest classes, forest successional classes, and rare, native plant communities.

A fine-filter approach will also be used to identify individual species for emphasis in the Southern Appalachian forest plans. Candidate species include federally listed threatened and endangered species, range-wide viability concern species, and sensitive species. Habitat relationships will be developed for these species from the existing species habitat association database, followed by an external scientific review. Habitat relationships are used to organize the list of species into functional groups according to broad habitat associations. These habitat associations, along with individual species, will be the focus in assessing the adequacy of planning to meet species viability requirements.

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scientific review of proposed conservation strategies before plans are published; (3) scientific involvement in designing monitoring protocols and adaptive management; and (4) a national scientific committee to advise the Chief of the Forest Service on scientific issues in assessment and planning.

The Committee recognizes that its role is not to dictate specific management approaches for the Forest Service but to provide advice that the Secretary and Chief may act on as they deem appropriate. Nonetheless, the Committee recognizes that such concepts as focal species, ecological integrity, and the use of scientific information may involve technical issues and that the Committee thus has an obligation to the Secretary and the Chief to provide some insight on how this framework for ecological sustainability might be converted from concept to application. Therefore, while our approach has not been field-tested, the Committee has drafted the following regulatory language, that, we believe, provides a useful approach to this issue.

Committee's Proposed Regulation on Ecological Sustainability Back to Top

36 CFR Sec. 219. Ecological Sustainability.

A. Goals. Nature provides many goods, services, and values to humans. These ecological benefits occur as two, major, interdependent forms: the variety of native plants and animals and the products of ecological systems, such as clean water, air, and fertile soil.

The most fundamental goal of the National Forest System is to maintain and restore ecological sustainability, the long-term maintenance of the diversity of native plant and animal communities and the productive capacity of ecological systems. Ecological sustainability is the foundation of national forest stewardship and makes it possible for the national forests and grasslands to provide a wide variety of benefits to present and future generations.

B. Diversity. Ecosystems are inherently dynamic; changes regularly result from natural events, such as floods, fires, or insect outbreaks. Human intervention, such as through forest cutting and water diversions, is often substantial. Thus, because species must have the capability and opportunity to respond adaptively to changes in their environment, species diversity and ecological processes can only be sustained if the essential elements of the natural dynamics of ecosystems are recognized and accommodated when human intervention occurs. Planners and managers must apply the best available scientific information and analysis so that the diversity and adaptive capability of ecosystems will be maintained and restored.

1. Levels of diversity. Ecological diversity must be considered at three hierarchical levels: ecosystems, species, and genes, all of which are necessary parts of a strategy to sustain species values and ecological goods and services. Ecosystem diversity, including landscape diversity, is the coarsest level of resolution in this hierarchy. Ecosystems are physical envionments and the associated communities of interacting plants and animals. Ecosystem diversity can be described by the variety of components, structures, and processes within an ecosystem and the variety among ecosystem types and functions across broad areas, such as watersheds, landscapes, and regions. Ecosystem diversity provides essential elements for sustaining individual species and the productive capacity of ecosystems. Species diversity refers to variation in the number and relative abundance of species (including subspecies and distinct populations) within a given area. To maintain species diversity, individual species must have the capability and opportunity to respond adaptively to their environment. Genetic diversity, the finest level of resolution in this hierarchy, refers to the degree of variation in heritable characteristics (including life histories) within and among individual organisms and populations.

2. Use of surrogate approaches. Ecological diversity is expressed at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Explicitly describing and managing all elements of diversity and their interconnections within a single assessment or planning effort is beyond the capacity of the agency. Thus, planners must identify surrogate approaches that rely on a subset of ecological measurements that are sensitive to management and indicative of overall diversity. Although all three levels of diversity are essential to providing ecological sustainability, the most developed scientific knowledge and assessment strategies relevant to broad-scale resource management occur at the ecosystem (especially landscape scales) and species levels. Accordingly, this section primarily addresses ecosystem and species diversity.

C. Ecosystem Diversity. The first step in providing for ecological sustainability is to sustain the variety and functions of ecosystems across multiple spatial scales, from microsites to large landscapes, to maintain the diversity of native plant and animal communities and the productive capacity of ecological systems.

1. Management standards: ecological integrity. The decisions of resource managers must be based upon the best available scientific information and analysis to provide for conditions that support ecological integrity sufficient to meet the goals of this section. The ecological integrity of an ecosystem can be defined as the completeness of the composition, structure, and processes that are characteristic of the native states of that system. Ecosystems with high ecological integrity continue to express the evolutionary and biogeographic processes that gave rise to the current biota; have a species composition, diversity, and functional organization expected from natural habitats of the region; and are resilient to environmental change and disturbance occurring within their natural range of variability. As part of this analysis, planning must address needs for variation in frequencies and intensities of fire and in-stream flows of water, and, as appropriate, establish standards for fire regimes and for quantity and quality of water needed to meet aquatic goals. Ecological integrity should be analyzed at appropriate spatial and temporal scales and consider the cumulative effects of human and natural disturbances.

2. Assessment and planning. Measures of ecosystem integrity shall be developed in regional assessments based on scientific principles and knowledge of local conditions. As national forests and grasslands may comprise only a portion of the landscape under consideration, coordination with other landowners and institutions concerning probable future conditions is critical. Planning documents must explicitly set forth the constraints and opportunities for sustaining ecological systems presented by jurisdictional patterns and varying land management objectives. In general, in assessing and planning for ecosystem integrity, the planning process must address the larger physical landscape (its historical legacy, its current condition, its biological potential, and its expected changes over successional time) both within and beyond the national forests and grasslands.

3. Validation. The assumption that coarse-filter elements can serve as a basis of sustaining native species diversity shall be validated through monitoring and research. The best available scientific information and analysis shall be used to assess this assumption in a timely manner. If this assumption is invalid, then additional coarse-filter elements will be required, or modification of the coarse-filter approach will be needed, and appropriate management action shall be taken to meet the goals of this section.

D. Species Diversity. A second step in providing for ecological sustainability is to sustain the diversity of native plant and animal communities through maintaining and restoring the viability of the species that comprise them. The goal of this section is to provide the ecological conditions needed to protect and, as necessary, restore the viability of native species.

1. Focal species. The primary obligation in the selection of focal species is to provide for the diversity of native species. However, since it is not feasible to assess the viability of all species, this section will employ focal species to provide for plant and animal diversity. The status of a single species, or group of species, such as a functional guild of species, can convey information about the status of the larger ecological system in which it resides or about the integrity of specific habitat or ecosystem processes. Regional assessments shall select an appropriate number of focal species that represent the range of environments within the planning area, serve an umbrella function in terms of encompassing habitats needed for many other species, play key roles in maintaining community structure or processes, and are sensitive to the changes likely to occur.

2. Management standards: species viability. The decisions of resource managers must be based upon the best available scientific information and analysis to provide ecological conditions needed to protect and, as necessary, restore the viability of focal species and of threatened, endangered, and sensitive species.* A viable species is defined as consisting of self-sustaining populations that are well distributed throughout the species's range. Self-sustaining populations are those that are sufficiently abundant and have sufficient diversity to display the array of life-history strategies and forms that will provide for their persistence and adaptability in the planning area over time.

3. Validation. The assumption that focal species are providing reliable information about the status and trend of species not being directly monitored shall be validated through monitoring and research. The best available scientific information and analysis shall be used to assess this assumption in a timely fashion. If this assumption is invalidated for a given focal species, then such focal species shall be augmented or replaced by species that better meet the criteria, and appropriate management action shall be taken to meet the goals of this section.

E. Implementation. The determinations required regarding ecosystem integrity and species viability shall be made at the appropriate planning level. Decisions at each level must be consistent with such determinations. For example, viability determinations for wide-ranging species are best made at the regional scale. Planners and managers must then demonstrate consistency with this determination in all subsequent decisions made at finer scales of planning, including the project level.

F. Monitoring. Effective monitoring is a critical aspect of achieving ecological sustainability. Monitoring, which must be an ongoing process, provides a better understanding of how to sustain ecosystems and serves as an "early warning system" to detect declines in ecosystem integrity and species viability before irreversible loss has occurred. The monitoring program must select indicators of ecosystem integrity and species viability, develop methods for measuring such indicators, designate critical indicator values that would trigger changes in management practices, obtain data to determine whether such critical values are being approached, and interpret those data in relation to past and potential management decisions. If analysis and assessment concludes that some critical values are being approached, then the appropriate plan must be reevaluated to determine whether amendments are necessary to comply with the provisions of this section.

G. Development of Viability Assessment Methods and Conservation Strategies. Regional assessments shall develop methods for assessing ecosystem diversity and species diversity, including methods for assessing ecological integrity and the viability of focal, threatened, endangered, and sensitive species, and shall apply them to estimate the likely condition of ecosystems and species. These assessments shall also propose strategies for use in testing the effectiveness of plans in conserving ecosystem diversity and species diversity.

