It’s a pleasure to have this opportunity to discuss sustainable development in relation to forests and forestry. Thank you for inviting me, and I look forward to learning from you.
 

Sustaining America’s Forests

Sustainable forestry is at the core of who we are at the Forest Service. Our mission is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.

Our mission statement includes key words and phrases. First, “to sustain.” We are all about sustainability. Second, “the nation’s forests.” Our mission extends to all forests in the United States, whether in federal, state, tribal, local, or private ownership. Our role is to help extend sustainable forestry across the nation. Third, “to meet the needs of present and future generations.” Our mission is about meeting people’s needs over time—again, sustainability.

The Forest Service was created in 1905, and our mission is founded on twin insights by conservationists at the time: people need forests, and our nation was losing its forests.

All Americans, whether they own forest land or not, benefit from our nation’s rich forest resources in multiple ways. Forests are part of our cultural heritage. Forests are places of privacy, of peace and seclusion and great natural beauty. Forests are home to many Americans, part of their family legacy, places where they can enjoy friends and family, places where they can indulge in the great American traditions of hunting and fishing.

Forests also provide sustenance, including 53 percent of the nation’s runoff for drinking water. Private forests alone supply 30 percent of our nation’s drinking water. Forests clean the air we breathe and sequester about 12 percent of the carbon dioxide that Americans emit each year. Forests support vital habitat for America’s native fish and wildlife, part of our national identity. Think of salmon, bald eagle, and grizzly bear, all forest dependent.

And forests are an indispensable source of green energy and renewable building materials. Private forests alone supply 90 percent of our nation’s domestically produced forest products. Look around any American home and you will see forest products … doors, tables, paper, flooring, and more. The home itself is probably built from wood.

Yet there was rampant deforestation across the United States when the Forest Service was founded. At the time, most people thought of America’s ancestral forests as inexhaustible. Trees were there to be cut and sold, with no thought to the future, and forests were obstacles to progress. By the turn of the 20^th century, America had lost a quarter of its original forest estate, and most of that loss had come just since the Civil War.

People said enough. A generation of visionary American leaders came along, leaders like President Theodore Roosevelt. Unless we practice conservation, they said, those who come after us will pay the price. And the price will be misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity we have today.

So we decided as a nation to leave a legacy of forests for our children and grandchildren. We developed methods and models for the sustainable use of America’s forest resources across landownerships … on state and federal lands, on tribal lands, and on private lands.

And it worked. A third of our nation’s land area is still forested today, including 90 percent of our original forests in the West. In fact, we have the world’s fourth largest forest estate, and we are by far the world’s largest producer—and consumer—of forest products.

The United States has about 766 million acres of forest land. Two-thirds are owned or managed by states, tribes, local governments, businesses, and families. The Forest Service is entrusted with the care of another 20 percent, and we also assist the states and private forest landowners in sustainable forest management. In addition, we conduct high-quality forest-related research and development, and we make the results available to businesses, forest landowners, and other agencies and organizations. Our International Programs staff extends our outreach worldwide.

Our mission is unique in that our role is to help sustain forests across jurisdictions and to connect people to forests by meeting their needs across the nation and around the world. So what we do is to care for the land and help others do the same, and why we do it is to serve people. Hence, our motto: “Caring for the land and serving people.”
 

Forest Trends in the United States

I mentioned our Research and Development mission area. We have the largest conservation-related research organization in the world. Part of our job is to study our nation’s forests, all 766 million acres, and to track the trends in forest landownership and land use so that Americans will know what is happening and can take appropriate steps to respond.

