Excerpted from the recently published RFF study The Forest Service: A Study in Public Land Management, by Glen O. Robinson.
Among the common criticisms leveled against government agencies is their neglect of long-term planning. It is a charge that has been especially prominent in the case of the independent regulatory commissions. However, such a charge cannot reasonably be leveled at the Forest Service. Whatever else one may say of Forest Service planning, one cannot fairly say it does not engage in sufficient, long-range planning. A significant percentage of the agency's professional staff is devoted to little else but preparation of management plans. At all levels, and for virtually every activity, plans are bountiful; in fact, the trouble is that there are probably too many separate plans, inadequately coordinated and integrated.
A major difficulty is in integrating various components of the functional planning system. Even disregarding the multiplication of plans and planning directives resulting from the two or more levels of planning (say, district and forest or forest and region), the task of fitting these together into a coherent planning scheme is obviously an enormous one. And it is one which has been rather neglected until very recently. Until the late 1950s, virtually no planned integration of different functions existed.
The introduction of multiple-use planning was a significant step toward co-ordination of the different resource functions, but . . . for all of the emphasis given to multiple-use planning in the Forest Service Manual and other official directives, multiple-use plans never achieved preeminent stature among management plans.
The basic weakness of multiple-use planning was that it was inadequately integrated into the mainstream of management planning and operations. Instead of attempting to coordinate a number of different, largely autonomous functions, there was a need to integrate multiple-use planning into a single-stage system. Such a new system was needed, not merely to give greater recognition to appropriate multiple-use constraints on individual functions, but also to develop a comprehensive land use plan in which each forest resource activity would be integrated. Individual functional plans would be developed where appropriate, but these would be derived from the comprehensive land use plan. Thus, the new plan would be the primary land use plan, not merely a coordinating document for connecting autonomous functional plans.
Essentially, this is the thrust of the new "land use" (the currently preferred term for the multiple-use planning process) planning system which has been implemented by the service in recent years. As this is written, the new planning system has not been fully developed, and there remain some uncertainties about its practical implementation and effects. The main uncertainty is how well the new planning process will achieve its intended purpose of integrating resource planning. In particular it remains to be seen whether the new land use planning will materially alter the relative priorities among resource uses, whether it will, as was intended, achieve a greater balance among the five major resource uses. At the early stage of implementation—when I interviewed Forest Service officials in the field—some skepticism was voiced by many with whom this was discussed.
It is too early to predict effects; many years must pass before they will become publicly visible. What can be said is that the design of the new land use planning approach to multiple-use forestry does look in the right direction of more fully integrated resource planning.