H. Evaluation of Plans. The following evaluations shall occur during planning: (1) an evaluation of the plan's capability to provide for the ecological conditions necessary to support ecosystem diversity and species diversity and (2) an independent review, before publication of the plans, by Forest Service and other scientists of the effectiveness of the plan in meeting the goals of this section. The results from this work shall be made available to the public.

* NOTE: Sensitive species should be defined in the definitions section of the planning regulations (219.2). This definition will read as follows: Sensitive Species. Those species identified as sensitive under the Forest Service's sensitive species program, currently set out in the Forest Service Manual, Chapter 2670.

6B. Water and Watersheds Back to Top

Because watersheds are typically embedded within broad biophysical regions, their individual characteristics, functions, and processes have an important role in the maintenance of biodiversity and ecological integrity. While watersheds are simply geographic areas, the degree to which ecosystem functions and processes operate within them provides an important perspective regarding their overall "integrity" (i.e., the quality or state of being unimpaired, sound). At a variety of landscape scales, human uses, either individually or collectively, have influenced the character and integrity of many national forests and grasslands. As a result, there is an increasing need to protect watersheds in which modifications have been minimal and integrity remains relatively intact. Such key watersheds can provide important refugia to species and can provide important references for demonstrating how relatively intact systems operate. The identification of key watersheds should thus be a high priority in any planning effort.

A loss or degradation of watershed integrity can occur in many ways: a loss or reduction in specific species or their abundance; a change in the timing, amount, or quality of ecosystem outputs; a change in the physical structure of the stream; or some combination of these and other factors. Historically, many human uses have occurred on national forests and grasslands, and many of these have contributed to altering watershed integrity, both locally and at landscape scales. For example, loss of watershed integrity might be represented by a reduction in beaver populations, alteration in the abundance and distribution of wild ungulates, a change in fire regimes, extensive use of short-rotation and evenaged silvicultural systems, modification of streamflow and sediment regimes, introduction of nonnative plant and animal species, season-long grazing, high-density recreation use, private land uses associated with adjacent landowners (particularly where mixed ownership patterns prevail), and others. Because restoration of impacted watersheds is generally considered to be more difficult than maintaining intact systems, planners and managers must continually strive to prevent and minimize the occurrence of significant impacts to national forest and grassland ecosystems.

The Legal Mandate to Conserve Watersheds Back to Top

Watershed protection has always been a central theme in national forest law and policy. When Congress authorized the president to establish forest reserves in the 1891 Creative Act, the overwhelming reason was to meet the request of municipalities and irrigation districts for watershed protection. In the 1897 Organic Act, the first listed purpose of the forest reserves was "securing favorable conditions of water flows." Timber production was the other announced purpose, but logging proponents regularly assured Congress that watershed functions would not be compromised. The Weeks Act of 1911 was also a watershed protection statute. The Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960 lists watershed purposes as one of the multiple uses and, taking the long view, provides for "the maintenance in perpetuity of a high-level of regular or periodic output" of the multiple uses "without impairment of the productivity of the land." While the NFMA of 1976 indicates timber, range, and other resources were important multiple uses of National Forest System lands, Congress nevertheless emphasized the importance of long-term sustainability:

Sec. 2. (6) the Forest Service ... has both a responsibility and an opportunity to be a leader in assuring that the Nation maintains a natural resource conservation posture that will meet the requirements of our people in perpetuity.

The NFMA calls for consideration and protection of water courses and watersheds in a number of places. First, the NFMA identifies water as one of the multiple uses. Second, it has specific provisions about protection of water courses and watersheds when timber harvest is considered:

(6) (g) (3) (D) insure timber will be harvested from National Forest System lands only where- (i) soil, slope, or other watershed 154

conditions will not be irreversibly damaged; ... (iii) protection is provided for streams, streambanks, shorelines, lakes, wetlands, or other bodies of water from detrimental changes in water temperatures, blockages of water courses, and deposits of sediment, where harvests are likely to seriously and adversely affect water conditions or fire habitat.

(6) (g) (3) (D) insure that clearcutting, seed tree cutting, shelterwood cutting, and other cuts designed to regenerate an evenaged stand of timber will be used as a cutting method on National Forest System lands only where- ... (v) such cuts are carried out in a manner consistent with the protection of soil, watershed, fish, wildlife, recreation, and esthetic resources, and the regeneration of the timber resource.

Other federal legislation, such as the Clean Water Act (CWA) (1972 and as amended 1987) also mandate the conservation of water resources. The overall purpose of the CWA is to "restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation's waters." To accomplish this, individual states are responsible for regulating both point and nonpoint sources of pollution by designating beneficial uses for each body of water, by defining criteria necessary to ensure these uses are met, and by implementing an antidegradation policy, which requires, at a minimum, water quality to be maintained and protected. As a component of the antidegradation policy of the CWA, high-quality waters, which represent "an outstanding national resource," such as waters of national and state parks, of wildlife refuges, and of exceptional recreational or ecological significance, should be designated and afforded a high level of protection. Waters of many national forests clearly meet these criteria.

In addition, the Federal Power Act requires the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to consider the protection of fish, wildlife, recreation, and watershed values in the relicensing of federal dams. This authority could have important implications for the protection of water resources and associated beneficial uses as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nonfederal dams come up for licensing in the next few decades. (See Sidebar 6-3.)

Watershed Integrity and Restoration Back to Top

Where watershed conditions, functions, or processes on national forests and grasslands have been significantly altered by human activities, the restoration of those conditions, functions, and processes should assume a high priority. From an aquatic perspective, the National Research Council (1992) defined restoration as representing

"re-establishment of pre-disturbance aquatic functions and related physical, chemical, and biological characteristics; ... it is a holistic process not achieved through the isolated manipulation of individual elements."

"Disturbance" in this context refers to the intensive land use that has often occurred in the past 50 to 150 years in the west and much longer in the east. From a larger watershed or ecosystem perspective, restoration should also include the conditions, functions, and processes of riparian and terrestrial ecosystems. The definition of restoration by the National Research Council is similar in intent to the definition of ecological integrity given in Sect. 6A: "The ecological integrity of an ecosystem can be defined as the completeness of the composition, structure, and processes that are characteristic of the native states of that system. Ecosystems with high ecological integrity continue to express the evolutionary and biogeographic processes that gave rise to the current biota, have a species composition, diversity, and functional organization expected from natural habitats of the region, and are resilient to environmental change and disturbance occurring within their natural range of variability."

Restoration of watersheds and their ecosystems can often represent a major scientific and management challenge. Forest and range systems are complex (have many components and processes) and are adaptive (conditions and the biota may respond over time to changing environmental conditions and human uses). In addition, forest responses to environmental conditions and human uses are often nonlinear, demonstrating threshold behaviors (e.g., antagonisms and synergisms are common). While "restoration science" is currently developing a better understanding of factors affecting the trajectories of recovering ecosystems, managers have few models of restoration success to emulate in their planning efforts. Nevertheless, some restoration principles are beginning to emerge:

1) The historical range of natural variability of ecosystem conditions and processes at watershed and bioregional scales needs to be considered and understood as a context within which to consider planning decisions across a variety of spatial scales.

2) An important component of ecological systems is that they have developed in conjunction with, and in response to, disturbance regimes (e.g., varying hydrologic patterns at landscape and micrometeorologic scales, fires, insects, and diseases). Thus, where such regimes have been significantly altered, their reestablishment will generally be a high priority.

3) Because vegetation is a key component of natural ecosystems and often experiences the effects of land-use activities (e.g., grazing, timber harvest, and fire control policies), the ecological role of plant species and communities must be understood relative to terrestrial, riparian, and aquatic systems. Although some of this information is available in the scientific literature, it will almost always be incomplete at some level, or it may not be fully applicable to specific watershed conditions. Thus, local "reference sites" or demonstration areas of functionally intact plant communities need to be identified, protected, and used to gain local understanding and experience of related functions and processes.

4) The history of resource development and land-use patterns associated with national forests and grasslands must be understood within watersheds and across bioregions. This information may be critical not only for understanding the present status and trends of various resources but also for identifying potential reasons for existing conditions. Because many watershed effects have occurred prior to the current generation of resource managers, understanding historical trends in resource conditions often provides important insights for developing restoration strategies and plans.

Because of the numerous local and landscape-scale modifications to vegetation, to soil characteristics, to disturbance regimes, and to the distribution and abundance of terrestrial and aquatic species that have occurred on many national forests and grasslands as a result of human uses, there is increasing recognition in the scientific community of the need to protect watersheds, particularly those portions of watersheds that currently remain in good ecological condition. In other situations where resource degradation has occurred, the restoration of watershed processes and functions is a high priority. Although restoration can take a number of pathways, two general approaches are commonly recognized: passive and active. As an example of the passive approach, many areas are capable of ecological recovery simply by stopping or removing the human perturbations that originally contributed to degradation. In such situations, the natural disturbance regimes are likely still operating, and the biota are sufficiently resilient to recover, despite the effects of previous management practices and the occurrence of natural disturbances. This approach to restoration is considered to be "passive" and may be the most effective approach for wide number of situations. In other instances, degradation may have been so extensive that more direct intervention is required before restoration can occur. This approach might include such practices as stand-density reductions before the reintroduction of fire, removal of an exotic species that competes with native species, reintroduction of a locally extirpated species, decostruction of highly erosive roads, and others. This more proactive approach represents "active" restoration. However, in both situations the general improvement of ecological functions and related physical, chemical, and biological characteristics is the goal.