Our population in the United States is now about 327 million. By 2050, we are projected to have a population of almost 400 million, and developed areas are expanding even faster than our population. Land use conversion to developed uses means forest loss and rapid growth of the wildland/urban interface, or WUI. Here are some of the corresponding trends and effects:

• According to one study, we can expect a net forest loss from 2010 to 2060 of up to 37 million acres. That’s an area the size of Illinois.
• Housing density is rising. From 2000 to 2030, according to another study, we can expect substantial increases in housing density on 57 million acres of rural private forest land. That’s an area larger than Utah … larger than all of New England.
• Densification and conversion to urban land uses increases impervious surfaces and stormwater runoff, which decreases water quality and degrades watersheds.
• The greatest threat to wildlife habitat in the United States comes not from timber harvest or roadbuilding but from habitat loss through land use conversion and forest fragmentation.
• Experience in the South, which has the most productive forest land in the world, shows that land use conversion reduces outputs of forest products. Which only stands to reason.
• The WUI is rapidly expanding, as is the fire risk to homes. Nationwide, one home in three is now in the WUI, and fire danger is especially acute in the West. Last year, wildfires destroyed more than 18,000 residences. Worse, more than a hundred people died in wildfire entrapments, often while fleeing their homes.

Public lands are magnets for WUI growth, with profound implications for wildland fire management. A study in 2013 by Headwaters Economics showed that only 16 percent of the private land adjacent to public land in the West has been developed for residential use. Protecting private property from wildfires accounts for 50 to 95 percent of our annual firefighting costs. If just half of that undeveloped WUI gets developed, then our firefighting costs would explode to take up the lion’s share of the Forest Service’s annual budget, reaching more than $4.3 billion each year. Unfortunately, our nation is on course to see exactly that happen.
 

Sustaining America’s Forests

The Forest Service is committed to doing everything we can to sustain America’s forest resources for the use and enjoyment of all Americans, both now and for generations to come. That means doing all we can to expand markets and social license for sustainable forest management on private land. We commend Weyerhaeuser and other large private forest landowners for your commitment to sustainable forest management, and we want to work with you to help keep vital landscapes forested and sustainably managed for the future.

To that end, our Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, has been working to find new and more efficient ways of using wood fiber, including through biofuels and nanotechnology. One promising area of growth is mass timber—the use of cross-laminated timber technology to construct high-rise buildings of twelve stories or more from wood. The latest version of the International Building Code now allows for mass timber buildings of up to 18 stories! Mass timber buildings are going up across the country, and the number of mass timber production facilities is increasing as well. The Forest Service is working with partners like WoodWorks, the Softwood Lumber Board, the American Wood Council, and universities to help stimulate the mass timber market.

We are always looking for ways to expand markets for wood products and wood energy. This past May, we announced almost $9 million in new Wood Innovations Grants. These grants will open up new markets for low-value wood so we can treat more hazardous fuels to improve forest conditions across the National Forest System and other lands. These public–private partnerships create jobs, support firesafe communities, restore healthy forest conditions, and spur environmentally sound innovation.
 

Being a Good Neighbor

We also want to be a good neighbor on the lands we manage. The Forest Service manages about 193 million acres of national forests and grassland in 43 states and Puerto Rico, including about 20 percent of the nation’s forests. As you know, most forested watersheds across the United States are in multiple ownerships, so we share risks and responsibilities with our state, private, tribal, and other neighbors.

That’s why being a good neighbor is so important. Being good neighbors means recognizing the rights, values, and needs of neighbors, partners, and stakeholders in the National Forest System. It means working with our neighbors to improve forest conditions. It means recognizing our interdependence and showing up as trustworthy, caring, and respectful.

Closely related is our national priority of shared stewardship. America’s forests can’t succeed if we all focus inward on our own concerns, and the Forest Service can’t succeed if all we do is focus on National Forest System lands. We need to work with partners, landowners, and the people we serve to improve the condition of the nation’s forests, both public and private, in the spirit of shared stewardship across shared landscapes.

The forest management challenges we face are as great as ever before. With respect to fire alone, our nation has over a billion burnable acres of vegetated landscapes, most of them naturally adapted to periodic wildland fire. About 80 million acres on the National Forest System overall are at risk, and about a third of that area is at high risk. Hundreds of millions of acres of other lands are also at risk. We are all in this together, and we need to use every tool and authority we have to improve forest conditions.

