The Forest Service is Pulled in Every Which Way

By Headwaters News, 12-21-06

It’s hard to know what to make of the Forest Service lately. The 100-year-old land management agency has somehow (surely someone can map out exactly how this happened) backed into such a corner whereby it is constantly at the mercy of Congress, the president, industry, environmental groups and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Sometimes its own leadership seems to come into play only after the above have said their piece.

The Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana hosted a conference last month entitled “Challenges Facing the U.S Forest Service: A critical review.” After the one-day conference, at which Mark Rey, Undersecretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and Environment and former Chief Jack Ward Thomas spoke, another speaker, historian Char Miller wrote about his reactions to the various speakers and participant remarks in a column for Headwaters News.

That initial column from a couple weeks ago sparked some heated debate over the agency’s current focus and whether that was real or philosophical. Meanwhile, the media have been diligent in covering the fallout from last summer’s very expensive wildfire season, the continued wrangling over possible closings of campgrounds and other developed recreation facilities and the ever-present squabbles over whether to cut down trees — all of which makes for a great framework for even more debate.

Today, Patrick O’Driscoll at USA Today writes that the agency is falling further behind in its tree replanting efforts following wildfire, insect kills and disease. The reason: budgets that are shrinking and being diverted to fire suppression costs. O’Driscoll reports that the agency had to borrow $200 million from other programs to cover firefighting costs this year, most of it from reforestation projects.

Yesterday, the Casper Star-Tribune posted a Sacramento Bee story on an audit performed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General, which criticized agency fire managers for spending excessively, not acting on past lessons learned and suppressing too many fires that should have been allowed to burn naturally.

The agency took the “beating” with a straight face and agreed to deal with the results. One of the biggest criticisms in the audit was that the agency spends up to 90 percent of its fire budgets protecting private property.

Montana, for one, may be acting preemptively by addressing this issue in its upcoming Legislative session and looking at legislation that requires counties to address development in the wildland-urban interface by 2009, or lose access to firefighting funds from the state's general fund. NewWest.net’s Greg Lemon has the full scoop on that. Such an action may have implications beyond the state, if the federal agency decides it isn’t going to continue footing the bill for protecting so much non-public land.

Elsewhere regarding the Forest Service:

Utah’s Dixie National Forest is preparing a new travel plan for the forest that focuses on motorized recreation, mainly reining it in a bit and managing it better. The New York Times ran a story last weekend looking at user conflicts between skiers and snowmobilers in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest that is emblematic of conflicts around national forest system. And last week, the Reno Gazette-Journal wrote about the Winter Wildlands Alliance, which said that too much national forest land was open to snowmobilers in the 11 Western states.

In Idaho, agency officials and some community leaders are saying that a plan to log 2,200 acres in Bonners Ferry's municipal watershed is necessary to help prevent another fire, but an environmental group says slash piles left there from logging a few years ago was what caused the fire, and that this plan is tied more to an effort to increase lumber mill jobs than it is to forest health.

In Wyoming the Medicine Bow National Forest reduced acreage in planned clear-cuts from 552 acres in the Devil's Gate area to 283 acres, primarily at the behest of the state’s wildlife officials who were concerned about logging’s effect on winter habitat for elk and deer.

And in Colorado, forest recreation planners are trying to figure out what facilities to stop funding to provide that state’s share of the called-for $140 million in budget cuts from last year's funding. An analysis of the 2007 Forest Service budget shows how a 2.5 percent budget cut was done to lower the annual budget to $4.9 billion.

So, who’s right? Is Char Miller correct when he says the agency is undergoing a paradigm shift away from the contentious and confrontational extraction issues of the past and toward a new era of collaboration and ecosystem management, or are his critics correct when they say it’s the same old Forest Service, except now its been even more co-opted by environmental interests?
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