Key Elements in a Strategy for Conserving and Restoring Watersheds Back to Top

To conserve and restore watersheds, we suggest a six-part strategy:

1) Provide conditions for the viability of native riparian and aquatic species. The status of native riparian and aquatic species is typically an important indicator of watershed condition. Thus, it is important that native riparian and aquatic species be included as candidate focal species in the analysis, as discussed in Sect. 6A , to provide for the ecological conditions needed to conserve native species. In particular, threatened, endangered, and sensitive riparian and aquatic species should receive extensive consideration in the analysis. The needs of these species should represent a driving force in developing goals and standards for areas near streams and in estimating the overall ecological conditions of watersheds.

2) Maintain and restore watershed integrity. Watershed integrity is the expression of ecological integrity at the scale of a watershed. Based on the definition of ecological integrity in Sect. 6A, watersheds with high integrity continue to express the historic and biogeographic processes that gave rise to the current biota; have a species composition, diversity, and functional organization expected from natural habitats of the region; and are resilient to environmental change and disturbance occurring within their natural range of variability. In the discussion above, we defined restoration as the reestablishment of functions and related physical, chemical, and biological characteristics. While the wording is somewhat different for these two definitions, both have a similar intent. Controlling, modifying, and, in some instances, eliminating land-use disturbances that adversely affect watersheds are important components of maintaining and restoring watershed integrity.

The maintenance of flow regimes is of fundamental importance to sustaining riparian and aquatic systems. The protection and long- term maintenance of flow regimes in many areas will likely require the Forest Service, as a high priority, to pursue the development and attainment of in-stream flow claims and to follow through on its legal mandate to set conditions for the relicensing of nonfederal dams for flow regimes and fish and wildlife. For degraded watersheds, improving their integrity will require the reestablishment of aquatic functions and related physical, chemical, and biological characteristics to within the historical range of natural variability. Again, as indicated by the National Research Council (1992), restoration is a holistic process not achieved through the isolated manipulation of individual elements.

3) Recognize watersheds in assessment and planning. Assessment and planning efforts directed at conserving and restoring watershed integrity can generally be most effective when watersheds are used as the organizing concept for analysis. The cumulative effects of historical and ongoing management practices upon various environmental measures (e.g., erosion and sediment production, riparian habitat, water quality, and aquatic species) often become manifest in a watershed context. Thus, Forest Service efforts directed at ecosystem protection and restoration should consider watersheds as their fundamental landscape unit, to the extent practical, in both assessment and planning.

4) Develop an overall strategy for setting priorities for restoration and use. A common saying among the watershed community is to "save the best, restore the rest." From an ecological, cultural, political, and economic perspective, it is almost always easier to protect intact and functioning ecosystems than it is to restore degraded ones. Thus, it is important that assessments classify watersheds as to their current ecological condition and integrity. Planning should then use this information in deciding where protection is warranted and where land-use management and restoration activities should occur.

Generally, management should be cautious in taking risks in watersheds in good condition; there is too much at stake. Sometimes, minimal standards for watershed condition are used to set limits on activities, allowing for the deterioration of watersheds with high integrity, as all watersheds approach a common level. In general, such an approach should be avoided: management in different watersheds should reflect the values of concern and the characteristics and conditions of the watershed itself. Where watershed conditions have diverged significantly from the historical range of natural variability, opportunities for restoration should be considered in planning efforts. In these situations, land managers may want to assume a risk of short-term ecological impacts to attain long-term restoration goals.

At both the site-specific and aggregate scales, it is important to limit the adverse effects of land-use disturbances, particularly those that are unrepresentative of the natural disturbance regimes or that have significant unintended consequences to species, productivity, water quality, and other watershed conditions. At the same time, it is important to encourage land uses that emulate natural disturbance regimes. In this manner, and over the long term, undesirable cumulative effects of land use can be controlled and minimized at both site-specific and watershed scales.

5) Energize the people of the watershed to help. Most watersheds of any size contain a mixture of federal and nonfederal lands. Often, national forests cover the upper watershed and private landowners hold the rest. Or national forests might cover the entire watershed except those lands adjacent to rivers and major streams. Collaborative stewardship by all the landowners, along with state and local governments and the public, will be needed for successful conservation and restoration of these watersheds. Watershed councils can often motivate and direct crucial voluntary conservation efforts.

6) Monitor watershed condition over time as part of adaptive management. Restoration efforts need to be monitored as part of the adaptive management approach to natural resources. Such efforts, which may ultimately succeed or fail, should be tracked and reported in an open manner. Monitoring is of fundamental importance for learning about the effects of various management practices because it provides the linkage between the original management decisions and the consequences of those decisions. Because not all attributes of a particular watershed or plan can be tracked in any given monitoring program, monitoring efforts need to be directed at selected components, those that provide immediate feedback to land-use managers and the public about the ecological integrity of the watershed.

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6-3. The Importance of FERC Relicensing to Fish and Wildlife and Watersheds

The Federal Power Act (FPA) regulates most hydroelectric development, covering all nonfederal hydropower projects on navigable waters of the United States, on federal lands, and on nonnavigable waters subject to Commerce Claims jurisdiction. The FPA was enacted in 1920 and amended several times since then. The latest amendments, embodied in the Electric Consumers Protection Act of 1986, are intended to strengthen the FPA's protection of nonpower values though giving more authority to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the independent federal agency responsible for implementing the FPA, to adequately safeguard fish, wildlife, water quality, and other public uses of the nation's waters.

The FPA authorizes FERC to issue hydropower licenses for up to 50 years if the license is deemed to be in the public interest. In determining whether licensing a project would be in the public interest, FERC must examine all relevant issues and must give consideration to both power and nonpower values of the resource. Nonpower values include "the protection, mitigation of damage to, and enhancement of fish and wildlife (including related spawning grounds and habitat), the protection of recreational opportunities, and the preservation of other aspects of environmental quality" 16 USC 803(a). The public interest involved is the same, regardless of whether the application is for a license to construct a project or a license to operate an existing project. Moreover, the FPA mandates license terms that provide "adequate and equitable" protection, mitigation, and enhancement measures for fish and wildlife and their habitat 16 USC 803 (j).

Hydropower development and relicensing proposals on federal reserved lands (e.g., national forests) are subject to two additional requirements. First, FERC cannot license a project that would be inconsistent with the purpose of the national forests. Second, the federal land management agency in charge of the reservation can prescribe mandatory license conditions deemed necessary to protect and carry out the purpose of the reservation (16 USC 797 (e)). A federal agency's conditioning authority, however, cannot be exercised arbitrarily; it must be reasonably related to the protection of the reservation.

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6C. Identifying the Suitability of Lands for Different Types of Resource Management Back to Top

The National Forest Management Act, Sect. 6 (g) states that guidelines are to be developed that "... require identification of the suitability of lands for resource management." The classification of lands as to their suitability for different kinds of resource management should be made during planning for large landscapes. Land classifications are often needed to support decisions at various levels and can be incorporated into the land and resource management plan. Furthermore, the identification of lands not suited for timber production should be a subset of the identification of the suitability of lands for different types of resource management.

The planning process should classify (zone) lands by suitable types of resource management: habitat preservation, water-quality management, timber production, range management, and recreation. Some lands might be classified as suitable for all types of management; others might only be suitable for one type. Site-specific analysis might be necessary to refine the estimates of where activities could actually occur and the form they could take.

The most complicated portion of this analysis addresses resource management involving timber harvest and timber production, where timber production is defined as a long-term commitment to produce commercial timber volume. NFMA states "Sec. 6 (k) In developing land management plans pursuant to this Act, the Secretary shall identify lands within the management area which are not suited for timber production, considering physical, economic, and other pertinent factors to the extent feasible, as determined by the Secretary, and shall assure that, except for salvage sales or sales necessitated to protect other multiple-use values, no timber harvesting shall occur on these lands for a period of 10 years."

Under this clause, timber harvest can occur for the "protection of other multiple-use values," even where the forest is not suitable for timber production. Thus, lands suitable for resource management involving timber harvest need two subcategories: (1) where timber harvest is prohibited and (2) where timber harvest is permitted. When timber harvest is permitted, however, it might be either (1) for protection of other multiple-use values, even though timber production is not a goal, or (2) for timber production as one of several goals.

