Rocky Mountain Environmental Grok
People Power Paradigm Pondered
By Brodie Farquhar, 1-02-07
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One of my favorite editors (you can learn a lot in the woodshed) once threatened to fire me if I ever used the word "paradigm."
I've done so twice in this posting, thanks to Headwaters News' "Perspective" section, focused on Challenges Facing the U.S. Forest Service: A Critical Review, which was sponsored by The University of Montana’s O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West with major support from The Cinnabar Foundation on Nov. 28-29, 2006, at the University of Montana in Missoula.
Alas, I was not able to attend, but Trinity University's Char Miller and Headwaters' Daniel Berger give excellent overviews about changing paradigms within the USFS, coupled with their own penetrating analysis.
Miller was spot on in explaining that the Forest Service is a changed and changing institution, despite the best efforts of the Bush Administration to roll the agency back through a time warp to the 1950's, when proud timber beasts ruled and there were no weeny greenies roosting in trees, filing lawsuits to block timber cuts or to save some mangy owls.
What's happened in the past 30-some years, is that Western forests have been harvested (once, twice, thrice or more), the timber mill infrastructure is largely gone (never to return), the BIG budget is in wildfire fighting (all other line items are in steady decline), clean water -- not timber -- is the primary "product" of forests, unregulated and unrestrained motorized recreation is running amuck, and the triple bottom line (economic profit, environmental sustainability and social justice) is what makes sense to tree-huggers, timber beasts and residents alike.
It is this last point that could be the most profound paradigm shift in Western forests. For decades, the greens have been deeply suspicious of the word "profit," seeing it as a way for Big Timber to get a seat at the table and control the outcome of local negotiations. "Profit" has an entirely different meaning to a Weyerhauser or L-P, than it does to a smaller, locally-owned mill that is trying to stake a claim on such niche markets as log cabin or furniture construction or forest-friendly timber products. Locally-added value and keeping the jobs and profit in a local/regional economy makes more sense than shipping jobs and logs to a foreign country. Focusing on the triple bottom line can make loggers and tree huggers (despite past animosities) into allies.
That's not to say there won't be future forest fights. Mark Rey, a former lobbyist for the timber industry and now under secretary for natural resources and environment in the USDA, has two more years (at least) as boss of the boss of the USFS. While he's approved of some creative and collaborative approaches to forest management, other actions could leave him with a lasting legacy as the Last Timber Beast, when histories are written about the USFS and the Bush II administration.
This post has been corrected to clarify that Char Miller teaches at Trinity University, not Trinity College.
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Comments
"Paradigm change" originated in a very important book on the history and philosophy of science by Thomas Kuhn, entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's definition of paradigm change applied to the truly revolutionary conceptual changes in science that made it impossible to perceive the world as it had once been perceived. Examples of true paradigm change are Darwins theory of the origin of species by natural selection and Einstein's theory of general relativity.
The term has been so grossly misused, particularly by the media, business, and government since Kuhn that it has become almost meaningless. The term should be dropped from the vocabulary of all but historians of science.
To apply this term to the United States Forest Service, about which I'm sure you'll agree I know quite a bit, is to say nothing at all. The changes that Forest Service scholar Char Miller claims to be seeing in the Forest Service are not changes that we're seeing at the ground level in how the Forest Service actually does business. These are changes touted in the media that have no reality or basis in fact. The changes are at best wishful thinking and at worst an expression of a cynical ideology.
At present, the Forest Service is a demoralized, budget-starved agency so rocked by political and ideological controversy that it is paralyzed by fear, inertia, and the three-monkey syndrome. I'm watching this all play out in the revision of the Shoshone National Forest plan, which is shaping up to be a typical bureaucratic disaster for the Forest and those of us who live in the Forest day to day.
When I read Char Miller's column on the Headwaters site about the recent Cimarron-sponsored conference, I had to ask myself, just what forest service is he talking about? It's certainly nothing I recognize, nor is it anything that exists.
At the same time, I think Miller makes some good points (not all of which would be readily apparent to observers of the Shoshone), that the Forest Service is a different organization today, than it was two, three, four decades ago.
Although there's obvious political pressures from the Bush administration, different national forests do have different leadership styles and even operating cultures. There are some national forests and districts that exist in a time warp -- no different culturally than how they worked forty years ago. There are others, however, where bright, well-intentioned professionals are trying to do right by the resource and the law, threading a difficult path between a career train-wreck and complete surrender to political pressure.
