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Opportunity (and Context) Lost: 2012 NFMA Planning Rule

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The long-awaited NFMA “proposed planning rule” is out. It looks pretty much like the Draft rule to me. I have longed to see the Forest Service embrace adaptive management for public lands, or adaptive governance, as I argued here last year in Fixing the Rule: An Adaptive Governance Roadmap. But much like in the Draft, the preferred planning rule (Alternative A, pdf) in the Final Rule workup is a far cry from adaptive management.

Although draped in ecosystems rhetoric, when looked at from the real-world perspective of interrelated natural and social systems the 2012 Rule leaves much to be desired as adaptive management or adaptive governance. Here are four key points: First, the three levels of decision making—national strategic, forest administrative unit, project or activity—belie underlying realities of power and decision-making in the Forest Service. In short it stretches the imagination that important Forest Service decisions regarding ecosystems are to be made at the “forest administrative unit”, except for maybe the Tongass, The National Forests of Texas, and so on.

Second, desired (future) conditions are ineffectually dealt with at the forest or project scale, and often cry-out for contexts that don’t fit well under the category “national strategic.” Admittedly, the Forest Service has left itself an “out” re: broader scale assessments, but it is doubtful that many such efforts will yield substantive results.

Third, “standards” are better structured/set in contexts far from forest-level planning. I’ll be watching, but I can’t right now think of any meaningful standards that ought to be made in the development or revision of a forest plan.

Fourth, Why is the Forest Service hell-bent on replacing the federally accepted “appeals” process with an “objections process”? Does the Forest Service really believe that this is a change for the better?

My beef is not with many ecological/social concepts embedded in the 2012 rule: sustainability, species diversity, ecological integrity, etc. I have championed these for many years. But I have argued for years that they are better structured in an adaptive governance frame, rather than the rigid straitjacket of this rule. Is it time for Congressional oversight hearings on RPA/NFMA? Has this particular law outlived its usefulness? After all, the law was put in place in an era when production planning was still in vogue, before The Decline and Fall of Rational Planning. The law did not envision an era of collaborative stewardship of public lands.

Let’s look at each of the four identified problems in more detail:

Three levels of decision-making
In the old days when forest were viewed in large part through the eyes of production planners, it made sense to empower forest unit managers with setting up goals and objectives for individual national forests (as individual production factories). Projects and activities flowed from this goal setting: timber sales and other output production goals, for example. National or strategic goal and policy setting sat at the top and was informed by lower-level decision-making, although political pressures were arguably the main driving force for production goals like “getting the cut out.” This reasoning made its way into the RPA/NFMA and set the stage for the 1982 NFMA rule that still governs (despite repeated attempts to update it) the administration of the national forest system. But the days of viewing forests as production factories has ended.

Desired Conditions
Absent appropriate context, how is a forest supervisor to declare “desired conditions?” In my view, these appropriately derive from broader-scale assessments and policy considerations. Within such, a forest supervisor might make a periodic call as to forest or sub-forest niche(s). But to expect such without appropriate context-setting is asking the impossible. And it escapes me how this rule will promote effective context-setting.

Standards
Someone will have to show me just where forest level standards make any sense at all. I have argued before that they do not, and that standards are rightfully set and revised situationally as needed, not according to some time-clock for forest plan revision.

Objections Process to replace Appeals Process
I have never understood the need for this. It is at best a minor variation on a theme that could have as easily been made to work under the more-familiar appeals process. At worst, it proves a means to dodge public deliberation responsibility—to deny collaborators an opportunity to seek redress for surprise changes in proposed action as it becomes “federal action.” The only redress then becomes court challenge. It seems to me that in an attempt to streamline the process, the forest service only made things worse.

In Sum
Since the Forest Service has chosen not to take the adaptive management/governance path, why not revisit the RPA/NFMA law with an eye toward collaborative stewardship? I new or revised law might help the agency see how interrelated ecological and social systems require the interrelated efforts—at context-dependent scales—of both forest service line, staff, and research as well as collaborators from other agencies as well as interest groups and others who hold a stake in outcomes.