The tools we have include timber sales, targeted grazing, herbicides in some cases, stewardship contracts, and prescribed fire. Congress has given us new authorities, including 20-year stewardship contracting … expanded authority to work across landownerships with states, counties, and Tribes through Good Neighbor agreements … expanded categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act so we can get more work done on the ground. We are reforming our processes under NEPA and bringing our forest products management into the 21^st century so we can get more work done on the ground.

And we have made progress in using our new tools and authorities. Last year, we treated nearly 3.5 million acres through timber sales and prescribed fire, the highest levels ever. We sold 3.2 billion board feet of timber—the most in 21 years, creating jobs through a sustainable flow of forest products.

But I know we could do more to be a good neighbor. So I am asking for your help. Tell us what more we can do to care for the landscapes and watersheds we share. We are open to your ideas!
 

Shared Stewardship

Before closing, I want to mention a framework for working together across shared landscapes to achieve common goals. It’s called Shared Stewardship, and we developed it last year. We believe that joining together across shared landscapes and around shared values is critical for the future of conservation.

The reason is this: the scale of our work has to match the scale of the risks and the problems we face. For example, salmon face risks ranging from the oceans to headwater streams—and all points in between. If we want to have salmon, we need to mitigate the risks by working with partners at the appropriate scale.

With respect to wildfire, we have a similar opportunity to match the scale of our work to the scale of fire risk. In the past, our fuels projects were randomly scattered across landscapes. If a wildfire came, the project would usually work: the fire would drop from the canopy to the forest floor, where firefighters could control it before it burned into homes and communities. But we had no good way of assessing the full scale of the risk and placing our treatments accordingly.

Now we have tools for understanding a whole range of conditions at landscape scales. Today’s enormous fires can travel long distances to threaten homes, communities, and other values. The entire area at risk is called a fireshed, and scientists can now map entire firesheds, including all the federal, state, private, and other landownerships that collectively make up an individual fireshed. We can map the contribution to fire risk from each parcel of land, and we can use that information to forecast what might happen if we put various kinds of treatments here or there.

We can use the same approach for other kinds of threats, like invasive species. Through planning at the right scale based on the outcomes we agree on for shared landscapes, we can place treatments of any kind in a cost-effective way to achieve shared goals.

We propose to apply our new capacities through shared stewardship, with the states taking the lead. The states will convene partners to set broad priorities across shared landscapes for the outcomes we all want. Then we will come to agreements with communities and stakeholders on the right tools to use at the right time in the right places at the right scale.

The stars are aligned. All fifty-two states in our nation have forest action plans. The plans can serve as a basis for finding common ground. The states are uniquely positioned to convene stakeholders across firesheds to evaluate the wildland fire environment, to agree on cross-jurisdictional planning areas, to use tools to assess alternatives for managing fire risk, and to set priorities for investments that will bring the highest returns.

The Forest Service has already signed shared stewardship agreements with the states of Washington, Idaho, Montana, and others. More agreements are on the way.

Through Shared Stewardship, we hope to create opportunities to work together with you and others toward sustainable forest management across broad landscapes. I am interested in hearing your thoughts and perspectives.
 

Conservation Legacy

In closing, the Forest Service is here to work with you and to support you as large forest landowners in sustaining forested landscapes for future generations. We are part of a legacy of conservation in the United States that is more than a century old. Together, we reversed forest loss in America. Together, we laid the foundations for sustainable forest management for generations to come.

All we have accomplished is now at risk on multiple levels. But we have a common asset frame, the landscapes and watersheds where we share risks and responsibilities as landowners and land managers. We are committed to being good neighbors, and I believe we do that best by bringing partners and stakeholders together around common goals.

The Forest Service can deliver the science, technology, and experience to support flourishing markets for forest products—and to support our vision for Shared Stewardship. Through Shared Stewardship, we can promote the social, economic, and ecological vitality of our landscapes and communities for generations to come.