Since a Bush appointee has eviserated the Office of Special Counsel that was supposed to protect whistleblowers, perhaps we'll see some Democratic congressional hearings (and prosecutions) that will ease the heavy hand of political pressure and encourage USFS to do what's right for the resource, rather than making a politician, campaign contributor or bureaucrat happy in D.C.
If Congress can take the right steps (a big IF, I grant you), perhaps it can help restore "a demoralized, budget-starved agency so rocked by political and ideological controversy that it is paralyzed by fear, inertia, and the three-monkey syndrome."
The paradigm shift talked about by Miller is more internal and covert (due to political pressures) than overt. At least that's what I like to think.
By definition, a paradigm change is fundamentally revolutionary and literally changes the way people look at and understand the world. It can't happen in secret or covertly. Look at the uproar over the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859.
The digital revolution that all of us baby boomers are struggling to understand, while our children take it for granted, is a true paradigm change in the Kuhnian sense. Whatever changes are occurring in the US Forest Service, they most certainly aren't paradigm changes.
I think that in the 1970s, with the flush of the passage of the National Forest Management Act and other major national legislation, that there was great hope for major changes in the Forest Service, even if they didn't rise to the level of "paradigm changes," but it is impossible to point to any true improvements in the management of our forests over the last 30 years, whether my local Forest, the Shoshone, or others throughout the country. It's important to note that those of us who work USFS issues may have particular forests that we deal with, but that doesn't mean we are unfamiliar with the larger bureaucracy.
The single greatest problem facing the Forest Service today, the strangling of its budget and the push to switch what funds it does have into fire, has had the key and significant consequence of forest neglect, and the best example of this is the ORV explosion across Forests in each part of the country. This is something Forest Service employees all recognize but it is something about which they, and we, seem incapable of dealing with.
It seems to me that a true paradigm shift where the national forests are concerned would involve a fundamental change in attitude regarding what a forest is, and what it's for. That is, the true paradigm of the forest is "the forest as home," as opposed to the forest as source of commodities and profit. That's not to say that it should be impossible to make a living from the forest--I certainly do, as a horse packer and wrangler and wilderness guide--but that's not all what the forest is to me. There's a whole lot more going on.
I see no understanding in the Forest Service that the primary function of the forest is as a home for me, my community, and wildlife. Thus, there is no paradigm change. We're just seeing the demise of a century old bureaucracy. What those of us who are intimately associated with various Forests are trying to do is find other ways--other paradigms--that will protect our forests as well as our livelihoods.
Robert
National Forest Trusts:
Breaking the Pattern of Discord
Publication of the 1970 report A University View of the Forest Service (better known as the Bolle Report) marked the beginning of an era of national forest management characterized by conflict, inconsistencies, dissatisfaction, and finally gridlock. All this is at the expense of local communities, national taxpayers, and sustainable forest ecosystems.
Today, the agency best known for Smokey Bear finds its once-stellar reputation sullied. The Forest Service has been unable to adapt to changing social values, new ecological science, and a Western economy based more on human capital and natural amenities than resource extraction. Disputes over national forest management are increasingly resolved by executive fiat, Congress, or the courts. The ideal of responsible management via sound science is a mere historical artifact.
For decades, groups such as the Sierra Club have characterized U.S. national forest system management as shortsighted, subject to opportunistic congressional politics, unaccountable, and ecologically insensitive. They were right.
However, many environmentalists continue to insist that federal control is essential to protect the national forests from abuse by rapacious Westerners. This position is both paternalistic and ironic. History reveals that much environmental damage in the region resulted from federally approved and funded projects carried out by agencies maximizing their appropriations. For example, the Forest Service’s road network is eight times the size of the U.S. interstate highway system. (The agency is essentially the world’s largest socialized road-building enterprise.)
When pressed for alternatives to federal control, many environmentalists naïvely offer solutions that lack historical perspective on the failures of past policies and provide little more than wishful thinking for the future. Those who believe that simply putting the “right” person in charge and/or adding more money ignore the problems inherent in the current system—including perverse incentives and incomplete information.
Rather than merely addressing the symptoms of poorly designed national forest policies or engaging in further piecemeal tinkering, we propose a more thoroughgoing reform.
We explore the potential of National Forest Trusts (NFTs) to experimentally manage a small number of national forests spread across the country. This proposal keeps the forests in the public domain and accepts current federal environmental laws as controlling, yet provides funding and management structures that would align managers’ incentives with the public interest and incorporate local knowledge of conditions and concerns unique to each forest.