If the Forest Service had embraced adaptive governance in this rule, we would see broad-scale assessments well up at appropriate scale and scope, accompanied by broad-scale policy, plans, or programs meant to address problems identified in the assessments. Monitoring regimes would accompany both. All would be structured at scope and scale appropriate to resolve issues and problems identified. Maybe we’ll see such anyway, somehow welling up for so-called forest plan implementation and other policy. Or maybe we’ll see endless, mindless, context-blind rituals at the forest scale: pretend assessment, pretend planning, pretend monitoring—forever missing opportunities for adaptive management, for adaptive governance.

Related: Fixing the Rule: An Adaptive Governance Roadmap

Forest Service Mindshift: From Regulators to Partners

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The Forest Service seems to love the idea of partnerships, but questions remain as to how this happened, and where it will end. I’m not talking about government-to-government collaboration here, but so-called “partnerships” in other arenas. The notion is particularly contentious when partners are “for profit” corporations. In the early 1900s, the Forest Service would never have dreamed (except in nightmares) of “partnering” with big business. Instead, founder Gifford Pinchot wanted to regulate forest management on all lands, including and especially lands owned by big timber companies. But it was never to be. Not here in the USA.

In Harold Steen’s The Forest Service: a History we find enough of the tortured history of the Forest Service to give me pause. Forest Service people had to be tough to maintain their zeal in trying to encourage conservation and regulate long-term timber supply in the face of frontier ethics that pretty much said, use it or lose it. Gifford Pinchot didn’t last as long as he hoped as Forest Service Chief (1901-1910)—having crossed at least one politician too many in his zeal to reign-in business corruption. Still, Pinchot left a mark that would position the agency pretty much in his shadow for a Century. Half of that Century, almost, the Forest Service sought to regulate all timber harvest public and private, and much of the grazing in the country.

Just before the Forest Service finally gave up the all-lands regulation fight early in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Administration, after being libeled “socialists,” the Forest Service switched gears and rhetoric, and decided to be cooperators in sustained yield units composed of both public and private land. [Remember that this was the era of emerging McCarthyism, and being branded as a “socialist” was at minimum problematic.] The public good in these deals was that the Forest Service could pressure private industry to grow up and out of it’s “cut and run” behaviors—to at least replant cutover lands. To some extent it worked. To some extent the tragedy on private lands continued. But at least the Forest Service tried to achieve its regulatory dream, albeit via other means—cooperation.

Public-private cooperation is a difficult concept to wrap the mind around. How do you cooperate with “the government”? Isn’t a democratic government supposed to be an extension of the people? I can easily wrap my mind around the idea of complying with government dictate or regulation. But to “cooperate” with the government? I’m not even sure what it means. You can almost wrap your mind around the idea when you think of the Forest Service as one of many entities that manage land in the US, but when you contrast government land management (particularly multiple use management) with other land management, the idea still doesn’t make all that much sense. Still, I admit that there are areas where similar goals (e.g. biodiversity preservation) may indeed make sense to multiple owners as well as the country as a whole.

The whole idea of “cooperation” didn’t make too much sense in the early days, and didn’t get better with time, as big recreation interests got more active in and around public lands. As the rhetoric shifted from cooperation to partnership, the task was not made easier. Ski resort complexes come immediately to mind. You tell me, where is the “public good” in a ski resort complex that cannot be obtained via contracting, else outright privatization? I know that there are those who believe that conservation is better obtained with a public-private regulation-partnership model in place. But I’m skeptical. On the other hand if we begin to privatize “inholdings” in government land, where does that game end? So maybe we just have to muddle through, grit our teeth and deal with the idea that there will be some limited, regulated private use of public lands, alongside public use.

