Montezuma
Born of conflict, saddled with an impossible task of balancing demands, and apparently fated to an existence of controversy, the U.S. Forest Service celebrated its 100th year this summer while sizing up its toughest challenges ever.
Increasingly, it is an agency hamstrung by litigation and politics, struggling to manage 155 forests. On the agency’s 192 million acres, the remnants of timber, mining and grazing interests tenuously exist alongside a burgeoning crowd of hunters, skiers, trail users and campers. Fast-developing communities constantly encroach.
“I’m still optimistic and still believe that this experiment can be successful,” Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth told The Denver Post. “The question is whether or not you can manage public lands for multiple uses in a way where people will try to come together and develop a consensus over how they want those lands to be managed, as opposed to fighting over it.”
To be certain, it is an agency that has made its fair share of mistakes.
Decades of fire suppression have allowed trees to grow more thickly and fuels more potent, leading to devastating, uncontrollable blazes such as the Hayman fire in 2002.
The expense of building roads for logging often has cost the Forest Service much more than timber sales have generated, and left a spider’s web of 445,000 miles of routes that have become a budget-busting maintenance nightmare.
And failures to protect wildlife habitat or follow other environmental laws have resulted in numerous costly losses in federal court – 44 in the past two years, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
But the Forest Service also struggles with the external forces of politics and public demand, finding itself in an untenable position as it tries to meet its mandate as a “land of many uses.”
Population poses problem
On a summer weekend, forest ranger Tyler Kirkpatrick maneuvered his Jeep over a bumpy dirt road into a high alpine basin near Montezuma, greeting campers, hikers, mountain bikers, picnickers, anglers and a steady procession of four-wheelers scurrying about below a small-scale mining operation.
“This is my office,” he explained, with a grin.
Scenes like this in the White River National Forest west of Denver depict many of the competing – and often conflicting – interests and ever-increasing pressures on federal holdings.
“The problems are growing more complex,” Bosworth said, noting that the U.S. population is projected to nearly double to an estimated 571 million by the end of the century.
“As the population increases and people are looking for solitude … I think the national forests will become more and more important to them. I think that’s a huge challenge we’re going to have to face.”
At age 100, the agency’s most serious concerns include:
People. Visitation to the national forests reached an estimated 214 million in 2004, up from about 5 million in the early 1920s. Colorado’s 11 national forests now host more than 30 million visitors annually. Crowds have grown so thick on the most-visited of Colorado’s fourteeners – the peaks above 14,000 feet, most of which are in national forests – that it’s not uncommon to see 300 people going for a summit on a summer Sunday. To see the famed Maroon Bells, visitors must pay $7 to ride a shuttle bus from Aspen because regular traffic overwhelms roads and parking lots.
Money. Buffeted by changing national priorities, the Forest Service budget – already deemed inadequate for basic upkeep – swings madly from administration to administration.
Under President Clinton, for example, the agency emphasized recreational uses; under President Bush, much of the same money has been shifted to fire suppression and extractive industries. Budget constraints have resulted in staff layoffs, closure of facilities and, this year, the sale of some unused buildings.
Politics. Almost every major management decision in the national forests is influenced by politics, whether it be the local congressman fighting for increased timber sales to bolster county revenues, or national debates over protecting roadless areas.
A controversial 10-year management plan for Colorado’s White River National Forest, for example, was heavily revised after then-Colorado Rep. Scott McInnis, the chairman of the House subcommittee on forests and forest health, objected to the dramatic increase in habitat protection. He drafted his own version that encouraged less wilderness protection and more recreation through ski-area expansions and fewer restrictions for off-road vehicles.
Litigation. Most major policy decisions are subjected to a raft of legal challenges, leaving the agency unable to move swiftly to address emerging issues such as beetle epidemics or salvaging burned trees for lumber.
By the time Vail ski area opened its polarizing Category III expansion in 2000, it had withstood nearly a decade of legal challenges in federal court by environmental groups opposed to the Forest Service approval over fears of diminishing habitat of the endangered Canadian lynx.
Energy developers, loggers and ski-resort operators have pointed to such cases as abuses of the National Environmental Policy Act, a 1969 federal law that requires land managers to consider environmental concerns and public input when making decisions on project proposals.
“Environmental radicals put up regulatory roadblocks to use of our national land, often miring any sensible land use proposal in endless litigation,” Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., said this week regarding a proposal to sell federal lands for hurricane-relief funds.
