We didn’t get much discussion going on the last of Al Sample’s 193 Million Acres posts.
So I’ll set out what I think might be the most controversial part..
Ecoregional planning was defined by immense landscapes, entire mountain ranges, the great river systems, the habitat requirements of wide-ranging vertebrate species—and by the federal courts’ tightly-articulated interpretation of what was required of federal agencies to comply with the Endangered Species Act. Adaptive management demanded near-continuous experimentation, monitoring, evaluation, adjustment, and more experimentation. This resulted in equally continuous plan revisions and adjustments, rather than a wholesale reconsideration of a national forest plan every 10-15 years as originally envisioned in NFMA.
Because these large landscapes invariably encompassed a mosaic of federal, state, tribal, and private lands and an enormous diversity of stakeholders, new collaborative planning models gradually emerged (Cortner et al. 1998, Cortner and Moote 1999), built upon a foundation of shared values, common goals, mutual respect—and a commitment to keep moving forward in order to address the ever-increasing array of conservation challenges on these landscapes. Large landscape conservation and ecoregional planning, by their sheer scale and complexity, do not lend themselves to central planning or micromanagement. They tend to steadily push decision making toward the local level (Kennedy and Quigley 1998). Even within the strictures of the reform statutes of the 1970s and subsequent case law, agency decision makers now have broader de facto administrative discretion in federal land management than at any time in the past half-century.
What was your experience of “ecoregional planning”? I thought maybe it was the Northwest Forest Plan and the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project, but are there others across the country? Are they plans outside of NFMA planning that amend plans? I don’t think the NWFP passed decision making to the local level (but I haven’t read the Kennedy and Quigley paper) nor did it allow for much adaptive management (according to my sources).
So what was “ecoregional planning” supposed to do in your view? Where was it tried? Where did it work? Is anyone doing it now? And how did it/does it relate to NFMA planning?
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Here’s Al’s post.
Ecosystem management and the return of administrative discretion
Against all odds, the US Forest Service has managed to navigate more than four decades of controversy and existential challenges. Since the 1960s crisis over clearcutting on the Bitterroot, Monongahela, and other national forests, various political forces on the left and the right have called for the abolishment of the agency, the national forests, or both. Chastened by prescriptive reform legislation in the 1970s, and wrestled to a virtual standstill by litigation in the 1980s, the agency has endured external strife and internal strains that would have broken most organizations.
Yet the US Forest Service has gradually found new footing, and today exercises greater professional discretion in forest management decision making than at any time in the past half-century. The Forest Service has helped pioneer the ecological science as well as the social processes that are central to modern adaptive management of forest ecosystems. But the pace of environmental, economic, and social changes affecting forests is accelerating. The future of the Forest Service, and its ability to continue its evolving mission to promote the conservation and sustainable management of the nation’s forests, may depend on its ability to demonstrate to policymakers and an urbanized public the net values derived from the nation’s relatively modest—but critically important—investments in forest sustainability and resilience.
Striving to meet public (and Congressional) expectations, the US Forest Service and the national forests almost single-handedly supplied the raw materials for the post-war housing boom, mostly from old-growth forests in the West, as private forests recovered from harvesting in support of the war effort (Hirt 1996, Culhane 2013). At the same time, the national forests hosted a steadily increasing number of outdoor recreationists, with more than twice the number of visitors to the national parks (Steen 1977). Having arguably invented the concept of multiple-use sustained-yield forest management (Steen 1991), the agency was stunned by its public characterization as disregarding environmental values in its quest for ever-higher timber harvests. The eventual compromise on the National Forest Management Act, in combination with other environmental reform legislation of the period—the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Water Act, Wilderness Act, and Endangered Species Act—brought much greater public participation and oversight in the agency’s land management decision making, and new limits on its professional discretion (Ackerman 1990). The breakdown of this compromise in the 1980s ushered in a difficult decade of repeated litigation, with the agency’s management discretion even more sharply limited by new statutory interpretations in case law.
Ironically, the ecosystem management policy that emerged from this struggle started a process whereby the agency’s field managers began to regain a measure of their former management discretion, but in a different form. Ecoregional planning was defined by immense landscapes, entire mountain ranges, the great river systems, the habitat requirements of wide-ranging vertebrate species—and by the federal courts’ tightly-articulated interpretation of what was required of federal agencies to comply with the Endangered Species Act. Adaptive management demanded near-continuous experimentation, monitoring, evaluation, adjustment, and more experimentation. This resulted in equally continuous plan revisions and adjustments, rather than a wholesale reconsideration of a national forest plan every 10-15 years as originally envisioned in NFMA.
