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Federal Document Clearing House
Congressional Testimony
September 21, 2000, Thursday
SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING TESTIMONY
LENGTH: 3147 words
COMMITTEE:
HOUSE resources
SUBCOMMITTEE: FORESTS
AND FOREST HEALTH
HEADLINE: TESTIMONY FUTURE OF THE
FOREST SERVICE
TESTIMONY-BY: ERIC KINGSLEY , EXECUTIVE
DIRECTOR
AFFILIATION: NEW HAMPSHIRE TIMBERLAND OWNERS
ASSOCIATION
BODY:
September 21, 2000 Prepared
Statement for the Record of Eric Kingsley Executive Director New Hampshire
Timberland Owners Association Before the Committee on Resources Subcommittee on
Forests and Forest Health of the United States House of Representatives Madam
Chairman and Members of the House Resources Subcommittee on Forests and Forest
Health, my name is Eric Kingsley and I am currently the Executive Director of
the New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association. Our association represents over
1,500 landowners, loggers, foresters and wood using industries in the Granite
State. Our members own and responsibly manage well over a million acres of
productive forestland. New Hampshire has a healthy forest with a good balance of
species, ecosystems, and age classes. We grow considerably more timber than we
harvest. Forest industries in the state contribute roughly $3.9 billion - eleven
percent of the gross state product - to our economy annually, and employ 6,500.
New Hampshire is the second most heavily forested state in the nation, with
roughly 84 percent of the state covered by hardwood, white pine and spruce-fir
forests. Of this forestland, 20 percent is under federal or other government
ownership -- primarily the White Mountain National Forest. I am here today on
behalf of the American Forest and Paper Association (AF&PA), of which the
New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association is a member. AF&PA is the
national trade association for the forest products industry. AF&PA
represents more than 250 companies and related associations that engage in or
represent the manufacture of pulp, paper, paperboard and wood products. The
forest products industry accounts for more than eight percent of total U.S.
manufacturing output, employs 1.5 million people and ranks among the top ten
manufacturing employers in 46 states. I am here today to talk about the current
state of our Forest Service and offer some recommendations that I believe will
point them in the right direction. Currently, the National Forest System has
fallen prey to overlapping and conflicting laws and regulations that have
riddled the management of our forests and grasslands with bureaucratic red tape.
This is preventing the agency from fulfilling Congressionally mandated
responsibilities to manage these lands according to The Organic Act, The
National Forest Management Act, the Multiple Use/Sustained Yield Act, and the
Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act. According to a Government Accounting
Office report, the National Forest System currently has 65 million acres at high
risk to catastrophic wildfire, insect infestation, or disease. This equates to
roughly one out of every three acres of our 192 million acre National Forest
System being in a state of poor health and is susceptible to catastrophic
occurrences. The Forest Service has acknowledged this and yet has failed to
produce a cohesive strategy to deal with the problem. This may be no more
evident than in the current fire season. To date, over 78,800 fires have burned
over 6.9 million acres of public land - an area larger than my home state of New
Hampshire, including 2.2 million acres on our national forests, resulting in
what many are calling the worst fire season since 1910. Recently proposed
regulations only threaten to further restrict and limit the Forest Service's
ability to actively manage federal forestlands and address the current forest
health crisis. The current administration has proposed major rulemakings that
include the President's roadless initiative, forest planning regulations,
transportation policy, and a draft strategic plan. Further, regional
assessments, national monument designations, and regional management plans have
been proposed and are in various phases of completion. Taken in isolation, these
actions are troublesome. Viewed as a whole these actions serve to undermine the
multiple use mission of the Forest Service. The regulatory initiatives that the
Forest Service is pursuing, an agency strategic plan, the land management
planning regulations, and the roadless area initiative
(affecting over one third of the national forest land base), are intimately
related. The outcome or decision on one of these clearly impacts the outcome or
decisions on the others. To date, the Forest Service has not provided any
analysis on this inter- relatedness and how they will collectively affect the
future of our Forest Service and National Forest System. A highly vocal and
extreme preservation community is marching in lock-step with the Forest Service
in development of these proposals. One after another they are introduced and
continually pull much needed resources from the agency and the forest level work
needed to be done to address the current forest health crisis. This has led to a
lot of rhetoric at the Washington Office level with limited action on the
ground, where it is most needed. But, even at the Washington level, there is a
severe lack in the development and implementation of proposals and regulations.
