[at-l] Forest Service Chief Speaks part 2 long......

[Slyatpct@aol.com (Slyatpct@aol.com)]

National Forest System Goals
 

The Forest Service has four principle goals for the National Forest System in 
the coming year. 

 

First, to implement the new roads policy to provide for safe public use and 
access of forests and grasslands for millions of Americans in a fiscally 
responsible and environmentally sensitive manner. 
 

Second, to implement the new planning regulations based upon science and 
collaboration with communities of place and communities of interest. 
 

Third, to employ science-based active management to help restore fire-adapted 
ecosystems, and to protect communities, habitat, and drinking water supplies. 
And, as a byproduct of this work, to provide jobs to communities and wood 
fiber for markets. 
 

Fourth to update and strengthen our existing old-growth policy statement. 
 
Old Growth
 

One of the most challenging responsibilities of conservation leadership is to 
take the long view — to look beyond the crisis of the day toward the future. 
This was in part what drove my decision to conserve roadless areas.  

 

Gifford Pinchot advocated professional forestry for public lands. Nearly 100 
years later, we celebrate his foresight and legacy. Aldo Leopold called for 
the protection of wilderness areas in the early 1920s and beyond. Seventy 
years later, the Forest Service manages more wilderness than any other 
federal agency. In the 1930s, Bob Marshall advocated protection for large 
roadless areas. Last week, the Forest Service protected more than 58 million 
acres of these unfragmented, wild places. 

 

Forestry, wilderness and roadless area protection are all ideas that were 
initiated and brought to fruition through the efforts of present and past 
conservation leaders — which brings me to the issue of old growth. Reverence 
for ancient trees is ingrained in our culture. Some trace it back to tree 
worship in the ancient old-growth forests of northern Europe. A semblance of 
that culture remains in Germany’s monuments to its few remaining ancient 
oaks, behemoths that witnessed the march of medieval armies. It echoes in our 
own cultivation of champion trees, often the sole survivors of ancient 
forests populated by giants. 

 

The drive for progress and prosperity, coupled with federal largesse in 
disposing of the public domain, led to vast clearcuts by profiteers who moved 
from region to region, confident in the belief that America’s forests were 
inexhaustible. First the eastern forests fell, next the forests of my home 
country, the Lake States. Finally, the entrepreneurs turned to the South and 
West. In their wake remained miles of slash, fueling enormous wildfires. 
Hillsides left bare were gullied by erosion; downpours caused flash floods in 
distant downstream communities.

 

Leopold wrote a fitting epitaph for the last old-growth maple in the last 
virgin forest in the Great Lakes region: “With this tree will fall the end of 
an epoch. … There will be an end of cathedral aisles to echo the hermit 
thrush, or to awe the intruder. There will be an end of hardwood wilderness 
large enough for a few days’ skiing or hiking without crossing a road. The 
forest primeval, in this region, will henceforward be a figure of speech.”

 

For too long, we allowed the issues of old-growth forests and roadless areas 
to serve as poster children for both sides of the conflict industry. In the 
not-so-distant past, old trees were viewed as “overmature” or “decadent” 
and targeted for cutting because of their high economic values. Today, 
national forests contain our last remaining sizable blocks of old-growth 
forest — a remnant of America’s original landscape. In the future, we will 
celebrate the fact that national forests serve as a reservoir for our last 
remaining old-growth forests and their associated ecological and social 
values.  

 

In 1989, Chief Dale Robertson issued an old-growth policy statement. Chief 
Robertson’s policy, issued in the midst of a controversial debate over 
spotted owl protection in the Pacific Northwest, called for standard 
definitions and inventories of old growth by forest type. The definitions 
were largely completed, although some might need revision based on new 
science and new information. New science and technology allows us to map and 
inventory the remaining old-growth forests with more accuracy and precision. 

 

It is time we revised and strengthened Chief Robertson’s old-growth policy. 
In the future, the Forest Service will manage old-growth forests specifically 
to maintain and enhance old-growth values and characteristics. We will 
develop manual direction that directs individual forests to:

 

Inventory and map remaining old-growth forests; 
 

Protect, sustain and enhance existing old-growth forests as an element of 
ecosystem diversity; 
 

Plan for old-growth within a landscape context, extending beyond forest 
boundaries; 
 

Determine the extent, pattern and character of old-growth in the past — prior 
to European contact and, potentially, at the time the area entered the 
National Forest System; and 
 

Project forward in time the amount, location and patterns of old growth 
envisioned under alternative management options. 
 

I will anticipate the critics’ charge that protecting old growth somehow 
translates into an abandonment of multiple use and active management. 

 

In fact, the opposite is true. In 2000, we had our worst fire season in 
years. In response, we developed a strategy to demonstrate how appropriate 
active management — prescribed fire, thinning and other mechanical treatments 
— can enhance ecosystem health and resiliency in fire-adapted forests where 
fire has been excluded. Many million acres of already roaded areas in 
national forests are at risk from uncharacteristic fire effects that can 
threaten communities, water quality, soils and habitat. This is where we must 
focus our work.

 

What we do not need to do to accomplish our stewardship responsibilities is 
to harvest old-growth trees. In some cases, when old-growth resources and 
values are threatened by the risk of uncharacteristic fire effects, we might 
choose to carefully thin and burn understory vegetation while leaving older, 
larger trees intact. Restoration will focus on the already roaded and managed 
portions of our landscape. That is where the risk is greatest to communities, 
municipal watersheds and habitat for threatened and endangered species.

 

We will work with local communities to prioritize and implement restoration 
projects. That means local jobs. It also means a new way of doing business, a 
changing focus for our timber program. In the future, timber harvest on 
national forests will serve as a tool for protecting watersheds, for creating 
habitat for threatened and endangered species, for restoring our ailing 
ecosystems to health, for protecting communities. 

 

Taking the long view, our central challenge in the coming millennium will be 
to demonstrate our resolve to protecting roadless areas and old-growth 
forests while building support for the need to restore fire-dependent 
landscapes. In the process, we can diminish the controversy surrounding 
national forest management, provide more jobs and more wood fiber through 
restoration, and build a constituency for active management based on 
scientific and ecologically conservative principles.

 

Thanks for being here today.