Four months ago, environmentalists thought incoming Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck made a promise to do things differently.
“The unfortunate reality is that many people presently do not trust us to do the right thing,” he told Congress in February of 1997. “Until we rebuild that trust and strengthen those relationships, it is simply common sense that we avoid (logging in) riparian, old growth and roadless areas.”
These words stirred the hopes of those fighting to preserve wilderness. But as summer approaches, the Forest Service is proposing dozens of timber sales, and many are in roadless areas. Forest activists throughout the country have asked Dombeck and the White House to stop the sales in the 40 million to 45 million acres of roadless areas that remain in the West, so far to no avail.
“The rhetoric is there,” says Steve Holmer of the Western Ancient Forests Campaign, a Washington, D.C.-based, nonprofit group which coordinates efforts to protect federal forest lands. “Unfortunately, it’s just rhetoric at this point.”
Roadless sales roll on
Holmer’s organization is in the process of compiling a list of proposed roadless-area sales. He says he’s aware of at least 20 to 25 controversial sales, one of which is the Tie Camp sale on the Medicine Bow and Routt national forests near the Wyoming-Colorado border. If this sale goes as planned, the Coon Creek roadless area, already hemmed in by 20 years of extensive logging, will be no more.
From 3,000 feet above, the Medicine Bow is dotted by snow-filled clearcuts. A web of roads snakes it way through the hills, connecting the treeless patches. Pilot Bruce Gordon, from the nonprofit group LightHawk, dips the left wing of his plane, pointing out clusters of small, sparse trees that were planted 15 to 20 years ago. He shouts over the roar of the engine: “They just don’t grow back up here – anyone can see that.”
Gordon points out what’s left of the roadless area; it’s easy to spot with its thick forest cover. If the Tie Camp sale goes through, bulldozers will carve 25 new miles of roads, opening 80 different areas to clearcut some 1,600 acres of the forests.
Even from the airstrip, the mountains look stripped where pine, spruce and fir trees, some as old as 500 years, have been removed. “We’ve got to ask what the land can handle. There may be environmentally friendly ways to cut, but now it’s just time to put on the brakes,” observes Leila Stanfield of Biodiversity Associates, a Wyoming group trying to prevent the Tie Camp sale.
It’s not just Wyoming. Sales are being proposed throughout the Rockies. Rob Ament, spokesman for the Bozeman, Mont.-based group American Wildlands, says the same thing is true in the Helena National Forest, where the Forest Service has scheduled the sale of timber on more than 1,000 acres in the Poorman’s Creek roadless area along the Blackfoot River. Ament names at least eight roadless-area sales on the Helena National Forest alone.
“It’s just a bad deal,” says Ament, whose organization is active in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. “The Forest Service is taking the head-in-the-sand approach to timber sales. They’re under the gun to get the cut, and the public doesn’t realize what it’s losing.”
The list of proposed timber sales in wilderness also includes the Cove and Mallard sales on the Nez Perce National Forest and the Deadwood sale in Boise National Forest, both in Idaho, and the Kazier sale on the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming. All worry activists concerned about endangered species, water quality and recreation.
Ament says he thought logging would ease up after the salvage rider of 1995 expired, “but that was just a temporary respite,” he says. “People don’t realize how pervasive logging is in the West. It’s really coming back at us now.”
In the post-salvage rider era, activists regained tools to fight logging, namely the administrative appeal and the lawsuit. Back in Colorado, for example, opponents of the Tie Camp sale plan to appeal the sale if Brush Creek-Hayden District Ranger Don Carroll approves it, and then may sue. But Stanfield says, “These processes just don’t work. We use them because they’re the only tools we have, but the truth is we just don’t know how to make a difference yet.”
What her organization and the environment needs, she says, is help from the top.
The worst job in Washington
Why has Dombeck let these timber cuts go through? Part of the answer may be that he can’t stop them. The Forest Service is large and decentralized, and attempts to change it in any sweeping way encounter staunch resistance from within and without, says Randal O’Toole, an economist who runs the Thoreau Institute. “There are 650 ranger districts out there. Dombeck couldn’t keep his eye on them, even if he wanted to,” says O’Toole, who has spent years studying the agency from Oregon.
Then there’s the ever-watchful eye of Congress. Early in the year, Dombeck convinced at least two deputy chiefs to retire, replacing them with non-Forest Service personnel. Shortly after, he was called to Capitol Hill, where Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, offered the perennial threat: If the Forest Service isn’t going to cut trees, why not just fold it into the Park Service? “It’s Congress’ way of bullying the agency,” says Steve Holmer, “of making sure Dombeck answers to them, not to the Clinton administration.”
Dombeck’s more conciliatory speeches of late give some clues to the obstacles he faces.
“I am not issuing a top-down policy dictum from Washington,” he told forest supervisors from Washington, Idaho and Oregon at a March meeting in Hood River, Ore. “You know where the controversial areas are. I am simply asking that you use common sense in your management decisions.”
“Chief of the Forest Service has been called the worst job in Washington,” says Chris Woods, Dombeck’s assistant. Woods says drastic action from the chief would hurt Dombeck’s long-term goals: reforming the agency and elevating wildlife and recreation to equal footing with the timber industry.
“You can’t have one-size-fits-all regulations from D.C.,” says Woods. “Dombeck’s philosophy is that the people closest to the resources know the resources best. These problems took years and years to evolve,” he adds. “They can’t be dissolved overnight.”
Money is another problem. Congress determines the Forest Service’s budget, according to how much timber revenue it has generated that year. Dombeck is already taking small steps to amend the traditional incentive system, says Woods, changing the employees’ performance evaluation system so it is based on “forest health” goals, instead of the timber sales quotas that have been used in the past.
That’s just tinkering, according to O’Toole. “Dombeck’s rearranging deck chairs and the Titanic is sinking,” he says.
The whole agency has to be reorganized, says O’Toole, a free-market proponent, and the entire incentive system revamped. He would have each national forest operate autonomously, allowing each to sell its trees at fair-market value. Forests would not be subsidized by tax dollars but would be funded by their own profits. Ideally, Congress would have little to do with forest management.
“Until then,” says O’Toole, “forest managers are going to follow their rewards, which have always been selling timber.”
Activists fighting sales in the West, however, would settle for some quick action from the chief. “Dombeck’s pleading ignorance after three or four months on the job is wearing a little thin,” says Steve Holmer. “We would like to see a permanent directive forcing the Forest Service to stay out of roadless areas. If the administration were serious about environmental protection, that’s what it would do.”
* Emily Miller, HCN intern
For more information, contact The Western Ancient Forests Campaign at 1025 Vermont Ave., Washington, D.C. 20005, (202/879-3188), e-mail: wafcdc@itc.apc.org; LightHawk Rocky Mountain field office at 970-925-6987, e-mail: lighthawkaspen@csn.net; or Biodiversity Associates at P.O. Box 6032, Laramie, WY 82070 (307/742-7978).
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The system cuts a new chief down to size.
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