Month: July 2010

The first “substantive principle” in last year’s Federal Register notice for a new Forest Service planning rule is restoration.  How did we get here?  Should we get out?  Before we adopt the restoration idea as a central theme of the rule, we need to be aware of the pitfalls.

The idea of restoration started with site-based approaches on well-defined areas such as a minesite or a wetland.  In the 1990s, a need was recognized to expand the scope of restoration ecology to embrace broader scales and tackle landscape-scale problems.  The term  “Forest Landscape Restoration” was a term first coined in 2000 by a group of forest restoration experts that met in Segovia Spain.  Internationally, several organizations such as the Global Partnership on Forest Landscape Restoration have formed to address the worldwide loss of half of the Earth’s forests over the last 200 years. 

There is currently a wealth of information about the emerging field of ecological restoration.  The non-profit Society for Ecological Restoration publishes a Restoration Ecology journal that helps explain restoration processes and descriptions of techniques.  The Society also works with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to publish an Ecological Restoration journal about current projects and techniques, and essays about the restoration idea.

Largely due to concerns about fuels and increases in large fires, the Forest Service started thinking about restoring fire regimes affected by a century of fire suppression.  Along with concerns about invasive species, declining road maintenance budgets, and climate change, in 2005, the Forest Service chartered a team to look at the evolving science of landscape restoration, and developed an Ecosystem Restoration Framework.  The framework made the following recommendations:

• adopt a national policy regarding ecosystem restoration, including defining ecosystem restoration as “the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed;”
• increase the productivity of the agency’s restoration efforts through improved integration of various programs spanning all Deputy areas;
• use national, forest, and project planning to engage Forest Service resources, partners, and stakeholders in identifying and implementing restoration needs and priorities;
• use budget and performance incentives to increase accomplishment of ecosystem restoration objectives.

Based on these recommendations, an interim directive was initially written last year and updated in March.  This directive, Forest Service Manual id-2020 , says that ecological restoration is a “foundational policy” for all program areas for the National Forest System.  It defines ecological restoration as:

Ecological restoration.  The process of assisting the recovery of resilience and adaptive capacity of ecosystems that have been degraded, damaged, or destroyed.  Restoration focuses on establishing the composition, structure, pattern, and ecological processes necessary to make terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems sustainable, resilient, and healthy under current and future conditions.

As a signal of the intent of the Administration, the Secretary of Agriculture spoke prominently about ecological restoration in his August 2009 speech in Seattle about the Forest Service. 

Then, the restoration idea quickly got more attention when the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program was established in the 2009 Omnibus Public Lands Management Act.  Now restoration needs were tied to money, and not surprisingly, needs were identified nearly everywhere.

Restoration is now being offered as a central theme of a new Forest Service planning rule.  But there are several problems.

First, the Forest Service may have troubles reconciling the idea that there are “degraded” ecosystems which must be restored, with its 100-plus year history of managing these lands.  Are agency leaders willing to admit that past forest management policies were wrong?  Are these past policies continuing today?  How can they be changed?

I remember talking to a representative of the timber industry at a regional roundtable meeting on the planning rule in Rapid City, South Dakota.  He told me that there are many “managed” forests that aren’t in need of restoration because of past forest management practices.  He described those instances where timber management has been used to thin forests and reduce fuels.

Second, for some forest types, there isn’t a clear idea about what restoration might look like.  For instance, in lodgepole pine, trees will eventually burn or die from insects.  The presence of large fires or insect outbreaks does not mean that the system is out of balance.

The idea of restoration leads to several value-laden questions:  restoring to what?  restoring for what purpose?  what do you do once things are restored?  Earlier posts on this blog have discussed the confusion with the Forest Service multiple-use mission, and the wicked problem that Forest Planning attempts to solve.  In describing the social problem posed by the idea of restoration, Eric Higgs from the University of Alberta notes that restoration efforts rest in the notion of redemption, where we heal ourselves culturally and perhaps spiritually by healing nature.  Because nature and ecosystems are historically and culturally contingent ideas, Higgs suggests that there is no one single, fixed, correct restoration for any particular site, although structure, composition, and function criteria may provide tight guidelines for success of a project.

Third, shouldn’t the idea of “maintenance” of ecosystems at least get equal billing?  A regional watershed program manager recently told me that “maintenance” is a well thought out priority for land management, as captured in the mantra for the Northwest Forest Plan: “Save the best, restore the rest”.    Maintenance means your first priority is to make sure that ecosystems that are already functioning well stay that way.  Maintenance gets to the core of what the agency does on the landscape – all the mitigation measures (i.e  soil and water  BMPs) that we supposedly implement for our projects and for third party authorizations, to ensure that we “do no harm”.   Even if it’s important to fix what’s broken, it’s also important to not break anything else.

 The problem with a restoration only focus is that it could potentially reward bad behavior (you made a mess, now you get money to clean it up) rather than reinforcing good behavior (you implemented BMPs, monitored to see that they were effective, and nothing went wrong).

Fourth, there are the purported “myths” about restoration ecology.  In a 2005 article by Robert Hilderbrand, Adams Watts, and April Randle,  the authors describe five problems with the restoration idea.  First, there is a problem with the typical assumption that ecosystems develop in a predictable fashion toward a specified, static, end-point or climax.  Many Forest Service planners these days are enamored by the “desired future condition” description as the central part of a Forest Plan.  But when systems are “reset” they usually don’t end at the same point, and the idea that you can restore a “carbon copy” of an ecosystem is the first myth.

There is also the problem with the idea that restoration of the physical structure will result in the same biological response.  The authors point out the “field of dreams” myth – that if you build it, they will come.  It’s not apparent that you will get the same distribution of species when you create the previous habitat.

Other myths include the idea that you can “fast-forward” succession and ecosystem-development, that you can develop a “cookbook” of practices that can be used to restore landscapes, and the “sisyphus complex” that nature can be controlled.  We may describe detailed and specific desired conditions in a Forest Plan, but can we really control the outcomes?

The authors are clearly in the adaptive management camp, and they explain that to get beyond the myths, projects need decision points along the way for possible interventions with contingency plans if things aren’t proceeding appropriately.

In previous attempts to develop a planning rule, the Forest Service has committed to the idea of “sustainability” as the guiding star for management of National Forests.  This idea flows from the legal mandate under the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act.  The idea of ecosystem services is an extension of the multiple use mission.   Perhaps restoration is a part of this mission, because the ecosystem must be functioning in order to provide the services.  But restoration may not be the full story, and perhaps it’s not the best way to describe the important work that must be done.