INTERIOR COLUMBIA BASIN ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT PROJECT

For the past three years I've been telling our employees on the Deschutes National Forest how incredibly lucky we are to be so completely in the middle of everything that's happening in the Forest Service today -- not only have we been challenged by implementing the Northwest Forest Plan, but we also have the opportunity to learn from the Interior Columbia Basin Scientific Assessment and implement the decisions for the Eastside EIS. The Spotted Owl range line divides the Deschutes National Forest almost in half.

Ever since Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team (FEMAT) and the Record of Decision on the Northwest Forest Plan were signed, we've developed procedures for watershed analysis, standards for Late Successional Reserve Assessments, processes for interagency and community collaboration, and approaches for rural development. We've worked with and funded our timber-dependent communities to develop community action plans to help redirect their futures and diversify their economies. The world has changed for us in significant ways, so we watch the Eastside EIS effort with great interest, wondering how what we've done on the Westside relates or doesn't relate to the Interior Columbia Basin Project.

All of this has been, and continues to be, intellectually fascinating especially when viewed from a top balcony. From this vantage point, we are revolutionizing the way we look at land management decisions, putting specific actions within a much larger context, seeing how and why actions are necessary, or unnecessary, given that larger context. It is giving more meaning, more clarity of purpose to on-the-ground activities. The Scientific Assessment will help us, on this large scale, distribute limited resources to where they buy us the greatest benefits. It will supply land managers with the scientific basis for sound resource decisions and help establish a wider ban of support than ever before. It can help us stay out of court, and win when we enter it.

I believe that for scientists, geographers and planners, there isn't a place in the world that offers a better opportunity to learn the latest in landscape level planning and ecosystem analysis than right here. My guess is that professors and students will study and critique this in classes for the next decade, and that natural resource professionals will build on it as a model to make critical resource decisions worldwide.

Well, the reality is that while all of this is exciting, intellectually stimulating, cutting edge, and all of that, there are some practical, even painful realities that bring this all quickly back down to earth.

I'd like to share briefly with you today our experience in bringing FEMAT and the Northwest Forest Plan down to earth, to a site-specific planning level, some of which may be reassuring to us as we look to the Eastside, some of which may not. I'll share as observations, and while there's a long list, I'll talk about four.

1. The fears have been worse than the effect. Benefits take 2-3 years to see.

We had tremendous concerns about the new levels of analysis required by FEMAT and the Northwest Plan. What was a watershed analysis required by FEMAT? Was it a 2-week deal or a 1-year effort? Was it 16 pages or 1,600? What resources should we dedicate to it, especially if we do not know what it might do for us?

We had the same questions about Late Successional Reserve Assessments. To say nothing of the collaborative processes suggested by the plan -- Provincial Advisory Committees, interagency committees at all levels -- a new bureaucracy in the making.

The list goes on. We ventured into what appeared to be a never-ending analysis paralysis, enough to make even the optimists among us skeptical.

Then, in the last two years, things started changing. On the Deschutes National Forest, we completed watershed analysis on most of the Forest, the recent ones being more focused and less expensive. We started seeing some value in the information we collected, and it began to shift how we thought about future decisions, the context within which we framed decisions, and how we prioritized the work to be done. This effort jump-started our movement into ecosystem management.

Today we can tier our site-specific analysis for projects to these watershed and Late Successional Reserve Assessments to make much more efficient and effective use of our resources. This past year, for example, we wrote an Environmental Assessment on a planning area of more than 150,000 acres, encompassing five sub-watersheds and most of a Late Successional Reserve. Never before would we have attempted an Environmental Assessment of such magnitude and scope. Only with the data available from these other levels was this possible. The results are a multitude of actions from 5,000 acres of understory commercial thinning the Late Successional Reserves, to salvage of 1,000 acres of beetle killed lodgepole, prescribed burning, 100 miles of road closures, and 10,000 acres of pre-commercial thinning in plantations to accelerate the development of old structured stands. As a by-product we will see 25-35 million board feet of commercial timber harvest in our Fiscal Year 1997 program. And we had no appeals, despite alot of public interest.