I wondered back in 1999 what we ought to make of emergent coziness between the government and those who seek to profit from land and resource managed by the government—particularly such coziness with organized commercial recreation interests. Here are a few inquiry questions I posed then, and repeat now:

  • What type commercial uses are appropriate on the National Forest in the 21st Century?
  • Is a “wise use”/multiple-use policy still sufficient when biological diversity, Wilderness, and other public use issues loom large?
  • Is there still reason to be wary of large scale commercial interests?
  • How ought we to fund the management of the National Forests, the National Parks, BLM lands, National Wildlife Refuges, etc.? Are user fees appropriate mechanisms? Are commercial permit fees appropriate? If so, in what mix and under what circumstances?
  • What roles, if any, might non-government organizations play in the funding federal lands management? What roles, if any, might corporations and other for-profit organizations play? What roles, if any, might nonprofit organizations play? Are all nonprofits created equally?

Public Use
Clinton-era Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, once safely out of office, endorsed “public use”, suggesting that we ought to steer clear of “privatization” via things like government/private partnerships. Oddly (or maybe not) Babbitt did not mention commercial recreations interests, while explicitly mentioning timbering, grazing, and mining. I’ll assume that Babbitt believed that they too ought to be in the mix.

I’ll not go that far, even though I wish we had never allowed so much commercial use of public lands—i.e managing national forests for “private” rather than public use. I realize that a “public use” agenda is not the way history played out on the public lands, although there is still time/hope. Further, I doubt that we would still have the public lands in the amount we still do, if the idea of strict public use had been the agenda from the get-go. The public lands were born in controversy, and we ought to be glad that we’ve so far kept them intact in an American culture hell-bent on promoting individualism, and individual profit-making. Still, there is time to make a major course-correction toward public use.

My Views on Public v. Private Use of National Forests
Where do I stand re: privatized commercial use of public lands? I enthusiastically support public use, including scenic backdrops to development, biodiversity reserves, wilderness reserves, and more.

I’m OK with some private use of public forest products/services, managed under broad multiple use/ecological stewardship guidelines. I’m OK with private use of wood products from the national forests. Although, I’ve argued that we might be better off just selling the products to commercial vendors at “the loading dock”—some transfer station that would allow products to be transferred from public to private ownership—rather than allowing corporate interests to work the public lands to get the products. I might even be OK with, e.g. timber sales contracts—i.e. allowing commercial entities to work public lands for the forest products—as long as there are enough eyes on the contracts to make sure that the taxpayers get a fair deal, alongside the contractors. Similarly with “stewardship contracts” that allow contractors to keep and sell some forest products.

I’m Ok with commercial recreation interests, although not OK with making the national forests into Disneyland-type destinations. I’m still struggling with ski resorts and upscale marinas on public lands, but I guess I’ll have to allow space for them in my design—and I do use them, so it would be a bit disingenuous if I were to suggest otherwise.

As for “outfitters and guides,” I believe they ought to be able to operate on public lands, but with much less privilege than they now are allowed. And I don’t think the Forest Service ought to try to regulate them. This gets tricky, but maybe not as much as we might initially think, since the agency will have to allow for group recreational use of the national forests in any case, and if a group has a outfitter and/or guide that doesn’t seem to complicate the matter that much. One question: Why does the Forest Service seek to regulate outfitters and guides?

But I believe that marketing, e.g. signing and soliciting for any and all commercial use of the national forests should be minimal and in keeping with traditional rustic imagery of the national forests.

And I believe that fee collection should be both fair to the owners of the national forests and should be easily administered. For example, it would be better to charge an annual fee for use, than to charge for each occurrence. Why? Simply because it detracts from natural experiences when one is constantly grabbing for a billfold.

Regarding concessionaires, I believe their presence is allowable (as it has been in the US Park Service since pretty much the beginning) but their operation ought not to be the “swinging hot spots” from Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi. Instead concessionaires ought to be relative low-key operations. Exceptions might be made for ski resort communities, but maybe the best bet there would be to trade lands so that at least the most commercial of operations are not on the national forests. But that too has problems as I explained above. My preference re: campgrounds/picnicgrounds is for the Forest Service to manage them (likely via volunteers) and use them in part for conservation education.