Given this complexity, it is not surprising that identifying the lands " not suited for timber production considering physical, economic, and other pertinent factors to the extent feasible..." has perplexed analysts since the passage of the NFMA. However, the criterion of economic efficiency broadly defined should eliminate many of these conflicts. For example, lands should be viewed as unsuited for timber production if the costs of regeneration, including using a reasonable discount rate, cannot be covered by the benefits (returns) from the future timber sales. In this case, these lands should not be allocated to timber production; such an allocation would be inconsistent with efficient attainment of long-term sustainability. Timber harvest should occur on these lands only to "protect other multiple-use values." Lands may also be unsuitable because of environmental damages associated with the harvest (e.g., serious erosion or water-quality deterioration) that exceed any surplus of harvest revenues over harvest costs. Similarly, economic criteria suggest that below-cost timber sales do not pass the efficiency test and therefore should not be undertaken unless justified by the achievement of some other end of sufficient value to justify the revenue losses. For example, if the below-cost activity generated substantial values in turkey browse to compensate for the losses, the activity would be meet the efficiency criteria. The careful use of economic criteria should eliminate many of the questionable practices of the past. We do believe these problems are solvable by appropriate analysis of revenues and costs. Furthermore, such problems can be avoided by using the scientifically credible, participatory planning process that is recommended in the report and by striving to attain the overarching goal of sustainability.

6D. The Role of Timber Harvest in Achieving Sustainability

Silvicultural Aspects of the National Forest Management Act Back to Top

The National Forest Management Act (NFMA) was most prescriptive in its sections on silvicultural practices within forested landscapes. This prescriptiveness becomes especially evident in a comparison of the detailed instruction in the section quoted below and the broad language on biological diversity within the Act. Yet whatever regulations are written for the national forests and grasslands, it is important that they allow flexibility in designing methods and systems to create and maintain the species composition, stand structure, and processes that are the foundation of ecological sustainability and that, in turn, sustain healthy economies and human communities. The Committee believes that NFMA provides adequate flexibility for the conditions of today and, we hope, of tomorrow.

In the discussion below, the need is emphasized for regional assessment to provide information on the characteristics of stands and landscapes that historically occurred in the different forest types (such as ponderosa pine or mixed conifer forests) and landscape units (such as mountain ranges, watersheds, or the range of some species). This information would then be used to guide and limit the silvicultural approaches to achieving stand and landscape objectives, including the selection of silvicultural systems and restocking standards.

Silviculture Back to Top

When managing for ecological, economic, and social sustainability, silvicultural practices should strive to emulate the effects of natural disturbance processes, such as fire, wind, insects, and disease, on the forest. This approach applies at both the stand and landscape levels and addresses both the temporal (recurrance interval) and spatial (extent) components of natural disturbances. In forests managed for timber production, regeneration harvest methods (clearcut, shelterwood, and selection) can simulate natural landscape-level (coarse-scale) disturbances that have periodically reinitiated succession. These methods represent a gradient of disturbance intensities from the high-intensity disturbance of clearcutting to the moderate disturbance of selection harvest. Silvicultural systems, such as even-aged, two-aged, and uneven-aged, that are achieved and maintained through various silvicultural activities, such as thinning, can mimic the structural conditions produced by different types and intensities of stand-level (fine-scale) natural disturbances.

In general, silvicultural systems were originally designed to achieve natural regeneration after harvest because the technology for planting stock (seedlings) had not yet been developed. The Committee suggests that, for reasons of genetic diversity, natural regeneration and the systems that provide it be considered specifically in the regulatory process.

6(g)(3)(D) ... permit increases in harvest levels based on intensified management practices ... [the "allowable-cut effect"]

From a silvicultural perspective, the linkage between intensified management practices and increases in harvest levels is certainly understandable. Intensified management often means increased growth, which, in turn, translates into increased harvest levels under an even-flow (or nondeclining-yield) constraint. The reality, however, is that the increased timber yield implied in this provision has not always materialized in the past, and it is questionable whether it will be a primary focus of future investment on much of the National Forest System lands.

Allowable sale quantities (ASQs) for many forest plans were derived from stand-level growth-and-yield estimates based on assumptions of intensive silvicultural practices (e.g., precommercial thinning, commercial thinnings, and fertilization). The stand-level projections were generally reasonable if intensive silvicultural practices had actually been used; in many cases, however, they had not been implemented at the scales envisioned in the plans. For this and other reasons, the projected ASQs for many planning areas have proven overly optimistic. If estimates of future timber yields are to be part of planning analysis, they should be based on realistic land-use allocations as well as realistic assumptions concerning investment in silvicultural practices. Put another way, a silviculture system designed to capture the potential timber productivity of a site is simply a theoretical exercise if there is little likelihood of its implementation.

6 (g) (3) (E) ... insure that timber will be harvested from National Forest System lands only where ... (ii) there is assurance that such lands can be adequately restocked within five years after harvest.

In this context, "harvest" applies only to "regeneration methods," such as clearcutting, selection, or the initial cut to establish a shelterwood or seed-tree system, that are intended to precede the establishment of a new stand. We presume that it does not refer to thinning, sanitation, or other harvests not intended to regenerate a new stand. We believe that the intent of this provision is to minimize situations in which combinations of difficult sites and inappropriate silvicultural methods result in regeneration failures. There are still, for example, many acres of poorly stocked spruce-fir clearcuts in the Central Rockies dating from the 1960s.

Two major questions immediately surface in interpreting this provision:

When does the five-year clock begin when the overstory is removed in a sequence of harvests?

Does the clause require that the sites in question "will be" restocked within five years or that they "could be" restocked within that period?

We recommend that "... adequately restocked within five years after harvest" should correspond to the period following cutting (e.g., five years after clearcutting, five years after a seed-tree cutting, five years after a cutting to establish a shelterwood, and five years after selection cutting). An alternative, and the current regulation, would be to start the five-year clock at the final harvest, regardless of the silvicultural system used. Although this alternative works for clearcuts, it makes no sense for other even-aged harvest methods, such as shelterwood or seed tree. With these methods, some trees are left on the site to provide shelter for seedlings and/or seed for natural regeneration. The final harvest, in which the remaining large trees are cut, is not intended to occur until the new seedlings are well established and regeneration is deemed successful, at which point, no clock is necessary. For these methods, then, the biological clock should begin with the initial cut, not the final harvest.

The Committee further recommends that the clause should be interpreted as "could be" adequately restocked rather than "will be" adequately restocked, within constraints discussed below. The reasoning is that, under ecosystem management, it will be important to consider natural regeneration for the maintenance of genetic diversity. Interpreting the clause to mean that sites "will be" restocked within five years of harvest, rather than "could be" restocked, could have a chilling effect on the willingness of managers to give natural regeneration a chance.

Consider, for example, shelterwoods on which natural regeneration of trees has a very high probability of success and the trees themselves are considered valuable for maintaining genetic diversity. If the parent trees on the site are not expected to produce good seed crops for several years, artificial regeneration (planting seedlings) may be necessary to ensure that the site is replanted within five years. Artificial regeneration could become the norm and perhaps even the default, possibly resulting in a loss of genetic diversity and adaptive potential.

This situation may occur even after natural disturbance, such as a fire, because regeneration on such sites takes more that five years on the average. The question has important implications in areas ranging from economics to conservation biology. In some cases, policies designed to address regeneration delays have produced high-yield stands with little or no range in age and little species diversity. Therefore, we make the following recommendation:

1) Any proposal for harvest should be based on the objectives for the stand and broader landscape and on an assessment of appropriate regeneration methods for each combination of major forest type and land-scape unit within each major region. (See the discussion concerning 6 (g) (3) (F) and 6 (g) (3) (F) (iv) below.) As a starting point in the analysis, the regional assessment would highlight the potential for successful regeneration in the major forest types and conditions likely to be encountered in the region. Through this process, the assessment would rule out forest types and/or landscape conditions in which it had not been shown, through experience or research, that it was possible with established techniques to restock an area within five years after harvest. This analysis, would serve as a first step in addressing lands "marginal" for restocking within five years.

2) An assessment of the potential for artificial and natural regeneration should accompany each silvicultural prescription associated with a proposed regeneration harvest. These harvests can be considered only if the site can be adequately restocked within five years.

3) In the silvicultural prescription, the basis for a conclusion that the site can be successfully restocked within five years would be presented. Potential evidence for this conclusion could include successful regeneration within five years on similar sites based on research findings or past experience. This process will serve as a second screen in eliminating lands marginal for restocking.

4) Natural regeneration would be permitted, even if it took more than five years, if conditions were being created through regeneration harvest that would allow the stand to reestablish naturally as has occurred through-out history in that type and condition of forest and if this method would meet stand and landscape goals. Permanent openings many be created for wildlife habitat improvement, vistas, recreational uses, and similar practices, but, for the purposes of this section, successful natural regeneration of the stand is the goal.

5) Any determination of an allowable sale quantity must include realistic calculations of the likely time until the stand is restocked, given the likely future method of harvest.

6) A priority of the technical and scientific review of assessments, strategic plans, and project implementation (discussed elsewhere in this report) will be to examine the analysis and rationales underlying regeneration guidance and decisions.

7) Regional guidelines should be developed covering the characteristics of natural regeneration in different forest types. These guides will define adequate restocking within the guidelines of regulations under 6(G)(3)(E).

