WESTERN SKIES - February 5, 2005

*** USFS ONE-HUNDRED YEAR ANNIVERSARY, PART 2 ***

ERIC WHITNEY: The U.S. Forest Service turns one hundred this year. The agency controls more than twenty-five thousand square miles of Colorado, and even more in other western states. Last week we looked at its unlikely beginnings under Teddy Roosevelt. This week, the Forest Service in the modern era, and how it's struggling to meet the demands of the twenty-first century public. From Northwest Public Radio in Olympia, Washington, Tom Banse reports.

[music: Gene Autry - "Smoky Bear Theme"]

TOM BANSE: With one hundred ninety-three million acres of National Forest nationwide, you would think there'd be plenty of room for everyone to do their thing, with room to spare for the animals. But seemingly endless controversy over logging, mining, grazing, trail uses, wildlife, and off-road vehicles indicates otherwise.

[period orchestral music: "Red Wing"]

BANSE: The first chief of the Forest Service, a man named Gifford Pinchot, gave the brand new agency these marching orders in 1905.

PINCHOT (VOICED BY ACTOR): Where conflicting interests must be reconciled, the question will always be decided from the standpoint of the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run.

BANSE: So what is the greatest good for the Forest Service today and for the next one hundred years? The answer from the present leader on a centennial tour might surprise you.

DALE BOSWORTH: I think that we're in a new period.

BANSE: In Boise, Chief Dale Bosworth said the Forest Service is at "a turning point" after a decade-long "transition" that put the timber wars and spotted owl controversy behind it.

BOSWORTH: I think we're in a period of ecological restoration and outdoor recreation. And maybe more than ever before, we focus on delivering the values and services like clean air, like clean water, scenic beauty, habitat for wildlife, and opportunities for people to enjoy the outdoors. These are the main things that people want today from their public lands.

BANSE: You'd think this might be a watershed moment for environmentalists, cause for celebration. But no. There's too much lingering distrust of the Forest Service and the current Bush Administration.

BILL ARTHUR: Like many words, it's what you do that implements those statements that really matters.

BANSE: In a red felt woodsman's hat, Bill Arthur strolls a canal park in Seattle. He's the deputy national field director for the Sierra Club. Arthur says supporting recreation, tearing out old logging roads and replanting, could be very good, but--

ARTHUR: Ecosystem restoration also encompasses a set of activities that the Forest Service euphemistically put under that category, that basically says we want to chop down a lot more trees and we'll call it forest health. I don't find that particularly useful.

BANSE: That mission phrase, "the greatest good", as the Sierra Club sees it, should mean no commercial logging in the National Forests.

ARTHUR: We need to take the commercial axe out of the forest, take the profit motive out of making bad decisions that ultimately the taxpayer has to subsidize and that ultimately ends up destroying resources that in fact have better and more value for the public if we protect them and leave them, and protect these areas for the future.

BANSE: The Forest Service chief wants to continue logging, mining, and grazing on public forest lands. It's a sideline that generates money and supports rural jobs, in places like Bingen, Washington.

[sound of sawmill]

JASON SPADARO: This is our lumber plant. We make stud lumber, which is eight-, nine- and ten-foot lengths - two by fours and two by sixes primarily.

BANSE: Jason Spadaro manages SDS Lumber, one of only two sawmills that survive in the Columbia Gorge.

SPADARO: We have three hundred eleven employees here whose jobs depend upon a stable timber supply.

BANSE: Logging on the National Forests is way, way down, off more than eighty percent from its peak in the 1980s.

SPADARO: Today virtually none of our timber supply, our log supply today, is from the National Forest lands. We've been as far as Russia looking for logs. We participated briefly in a venture there and have seen first hand what happens in other regions of the world where there are lower environmental standards.

BANSE: Spadaro went through the University of Washington's forestry program in the 1980s. There, the Forest Service mission was distilled to three Ws: wood, water, and wecreation. He's still waiting to hear the three Ws get equal billing in the new century.

SPADARO: What constitutes the greatest good for the greatest number is not making our public lands exclusively focused on timber production and commodity production nor is it making it exclusively focused on recreation or ecosystem restoration. But it's a balance of all of the above.

BANSE: If you think the debate between timber guys and environmentalists and all the others with something at stake can be resolved by the Forest Service, think again.

JACK WARD THOMAS: People seem to act like the Forest Service ought to be able to figure out what it's going to do for its next hundred years. That's not the charge of the Forest Service.

BANSE: That's former Forest Service chief Jack Ward Thomas. He says the agency has less and less autonomy. Congress has layered on decades of natural resource laws. Thomas, who now teaches at the University of Montana, guesses that President Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot would be appalled to see the agency they created so hamstrung.

THOMAS: Right now the agency, which is very--I would submit the best agency in government historically--is just like Gulliver tied down with a thousand strings. They know how. It's like a good fire horse in the old fire station. They can hear the fire bell, but they got hobbles on both feet, and they got blinders on, and somebody's yelling, "get up" and somebody yelling "whoa." They are just so bound up they can't move. And they need direction.

BOSWORTH: I think we're nipping some of those strings that have held Gulliver down.

BANSE: Current chief, Dale Bosworth notes the Bush Administration has published new rules intended to give agency foresters more management flexibility. Earlier, Congress passed a landmark wildfire control measure that limits some lawsuits over fire risk reduction. Bosworth promises to snip judiciously because some strings, in his words, "are there for a good reason."

I'm Tom Banse in Olympia.

ERIC WHITNEY: Next week: one last look at the Forest Service, from frustrated folks on the inside.