As for grazing on public lands, I’m hard-pressed to see a good case for continuing it, if only because of the many disease-related problems in co-mingling domestic stock and wildlife. I’m not opposed to grazing on public lands if properly managed, e.g. onsite caretakers of a herd, but only if we can somehow get beyond the disease problem.

Mining and Oil and Gas exploration are at-minimum problematic, but I don’t see them stopping. Our best bet might be to continue vigilance and seek ever-better-regulation of these activities relative to both environmental and aesthetic considerations.

Whadayathink?
Have I joined with the forces of “darkness and evil”, i.e. those who would “marketize” the national forests? Or is this a useful beginning to ring-fence creeping marketization? In his book The Abstract Wild, in a chapter titled “Economic Nature,” Jack Turner describes the loss of shared social values, what others might call the virtues of civic engagement. These values might include sense of community, sense of place, sense of wildness in interacting with and attempting to be, once-again, part of Nature, etc. Through time, however, the world, and particularly the US is approaching a place where all values save one—money—are lost along the timeline of a society madly reinventing itself into crass-consumerism, accompanied by marketing madness. In Turner’s words,

Only one widely shared value remains—money—and this explains our propensity to use business and economics rather than moral debate and legislation to settle our differences. …

This rejection of persuasion creates a social order wherein economic language (and its extensions in law) exhaustively describes our world and, hence becomes our world. Moral, aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual order are then merely subjective tastes of no social importance. It is thus no wonder that civility has declined. For me this new economic conservation “ethic” reeks of cynicism—as though having failed to persuade and woo your love, you suddenly switched to cash. The new economics conservationists think they are being rational; I think they treat Mother Nature like a whorehouse. (pp. 57-8)

And what about partnerships? I still don’t much like the word, neither the word “cooperator.” And I’m particularly incensed when government people cozy-up to commercial agendas, even sometimes becomming cheerleaders for such. I do like the idea of collaboration in policy making, in program development, and so forth. I have reservations as to the manner that the Forest Service now chooses to engage individuals and public interest groups, but that is a matter for other posts—many of which I’ve already aired.

Endnote
No matter how the “use” and “commercial use” debates play out, with accompanying litigation and legislation, there are at least two intertwined “bigger issues” that remain on the table, in the background: biodiversity and associated species loss, and human population growth (with related resource extraction and pollution concerns that include human lifestyle concerns). These two issues under gird pretty much all others but are not popularly discussed. I hope that these two items will again find their way into mainstream talk in advance of catastrophe. But I’m doubtful that such will happen anytime soon, and I don’t believe we’ve got a lot of time left, particularly given the dynamics of doubling of human population growth (Wikipedia link) and the fact that the doubling curve is an exponential growth curve that is working into a very steep space—i.e. when 3 billion became 6 billion people (30 years, 1 generation) the curves looks remarkably steeper than when 3 million became 6 million people (1000 years, 33 generations).

Forestry’s Next One Hundred Years: Leopold

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Gifford Pinchot’s utilitarian philosophy and management methods dominated US Forest Service thought, policy, and action throughout the 20th century. A quick read of Harold Steen’s The US Forest Service: A History, David Clary’s Timber and the Forest Service, and Paul Hirt’s A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests Since World War Two is testament enough of Pinchot’s domination. Add in the Forest Service sponsored movie The Greatest Good for icing on the cake.

But the next century belongs to Leopold at least in the eyes of film producer Steve Dunsky, who produced The Greatest Good. Dunsky’s new film, The Green Fire is about Leopold and his influence. Leopold’s revolutionary ideas emerged with the publication of A Sand County Almanac (1966), but the transition to mainstream thinking would not happen in the 20th Century. Dunsky says the 21st Century belongs to Leopold:

I think that was what was so exciting about doing this film is we didn’t just want to do a film about Aldo Leopold’s life, we wanted to talk about why he’s important today and the reason that this is in a way a sequel to The Greatest Good is that we see Leopold as being kind of the guiding vision of the Forest Service in the 21st Century. Gifford Pinchot and his colleagues in the early part of the 20th Century had a different idea about conservation: that nature was there to be used by people and it is. But Leopold’s vision is much more about people being part of a natural community, and that shift has been occurring in the Forest Service over the last twenty years. And I think that now is the time that we are really seeing the manifestation of that in the agency’s policy and our actions and so the timing is really perfect for Green Fire to be coming out.