6 (g) (3) (F) ... ensure that clearcutting, seed-tree cutting, shelterwood cutting, and other cuts designed to regenerate an even-aged stand of timber will be used as a cutting method on the National Forest System lands only where: (i) for clearcutting, it has been determined to be the optimum method, and for other such cuts it is determined to be appropriate, to meet the objectives and requirements of the relevant management plan.

With respect to clearcutting, the intent of this clause seems fairly obvious: clearcutting should be used only where it can be demonstrated to be the best method for meeting the objectives for the stand and landscape; it certainly should not be the default method that it had become in the 1960s. For many species and ecosystems, a convincing argument can be made for the "optimality" of clearcutting. Such an argument could, in principle, be made for most species that regenerate in essentially even-aged stands (e.g., red alder in the Pacific Northwest, lodgepole pine in the Rockies, and aspen in the Lake States) after natural, catastrophic, stand-replacing disturbances. It should be noted, though, that characteristics (size, shape, frequency, and pattern) of openings caused by these natural catastrophic stand-replacing disturbances vary considerably among different tree species.

While clearcutting may be an obvious choice for the regeneration of such pioneering species, clearcutting is not the only way that they can be regenerated and managed. Suitable conditions for regeneration can almost always be created with a range of alternative reproduction methods (e.g., clearcutting with reserve trees, a shelterwood, and even large-group selection).

An additional requirement is that cuts designed to regenerate an even-aged stand of timber are to be used only when they, and presumably the even-aged stand structures that result, meet explicit objectives of the plan. This requirement provides a great deal of latitude, but seems to suggest that even-aged stand management should not be the default method and that alternatives should be seriously considered. It is important to note that the requirement to explore alternatives to even-aged stand management is not a requirement to adopt classic uneven-aged management. Arguably, there is not a requirement to consider classic uneven-aged management. Non-traditional reserve-tree silvicultural systems can be used to create and maintain a broad range of stand structures that fall between the extremes of classic even-aged and uneven-aged silviculture. The choice of an appropriate regeneration method and silvicultural system needs to be made within the context of the ecology of the species involved and the management objectives at both the stand and landscape scale. These evaluations should draw upon the regional analysis of appropriate regeneration methods and patch characteristics. (See discussion concerning 6 (g) (3) (F) (iv) below.)

At times, there have been attempts to list the situations under which clearcutting will be considered. Such an approach is fraught with difficulties because of the impossibility of predicting all the different situations that might occur. With such a list, forest managers would be forced to fit any of the circumstances under which they would like to consider clearcutting into some category on the list, whether it really fit or not, which would lead to the inevitable claims of deception and fraud. The Committee believes that cases where managers would like to use clearcutting should be clearly justified as the best regeneration method for that situation and that each case should be judged by that criterion.

6(G)3(F)(iii) É cut blocks, patches, or strips are shaped and blended to the extent practicable with the natural terrain;

In general, there are abundant patch cuts where such blending with the natural terrain has not been done and others where it has been done quite well. The shaping of cut blocks has a critical visual impact and greatly influences the social acceptability of clearcutting. Straight lines are sometimes unavoidable, but we recommend that the intent of the law, even with the proviso "to the extent practicable," be reemphasized in the new regulations.

6 (g) (3) (F) (iv) ... according to geographic areas, forest types, or other suitable classi- fications the maximum size limits for areas to be cut in one harvest operation ... .

At the time NFMA was passed, there was concern and controversy over the large clearcut squares that were appearing on the national forests. Much of this concern was from a visual perspective. This clause was one attempt in NFMA to address the clearcutting issue and its unsightly effects. Setting upper limits on clearcuts and other even-aged methods seemed a useful way to address the problem at the time. In the context of ecosystem management, though, the limits can result in detrimental, unintended effects.

General implementation of this provision could be a prescription for fragmentation of the forest into patterns that have not been experienced historically though natural disturbance regimes. As forest managers have become interested in management (and silviculture) reflecting natural disturbance regimes, it has become less certain that simply restricting the size of the patch created by even-aged harvest is the best approach for determining the size of disturbance created through harvest. To emulate natural disturbances, it may be important to set minimum sizes as well as maximums and to have objectives for the overall pattern of disturbance on the broader landscape.

Analysis of the historical characteristics of disturbances should be undertaken in regional assessments for each major forest type and landscape unit within the region. The assessment should consider the types of silvicultural systems potentially useful in the recreation of these disturbance characteristics. Out of this analysis should come minimum and maximum sizes of disturbances in different forest types and landscapes and also information on the historical frequency, intensity, and pattern of disturbances.

Timber Removals, Sustained Yield, and the Desired Future Condition Back to Top

The National Forests Management Act specifies limitations on timber removals as follows:

Sec. 11 Limitations on Timber Removal-

(a) The Secretary of Agriculture shall limit the sale of timber from each national forest to a quantity equal to or less than a quantity which can be removed on such a forest annually in perpetuity on a sustained yield basis; Provided, that in order to meet overall multiple-use objectives, the Secretary may establish an allowable sale quantity for any decade which departs from the projected long-term average sale quantity that would otherwise be established; Provided further, that any such planned departure must be consistent with the multiple-use management objectives of the land management plan.

(b) Nothing in subsection (a) of this section shall prohibit the Secretary from salvage or sanitation harvesting of timber stands which are substantially damaged by fire, windthrow, or other catastrophe, or which are in imminent danger from insect or disease attack. The Secretary may either substitute such timber for timber that would otherwise be sold under the plan or, if not feasible, sell such timber over and above plan volume.

During the 1980s, this "sustained-yield" clause received considerable attention as one of the major considerations in land and resource planning. As an example, the primary function of FORPLAN, the primary analysis tool used by the Forest Service in planning, was to calculate harvest levels that met the provisions of this clause. With the broadened definition of sustainability advocated in this report, the use and function of this clause may change somewhat, but the national forests will still need to demonstrate compliance with it in land and resource planning.

It is highly likely that Congress expected that a significant majority of timber removals from the national forests would fall under the timber removal restrictions of Sec. 11a, since that was the case during the period in which the law was created. In recent years, though, timber harvest volume on the national forests has come from lands on which timber removal is a byproduct of achieving other goals or from salvage. It can be argued that Sec. 11a applies most directly to green volume on lands where timber production is a goal. Unless timber production is a goal, it is difficult to calculate the long-term sustained yield essential to operating the provisions of Sec. 11a. Also, salvage volume is inherently unpredictable. In writing regulations to implement this provision, the Forest Service will need to clearly distinguish those categories of timber harvest to which Sec. 11a applies.

The National Forest Management Act limits timber removals to be "a quantity equal to or less than a quantity that can be removed on such a forest annually in perpetuity on a sustained yield basis" given certain provisions. The need for predictable, sustainable timber harvest levels changes over time. In the past, this sustained-yield provision was seen as an all-purpose safeguard of sustainability. The restriction on timber harvest to the level that could be sustained in perpetuity would ensure that the forest was not plundered. An even flow of timber was seen as ensuring economic and social sustainability through contributing to community stability. In recent years, though, the identification of sustainability with sustained yield has wavered. The difficulty of producing an even-flow harvest level through time arises from several sources, including the inherently dynamic nature of ecological systems. Of course, it is this inherently dynamic situation that will make management for a "desired future condition" also difficult to predict or achieve with precision. Such inescapable uncertainty has lessened the capability of sustained-yield management to contribute to "community stability." Also, questions have been raised as to whether community stability is the appropriate goal.

Still, there is the desire for predictability in timber harvest levels. Without some notion of the magnitude of likely offerings, it is improbable that investment will occur in wood-processing facilities. Ultimately, national forests may be faced with a situation in which the operators needed to undertake desired stand treatments are not available. Just as the timber industry in many parts of the country requires outputs from the national forests, the national forests need a functional timber industry to help achieve long-term goals for these lands. In addition, communities planning for their future would like to have some confidence in the amount of timber that will be coming off nearby national forests.

Thus, the more that timber harvest con- tributes to long-term sustainability, the more predictable timber outputs will be. To the degree that timber harvest works against sustainability (ecological, economic, or social), it will be unpredictable and difficult to achieve. Proposals to harvest old-growth trees where they are relatively scarce will almost always meet with resistance. Proposals to temporarily raise timber harvests above sustainable levels to address employment problems generally meet with public dismay in the last planning process. On the other hand, thinning understories to reduce fuel and produce commercial volume can meet with acceptance and approval.

Under the Committee's recommendations, forest management actions in the future would be guided by a comparison of the existing condition to the desired future condition. Where timber harvest is scheduled, these actions should be stated as a prescription that focuses first on the actions needed to achieve the desired structure and composition. The volume taken is the result of applying the prescription. While aggregating the expected volume will also be useful, and may be one of the goals of the prescription, planning, budgeting, and monitoring should focus first on the kinds and amounts of expected actions and the conditions they produce.

Past planning, which often focused on timber harvest and the allowable harvest, tended to polarize people and groups. Planning that focuses on desired future conditions and outcomes and the activities to achieve them, on the other hand, gives the Forest Service its best chance to unify people on the management of the national forests and grasslands.