But environmental groups counter that in many other cases the Forest Service clearly has been wrong, such as when it attempted to sell off timber burned in the 2002 Missionary Ridge fire near Durango without concern for wildlife habitat and stability of steep slopes.
Colorado Wild filed a lawsuit in 2003 to halt the sale, and, given a high degree of likelihood of succeeding by a federal judge, forced the agency to withdraw the proposal and pay legal costs.
“These challenges are enormous,” Bosworth said of the pressures pulling the agency in different directions. “But we have to meet them. We don’t have any choice.”
“Timber!” heard often
When President Theodore Roosevelt first established the Forest Service in 1905, he set aside vast tracts of land throughout the country to protect them from “land grabbers” and timber profiteers.
“The American had but one thought about a tree, and that was to cut it down,” Bosworth, in a speech, quoted Roosevelt as saying.
“Like other men who had thought about the national future at all, I had been growing more and more concerned over the destruction of the forests,” Roosevelt wrote in a 1913 autobiography.
His idea – and that of his first chief, trained forester Gifford Pinchot – was to create a reserve of natural resources that could be both conserved and used wisely for the development of the country.
“It is not what we have that will make us a great nation,” Roosevelt said in an 1886 speech in the Dakota Territory, “it is the way in which we use it.”
At the time, he drew heavy criticism from settlers in the West, where the majority of the lands were collected, for not allowing further homesteading, as well as from pioneering environmentalists like John Muir, who wanted the land preserved rather than logged.
As it did a century ago, the debate continues to rage between environmental conservation and the doctrine of “multiple use” for the forests.
But today, the arguments increasingly are over “ecosystem management” and accommodating a vast increase in recreational uses – ranging from ever-expanding ski areas to all-terrain vehicle use to wilderness protections – while traditional activities such as logging and mining are being curbed by legal restrictions, economic factors and an anti-industrial philosophical climate brought on by the environmental movement of the 1960s.
“People recognized that our forests weren’t being managed well. The timber industry was clear-cutting the forests, and the environment was taking a beating,” said Sean Cosgrove, national forest policy specialist for the Sierra Club. “It was clear even by the mid-50s that our wild places were shrinking.”
Prior to that point, the agency had acted with great autonomy, working closely with the logging companies to provide timber for the settlement of the West and the postwar building boom.
Loggers cut more than 40 million acres of national forest, leaving behind only 5 percent of the native “old-growth” trees – critical wildlife habitat.
Adding to environmental criticism of such management, the agency acknowledged that it has lost as much as $1 billion annually administering the logging program because of management and road-building expenses, according to 2001 report by the congressional General Accounting Office, now the Government Accountability Office.
Since reaching a high-water mark of 12.6 billion board-feet of timber cut in 1989 – a level that even then-Forest Chief Dale Robertson acknowledged was “clearly unsustainable” – the annual yield has dropped to about 2 billion board-feet.
The GAO noted that the expense for producing timber has increased dramatically and the receipts declined sharply as a result of the shift away from timber management.
“The timber industry has given up on the national forests because they are no longer a dependable supplier,” said Rupert Cutler, former assistant secretary of agriculture, noting that domestic environmental regulations and cheaper operating expenses overseas have repelled timber companies and shuttered many American sawmills.
Meanwhile, debates such as that in the 1980s over the preservation of the northern spotted owl in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest were cast as “pitting jobs against the environment” but highlighted a new environmental ethic generally embraced by American society.
John Heissenbuttel, vice president of the American Forest and Paper Association, believes attitudes have changed dramatically even within the timber industry.
“Everybody expects reforestation today. Everybody wants to see protection against forest fires, forest diseases.
“Everyone appreciates the value of a natural landscape and the value of professional forest management,” he said. “That’s just part of our mind-set.”
But agreement on the threats and the values hasn’t freed the agency from its legacy of controversy, as various interests continue to battle – in court, in Congress and on op-ed pages – over the best way to proceed.
Recreation new quandary
Although logging and, to a lesser extent, mining, still take place in the national forests, recreation has taken over as the top demand today. Nowhere is that more evident than in Colorado.
The state claims three of the nation’s six most-visited recreational forests: the White River, home to 12 ski areas, including Vail and Aspen; the Arapaho-Roosevelt, just a half-hour drive from the Denver-metro area; and the Pike-San Isabel, site of a majority of the state’s 54 fourteeners.