Moving Beyond Agrarian Forestry
Like Dunsky, I believe the time is at hand for a change in philosophy from Pinchot to Leopold, or from “Group A” to “Group B” as Leopold described it:

[O]ne group (A) regards the land as soil, and its function as commodity-production; another group (B) regards the land as a biota, and its function as something broader. How much broader is admittedly in a state of doubt and confusion.

In my own field, forestry, group A is quite content to grow trees like cabbages, with cellulose as the basic forest commodity. It feels no inhibition against violence; its ideology is agronomic. Group B, on the other hand, sees forestry as fundamentally different from agronomy because it employs natural species, and manages a natural environment rather than creating an artificial one. Group B prefers natural reproduction on principle. It worries on biotic as well as economic grounds about the loss of species like chestnut, and the threatened loss of the white pines. It worries about whole series of secondary forest functions: wildlife, recreation, watersheds, wilderness areas. To my mind, Group B feels the stirrings of an ecological conscience.

Leopold’s Philosophy in Brief
Leopold began his Forest Service career in 1909. He was promoted rapidly and was proud to part of the “outfit.” He was true-blue green Forest Service. Leopold became a forest supervisor of New Mexico’s Carson National Forest at age 24. But his enduring philosophy developed later. [We wouldn’t expect many 24-year-olds to have much of the world figured out]. As he grew older and wiser, Leopold developed the philosophy that would guide him, along with many in the wildlands preservation movement, the environmental ethics movement, and more. Here is an essence: “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

With age and wisdom, Leopold began to be more contemplative about his own and others attempts to “manage the land,” to “manage wildlife”, and so on. That led him to his commitment to help humanity discover a rightful place as “plain members” of a broader ecological community: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals; or collectively: the land. … In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

Ten Key Insights from Leopold’s Land Ethic (The Encyclopedia of Earth)

First, Leopold’s Land Ethic helped create the field now known as “environmental ethics” or, more generally, environmental philosophy. … [Leopold] makes human considerations regarding the land and land use central to environmental decision-making and practice, but does not go as far as to make the land itself deserving of human moral consideration.

Second, Leopold’s land ethic challenges us to rethink our notion of what it means to say something deserves our human moral consideration (is “morally considerable”). … Western philosophical tradition restricts moral considerability to (some) humans on the grounds that only humans are capable of reason and rationality, use language, are rights-holders, duty-bearers, interest carriers or are endowed with a soul. By making the land itself morally considerable, Leopold challenges traditional Western conceptions of moral considerability …. [F]or Leopold, “the land” was included in the realm of things deserving moral consideration.

Third, Leopold’s land ethic challenges us to rethink what it is to be human. … Western philosophical tradition is that humans are different from and superior to nonhuman animals and “nature” … Leopold’s land ethic challenges and repudiates this division.

Fourth, in place of the favored Western view of humans as unlike other animals and nature, Leopold posits the notion of human beings as [plain] members of both human and ecological communities. This notion of humans as embedded in social and ecological communities forever challenges the time-honored distinction between humans and “the rest of nature.” No longer is it “obvious” that there is an essential difference between superior humans and inferior nonhuman animals and nature….

