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National Forests: The Next 100 Years

January 11, 2005

This month is the centennial celebration of the U.S. Forest Service. Let's wish the agency a happy birthday, from Chief Dale Bosworth to the hard-working rangers out in the sticks.

Then, once the 100 candles on the cake have been blown out, let's talk about the next 100 years.

What do we want from the 192 million acres of national forests under our care? Water? Timber? Oil and gas? Fish to catch? Deer to hunt? Trails to hike or ride? All of the above? Some of the above?

It might help to know what Theodore Roosevelt had in mind when he established the Forest Service, put Gifford Pinchot in charge, and nearly quadrupled the size of our national forest system during his eight years in office.

Roosevelt realized that America's natural resources are much more than storehouses of wood, minerals, and fuel. They are the foundation of the nation's vitality. Deplete them through waste and pollution, he worried, and future generations would inherit a weak, impoverished nation.

"Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of ensuring the safety and continuance of the nation," Roosevelt said in his New Nationalism speech in 1910.

The term "natural capital" was unknown in TR's day, but he had a firm grasp of the concept. Take good care of the forests and they'll take good care of us.

From 1905 until the end of World War II, the Forest Service was, for the most part, a conservative steward of the national forests. In the period after World War II, however, the wise fiduciary evolved into the live-for-day spendthrift it had become by the 1980s. Even Chief Dale Robertson, who headed the Forest Service in those years, said at last week's Forest Service centennial conference that the 12 billion board-feet that was being cut annually in the '80s was an unsustainable level of timber harvest.

The results are clear -- disfigured watersheds, unhealthy forests, and fragmentation of America's once-immense wild heritage.

Society took notice. Citizens lobbied, litigated, hoisted protest signs, and camped in trees. Laws were passed to protect wilderness, institutionalize science-based decision-making, and restore balance to the forests. Grudginly but inexorably, the Forest Service began acknowledging the reality that national forests cannot be managed like an overdrawn bank account for very long.

Battles over roads and logging will continue awhile yet. Backsliding is all too possible. Pork-barrelling politicians can't let go of outdated visions of forests as raw material depots. Subsidy grabbers will be forever among us, arguing that what's theirs is theirs and what's ours is negotiable. But larger issues demand our attention.

Chief Bosworth has described "four threats" to national forests -- fire, invasive species, unmanaged recreation, and open space loss. His list is a good start at framing today's forest problems, but you have to dig deeper to put the "four threats" into context. National forests are part of a larger natural endowment, here in America and elsewhere, that is feeling the pressure of our growing numbers and wasteful habits. At last week's centennial conference, Bosworth warned that if Americans truly value a land ethic, they must follow a consumption ethic as well.

Global warming is the largest of several angry elephants in the living room. As we burn more fossil fuels, we're poking a stick at a climate beast that is already beginning to react in worrisome ways.

Warmer temperatures are hastening the spread of forest pests and disease. If hotter, drier weather becomes the norm, nature may reboot forest ecosystems, altering them in ways beyond modern experience. We may push forests past a tipping point, degrading them in a way that would take lifetimes to overcome.

Chief Bosworth and his overworked rangers can't change America's dumb energy habits. What they can do, however, is fully embrace Theodore Roosevelt's conservation vision and update it for the next 100 years.

In ways that even TR could not have imagined, the Forest Service's stewardship mission is more critical than ever. As other wild lands disappear under pollution, sprawl, and fragmentation, national forests can serve as a remnant ecological nest egg yielding the vital dividends -- ecosystem services -- that our lives depend upon.

Happy Birthday, Forest Service. Enjoy the centennial celebration. Once the party ends, your job will be that much harder.