An example of this is the Forest Service's roads moratorium. On January 28, 1998
there was an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the Federal Register to
set up an 18-month moratorium on road construction and reconstruction while
developing a policy on road management. The Final Interim Rule was published on
February 12, 1999 initiating an 18-month moratorium effective March 1, 1999
through August 2000. It is now September 2000 and the moratorium has expired
with no new policy or direction for the construction and reconstruction of
forest roads. In over 31 months, the Forest Service has been unable to finalize
a new policy, even as Mike Dombeck, Chief of the US Forest Service, testifies
that there is currently an $8.2 billion backlog for maintenance and
reconstruction on forest roads and in the annual appropriations process submits
a budget request that fails to fund even 20% of the backlog. These regulatory
initiatives and their development also threaten the proper management of our
federal lands because they withdraw significant monetary resources. Funding is
being diverted from the regional and forest level of the Forest Service to the
Washington Office to support overhead. A layoff analysis found that over 6,500
permanent jobs, 19% of the Forest Service work force, has been eliminated.
However, at the same time, top management jobs in the Forest Service increased
by 6%. This shift in employment demographics is leading the Forest Service in
the wrong direction. In the past 3 years, the Forest Service has been unable to
meet its congressionally mandated goals because the staff and monetary resources
have been siphoned away and placed at the Washington, D.C. level to help create
a "legacy" out of our national forests. What will that legacy be? And what do we
want that legacy to be? Due to all of the reasons I have stated, I believe that
the future of the Forest Service needs to be one where science-based, active
forest management is utilized to return forest lands from their current state of
neglect. The forest products industry is not just concerned with logging as
claimed by Secretary Babbitt in a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times. We
recognize that forest products are just one of the multiple uses of healthy
federal forest lands. I am here to say that the forest products industry is part
of the solution to the forest health crisis; therefore, to contribute to the
development of solutions, AF&PA has developed a new federal land management
initiative called New Federal Forestry which proposes just such a paradigm shift
in the policies of the Forest Service's land management program. New Federal
Forestry was developed based upon a set of long term principles for federal
forest lands. New Federal Forestry: recognizes that forests are unique and
dynamic, sustains the long-term health of the forest landscape, protects clean
water, clean air, wildlife and fish in the forests, seeks to achieve landscapes
which contain a broad spectrum of ecological conditions, seeks to strike a
balance between ecological objectives, economic sustainability and social needs,
and allows decision making at the local level in a collaborative working
environment that enables participation by all forest stakeholders. In applying
these principles, the Forest Service needs to focus land management decisions at
the local level. Local level planning and decision-making has proven effective
throughout the country in projects such as the Quincy Library Group in
California. This is not only a western issue. New Hampshire's federal forests
are not experiencing the catastrophic wildfires plaguing much of the country,
they are among those lands identified as having a high risk of mortality due to
insect infestation and disease. Local level, collaborative efforts have been
implemented here as well in the development of the forest plan for the White
Mountain National forest. In New Hampshire, we are fortunate to have a culture
that values citizen participation in government. While viewed as quaint in other
areas of the country, our annual town meetings serve as the legislative body in
many municipalities. They require citizens to work together, respectfully
disagree when necessary, and come together to support the shared goals of the
community. This participation in decision making extends beyond town government
and into other reaches of our lives - including forest planning. Stakeholders
representing the forest products industry, environmental organizations,
recreation groups, local towns, and many others have come together to craft a
management plan for the White Mountain National Forest. This plan, mandated
under the National Forest Management Act, governs actions on the forest for the
next decade. Citizen participation in forest planning is difficult to manage,
but achieves a result that strengthens the relationship between the people and
their land. The value of locally led forest planning was recognized by all major
presidential candidates, including both Governor Bush and Vice-President Gore,
during our presidential primary. Unfortunately, the long hours and thoughtful
discourse that the citizens of New Hampshire and New England have put into
developing this plan are threatened by the top-down, one-size-fits- all actions
of the Forest Service. Unilateral decrees, made outside of this planning
process, undermine public faith in the value of their participation. This is
unfortunate, and will not serve the public or our forests over time. This is why
our trained professional forest managers should have the opportunity to
implement land management decisions at the local level. Private land managers
are not currently experiencing the same risks to their forests' health. Private
land managers are able to actively manage their forest lands and do so based
upon management principles similar to those I mentioned earlier. An example of
this is the forest and paper product industry's Sustainable Forestry Initiative
(SFI) program, a program that has received national conservation awards and
recognition from many environmental organizations. This is why I believe that
learning from private land management and conservation efforts, and past
national forest successes, such as the forest plan for the White Mountain
National Forest, can enable the Forest Service to empower its local
professionally trained officials and local stakeholders to develop plans to
restore forest health and sustainably manage the national forests to meet their
sustained yield/multiple use mandates. With my testimony, I submit a brochure on
the New Federal Forestry initiative I discussed earlier. Not only will this help
the Forest Service overcome its stagnant and ineffective forest management
program, but it will restore our national forest lands to a healthy state, and
then we will have a legacy for our National Forest System lands. Thank you for
this opportunity Madam Chairman. I would be happy to answer any questions from
the Subcommittee.
LOAD-DATE: September 22, 2000, Friday