Fifth, Leopold’s land ethic challenges us to rethink what counts as a morally relevant value in ethics, ethical decision-making, environmental policy and philosophy. No one before Leopold had ever defended the view that ecosystem integrity, diversity and beauty were morally relevant—perhaps deciding—values in human interactions with other humans, nonhuman animals or the natural environment. In doing so Leopold went far beyond traditional theories of ethics, ethical selves and ethical values: He made the “integrity, diversity, and beauty” of ecological communities, along with the requisite nutrient flows and energy cycles that are necessary for “land health” (or, the ability of the land to self renew), as themselves morally relevant values—ones which sometimes could and should trump traditional values of human self-interest, individual rights, human freedoms (or liberties) and economic efficiency. …

Sixth, Leopold’s land ethic challenges humans to rethink the role of emotion, care, love and empathy not only in ethics, ethical decision-making, and ethical policy, but also in what it means for humans to owe things to each other and the land. For Leopold, the development of an “ecological conscience”—necessary to the adoption of the land ethic—requires the development of emotional, experiential (e.g., hands-on) ecological literacy. Rational intelligence that is not exercised in concert with affectional or emotional intelligence is simply inadequate in ethics, environmental ethics and environmental decision-making.

Seventh, Leopold’s Land Ethics has yet to be understood and appreciated. It challenges us to understand the relationships between ecological diversity and cultural diversity in the creation, maintenance and perpetuation of human and land health. Leopold explicitly links cultural diversity with biodiversity when he writes, “Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very diverse, and the resulting artifacts are very diverse. These differences in the end-product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the world’s cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.” … Leopold laments the “exhaustion of wilderness” and “world-wide hybridization of cultures” as the destruction of both ecological and cultural diversity. For Leopold, the “wild roots” of cultures and the importance of our ecological heritage are part of our humanness and our human cultural heritage that should be recognized and preserved. …

Eighth, Leopold’s land ethic makes forest and wilderness preservation necessary for any adequate ethic, environmental ethic or environmental policy. …

Ninth, Leopold’s land ethic is that he saw the valuable roles to be played by both the ecological scientist and the ordinary individual in the preservation of [wildness]. …

Tenth, Leopold’s land ethic challenges us to rethink the relationships among ecology, ethics and economics. Leopold rejected the conception and practice of both traditional laissez-faire economics and ethics because neither made ecological awareness and sensitivity to ecological contexts central to their enterprises. He writes: “That man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic team is shown by an ecological interpretation of history. Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land. The characteristics of the land determined the facts quite as potently as the characteristics of the men who lived on it.” …
[footnote and hyperlink references omitted . See here]

One Final Leopoldian Notion
I’ll finish with one of my favorite Leopold quotes: “Obligations have no meaning without reference to conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of social conscience from people to land.”

Is Leopold’s time at hand?

Oregon O&C Lands In Play, Again

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Anyone remember the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000? The Act, along with follow-up legislation was supposed to wean rural Oregon Counties from long-standing dependence on timber revenues from O&C and other Federal Lands and put them on a path to “self-determination.” Guess what? It didn’t. In fact by funding the counties at highest revenue levels ever for a period of time, the Law may have increased the dependence. Admittedly, the recent global recession played a part in the drama, but the question remains as to whether the secure rural schools law really paved a path to “self-determination.” No matter. The Lands are once-again under consideration to help the counties out of a financial bind. Isn’t it time then, once again, to bring up the notion that these lands ought not to be put into play as a single-purpose program? Isn’t it time to realize that given the broad scale of this checkerboard (here’s a map, pdf), we need better resolution of a mixed ownership problem? Watershed concerns loom large, as do species viability problems. Then there are the ever-present access and esthetic problems that surround public lands ownership. And these are no doubt just the tip of an iceberg of problems. [Note: A good short history of this saga up to 2007 is found in Forest Magazine, a longer history was published in 2010 from the Congressional Research Service (pdf)

This is a problem that cries out for “all lands management,” yet our political system doesn’t seem ready to confront multi-scale deliberative democracy (Wikipedia link). We have tried to jump start that program for many years and always come up short. Remember Kai Lee’s Compass and Gyroscope: Integrating Science and Politics for the Environment. Lee’s masterwork went to press in 1993. Nearly 20 years later we seem to have largely forgotten that the issue is still on the table. It always will be, because as John Muir noted long ago, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” So too with the O&C lands.

