Managing the National Forests

The national forests of the United States comprise close to 190 million acres—an area larger than that of most countries.

The National Forest System is composed of 154 individual national forests, mostly in the western states, that provide a wide variety of products, from primary commodities, such as timber and forage, to final consumption services, like recreation, enjoyed in the forests themselves.

Unlike private enterprises, the national forests are required by law to engage in conservation activities intended to preserve the productivity of the land and also its common property nonpriced resource services. Indeed, the Forest Service was established precisely because of the need to perform a number of such privately nonremunerative tasks.

During much of the first half of the twentieth century, the Forest Service largely performed a stewardship role. It was not until the explosive growth in the demand for all resources, and the post-1945 intensification of rival demands for national forest resources, that conflicting demands became a troublesome issue.

The growing problem led to the passage of the Multiple Use Act of 1960, which established in law the several uses that the national forests were directed to serve. But acknowledging the rival demands did not resolve the problem of determining an efficient way of allocating resources between, say, timber production and recreation. The Renewable Resources Planning Act (RPA) of 1974, amended shortly by the National Forest Management Act of 1976, charged the chief of the Forest Service to assess periodically the supply of and demand for forest and rangeland resources, and to advance a systematic program to address them. While a preliminary assessment and program was prepared in 1976, it took another four years of experience to accomplish these tasks more thoroughly.

Presented to Congress in September 1980, the recommendations ran into immediate heavy weather. The program goals—expected to be a statement of potentially attainable production targets—fell victim to the Executive Office directive for budgetary retrenchment. What emerged was a higher-bound set of goals feasible under a liberal budget and a lower-bound set representing the Executive Office policy of anti-inflationary fiscal restraint.

Part of the ensuing congressional dismay may be attributable to the absence of a federal capital budget. Such a budget would prevent the confusion now permitted to exist between curtailing current appropriations and budget and reducing presently required investment for future production. As it is, the resolution of the Executive Office's intent to reduce government expenditures and Congress's intent to support orderly, balanced investment in long-term productive capacity on the public lands may founder on the failure to have established long since an orderly process for longer-term capital budgeting within the government.

Last year marked the submission of a completed RPA update, and also was the inaugural year for successfully implementing the implications of RPA, as amended, on several representative forests in the National Forest System. Economic scarcity of forest and rangeland resource outputs in the face of mushrooming rival demands called for more intensive and economically efficient management, and the legislation placed most of the planning and management responsibilities for the National Forest System at the forest level, where resource services originate. The complexity of managing scarce resources in the absence of relevant markets requires the development of rational allocation mechanisms of planning and management methods that indicate how the allocation of land among incompatible uses should be accomplished. Developing and implementing this methodology immediately provoked apprehension among interested parties, for three basic reasons.

First, the Forest Service traditionally has been manned by natural scientists who are comfortable with the stewardship role and relatively uncomfortable with economics. Given the existing complement of men and women and stringent personnel ceilings, it was not immediately clear that the Forest Service could marshal and deploy the economics and management talent to the extent and depth necessary to implement the regulations called for under the amended RPA.

Second, could methods be developed in time to address the various issues stemming from planning and management legislation, and in enough detail to be responsive to the requirements of amended RPA?

Finally, even if the matters of specialized personnel and software were resolved satisfactorily, would the much more extensive data requiring analysis be available in a sufficiently precise form? And could such data be obtained given limited budgets allocated to planning?

Has the legislation directed the Forest Service to achieve an impossible mission? As things developed, the Forest Service did manage to deploy its own specialized talent, in association with outside collaborators, to develop prototype software. While the magnitude of the job left room for improvements, the software clearly is available to undertake an analysis equal to the requirements of a first-generation effort, and this has been demonstrated on several forests.

The issue of exceeding what is judged to be a realistic budget for a national forest plan continues to be serious, however, and is accommodated in part by reducing the number of allocation alternatives analyzed. Not everyone will agree on the limited number of alternatives selected for comparison, nor on their specific composition. But several forests have completed their initial planning effort under the new legislation and have established the feasibility of this kind of planning, and this was not entirely assured before the successful prototype applications.

The planning and management activities engendered by the RPA as amended are moving forward vigorously. As is to be expected in an inaugural effort on so massive a task, not everyone will be satisfied with the results, but this may be more the product of desiring different options to be evaluated rather than dissatisfaction with the progress achieved in building the capability to implement the forest and rangeland planning and management legislation.

As Samuel Johnson was reported to have said in evaluating the competence of a dog walking on its "hind" legs, one does not quibble about how well it is done, one marvels that it is done at all. In demonstrating planning and management feasibility under very tough conditions, the Forest Service's performance last year is a cause for optimism. Given time and experience as allies, there now are good reasons to be confident that the future holds even better management of the rich national resources that are the national forests.