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Protecting and Restoring a Nation's Land Health Legacy

Mike Dombeck, Chief of the United States Forest Service
Missoula, Montana
February 3, 1999

Introduction
A few months ago, I met with the senior leadership of the Forest Service at Grey Towers, the home of Gifford Pinchot. Surrounded by so much history and tradition, it was impossible not to be impressed by 100 years of Pinchot's rich legacy.

How will the decisions we make on the land today influence what we are remembered for one hundred years from now? That should be the question that guides every decision we make. What made Pinchot's young Forest Service unique was a set of conservation values that were not necessarily popular but were always made in the long-term interest of land health. For decades, the Forest Service followed those conservation values and argued, for example, against wasteful clearcutting practices that devastated the watersheds of the Appalachians, and northeastern and Great Lakes area forests.

Following World War II, another set of values came to the forefront - helping to fulfill the national dream of providing families with single family homes - good and important values. Our timber harvests escalated for nearly a quarter of a century. Along the way, social values changed. Many people ceased viewing national forests and grasslands as a warehouse of outputs to be brought to market and instead began assigning greater value to the positive outcomes of forest management. Wildlife and fish habitat, recreation, and clean water, wilderness, and cultural and spiritual values became more and more important as national goals.

The result is that today, we often find ourselves caught in the middle between competing interests. Some look to Congress to ``fix'' our organic mandate. Others push to limit the number of citizen appeals. Still others ask courts to resolve land use policies through litigation. Too often we find ourselves waiting for someone else to resolve our issues for us.

The fact is that the roadless areas, wilderness, recreation and old growth issues of today are no different than the 100-year old debate over clearcutting. Our obligation is to exercise leadership over the most vital conservation issues of our generation.

Over time, our leadership capacity to assist those who manage the more than 500 million acres of forests outside of the national forest system has diminished. Our greatest value to society in the future will be to bring people together on the land and to provide technical assistance and scientific information to states, private landowners, and other nations of the world.

Consider, we are spending about two billion dollars per year managing 191 million acres of national forest yet contributing only about $200 million toward the 500 million acres of state managed and privately-owned forests. Are our best efforts as conservation leaders spent trying to build roads in roadless areas? Or, in helping a wealthy nation to protect and restore its natural resource wealth through research, technical assistance, and providing international examples of ecologically sustainable forest and grassland management?

As the President noted in his State of the Union address, 7,000 acres of farmland and open space are lost every day. The number of tracts of forestland of 50 acres or less doubled from 1978-1994. In other words, as we lose open space, forest tract size is diminished, and the land's health is compromised. These facts sound a clarion call to action.

Pinchot himself said, ``we must everywhere always prefer results to routine.'' No support exists for a process-oriented and labor intensive bureaucracy. History is replete with agencies and businesses that could not, or would not, adjust to changing times and consequently became obsolete. The giants such as Pinchot, Leopold, Bob Marshall, Carson, and Arthur Carhart set another far higher, far more memorable, and far more forward thinking standard - helping communities develop a more harmonious relationship with the land and water that sustain us. Our challenge is to measure up to their legacy.

We are making progress.

• We articulated and are implementing a common sense and science-based natural resource agenda.
• Our financial management reforms are on track and we have greatly reduced our long-standing backlog of civil rights complaints.
• The Committee of Scientists recommendations on draft planning regulations will soon be released and draft regulations will follow.
• Our interim roadless proposal will soon be finalized and we are developing a long-term forest roads' policy.

We must accelerate the pace. Society demands clean water, species conservation, more outdoor recreation opportunities, conservation education, eradication of non-native invasive species, landowner and community assistance programs, and new research and technologies on forest inventory and analysis, wood conservation and more efficient wood utilization.

Incentives and Challenges

Our challenge today is to ensure that the incentives that drive all aspects of our programs promote ecological sustainability. We have proposals, and a few successes that, with the funding of Congress, will help ensure that future forest management decisions are driven by the long-term interests of the land and the people that depend on it. For example:

• Last year, Congress acted on our proposal to eliminate what was widely perceived as a subsidy and more importantly eliminated the incentive to build new roads in order to finance our road reconstruction backlog - clearly an unsustainable approach.

We must bring greater accountability, more public scrutiny, and transparency to all our processes. For example, we are financing a significant percentage of our costs through timber related ``trust funds'' that are not subject to annual appropriations or public scrutiny. Given that timber production on national forests has declined by 70% in less than a decade, such an approach is unsustainable. This year, we will begin to implement administrative reforms to our trust funds while we consider more permanent legislative solutions. For example, we propose to revise the definition of salvage to reduce if not eliminate "associated green" timber often taken in salvage sales.