Long considered a benign activity that could co-exist with other uses, the sheer volume of recreation now is drawing new scrutiny, as forest rangers struggle to maintain existing roads and trails, campgrounds, picnic facilities and other amenities worn down by tens of thousands of footsteps or damage created illegally by mountain bikers, hikers and ATV riders.
Jim Bedwell, supervisor for the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests, noted that off-highway vehicle use has grown 60 percent in the past five years.
“That kind of growth, with the resources we have, is impossible to keep up with,” he said. “We have to make sure we’re taking care of the golden goose.
“We have to make it sustainable. (But) we are looking at restricting use more than we have in the past. We’ve concluded that we just cannot afford some of the destruction that we’ve had out there.”
In fact, Bosworth places unmanaged recreation as one of the four major threats facing the Forest Service today, along with invasive species, loss of open space and fire threats.
Meanwhile, the federal budget for managing recreation has shrunk. The Rocky Mountain region, for example, received about $34 million for management of recreation in 1990.
Just 10 years later, that figure had dropped to about $28 million, a 20 percent decrease when adjusted for inflation.
The agency has coped with budget shortfalls by hiring private concessionaires to run many campgrounds and instituting a fee program for some of its most popular sites.
This year, for the first time, it has resorted to selling off hundreds of its properties, including maintenance facilities, administrative buildings and district offices.
Many critics point to Congress for the diminishing support for the Forest Service, arguing that shorting the agency is penny-wise and pound-foolish and serves to the detriment of preserving the public resource.
“Congress isn’t upholding its responsibility,” said Robert Funkhouser, chairman of the Western Slope No-Fee Coalition, an organization that opposes fees being charged on public lands.
“These are our public lands – we’ve already paid for them through our taxes – and Congress isn’t paying for their upkeep.”
McInnis, the retired Colorado congressman, acknowledged that political intervention has influenced the agency in every area from budget to on-the-ground policy, mostly with negative results.
“I had members on my committee … deciding the width of the trees that the Forest Service should be allowed to harvest,” the Glenwood Springs Republican said.
“Yet I don’t think I had any member on the committee that had a degree in forestry. I don’t think that I had any member on the committee that spent more than a week really working in the forest. … I was in that category too.”
McInnis said that he came to respect the forest managers, most of whom he believes do a good job and make sensible decisions, except when misdirected by Washington.
The latest major issue to draw congressional attention, fire management, in many ways is a case study of good intentions and mismanagement mixed with politics.
In the 1940s, forest fires consumed an average of 22 million acres of timber each year, generating horror at the unnecessary loss of resources and prompting a public campaign featuring Smokey Bear and his universally known catchphrase: “Only you can prevent forest fires.”
The ads proved effective in cutting fire losses to an average of 5 million acres annually, but the underlying philosophy – put out all forest fires, large and small – backfired: Today, two-thirds of forestlands have unnaturally high buildups of vegetation and are at risk for catastrophic wildfires.
After a series of massive fires in the West, Congress and the White House responded in 2003 with the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, intended to return forests to their natural, fire-tolerant condition and to spare communities from fire threats.
But even that noble idea has generated controversy, as traditional thinning operations draw criticism from environmentalists over road construction and indiscriminate cutting, and logging companies shun the bidding process because many of the trees are considered too small for economic benefit.
Ignoring the big picture
In the next 100 years, dilemmas over people, politics and money will become increasingly common, Bosworth said. And they don’t even scratch the surface of what he considers to be the big-picture troubles on the horizon: climate change, watershed protection, encroachment from development and America’s insatiable appetite for wood – now primarily being imported from overseas.
Representatives of conservation groups agree with those concerns, but they contend that, first and foremost, the forests need assured sustainability through environmental protections.
They say many environmental safeguards have been severely eroded under the current Bush administration, citing the repeal of Clinton’s protections for roadless areas and new rules that encourage logging and oil and gas exploration.
It is, however, a present-day political argument, not necessarily a key to the agency’s next 100 years.
“My biggest fear has been that the popular issues of the moment – like whether or not we’re producing too much timber or not enough timber … (will) absorb so much of our energy that important things tend to fall by the wayside,” Bosworth said.
“These issues might not have as much popular appeal at the moment like things like timber or road building, but they’re far greater concerns, I believe. And I think we need to change the national dialogue to focus on things that really count.”
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