Because these large landscapes invariably encompassed a mosaic of federal, state, tribal, and private lands and an enormous diversity of stakeholders, new collaborative planning models gradually emerged (Cortner et al. 1998, Cortner and Moote 1999), built upon a foundation of shared values, common goals, mutual respect—and a commitment to keep moving forward in order to address the ever-increasing array of conservation challenges on these landscapes. Large landscape conservation and ecoregional planning, by their sheer scale and complexity, do not lend themselves to central planning or micromanagement. They tend to steadily push decision making toward the local level (Kennedy and Quigley 1998). Even within the strictures of the reform statutes of the 1970s and subsequent case law, agency decision makers now have broader de facto administrative discretion in federal land management than at any time in the past half-century.
References
Ackerman, S., 1990. Observations on the transformation of the Forest Service: The effects of the National Environmental Policy Act on US Forest Service decision making. Envtl. L., 20, p.703.
Cortner, H. and Moote, M.A., 1999. The politics of ecosystem management. Island Press.
Cortner, H.J., Wallace, M.G., Burke, S. and Moote, M.A., 1998. Institutions matter: the need to address the institutional challenges of ecosystem management. Landscape and urban planning, 40(1), pp.159-166.
Culhane, P.J., 2013. Public lands politics: Interest group influence on the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Routledge.
Hirt, P.W., 1996. A conspiracy of optimism: Management of the national forests since World War Two. U of Nebraska Press.
Kennedy, J.J. and Quigley, T.M., 1998. Evolution of USDA Forest Service organizational culture and adaptation issues in embracing an ecosystem management paradigm. Landscape and Urban Planning, 40(1), pp.113-122.
Steen, H.K., 1977. The US Forest Service: A History. Durham, NC: Forest History Society.
Steen, H.K., 1991. The beginning of the National Forest System. US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service.
There is almost no adaptive management happening on NF in the state of Washington. No monitoring, no evaluating, no effort to ‘circle back around’. They are demonstrating they’re greatness at fire risk reduction. Any thing flammable, whack and stack. Next Sale. It’s carte blanc, thank you very much.
What NF are you talking about?
Ok, I’ll bite. I agree that the Forest Service has pushed back against attempts to limit its discretion, including those in NFMA. However, I don’t see “ecosystem management” as part of that. What I saw (most obviously under Chief Jack Ward Thomas) was a push for a stronger role for science in narrowing management discretion, such as various kinds of scientific review requirements that were proposed for decisions, and requirements for adaptive management. I had a number of run-ins with Tom Quigley when he (a researcher) was helping run the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project where I tried to impose regulatory planning process requirements on what the scientists wanted to do.
I have previously observed that the movement towards more discretion is because, “The Forest Service has learned from the first set of NFMA plans that mandatory forest plan standards can infringe on its traditional management flexibility…” (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.cfc.umt.edu/bolle/files/Haber_Bolle%20Perspective_Sept_5_2015.pdf) I have since seen that revised plans have sought to get rid of anything mandatory that they can. However, this discretion works against the certainty needed for compliance with substantive requirements (especially for wildlife), and may be reigned back in by a judicial challenge under “federal courts’ tightly-articulated interpretation” of same.
While continuous planning to keep plans more current and avoid “episodic” plan revisions was a goal for new planning regulations, I have not really seen “continuous plan revisions and adjustments” before or since the 2012 Planning Rule. Sample provides no citation for this statement and I would be interested in any actual research done on this question. The new Planning Rule unfortunately did not make amendments easier to do (such as the interim amendments and categorical exclusion I advocated for environmentally protective amendments).
As for multi-jurisdictional “ecoregional” planning, we might thank Yellowstone to Yukon for pioneering this, but when I first brought it up as something the Forest Service might want to participate in, I was shamed for doing so. Later I represented the Forest Service on a regional Landscape Conservation Cooperative, which were led by the Fish and Wildlife Service in an attempt to coordinate conservation planning among state federal agencies (now defunct). The “mosaic of federal, state, tribal, and private lands and an enormous diversity of stakeholders”
has evolved into the Network for Landscape Conservation: https://landscapeconservation.org/. It fully recognizes/encourages local decision-making, but to me, the challenge (in the Forest Service as elsewhere) has always been how to get local decisions to be responsive to broader scale needs. I don’t think the federal land management agencies are the major players in this that you might expect them to be, and they certainly wouldn’t cede any of their discretion if they were.
Collaborative forest planning was seen as desirable and encouraged in the 2012 Planning Rule. This stemmed partly from the idea that newly required “desired conditions” were something that the interested public could grasp and discuss, and partly from thinking that it would narrow the realistic decision space for plans (and make planning go faster). I don’t think this has worked out too well (and I’m not seeing a strong connection between this and ecosystem management or administrative discretion).
