A Partnership
Tradition for the Future of Conservation
Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth
International Paper/The Conservation Fund:
Environmental Excellence Awards Luncheon
Washington, DC—June 23, 2004
Thanks, George, for that warm introduction. This is a great occasion
to celebrate conservation, and I want to personally thank the Environmental
Excellence Award winners for giving us this opportunity—
- Camilla Herlevich, founder of the North Carolina Coastal Land
Trust and winner of the Conservation Award; and
- Melanie Phelps and Joyce Webb, winners of the Environmental
Education Award for their educational work in the Colorado River
watershed.
Your work exemplifies the partnerships we will need for the future
of conservation and sustainable forestry, and I thank you and commend
you for that.
I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about the role
we play at the Forest Service in conservation and sustainable forestry.
I’ll say a little about who we are, where we’ve been
in the past, and where I think we’re going in the future.
Who We Are
Most of you probably know that the Forest Service is celebrating
our centennial next year. For a hundred years, we’ve had the
same mission of caring for the land and serving people. We’ve
always tried to deliver the values that Americans want from their
forests and grasslands, and we’ve always done that through
partnerships—whether with timber producers and ranchers, with
local homeowners and communities, or with conservationists and environmental
groups.
Our mission includes managing the national forests and grasslands.
But it also includes promoting sustainable forestry on state and
private lands, and we have a whole array of programs for that. We
also have maybe the largest research and development organization
in the world devoted solely to conservation. So that’s who
we are and what we’re about—caring for the land and
serving people through partnerships all across America.
But what Americans have wanted from the land has changed over time,
and in response the Forest Service focus has shifted. Let me just
talk about that in terms of the National Forest System, although
it applies to our State and Private Forestry and Research programs
as well. It will give you some idea of where we’ve come from
and where I think we’re headed.
Where We’ve Been
In the past century, we have been through three very different eras
of national forest management, and now we are in a fourth. A century
ago, our nation faced a crisis caused by unrestrained exploitation
of our natural resources. Bison, elk, and other wildlife species
were almost extinct, and we were seeing disastrous fires and floods.
There were also widespread fears of a timber famine.
Conservation came out of that crisis. The National Forest System
was established in 1905, and the Forest Service was charged with
managing it. We went in and put the multiple uses for the first
time under careful management. For example, overgrazing had been
a problem, and we got that under control. We also protected the
game and started to get the fires under control.
The next era came with the Great Depression in the 1930s. The New
Deal ramped up our social responsibility, especially through the
Civilian Conservation Corps. Every national forest had at least
one CCC camp, where we gave jobs to thousands of unemployed Americans.
The CCC built a lot of our infrastructure—roads, trails, campgrounds,
ranger stations, and so on. The CCC planted trees and helped us
control many more fires.
World War II ended the CCC, but I guess you could say the era of
social responsibility continued through the war effort, which we
strongly supported. A lot of our employees enlisted, and we ramped
up timber supplies needed by our troops.
The 1950s were a period of transition into the timber era. From
the 1960s through the 1980s, every administration, with strong congressional
support, called for more timber from the national forests. In those
30 years, we went from producing very little timber to meeting 20
to 25 percent of our nation’s sawtimber needs. We helped millions
of Americans fulfill the American dream of home ownership.
The first Earth Day in 1970 signaled another major shift in public
values. In response, our management began to change. By the 1990s,
we were no longer focusing primarily on timber production. Instead,
our main focus was on ecosystem health and capitalizing on the multiple
uses to get there. Today, we use timber harvest primarily to restore
forest health. The national forests produce only about a sixth as
much timber as before, mostly as a byproduct of treatments for other
reasons. And our road system is now shrinking. From 1998 through
2002, we obliterated 14 miles of road for every mile of new road
we built.
Where We’re Going
That brings me to where we’re going. We have entered a new
era of ecological restoration. We manage the land for long-term
ecosystem health while meaningfully engaging the public in our decisionmaking.
We believe that what we leave on the land is more important than
what we take away.
Today, the main values that Americans want from their public lands
are clean air and water, habitat for wildlife, scenic beauty, and
plenty of opportunities for outdoor recreation. The main threats
to these values aren’t timber harvest or livestock grazing
or roadbuilding. The main threats are fire and fuels, invasive species,
loss of open space, and unmanaged outdoor recreation. Consider:
- In the West, we face some of our worst wildland fires in history.
- Nationwide, invasive species have contributed to the decline
of up to half of our imperiled species.
- We are rapidly losing our open spaces. Every minute, Americans
lose about 4 acres of open space to development.
- And recreational uses have been rising so fast that
we haven’t always kept up. In particular, we’re seeing
unacceptable resource damage from the unmanaged use of off-road
vehicles.
Given all this, our focus has got to be on ecological restoration.
I met with the forest supervisors a few months ago, and I can tell
you that they “get it.” They are fired up and ready
to get on with the job of ecological restoration.
How We’ll Get There
That brings me back to partnerships. Whether it’s restoring
our longleaf pine ecosystems in the Southeast or the Colorado River
watershed in the West, we can accomplish ecological restoration
only through partnerships. I think the Environmental Excellence
Award winners here today could tell you that, and our forest supervisors
and district rangers understand that, too.
We’re trying to do that through a community-based collaborative
approach. The idea is this: We sit down with people from the community
and anyone else who might be interested, and together we formulate
some shared long-term goals for the land. Then we figure out how
we can work together to get there.
I’d be the first to admit that we don’t always do that
so well. In a lot of places, we’ve got a ways to go before
we’ve got this kind of full upfront collaboration with our
partners. But we’re getting some help. Through the Healthy
Forests Initiative and Healthy Forests Restoration Act, we’re
streamlining our processes so we can deliver on our promises and
get more done on the ground. For example, if we can work upfront
with communities to get community fire plans in place, then under
HFRA we can get more fuels reduction work done for community fire
protection.
Sometimes our own agency culture can put obstacles in the way.
That’s where I think our proposed new planning rule can help.
We want our line officers to focus on getting local agreement in
place long before we reach the project stage. Then our NEPA processes
won’t hold us up so much.
Our expanded authority for stewardship contracting holds a lot of
promise along these lines. For example, we might contract with a
business or community group to restore a fire-adapted forest while
obliterating roads, replacing old culverts, and utilizing biomass
to heat local schools. The community drives the process, and everyone
wins. I think that’s the gist of where we’re headed.
Community Forestry Is Key
In closing, we’ve come a long way since the beginnings of
the conservation movement a century ago. Values have changed and
so have the challenges we face, but we’ve always been committed
to partnership. Today, that means working upfront through collaborative
partnerships for long-term ecosystem health.
For that, we’re going to need help from our partners. Community-based
forestry is relatively new for us, and we’re still working
it out. I invite you to work with us to help make it a success.
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