Forestry Chief Wants Balanced Management of Nation's Forests
11/9/98
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Title: Forestry Chief Wants Balanced Management of Nation's Forests
Source: Post Gazette
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 11/9/98
Byline: Don Hopey
The days of seeing the nation's forests only for their
trees are over.
Michael Dombeck, chief of the U.S. Forest Service since
January 1997, says so, although he does so in a voice so
moderate that it barely rustles the much more colorful
leaves of the season or the rich, politically powerful
logging interests.
The 50-year-old Wisconsin native, still as earnest as the
high school science teacher he once was, and employing the
nonconfrontational style that served him well during three
explosive years as director of the Bureau of Land
Management, recognizes the need to give priority to the
ecological and recreational values of the 191 million
forested acres under his control.
Unlike many of his 13 predecessors whose policies
effectively rechristened the agency the "Timber Service,"
Dombeck seems intent on making his agency live up to its
name.
He has emphasized his intention to return the Forest
Service to its roots of watershed protection, to continue
to chop away at clear-cut forestry practices, and to focus
on sustainable forest management and the ever-increasing
demands of recreation.
The nation's head tree-hugger made those points when, for
the second year in a row, he showed up at the Society for
Environmental Journalists annual convention last month in
Chattanooga, Tenn.
Tieless, and with his shirt sleeves rolled up to working
lengths, the boyish-looking Dombeck answered questions on
forest issues with a handful of environmental reporters,
including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Don Hopey.
Q: What's the effect of increasing recreational use of
national forest land?
A: The highest recreational workload in the U.S. is in the
Forest Service. We get 850 million to 900 million visitor
days each year in the forests. The Cherokee National
Forest (in Tennessee) has 10.2 million visitors a year
compared to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which
gets 10 million and is the most-visited national park. The
thing we've got to do with recreation is ask ourselves:
How do we fund the program? What changes do we make to
move the Forest Service from one focused on timber to one
that now demands more and more emphasis on recreation?
Q: How are you shifting the Forest Service emphasis from
timber production?
A: There was a time when getting out the cut was very
important. I don't think we can discount that. But we are
moving to a system that targets land-based performance
measures. Forest managers should be rewarded based on the
long-term trends on the land they are responsible for,
including water quality, soil stability, basic ecosystem
values, the quality of the fish and wildlife habitat, the
trends in endangered species, and trends in forest health
dealing with noxious, invasive plants and animals.
Q: Has there been any institutional resistance from forest
managers or supervisors accustomed to getting out the
timber cut?
A: It's about what you'd see in any large organization.
There are folks telling me to move faster. Others are
happy with the way things are, and others wish the entire
debate would go away and we could go back to the 1970s
cutting.
Q: How has the Forest Service budget been affected?
A: The budget has been focused on putting the cost of
management on the back of timber. When we were harvesting
8, 10, 12 billion board feet of timber a year that was
feasible. But now we're in an era where we're harvesting
about the same amount of timber as we were in the 1950s,
and we have to look for other revenue sources. Certainly,
from my point of view, we shouldn't be talking about
below-cost timber sales. We've got to focus on the future
condition of the forest.
Q: Some environmental groups have been critical, claiming
there's a gap between your words and the reality in the
woods.
A: I get the same question from my employees. They say,
"Where's the money for that kind of management?" The fact
is we need to work on the budget issues and appropriations
with Congress and the administration. But where do you
start? You start by laying out a philosophy and trying to
convince people this is the right way to go to build a
support base.
Q: What's your vision for the future of the Forest
Service?
A: One of the most important things for the Forest Service
and its employees is we need to be looking beyond the
headlights, looking at what are the values that people
connect with today, and what they will be 10, 20, 30 years
from now and why. I was just on the Cherokee National
Forest this morning and met with some people. It's
heartening to hear how they love the forest, love the
scenery, love the water and open space. We've got to be
talking to American people in more value-laden terms.
People love the forest more than ever.
Q: Why is that?
A: A lot of the controversy associated with forest
management, and all public land management really, has to
do with the fact of fragmentation in the U.S. Atlanta has
sprawled over 400,000 acres of land over the last couple
of decades. Chicago's population has increased 4 percent,
but the urban area has expanded by 40 percent. As a
result, the large tracts of public land, national forests,
state forests, private lands, are increasing in value in
terms of quality of life for the American people. All that
drives the debate.
Q: Why are we seeing so much controversy over forest
management?
A: National forests and public lands do belong to
everyone, yet the people who live there and have them at
their back doors feel a special relationship. I'm one who
grew up on a national forest and I can relate to that. But
what I see as I travel around the nation is that
communities are getting more and more diversified with all
sorts of interests.
Q: And that has spawned court challenges to forest policy
and timber sales?
A: We're adjusting to the court system as a player.
Before, when local community sentiment was uniform, there
were fewer challenges. In Wyoming you had the cowboys and
miners, rural communities had loggers. Now, whether you go
to Telluride or Sun Valley or Cleveland, Tenn., you have
people of all walks of life there for a whole variety of
reasons. There's much more balance and that puts more
demands on the open space. It's more challenging for
agency employees because we have to act as facilitators
and have all these interests to deal with, but that's what
democracy all about.
Q: Road building and roadless areas have been one area of
controversy. In January, you proposed a temporary
suspension of road building. Why?
A: We should have a final rule on road building in a
month. But there are really two reasons for my proposal.
One, if you look at it from a business standpoint,
projects that we propose in roadless areas are
controversial, appealed and litigated, and there's about a
50 percent failure rate. So if you're looking at the
bottom line of dollars, that's not the place you want to
make your investment.
And if you look at it from a conservation standpoint, the
health of the land, we have data from across the country
that indicates the bulk of the strongholds of aquatic
species that are threatened, endangered or rare are in
roadless areas. I'm not proposing no management in those
areas, but we ought to look at other ways of getting on
the land when we need to do management.