Historically, the agency's success was often measured, and consequently funded, by outputs from the national forest system such as board feet of timber produced or the amount of grazing on forests and grasslands. This year we will develop and begin to implement new land health performance measures that evaluate such things as clean water, wildlife and fish habitat, forest ecosystem health, and soil productivity and stability. We will still track traditional outputs of goods and services but they will be accomplished within the ecological sideboards imposed by land health . These new measures will be consistent with international sustainability criteria and integrated into employee evaluations, budget development, forest planning, and agency priorities and accountability.

For the second year, we will propose to Congress separating timber harvest on national forests from the funds that counties receive to maintain schools and roads. Why should the richest country in the world finance the education of rural schoolchildren on the back of a controversial federal timber program? Collaborative stewardship implies an obligation to help provide communities with economic diversity and resiliency so they are not dependent on the results of litigation, the whims of nature or unrelated social values to educate their children and pave their roads.

The Committee of Scientists will issue their final recommendations on forest planning soon. I expect that they will suggest that we:

1. Focus our planning efforts on the long-term sustainability of watersheds, forests, and grasslands and the ecological, economic, and social benefits they can provide.

2. More effectively link forest planning to budget and funding priorities.

3. Practice collaborative stewardship through use of diverse and balanced advisory groups and adaptive management through monitoring.

Taken together, these efforts will demonstrate to Congress and the American people the imperative of making investments in the land. Investments that may not yield year end profits but whose dividends will be plain when:

• A citizen of Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, or Missoula turns on their tap and drinks clean water from a National Forest;
• A parent in Vermont takes her daughter fishing on the Green Mountain National Forest.
• A small mill operator in Montana sends twice as much wood fiber to market from a single tree due to Forest Service research and development; and
• A private landowner in Illinois bequeaths to his children 20 acres of healthy, diverse and productive forestland through forest legacy conservation easements.

Watershed Protection and Restoration

The cleanest and largest amount of surface water runoff in the nation comes from forested landscapes. Mindful of this fact, a year or so ago, Jay Cravens, a retired Forest Service employee offered me some advice. He said, ``Mike, just take care of soil and water and everything else will be OK.'' That sage counsel guides our approach to watershed management.

Multiple use does not mean we should do everything on every acre simply because we can. We must protect the last best places and restore the rest. Many areas are simply not appropriate for certain activities, such as hard rock mining. For many years, Congress has been unable to reach consensus on updating the 1872 Mining Law. Their inaction does not, however, diminish our responsibility to use the best science to protect the most scenic, the most diverse, the most special places. One such place is the Rocky Mountain Front.

I have asked the Secretary of Interior to withdraw the Rocky Mountain Front from hard rock mining for two years while we evaluate the long-term future of the area in an open and public process.

The Forest Service has a long and storied history of working to protect the incredible fish, wildlife, cultural, and scenic resources of this area. From Bob Marshall's efforts to protect the wilderness memorialized by his name to Gloria Flora's decision last year to prohibit oil and gas leasing in the area, I intend to continue that tradition.

The Rocky Mountain Front, is only one of the hundreds of thousands of great places under our care and supervision. Within the next five years, over 65% of our forest plans, representing over 150 million acres of land, are scheduled for revision. In keeping with Clean Water Action Plan commitments, likely recommendations from the Committee of Scientists, and consistent with our mandates from the Organic Act through the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water acts, watershed health and restoration will be the overriding priority in all future forest plan revisions.

Forest Service managed lands truly are the headwaters of America, supplying river systems, and recharging aquifers. They contain riparian, wetland, and coastal areas that are essential for the nation's water supply and prosperity. Our forested landscapes contain the coolest and cleanest water in the nation. We must protect these precious resources. Future forest plans will develop strategies and document how we will:

• Maintain and restore watershed function, including flow regimes, to provide for a wide variety of benefits from fishing, to groundwater recharge, to drinking water.
• Conduct assessments that will characterize current condition and help make informed decisions about management activities, protection objectives, and restoration potential.
• Provide for the protection, maintenance and recovery of native aquatic and riparian dependent species and prevent the introduction and spread of non-native species.
• Monitor to ensure we accomplish our objectives in the most cost-effective manner, adapt management to changing conditions, and validate our assumptions over time.
• Include the best science and research, local communities, partners, tribal governments, states, and other interested citizens in collaborative watershed restoration and management, and
• Provide opportunities to link social and economic benefits to communities through restoration strategies.