This has done more than just consolidate our work. Our employees are on fewer Interdisciplinary Teams. We do with one NEPA analysis what it took 5-10 before; employees are more focused and less frazzled.

We now look at a Forest-wide Program of Work, not just a district-by-district approach. We know where our resource concerns and opportunities are and can direct our resources to the work that needs to be done first.

For the first time since I've been on the Deschutes National Forest, we are ahead in our project planning for the year. And ironically for a Forest known to be a premier recreation forest, where we emphasize timber as an outcome and not the primary objective of our vegetation treatment projects, we have had the largest timber program in Region 6 for the past two years.

So this is a long description of my first point. The others will be briefer, but I can't stress enough the need to be patient with the up-front analysis and capitalize on what's been learned on the westside [of the Cascades].

2. Interagency and Community Relationships have been strengthened

Much to our surprise, the Provincial Interagency Executive Committees (PIECs), Provincial Advisory Committees (PACs), the new consultation procedures with US Fish and Wildlife Service (worked well on the Deschutes) and the rural development programs seem to have brought us back together with our communities, and with our agency partners in land management. Again, this did not happen overnight. It took almost a year and a half for our Provincial Advisory Committee (which is also a Resource Advisory Council) to become familiar enough with the issues as a group to take positions on project priorities, range standards and guidelines, and forest restoration projects.

3. Our relationship with science is stronger, our reliance on science has never been greater

We know that without solid science behind our decisions we will continue to find ourselves battling in court. But even more significant, credible science has given us a basis to build stronger public support for what needs to be done on the ground.

Our forest level Ph.D. ecologists, pathologists, and entomologists have been key in helping forest specialists understand and use current research. They participate on Interdisciplinary Teams and sit by managers' sides as decisions are discussed with the public. You'd be astounded to know how well our resource specialists know what is in FEMAT, and I have no doubt they will know the scientific assessment for the Interior Columbia Basin just as well.

And now my last observation.

4. Our Workforce

The largest changes required in the last five years have come not with science, not with new processes or procedures, or even new relationships. The most significant change has been a psychological one.

Did anyone think to do a psychological assessment of those natural resource professionals who are key to the successful execution of strategies like FEMAT and this Interior Columbia Basin Science Assessment, to say nothing of the psychological shift taking place in communities throughout the Pacific Northwest?

Since my job is managing the people who will and are implementing all these new concepts, let me share my observations:

Employees today operate under a spotlight, there's an expectation that decisions must be airtight, and able to withstand all legal challenges. We can do 100 things right, and then one mistake appears and to them it undermines all their successes. They receive the displaced anger from members of the public, family, and friends -- from all sides of the issue -- from shutting down mills to anger over clearcutting and overgrazing. Our employees are on the front lines, taking the flack, face-to-face, in the media, and at times from each other.

With downsizing there are fewer people to do the work and less money to do it with. An extra burden falls on those who remain on a Ranger District, sometimes trying to do the work done by two or more people in the past -- trying. Four years ago we asked them to completely rethink how we approach projects on the ground. Ecosystem management replaced, in some minds, multiple-use management. Now we ask them once again to try new processes, learn new standards and guidelines, read the new science and to help us move in a new direction without a clear road map.

Remember that the bulk of our workforce is between 35-50 years old; many have worked for us 15-25 years. You may also know that many people came to work in natural resource management for its stability, security, and predictability. For a long time it was like that. We're asking an organization of people fundamentally uncomfortable with change to participate in a revolution, when they already carry a lot of war wounds.

My point is that we as leaders, and I include much more than line officers in that (scientists and key staff are critical), need to help people through this time of warp-speed change. In a hundred different ways we need to express our confidence in people, we need to give them the time they need to learn, the tools they need to learn with, and room to make mistakes. If we are going to continue to tap into the talent and energy of our workforce, we have to give them the encouragement and support they need to succeed.