When I looked at the O&C lands map yesterday I thought, Why not just trade away the checkerboard federal lands for lands nearer the larger blocks, i.e. block-up ownership? That way land management would be made easier. But easier is not always better, as the massive and extensive clearcuts of recent memory in the Northwest constantly remind us. In the old days the clearcuts tended toward checkerboard, following the ownership patterns. If we were to block up the ownership what might we get, particularly on the then predominant private lands?

I sometimes ponder Gifford Pinchot’s notion of needing to regulate all forest lands. In Pinchot’s day the rallying cry was to prevent a “timber famine.” In our day, I believe we need to regulate all lands in an attempt to stave off and/or reverse a “biodiversity famine.”

Increasingly I ask myself, What might Aldo Leopold recommend? Leopold not only was a forest supervisor, but in later years also helped found the Wilderness Society, and importantly helped to guide the foundation of both wildlife management and environmental ethics. So, What might Leopold recommend?

Note: As I was updating this post, I realized that an alternative resolution to the funding side of this problem has been on the table for a long time: provide “just compensation” to counties with a preponderance of federal lands via PILT. A careful look at the recent Congressional Research Service’s assessment of the situation (pdf), yield’s Ross Gorte’s long-standing contention that the Congress ought to find means to get overly dependent counties off the federal dole by fully funding PILT payments, and thereby rid the nation of the plague of over-cutting federal lands in the name of “revenue enhancement.” Or maybe I just read Gorte’s CRS piece too quickly, in which case I can either amend this post one more time, or maybe just “deep six” it.

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Updated (4:56 PM MDT): After Andy Stahl corrected me via email on an earlier version of this post as to what is/has been in play w/r/t Oregon Counties and Oregon School Districts:

The [1937 ] O&C Act gives the counties three times the stake in BLM logging as compared to national forests — 75% of sale receipts vs. 25%. Further, the counties don’t share any O&C revenue with schools. The schools get only a portion of national forest logging receipts. The school’s share is set by state law at 40% in Oregon with 60% going to county road funds. Schools receive zero BLM O&C monies.

So I changed my mistaken wording that tied rural schools to O&C timber receipts, and reworked other parts of this post accordingly. Lemee know if I’ve still got it wrong.

On Corruption, Agency Capture and Forest Service Experience

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In comments on a recent post I noted that “corruption and bias are always in play” when dealing with high-level politics. Over at the Kaufmann Governance Post, Daniel Kaufmann has taken up a crusade to daylight and castigate what he calls “corruption,” moving it beyond more traditionally narrow framing as bribes, kickbacks, direct money payoffs, etc. In a post titled Capture and the Financial Crisis: An Elephant forcing a rethink of Corruption, Kaufmann says,

it makes sense to have a neutral and broader definition of corruption, akin to: “the privatization of public policy”. In addition of being a legally neutral definition, it moves beyond coarse manifestations of bureaucratic bribery, and it would encompass undue influence or capture of regulations and policies by narrow interests.

Kaufmann is particularly critical of undue influence of lobbyists and other “influence peddlers,” and notes:

the focus on corruption needs to move away from exclusive focus on the ‘abuse of public office’ and squarely acknowledge that corruption often involves collusion between the public and private (and at times outright capture by the private potentates).

What do you think? Does Kaufmann’s framing make sense? If so, Who ought we to have as Under Secretaries, as Agency Heads, etc? Or does might it be that some be dis-allowed from serving. If so, who? Or does it make any difference? Maybe an answer is that “we the people” ought to watch particularly closely those who have been “influence peddlers,” rather than banning them outright.

I have been particularly outraged that lobbyists have so much power in our country. And I believe far too much discourse and policy-making in the US revolves around industry and commerce, and too little around matters of “public interest.” Hence I was happy to see President Obama disallow “lobbyists” from filling the seats known as “political appointees.” Still, I wonder: Did it help?

