Ecosystem Management: An Uncharted Path for Public Forests

Should public forests be managed to reduce all traces of modern human activities or to produce goods and services? Recently, the U.S. Forest Service seemed to answer that question by saying that it would like to restore the forests of the northern Rockies to presettlement conditions—that is, to the way the forests were at the start of the nineteenth century. This is indicative of the Forest Service's new philosophy of ecosystem management and reflects its shift away from multiple-use management, which has been the practice on public forestlands since the 1960s.

The impetus for both approaches is the desire to sustain forests. Concern about the rapid rate of logging on public lands following World War II led to congressional legislation that called for multiple-use management. This legislation explicitly recognized the worthiness of a range of goods or services provided by public forests—including market goods, such as timber, and nonmarket services, such as habitat for wildlife. Congress charged the Forest Service with managing forests to produce a mix of both within the context of sustainability.

In recent years, however, the leadership of the Forest Service has backed away from this goal as its attention has focused on forest ecology—the totality of relationships between forest organisms and their environment. This concern with forest ecology is embodied in the leadership's advocacy of ecosystem management. In accordance with this philosophy, the service has all but abandoned the notion of forests as primarily a vehicle for producing multiple goods (or "outputs") desired by society. Instead of practicing multiple-use management, which emphasizes the sustainable production of myriad goods and services, the Forest Service has embraced ecosystem management, wherein the condition of forest ecosystems—the complex of forest organisms and their environment functioning as an ecological unit in nature—is considered to be the preeminent output.

Although an ecosystem-based approach has much to offer in the form of a broader, more integrated, and more comprehensive view of the forest—and thus contributes to the development of more effective management tools—its defect is its disregard for certain socially approved objectives. In essence, ecosystem management aims to restore forests to some biological condition that reflects fewer human impacts, but just what condition is a matter of arbitrary selection. Because ecosystem management has no real legislative mandate, decisions to seek any one of many possible conditions are being made by the Forest Service rather than by society at large, which makes its wishes known through the legislation of management objectives. More to the point from the perspective of taxpayers, these decisions are being driven almost exclusively by biological considerations, with little attention paid to economic and other concerns. In short, when identifying objectives, ecosystem management ignores the social consensus implicit in the congressionally legislated objective of producing multiple market and nonmarket forest outputs and, instead, attempts to achieve some arbitrary forest condition about which society has little say.

Management of public forestlands requires the identification of clear objectives and the development of a regime (procedures and tools) that will achieve the objectives without violating the constraints imposed by the availability of resources and the acceptability of actions and outcomes.

Forest management without objectives is meaningless. In the absence of stated goals, we cannot differentiate successful forestry activities from unsuccessful ones. And in the case of public forestlands, the ability to gauge the success of management efforts takes on added significance because these efforts are being financed by taxpayer dollars. Moreover, without specifying objectives, we cannot ensure that the preferences of society are being reflected in the way that our forests are managed. These preferences should inform goals as well as define the constraints within which a management regime will operate.

But where objectives dictate the management approach under multiple-use forestry, ends merge with means under ecosystem management. Indeed, in actual practice, the objective of ecosystem management is most often simply the application of an ecosystem, or ecosystem-based, approach that is concerned first and foremost with the state of the forest itself. Thus while the Forest Service has been embracing ecosystem management as its operating philosophy for several years, no clear vision of output goals, at least as traditionally understood, has emerged. What has emerged is a preoccupation with forest condition—that is, with biological attributes, such as a forest's structure (mixture of younger and older trees) and variety of tree species—rather than with the goods and services (particularly those consumed by humans) that forests provide.

Ecosystem management versus multiple-use management

Jack Ward Thomas, chief of the Forest Service, has said that ecosystem management means sustaining forest resources, from which will flow many goods and services. But our public forests have for decades been managed to sustain multiple uses. Is ecosystem management really different from multiple-use management?

The mandate for multiple-use forestry has been expressed by law since 1960, when Congress passed the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act. This act acknowledges that forests generate both market goods and nonmarket goods. The objective of multiple-use management is to produce the mix of these market and nonmarket goods that maximizes the value of forests to society.

If the objective of ecosystem management is simply the management of whole ecosystems for a variety of purposes, such management might be viewed as an expansion of the multiple-use approach. Under this expanded approach, the set of outputs under consideration would broaden to include the biological condition of the forest itself. In addition, the boundaries of the management unit would enlarge, because changes in forests affect the geographic area around forests. Finally, the potential uniqueness of each forest ecosystem would be recognized and new management techniques would be introduced. Conceptually, these considerations represent modest extensions of multiple-use management. The job of the public forest manager would continue to be producing the mix of outputs that would maximize the social value of the forest.

Given ecosystem management's focus on forest condition, the first question that arises is whether a given forest's current condition should be maintained or modified to some specified extent. Once such a decision is made, the vagueness of the management objective disappears. But, as I suggest below, the selection of desired or acceptable condition is essentially arbitrary. As a result, the objective chosen today may be sadly outdated in perhaps a few years.

Although not readily apparent, arbitrariness is reflected in the Forest Service's apparent preference for restoration, rather than maintenance, of forest condition. This restoration entails the return of forests to some state characterized by fewer human impacts—for example, the return of the forests of the northern Rockies to presettlement conditions. But why not aim for a forest condition that predates human activity?

Public forests were established to generate benefits for all citizens, and in the past the objectives of forest management reflected a degree of political consensus In recent decades, these objectives have been codified in congressional legislation: the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960, as well as the Resources Planning Act of 1974 and the National Forest Management Act of 1976. By contrast, forest management as practiced by the Forest Service in the mid-1990s has no clear political or social mandate. Indeed, ecosystem management marks a sharp shift away from legislatively supported multiple-use forestry—which recognizes many biological, social, and economic values—focusing instead on an arbitrary forest-condition objective that, in essence, is defined by biological considerations only.

While the Forest Service's adoption of ecosystem management may be inconsistent with legislation mandating multiple-use management, it is not inconsistent with the Endangered Species Act (ESA). In fact, recent court rulings that earlier Forest Service actions were contrary to the ESA do provide a rationale for the service's shift to ecosystem management. These rulings do not, however, provide sufficient justification for jettisoning the multiple-use objectives called for in existing legislation, at least until such time as a national consensus on new forest management objectives is codified by Congress.

The practice of ecosystem management, however, has arisen partly as a result of the difficulties inherent in multiple-use forestry. Achieving the optimal social mix of outputs is, obviously, no easy task. The selection of outputs has been complicated further by court interpretations of the ESA that constrained management decisions. In this context, the current administration and the new Forest Service chief have promoted the shift to an ecosystem management approach.

Changes in the administration or the ESA are likely to alter the way that ecosystem management is practiced, however, perhaps making the forest conditions managed for today undesirable tomorrow. And changes are likely. Administrations come and go, after all, and with them the leadership of the Forest Service. Moreover, the ESA is expected to be amended. In the absence of any kind of legislative mandate, then, ecosystem management could go by the wayside or it could constantly alter the goods that forests provide and do so without reference to public opinion.