Budgeting by amount and type of actions needed, rather than volume harvested, will ensure that the needed treatments occur. Currently, the understandable tendency is to tackle the easy treatments to get the stated volume; accountability by type of treatment will help reduce that.

The expected outcomes following a specific management action should guide the design of the monitoring program. The degree to which outcomes correspond to expectation will provide a key piece of information about progress toward the desired future condition. This information provided by monitoring should be gathered on an annual basis from the projects that have occurred.

Large landscape plans should provide an estimate of desired conditions and a schedule of management actions to achieve them, including timber harvest, that then serve as reference points for the achievement of the restoration plan goals.

In large-landscape plans, a schedule of forest management actions needed to reach the desired conditions should be estimated along with the conditions expected to be achieved through time. The correspondence of expected management actions and conditions through time with actual management actions and conditions should be a critical measure of achievement of forest plan goals. Measurement of plan performance would be accomplished through (1) comparing, on an annual, basis, expected treatments with actual treatments and (2) comparing, every 5 to 10 years, expected conditions with those that occur. Either of those measures might have three possible outcomes: (1) concluding that management actions are moving the landscape towards the desired future conditions; (2) concluding that the treatments need to be adjusted to achieve this condition; or (3) reevaluating the desirability of the future conditions that have been identified as the goal.

External Influences on Forest Service Planning

The Budgeting Process and Planning Back to Top

For planning to be meaningful, it must correspond to the current and likely future situation. To achieve this goal, there must be some relationship between the plan and the budget available to undertake the plan.

Independence of the Planning and Budgeting Processes

One of the common criticisms of the current Forest Service planning process is its failure in implementing plans. This problem originates with the weak link between the planning process and the budget. In public meetings across the country, the Committee heard a repeated complaint: Plans often are not accompanied by matching budgets. Thus, the budget available does not provide sufficient funding to allow the plan to be implemented as developed.

The discrepancies between budgets and plans come from two sources. First, the total budget provided by Congress is typically less than that required for the planning. Second, the congressional budget is allocated by "programs" and bears little relationship to the configurations of individual forest plans. For example, the budget passed by the Congress may allow funding of 110% of the total timber called for in the plan, but only 30% of the planned recreation.

Although some have argued that budgeting is an internal problem, which the Forest Service can circumvent, it appears to be driven more by congressional prerogatives than by agency decisions. The Forest Service has some discretion in developing the initial budget request and in reallocating funds among budget categories after congressional action and also retains some funds from timber sales. In sum, though, the ability to obtain funding for the plans as approved is typically beyond the control of the Forest Service.

This problem was exacerbated in the first round of plans developed under the NFMA, where fiscal realities often received little consideration. Those plans developed both the goals for forest management and a set of actions for the plan to achieve these goals. The activity set was generally developed without restricting the budget needs to current experience. Instead, the plans were developed to help define the budget that would be needed, based on conclusions reached by the Forest Service after much analysis and public involvement.

The current budgeting process is approximately as follows:

1) The forest supervisors estimate the budget required to carry out the forest plan on an annual basis.

2) These budgets are totaled by the Forest Service and submitted to the Department of Agriculture.

3) The Department of Agriculture provides a budget ceiling, typically less than the amount requested by the Forest Service.

4) This budget goes to the Office of Management and Budget and is negotiated, with the Forest Service included in the negotiations.

5) The budget proposed by the administra-tion is presented to Congress.

6) Congress then produces a budget (based on its priorities) that is signed by the president.

The budgeting process, as described above, is largely independent of the planning process and the plans for the national forests and grasslands except that Congress generally accepts upper limits on commodity outputs, such as the allowable timber sale levels, defined in the plans. Furthermore, because the final allocations in the congressional budget are on the basis of programs, not plans, the budgeted items often relate poorly to the various plan items. Finally, the total budget appropriated by Congress is usually less than what is required to finance the forest plans.

This disconnect between budgets and plans has led to a number of unfortunate consequences. First, the Forest Service has to patch together budget provisions for the different programs to undertake the integrated management increasingly mandated by the plans and courts. Second, the unequal budgeting for different resources and outputs means that goals for each plan are unequally met. Finally, the disconnect undermines public confidence in the Forest Service's planning process as people find that the hard-earned compromises they fought for in the forest plans cannot be fully implemented.

Improving the Relationship Between Land and Resource Management Planning and Budgets Back to Top

In concept, the RPA/NFMA envisioned that Congress would craft thoughtful and deliberate budgets to complement widely accepted forest plans. If Congress paid close heed to the plans and their components, funding presumably would reflect the size and priorities of the plans.

Some have argued that alternative approaches to budgeting are likely to be more efficient. For example, the National Park Service receives Congressional funding by individual park. Such an approach has been suggested for the Forest Service, and in fact, the Quincy Library legislation provides for separate funding for the National Forests of Northern Sierra Nevada in California. If Congress were to use a line-item, forest-by-forest funding approach to provide the total Forest Service budget, the correspondence between forest plans and budgets might improve.

Within the current budgeting process, however, some changes could be undertaken to enhance the connection between likely budgets and plan assumptions about them. The Committee recognizes that for plans developed under the NFMA to have any credibility, there must be some reasonable expectation that those plans can be implemented. In general, the recommendations below recognize that planning must adhere to the likely budget rather than assuming that the budget will adhere to the plan. At the same time, the suggestions below allow for the role of planning in describing possibilities, the "wish list" for the national forests and grasslands that might be achieved with sufficient funds.

The Central Role of Budgets:

Affecting the Rate of Achievement of the Desired Future Condition

In general, strategic (large-landscape) plans should focus on long-term goals for management of the national forests and grasslands and different areas within them, leaving the details of achievement of these goals to the tactical, year-to-year implementation (small-landscape) plans. In our model, strategic plans focus on setting the goals for different areas of the public lands and the desired future conditions and outcomes associated with these goals. The plans also estimate the pathway (mix of actions over time and expected conditions along the way) to achieve the desired future condition considering likely budgets.

It would be useful for the strategic plans to outline progress toward achieving desired future conditions and outcomes under a number of budget levels, in addition to expected budgets, and to estimate how these budgets would affect progress. As an example, hazard reduction needed to achieve the desired future condition would take a long time under current budgets but could be expedited under a higher budget level. This type of information would be useful in formulating budget requests and in alerting the public to the implications of different budget levels.

In each year, analysis of the actions needed to move toward the long-term goals would provide the basis of the budget request. Resulting budgets would determine the mix of actions actually used to move toward the goals and how rapidly progress would be made.

Under this scheme, year-to-year budget variations would not necessitate changes in the choice of the desired future condition of the forest. However, reduced or increased budgets would likely change the time it would take to achieve those conditions.

It would be useful to all those interested in management of the national forests and grasslands to understand how the annual budget level and distribution among programs are affecting progress toward long-term goals. Therefore, an annual report should be published that outlines the budget for the year for each forest and its impact on progress toward long-term goals. Also, as plans are revised, they should compare actual budgets for the plan period to those that were expected.

The Role of Budgeting in Setting the Desired Future Condition

In setting the desired future condition (the long-term goals for management of the national forests), two aspects of budgeting must be considered. First, it would be important to understand whether the budgets required to maintain the desired future condition, once it is achieved, are at all reasonable. As an example, some strategies for maintaining forest structures in fire-prone landscapes rely on a prescribed fire every few years. It may be that the total budgets for these activities on a given forest would add up to an amount much higher then would likely be funded. Although it is improbable that the desired future condition would stay constant over the time necessary to achieve it, it would nevertheless be instructive to evaluate the feasibility of the budget projected to maintain it. If the budget levels so calculated seem out of line with likely budgets in the long-term, planning would need to investigate other future conditions that were more compatible with likely budgets.

Second, the long-term management goals may need adjustment if it becomes clear that Congress is unlikely to fund accomplishment of those goals. Although we would not want the strategic plan to react to each year's budget level and distribution, five or ten years of budgets that systematically do not fund achievement of some goals in the strategic plan would send a signal about the realism of the plan.

The Importance of Self-Funding Programs

One way to reduce the uncertainty of budgeting is to fund activities out of a percentage share of the net returns from user fees. As many have pointed out, such an approach should reduce the dependence of the Forest Service on the vagaries of the budget process, encourage managers to be efficient in their expenditures, and provide signals indicating the value that members of the public place on different goods and services. Some forms of recreation, as an example, would seem perfect for this approach. Recent Resources Planning Act assessments suggest the American people would be willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars per year for the right to undertake recreation on national forests and grasslands. As another example, developing stand-treatment projects that contribute to sustainability while paying for themselves will be a major challenge for the next decade. While it is difficult or impossible to charge individually for collective goods, such as the protection of endangered species, self-financing activities will be one key to a stable future for programs on the national forests.

