Forests need modern-day equivalent of Marshall Plan

Thursday, December 14 2006 @ 07:59 AM MST Contributed by: Admin Views: 92 by Richard Werst Environmental groups that have sued the Forest Service in the recent past, now lobbying Congress to expedite salvage and fund more timber sales? The challenges of forest restoration call upon everyone “to set aside conflicting views and interests, to bury the animosity of conflict-ridden pasts, and to find a common interest in restoring the ecological health of our forests,” a prominent environmental leader said in Missoula last week. Mitch Friedman, executive director of Conservation Northwest, formerly the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance, made the remarks at the conference, “Challenges Facing the U.S. Forest Service,” presented by the University of Montana’s O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West. Referring to himself as a West Coast liberal green who was one of the first tree-sitters; a deer hunter, failed pole vaulter for the MSU Bobcats, whose work history ranges from driving forklift in Chicago to driving cattle in southeastern Wyoming to monitoring foreign fishing vessels in the Bering Sea, Mitch told those assembled for the conference that his group is “meddling to expedite the preparation of federal timber projects, even on a post-fire salvage sale” and that “they have fallen to lobbying Congress to fund more timber sales, some of questionable profitability.” “The justification for these transgressions, compromises, and downright flip-flops,” he said, “is that our forests are damaged by many decades of livestock grazing, road building, industrial logging, and misguided fire policy—and are further threatened by an actively and rapidly warming climate.” Acknowledging that are groups on his side that reject any notion that common ground does exist, Friedman told the audience that a corollary could possibly be found in the Marshall Plan, through which “the many conflicting paths that led to a ruined Europe were overcome to build a better common future, a new path in common, after World War II.” Some Forest Service leaders are already attempting to transform the agency, he said, referring to an Earth Day speech given by this year by Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth. He quoted Bosworth as saying: “Our focus today is on restoring and maintaining the ability of ecosystems to furnish services that people want and need.” Comments and questions from the audience seemed to praise the spirit of collaboration and compromise while asking how will it function on the forest floor. One person pointed out that the red tape involved in timber sales means that any project has a minimum price tag of a quarter of a million dollars. Former Chief of the U.S. Forest Service Jack Ward Thomas, addressing the conference earlier in the day, pointed out that opponents of active timber management have a multitude of legal resources, while the proponents of timber management are handicapped. For the price of a postage stamp you can shut a project down, he said. “Management requires money. Where is the money to support an effective agency coming from?” Friedman added at one point in this speech that the Forest Service budget has been stood on its head. Even though annual budgets have remained static, an ever-larger percentage of the available monies are going to fire suppression rather than to timber sales. Having told the audience earlier that his group supports harvesting and thinning smaller timber in the interior forests coupled with prescribed fire, Friedman addressed the comment by saying that once the ground rules are established things would cost less. “Hammer out the larger picture,” he said, “and let the individual projects move forward unimpeded.” Responding to an audience member who pointed out that for collaboration to work there has to be a meeting of core values, Friedman said that both sides of the issue will have to get better at giving clear signals. “You can’t always bless the perfect timber sales,” he said. “Some must be approved because they are good enough. Liberal downtown elements need to get down off their high-horse a little bit and accept some logging.” Former Chief Thomas asked a somewhat rhetorical question that was never really answered. When both sides are either paid bureaucrats or zealots, “How do I participate? If the collaboration includes only bureaucracies and organizations, how does the individual citizen participate? he asked. Former Missoula Mayor Dan Kemmis, Center Senior Fellow in Public Policy, former Center Director, and moderator of the conference, summed up the consensus view when he observed during a question and answer session that this year’s conference enabled everyone to get a fix on where things are. Next year’s conference will focus on what to do next. ###

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