Forest Service Struggles to Redefine Role

CARROLL, N.H. —  The woods across the Ammonoosuc River did not used to look like this, lush with birch and fir, inviting even at midwinter.

“It is a dull-brown waste of lifeless, fire-eaten soil and stark white boulders,” Collier’s magazine wrote in 1908. “It is as if the contents of some vast cemetery had been unearthed in that little valley.”

Their majestic trees felled by loggers, the vast acres of remaining brush charred in blazes ignited by sparks from loggers’ locomotives, the forests of the White Mountains were bare.

Such were the conditions that greeted the U.S. Forest Service when the East’s premier mountain range was included a few years later in the growing network of national forests, brought into the fold to protect it from further exploitation--not, as with the great forests of the West, to keep it in the public domain as an eventual timber resource.

Now, after decades of beaver-like determination to cut as many trees as sound forestry allows--and, in the view of many environmentalists, millions more--the Forest Service is in the throes of a root-shaking debate. At stake, critics worry, is the future of all timber cutting in the national forests and, supporters believe, the possibility that recreation and conservation activities could be raised to an unassailable pedestal.

Over the course of one year in office, Forest Service Chief Michael P. Dombeck has presided over a continuing decline in logging. He has spoken out about the need to protect the environment. He has put at the top of his agenda the promotion of a “collaborative stewardship” of the nation’s forests that takes into account not only the long-powerful timber interests but also the voices of campers, rock climbers, hikers and others for whom the forests are a distant wilderness or an easily accessible respite from urban and suburban life.

It is that very mix of users and habitats--loggers and backpackers, wilderness areas, ski slopes and timber stands--that makes the White Mountain National Forest a model that Dombeck would like to replicate across the country.

Anticipating a battle with key Republicans in Congress, Dombeck is planning to present his agenda in a speech Monday. He will tell agency employees that they face “one of the noblest, most important callings of our generation: bringing people together and helping them to find ways to live within the limits of the land.”

If he succeeds in reorienting the Forest Service, the ramifications will be felt across the country--from the eastern edge of the White Mountain National Forest to the Los Padres, Angeles, San Bernardino and Cleveland national forests in Southern California.

Nowhere can the effect of such a course be better seen than here on the snow-packed but well-trod trails of the 773,000-acre White Mountain National Forest. That is not large, compared to the vast forests of the West.

Yet imagine setting out on U.S. 101 in Thousand Oaks, turning south onto I-5, and for the entire 80-mile journey to Mission Viejo seeing trees, ponds, an occasional village, logging trails that disappear into the timber of the Presidential Range--and little else.

That is the scale and scope of this forest within a day’s drive of nearly one-quarter of all Americans. Each year as many as 6 million people--nearly as many as those visiting Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks combined--make the trip.

To be sure, the emerging shift in the Forest Service is a far cry from the proposal of Rep. Cynthia A. McKinney (D-Ga.) to end all logging in the national forests.

But it is not the same agency that, operating not so much to protect natural resources as to bring them to market, has dominated the 20th century West.

Even one of its defenders, Charlie Niebling, policy director of the Society for the Preservation of New Hampshire Forests, said: “There’s no question the U.S. Forest Service, from the New Deal era into the 1990s, was driven by the need for commodity extraction and was a welfare agency for rural areas it dominated.”

Dombeck, a fisheries biologist and Forest Service veteran, took his job with the goal of examining the role of American forests in U.S. economic and social life.

Just consider, he said, this statistic: The number of logging trucks now operating in the national forests, 15,000 each day, is unchanged from the 1950s. But the daily flow of 1.7 million vehicles into the forests for tourism and recreation is 10 times greater than at mid-century.

After World War II, “the social focus was on wood products and the Forest Service delivered,” he said in an interview. “Now we’re the largest provider of recreation in the United States, yet our budget structure and incentives are stuck back in the big-timber era.”

In a policy decision that diverged sharply from the past, Dombeck in January proposed an 18-month moratorium on building roads in roadless logging areas of the national forests--exempting Alaska’s massive Tongass National Forest and certain Pacific Northwest areas.

Logging roads are considered among the most egregious scars on the forest landscape. The 373,000 miles of such roads--roughly nine times the distance covered by the nation’s interstate highways--cut off wildlife routes and leave bare soil that is subject to erosion.

And last month, the agency withdrew its previous approval of what would have been the first open-pit gold mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In October, it reversed an earlier plan that would have allowed drilling for oil and gas in 7% of the Lewis and Clark National Forest on the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

Within the agency, Dombeck has begun moving out of key positions some longtime employees who were closely allied with timber interests. He is putting greater emphasis on how individual foresters protect water and soil and less on whether they meet timber-sale quotas.