Recommendations for Improving the Relationship Between Planning and Budgeting

1) The strategic plan should concentrate on setting long-term goals and the associated desired future conditions and on making a first estimate of the pathway (mix of actions over time and conditions along the way) to achieve these future conditions. The estimated rate of accomplishment of the desired conditions should be keyed to expected budgets, along with analysis of how increased or decreased budgets will affect the rate of progress. The details of actions necessary to achieve progress toward these goals, however, should be left to implementation planning.

2) As part of strategic planning, the budgets necessary to maintain the desired future condition should be examined; if they appear unrealistic, less budget intensive desired future conditions should be considered.

3) Implementation plans, updated annually, should be the basis for budget requests.

4) Budget shortfalls will affect implementation plans and the rate of progress toward goals; they do not automatically trigger a revision in the strategic plan

5) If it becomes clear over time that Congress is unlikely to fund achievement of the long-term goals and associated desired future conditions, then the strategic plan itself may need revision. During plan revision, a comparison should be made between the expected and actual budget during the plan period.

6) An annual report should be published that outlines how the budget for the year is affecting progress toward long-term goals. [Items 5 and 6 repeat what is said on p. 209.]

7) Both strategic planning and implementation planning should consider activities that have the potential to pay for themselves in addition to activities that rely solely on appropriated funds.

8) The national forests and grasslands should continue experiments to fund entire programs for individual national forests and should report on the experience with this approach so far.

Requirements of Other Laws and Regulations Back to Top

Numerous observers, including the General Accounting Office and a former Forest Service chief, have maintained that the overlapping of various environmental laws (e.g., the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, National Forest Management Act, and Clean Water Act) generates substantial planning difficulties. Given Congress's apparent reluctance to "harmonize" the environmental laws through legislation, it appears that administrative reform is the best route to overcoming these problems. Toward that end, the Committee has made a number of suggestions throughout this report which are summarized here:

1) Representatives from agencies responsible for implementing these other laws should be included on the teams doing land and resource management planning.

2) The project review of these plans' implementation should be conducted by a team that includes representatives of these agencies.

3) A coordinated strategic plan (large-landscape plan) should be developed across federal ownerships within a region.

4) The planning processes associated with the other laws, including the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, should be examined and integrated with the planning process mandated under NFMA.

The Committee realizes that the regulatory agencies, especially the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and Environmental Protection Agency, are part of the check-and-balance system for land management to ensure that these agencies do not neglect legal mandates for protection of species and ecosystems. While the Committee fully expects the continuation of that role by these agencies, it feels that the changes suggested here will improve planning by getting the concerns of other agencies addressed early in the process and by coordinating the planning of large landscapes across agencies.

Proposed Purpose, Goals, and Principles for Inclusion in the Federal Regulations Back to Top

Past regulations implementing the National Forest Management Act have begun with a statement of purpose. We felt it would be useful to the Secretary to summarize our recommendations in a similar statement of purpose. We offer such a statement below in terms of a purpose, goals, and principles for consideration and use in the development of the next planning regulations.

36 Code of Federal

Regulations § 219.1

Purpose, Goals, and Principles

(a) Purpose. The National Forest System constitutes an extraordinary national legacy created by people of vision and preserved for future generations by diligent and far-sighted public servants and citizens. They are the people's lands, emblems of our democratic traditions.

The national forests and grasslands can provide many and diverse benefits to the American people. These include clean air and water, productive soils, biological diversity, goods and services, employment opportunities, community benefits, recreation, and naturalness. They also give us intangible qualities, such as beauty, inspiration, and wonder.

To assure the continuation of this array of benefits, sustainability should be the guiding star for stewardship of the national forests and grasslands. Like other overarching national objectives, sustainability is broadly aspirational and can be difficult to define in concrete terms. Yet, especially considering the increased human pressures on the national forests and grasslands, it becomes ever more essential that planning and management begin with this central tenet.

Sustainability is broadly recognized to be composed of interdependent elements, ecological, economic, and social. It operates on several levels. As a collective vision, sustainability means meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. As an approach to decision making, it calls for integrating the management of biological and ecological systems with their social and economic context while acknowledging that management should not compromise the basic functioning of these systems. As a measure of progress, it provides a set of criteria and indicators to guide action. Building on this foundation of sustainability, the national forests and grasslands can provide a wide variety of uses, values, products, and services that are important to so many people, including outdoor recreation, forage, timber, wildlife and fish, water use, and minerals.

The objective of planning for the National Forest System is to guide stewardship to fulfill the purposes of the national forests and

grasslands and to honor their unique place in American life. The regulations in this subpart set forth a process for developing, adopting, implementing, and revising land and resource management plans for the National Forest System as required by the National Forest Management Act of 1976 (hereafter, "NFMA"), the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Act of 1974, the Organic Act of 1897, the Multiple-Use, Sustained-Yield Act of 1960, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Clean Water Act of 1977, and other applicable statutes.

(b) Major Goals and Principles. Land and resource management planning shall strive to achieve the following major goals and embody the following principles.

Goal One. Planning strives to assure the ecological sustainability of our watersheds, forests, and rangelands.

The benefits we seek from the national forests and grasslands depend upon the long-term ecological sustainability of the watersheds, forests, and rangelands. Considering the increased human pressures on them, it becomes ever more essential that planners focus on the heart of the idea of sustainability, that our use today does not impair the functioning of ecological processes and the ability of these natural resources to contribute economically and socially in the future. Accordingly, the first priority for stewardship in the national forests and grasslands must be to maintain and restore the ecological sustainability of watersheds, forests, and rangelands for present and future generations.

While one function of the pursuit of sustainability is to chart a broad and idealistic objective, important aspects of sustainability can also be defined and measured with some precision in the planning process. First, species viability, which is essential to ecological sustainability, is a powerful metric. Second, useful measurements can be made of ecological productivity through such indicators as water purity, air quality, soil fertility, fire and flow regimes, plant growth, and the variety and distribution of forests and rangelands. By seeking to sustain biological diversity and ecological productivity by first emphasizing what we leave before we consider what we take, forest planning can play a crucial role in laying the necessary foundation for the economic and social components of sustainability: making contributions to strong, productive economies and creating opportunities for enduring human communities. At the same time, planning recognizes that ecological, economic, and social sustainability are inextricably linked; impairing the sustainability of any one aspect affects the entirety.

Principles

(a) Planning first provides for the diversity of plant and animal communities and the productive capacity of ecological systems, the core elements of ecological sustainability. Biological diversity and ecological productivity, in turn, depend on the viability of individual species. Diversity is sustained only when species persist. In addition, biological diversity and ecological productivity depend on maintaining the characteristic composition, structure, and processes of ecosystems in the presence of human and natural disturbances, on maintaining the ecological integrity of these systems.

(b) Planning must be based on science and other knowledge of the world, including the use of scientifically based strategies for sustainability. The best available ecological, economic, and social information and analysis must be the foundation of land and resource management planning. Planning should consider information from a wide range of sources, including scientists in public and private organizations as well as other knowledgeable people in tribes and local communities.

(c) Planning requires independent scientific review of assessments and plans before their publication. Regional assessments should suggest methods and strategies for providing for species viability and ecological integrity. With that information, planning should construct conservation strategies and have them reviewed for accuracy and sufficiency by Forest Service and other scientists before a plan becomes final.

(d) Plans include measures for evaluating whether stewardship goals have been achieved. Because one of the core functions of planning is to foster informed management decisions through ongoing assessment and evaluation, effective monitoring is a crucial aspect of planning and management. Additionally, independent field review by Forest Service and outside technical and scientific experts plays an important role in monitoring the contribution of plans to the sustainability of our forests, streams, and watersheds.

Goal Two. Planning promotes economic and social sustainability by providing for a wide variety of uses, values, products, and services and by enhancing society's capability to make sustainable choices.

The national forests and grasslands have been a grand experiment in providing for the multiple uses (outdoor recreation, forage, timber, wildlife and fish, water use, and minerals) of these lands on a permanent basis, following Gifford Pinchot's dictates that the lands be devoted to "their most productive use for the permanent good of the whole people ... always bearing in mind that the conservative use of these resources in no way conflicts with their permanent value." The planning and management of these lands should be for the entire world a shining example of stewardship that provides a wide variety of uses, values, products, and services in ways that are compatible with long-term ecological, economic, and social sustainability.

Principles

(a) Planning needs to recognize the interdependence of forests, rangelands, and watersheds with economies and communities. Many communities depend on the national forests and grasslands for much of their economic, social, and cultural sustenance. Although the Forest Service cannot and should not be expected to single-handedly sustain existing economies and communities, the national forests and grasslands nonetheless contribute many values, services, outputs, and uses that allow economies and communities to persist, prosper, and evolve according to their own wills. This charge, contributing to the well-being of people today and tomorrow, is at the heart of the Forest Service's role in economic and social sustainability. Within a context of sustaining ecological systems, planning must take generous account of compelling local circumstances. This approach includes the needs of ranching, farming, timber, and mining communities as well as Indian communities relying upon treaty obligations and Hispanic communities depending on the resources in former Spanish and Mexican land grants.