“I agree that the Forest Service has pushed back against attempts to limit its discretion, including those in NFMA.”
Citation? Not just anecdotal cherry picking?
I’m all for more science in the use of adaptive management, but where can we see that the 2012 NFMA and ‘Planning’ has made a real difference in outcome?
Anecdotal, based on my personal experience. But probably not cherry-picking; the dislike of mandatory standards seems to be a majority view of Forest Service line-officers.
The Forest Service has never been very scientific about adaptive management. It sometimes seems like a euphemism for “doing what we want” (with little follow-up on how it worked).
So, again, please post hard factual truths. If the USFS is held to that standard, so are you in making these statements.
Otherwise, what the USFS does, is no different from what you say here – right? As a planner and lawyer, facts matter, right? Not opinion? Or is planning a euphemism for “I don’t like this”?
I would say that blogging is all about opinions, hopefully based on facts, as we know them. I’ll wait for you to provide your alternative experience – based on line officers who praise forest plan standards. Or where the Forest Service has institutionalized adaptive management as envisioned by scientists. (Trolling is all about personal attacks in lieu of offering counterarguments.)
Thanks for responding, Jon!
Here are my thoughts and questions on what you said..
(1) ” The new Planning Rule unfortunately did not make amendments easier to do (such as the interim amendments and categorical exclusion I advocated for environmentally protective amendments).”
I was in the WO as NEPA AD for the prior effort (2005) and many of the planners were the same folks. We were fans of the “loose-leaf notebook” approach to plans.. what do you think happened to that idea and why did the Deciding Group not intentionally make amendments easier to do?
(2) LCC’s. Here’s a 2018 article on “what happened to them”. https://www.southatlanticlcc.org/2018/11/26/what-is-the-status-of-the-lccs/
It sounds like whatever they wanted to be devolved back to the eminently practical and understandable.. “let’s work on collaborating on conserving fish and wildlife species with partners”. It seemed overmanaged and structured when I worked with them.. another venue for the same folks to talk about the same stuff. But that’s just my experience.
(3) DCs and Their Origins and Utility. I’ve been in public meetings where the whole desired conditions discussion did not seem to go that well with the public (I think DCs were also part of the 2005 Rule).. too vague. The public mostly saw the Forest as a place to recreate, hunt and fish, and seemed to want to talk about more concrete things like access and conflicts.
In 2008 (obviously before the 2012 Rule) , a multidisciplinary team in R-3 developed ecological DCs https://nmfwri.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Desired-Conditions_R3_2014-Final-10_15_2014.pdf
In fact, in that R-3 doc it states..
“Forest Service emphasis on desired conditions has increased since the first forest plans were published in the 1980s. The first plans emphasized specific activities and restrictions rather than identifying desired ecological, social, and economic conditions. Current revisions of forest plans emphasize ecological, social, and economic conditions and provide clearer vision of what is to be achieved on the landscape over time.”
(1) I always thought the “loose leaf notebook” idea sounded dismissive of the quasi-contractual nature of forest plans with the public. You’ve got to go back to the public to change them. The amount of NEPA needed to do that has been debated. While the Forest Service went big once (“no EIS needed for plan revision”) and lost, they didn’t seriously pursue smaller efforts to simplify amendments (especially those with limited environmental impacts or even benefits). I was disappointed in CEQ’s involvement in this, which seemed to me more like a policy turf grab – to require NEPA in places where it isn’t legally necessary.
(2) I know the LCCs were not popular. At the time I thought the formal structure forced the Forest Service to “collaborate” more than it liked.
(3) I think R3 got that from something I wrote (sort of kidding, but it could be true, since Bob Davis and I and other planners were all saying that then). It was a surprise to me that the folks who seem most interested in ecological things have not been more visible during the plan revision process arguing for the “natural range of variation” (old growth?), minimum requirements for rare habitats and species, or even desired fuel conditions.
When I was around during this period the loose leaf notebook idea wasn’t about not going back to the public.. I think it was being happy with a variety of different decisions (oil and gas leasing analysis, travel management, species regional amendments) all in the notebook. Each one could be updated (with the public) without trying to redo the whole enchilada aka plan revision. Maybe we can a retiree planner from that time and place to write about it. Maybe we all meant different things…
My research on the Forest Service has indicated that line officers feel they have less discretion/autonomy than they used to. If this is true, I wonder if the lack of autonomy and discretion is partly to blame for the inability of the agency to realize to any degree the goals of adaptive management.