And, in what could be a major departure from current policy, he is considering taking a chain saw to long-standing policy that gives towns and counties 25% of the money timber companies pay the Forest Service for logging rights. Local reliance on the revenue, used for schools and other municipal services, places undue pressure on the Forest Service to approve more logging than may be supported by sound science, critics argue.

Instead, Dombeck would establish specific fees to be paid to the communities.

In making the shifts, Dombeck is also looking back to one of the Forest Service’s original missions: protection of the nation’s water supply. In California, he observed, the Forest Service is responsible for 20% of the state’s land surface, which receives 60% of the state’s rainfall. Across the country, 80% of the nation’s rivers originate in national forests.

But the timber industry and its supporters in Congress worry that Dombeck is trying to take the Forest Service out of the business of selling trees.

“What’s going on is a continual effort to stop cutting trees in the national forests--period,” said W. Henson Moore, a former congressman and George Bush administration Energy Department official who now is president of the American Forest and Paper Assn.

A more appropriate Forest Service goal, said Brad Wyman of Crown Vantage, a Berlin, N.H., milling company, “is to show how to cut timber with the greatest public benefit.”

For that, he said, “the White Mountain National Forest is a model.”

Still, it is rare that a sale of timber acreage or the Forest Service’s approval of a ski slope’s expansion is not met with the contentiousness of a New England town meeting.

In addition, the Forest Service itself is resistant.

“How do you change a bureaucracy that is set with a 100-year-old tradition and supported by Congress?” asked Mike Francis, a Wilderness Society forestry expert.

Almost overlooked in the debate over whether logging will continue in the forests--it was on a downward trend even when Dombeck took office--is his increased emphasis on recreation.

“When you look at a map of the East Coast, the White Mountains are a great big island of open space that says ‘Come here,’ ” said Eric Kingsley, executive director of the New Hampshire Timberland Owners Assn.

Throughout its history, “the Forest Service has looked down on recreation in large measure because Congress has never given it any money for recreation,” said Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

Yet three times as many people visit the national forests as the national parks, and Dombeck “sees those visitors as an incredible, untapped constituency” for the forests, “to replace the old political constituency--the timber interests and miners,” Stahl said.

Even on a sunny midwinter day when the temperature threatens to reach 30 degrees, it isn’t uncommon to encounter 50 or 60 hikers in the shadow of the legendary 6,288-foot Mt. Washington. Winds there have been measured at 231 mph, stronger than anywhere else on the planet; temperatures have reached 47 degrees below zero; and snow has fallen in every month of the year, including 96 inches last May.

As hikers make their way down the snow-packed 2.4-mile trail from Tuckerman Ravine to Pinkham’s Notch, they express unanimous support for Dombeck’s agenda.

Rich O’Brien, a 37-year-old lawyer hiking with his 13-month-old son, William, on his back, has been visiting the forest several times a year since he was a teenager.

“This offers a tremendous opportunity to just get away and lose yourself,” he said.

At the trail head is Peter Brandenburg, 27, and Darwin, his standard poodle.

Any effort to balance logging and recreation in the forests, he said, “is overdue. . . . If you hike up the ridge, it’s clear-cut city,” said Brandenburg, whose Arlington, Mass., home is 3 1/2 hours away.

But is this forest’s successful combination of recreation and timber transportable to the West?

Here, a shared dependence on the forest’s timber, water and recreational resources has created a sense of communal property among loggers, ski operators, owners of bed and breakfasts, other merchants and users who trek here from throughout the Northeast.

As a result, said Ted Howard, chairman of the department of natural resources at the University of New Hampshire, the debate “gets a little closer to conversation and dialogue, and the local groups . . . generally come to the table with an open mind.”

In the West, where forest issues have brought violent protests, there is no such tradition.

“The transition in the western United States,” he said, “will be painful.”

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Logging and Leisure

Volume of timber cut in the national forests, in board feet:

1950: 3.5 billion

1960: 9.4 billion

1970: 11.5 billion

1980: 9.2 billion

1990: 10.5 billion

1991: 6.6 billion

1992: 7.3 billion

1993: 5.9 billion

1994: 4.8 billion

1995: 3.9 billion

1996: 3.7 billion

*

Recreational-use visitors to national forests (includes campgrounds, winter sports, wilderness sites and other uses, but not hunting, fishing and drive-thrus), estimated:

1960: 92.6 million

1970: 172.6 million

1980: 233.5 million

1990: 263.1 million

1992: 287.7 million

1993: 295.5 million

1994: 330.3 million

1995: 345.1 million

1996: 341.2 million

Source: U.S Forest Service