(b) Planning fosters a broad-based under- standing of the vital interrelationship between communities and sustainably managed forests and grasslands. It provides mechanisms through which communities can organize their energies and enterprises in a manner that promotes economic and social sustainability and develop realistic expectations about long-term uses, values, outputs, and services contributed by the national forests and grasslands.

(c) Planning searches for strategies and actions that provide for human use in ways that contribute to long-term sustainability. Finding strategies and actions that contribute to long-term sustainability, rather than work against it, is the surest way to increase the predictability of these uses.

(d) Planning recognizes the rights of American Indian Tribes. Indian tribes possess unique and important rights recognized by federal treaties, statutes, and executive orders. The agency has a general trust responsibility to federally recognized tribes and a duty to acknowledge them as sovereign governments and to work with them on a government-to-government basis. Depending on the circumstances of particular tribes and national forests, such lands also may provide for tribal hunting, fishing, and gathering rights; access to sacred sites; protection of graves and other archaeological sites; watershed protection for down-stream Indian reservations; and fishing sites.

Goal Three. Planning recognizes and is efficiently integrated into the broader geographic, legal, political, and social landscape within which national forests and grasslands exist.

In every sector of the country, the Forest Service and the national forests and grasslands are just one important agency and one important land system among many important governmental and private entities and land ownerships. Some of these agencies have statutory authority over the national forests. Other agencies, governments, corporations, and citizens manage land in and around the national forests. Still others have a keen interest in the national forests and can affect the way the political process views Forest Service action.

Sustainability of watersheds and other natural areas in which national forests and grasslands are located will inevitably depend upon activities on nearby federal lands, tribal and state lands, and private lands and on the actions and attitudes of a wide variety of agencies, governments, and citizens. These landowners will vary in their abilities as well as their interest in providing the mix of uses, products, values, and services that people seek from forests and rangelands. Planning, therefore, must be outward-looking. It must have the goal of understanding the broader landscape in which the national forests and grasslands lie. And it must achieve the highest values in managing these lands within the context of how people, businesses, and governments will conserve, regulate, and use the lands within and around the national forests and grasslands.

Principles

(a) Assessment and planning require a coordinated approach by all affected federal agencies. Cooperation from the beginning with all federal agencies with statutory authority over the national forests and grasslands is essential. Obtaining early participation of, and joint planning with, all federal land management agencies in the area is another key to successful planning. While the Forest Service cannot require participation and joint planning with other federal agencies, the agency should seek and actively encourage it.

(b) Planning proceeds from start to finish in close cooperation with state, tribal, and local governments. Success in achieving goals for the national forests and grasslands may depend upon decisions made by other jurisdictions. Similarly, the Forest Service often can help other jurisdictions achieve their objectives through cooperation.

(c) Planning is interdisciplinary. Planning must respond to a broad range of scientific, economic, and social concerns. Therefore, planning teams must represent diverse disciplines and work together collectively and collegially to develop information and alternatives. Consultants can be employed to tap other relevant sources of knowledge.

(d) Planning must be based on the spatial and temporal scales necessary to assure sustainability and provide for multiple use. Ecological boundaries that also have social meaning, such as river basins and mountain ranges, will be useful for planning in the future. These planning boundaries often do not follow the boundaries of the national forests and grasslands. To achieve long-term sustainability, planning must often take account of cumulative effects on resources within and beyond the boundaries of the national forests and grasslands and well beyond the life of a plan.

(e) Planning recognizes the regional, national, and global implications of management. Assessment and planning should acknowledge how management of the national forests and grasslands can contribute to ecological, economic, and social sustainability on regional, national, and international scales. Often, federal lands will need to anchor regional and national conservation strategies for species and ecosystems so other landowners can continue production of goods and services without undue restriction. In addition, the wood, water, and recreation they provide are often important to regional economies. With the global concern over climate change, the national forests and grasslands should consider the effect that their management will have on carbon sequestration.

(f) Planning acknowledges the limits and variability of likely budgets. Plans should be realistic in budget estimates and resilient in the face of erratic budgets. The public should become aware of the degree to which plan implementation is dependent on annual budgets. In addition, the Forest Service should consider the development of more self-funding activities to reduce its dependence on appropriated funds.

Goal Four. Planning meaningfully engages the American people in the stewardship of their national forests and grasslands and builds stewardship capacity.

The national forests and grasslands belong to the American people. For these truly to be the "people's lands," the people must understand the land's condition, potential, limitations, and niche in resource conservation in this country. Just as the Forest Service can help the American people learn about the limits and capabilities of the national forests and grasslands, so too must the managers be educated by the unique knowledge, advice, and values of the American people. Citizens can provide a wide array of services, ranging from volunteer work on trail crews to participating in collaborative efforts aimed at resolving disputes over specific projects. The Forest Service should draw on this knowledge, wisdom, and energy by building relationships, dialogues, and partnerships with the groups and individuals who wish to have a role in setting the future course for the national forests and in implementing these decisions.

Principles

(a) Planning encourages extensive collaborative citizen participation. Land and resource management planning must provide mechanisms for broad-based, vigorous, and ongoing opportunities for open public dialogue. These dialogues must be open to any person at any time, conducted in nontechnical terms readily understandable to the general public, and structured in a manner that recognizes and accommodates differing schedules, capabilities, and interests. The participation of citizens should be encouraged from the beginning and be maintained throughout the planning process. The public should have a role in assessments, issue identification, implementation, and monitoring.

(b) Planning builds upon the human resources in local communities. Just as local communities depend on the national forests and grasslands, so too the health of many forests, rangelands, and watersheds depends on healthy communities. Many restoration actions are needed on these lands, including programs to improve riparian conditions, reduce fuel loads, and rebuild and decommission roads. These efforts will require entrepreneurs and a trained workforce. The surrounding communities, assuming that they continue to exist and prosper, can help provide these services. Planning and management must realize the full potential of these human resources to further the stewardship of the national forests and grasslands.

(c) Planning and plans are understandable to the American people. A central purpose of planning is to speak directly to the public. The language of planning must be clear and straightforward. These are the people's lands, and planning must be welcoming to the public.

(d) Planning actively seeks out and addresses key issues, especially the toughest ones. Planning cannot avoid controversy by trying to bury it. The best guidelines will emerge from an open, candid, and collaborative process that tackles key issues.

(e) Planning restores and maintains the trust of the American people in the management of the national forests and grasslands. Planning is a principal setting in which the Forest Service relates to the public. It can be a valuable forum in which to reestablish the public's confidence. Planners need to work on the premise that effective planning and management cannot be achieved without the public's respect and trust. Therefore, planning should integrate the public into the process, give the public accurate and complete information in a way that can be understood, make extensive use of public input, and meet public expectations by adopting realistic plans and fulfilling their objectives until amended. The Forest Service should welcome independent field review of its plans and actions.

Goal Five. Planning, which must be at once visionary and pragmatic, guides stewardship.

Planning has long been viewed as a burdensome exercise with little connection to management. In fact, planning must be an organic part of stewardship of the national forests and grasslands: plans must be working guides that Forest Service employees find useful and motivating. Given the frequency with which new issues arise, new information becomes available, and unforeseen events occur, planning should be viewed as an ongoing process, where guidance and directions are adapted, as necessary, to new understandings.

Principles

(a) Planning organizes around a collective vision of the desired future. Developing a collective vision of future landscape conditions and the uses, products, values, and services that will be provided by these conditions is our best hope for a "coming together" of the people and groups that care about the national forests and grasslands. A plan document should begin with a short mission statement that captures this vision, a mission statement that is broad but vivid and evocative, a dream rooted in reality. The "desired future condition" and the outcomes associated with it should serve as the central reference points for planning and management of these lands. Performance measures, monitoring, and budgets should be directed toward achievement of the actions and conditions needed to move toward the desired future.

(b) Planning should be efficient in achieving goals. Strategies that simultaneously address multiple goals and find the least-cost method for achieving these goals are essential guides to efficient stewardship as is demonstration that the social benefits exceed the social cost.

(c) Planning must be at once practical and innovative. Planning is not an end in itself but rather must be a useful endeavor that furthers real-world objectives, including serving as a working guide for stewardship. At the same time, planning must encourage risk-taking and creativity. Valuable innovations have been developed during Forest Service planning, ranging from successful collaborative efforts to multiagency watershed and large-landscape assessments.

(d) Planning must be done expeditiously. Lengthy planning efforts frustrate public participants, strain Forest Service resources, and can result in plans that are outdated when adopted. Planners should aim to complete the planning phases from assessment through formal adoption of small landscape plans within three years and preferably less than two. To accommodate this goal, analytical requirements should be kept to a minimum consistent with achieving the purposes of planning. In the future, when plans are regularly kept current through the amendment process, plan revisions should be completed in an even shorter time.

(e) Plans should be dynamic and adaptable. There is no such thing as a "final plan." While a plan should strive to attain a reasonable degree of predictability in its implementation, everyone must recognize that unpredicted events, ranging from natural disturbances to changed market conditions, will occur. Forest Service officials must respond adaptively to new circumstances through plan amendments, small and large, so the plans will remain fully current. Plans must be living documents.