I find it difficult to make a case that it is worse to have an industry lobbyist, i.e. Mark Rey as an Under Secretary who oversees the US Forest Service than to have a key corporate lawyer like John Crowell, from the same industry that by many accounts had already captured the Forest Service. In either case I find such appointments at least questionable. That is not to say that an individual from such backgrounds might not rise above said background, just that it seems unlikely that they would.

How might we do better in our politics? Unfortunately, we seem to be in one of those moments that Richard Hofstadter called “paranoid” in his book The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Wikipedia link). In such moments neither side in the US two-party system will listen to the other side, and power-over rules the day—power-with is seldom seen or used.

[Note: The idea that the Forest Products Industry captured the Forest Service at a point in time, is somewhat appealing given how dominate Timber used to be as one of the “multiple uses.” But the idea was never totally true, and less true today than yesterday. Still there is/was enough “capture” to be wary of lobbyists from, and other advocates for a dominant industry to be key policy-makers for that agency. Even if “big timber” is in its twilight as per the Forest Service, “big recreation” is still very much and increasingly at center stage.]

Three Pathways to Adaptive Governance

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Adaptive governance—an adaptive management approach to public lands management—is well underway, and will replace planning, the Forest Service’s chosen management strategy for the 20th century. This may be seen as a bold assertion. But the ideas and actions embedded in adaptive governance have been emerging for quite some time as more and more people realize that 20th century notions cannot guide the Forest Service or any other government agency into the 21st century. Adaptive Governance framing is very different from scientific management/planning framing.

Gifford Pinchot’s “planned forests” guided Forest Service thought, policy, and action for the 20th century. (See, e.g.: here, here (pdf)). It was a model where humans sought to recreate and control Nature’s forests for utilitarian purposes. This model no longer serves. For the 21st century, we are better served with Aldo Leopold’s notion that humans humbly serve as plain members of a broader ecological community, and are not masters of the community. Still, humans must derive sustenance from the land and also re-create the human spirit via interrelationship with the land. To facilitate this transformation, a broad educational campaign in ecological literacy is needed. Part of that educational process can be effected via deliberative democracy in development of adaptive management strategies and actions, with its emphasis on learning not only to incrementally design and implement ever-better management actions, but also to design and implement ever-better management and science theory.

My assertion that adaptive governance is well underway stems from many conversations with planners, NEPA coordinators, and planning directors. It also stems from extensive reading in adaptive governance. [See, e.g. Adaptive Governance: Integrating Science, Policy, Decision Making (Brunner et al, 2005), Finding Common Ground: Governance and Natural Resources in the American West (Brunner et al, 2002), The Politics of Ecosystem Management (Cortner and Moote, 1999)]

At this time when we are discussing the recent Draft NFMA rule, I see three paths forward for the Forest Service: Leave the NFMA rule anchored in by-gone-era planning, while continuing to move toward adaptive governance in all other aspects of forest service thought/action. Develop a very simple NFMA rule that frees the Forest Service of much of the baggage of past NFMA rules, thereby allowing the agency to move forward into the adaptive governance era. Embrace adaptive governance in the NFMA rule.

If as expected the Forest Service chooses to embrace a slightly tweaked Final NFMA rule, which it now calls a “planning rule,” the major problem is that it will further erode trust—a much-discussed casualty of the highly controlled central planning methodology with its “jack in the box” public involvement strategies. [Yes, I’m aware that the Draft rule champions collaborative engagement, but we all know that the Forest Service has little intention to alter its current behavior of giving little more than lip-service to collaboration in forest planning, let alone in higher policy arenas. Besides, if as I’ve argued forest-level planning has little to offer re: adaptive governance, even extensive well-intentioned collaboration in that arena will yield little more than frustration and discontent.]

If the Forest Service chooses to develop a very simple NFMA rule, public interest groups may go along, recognizing that the US Congress is not likely to repeal, amend, or revise RPA/NFMA anytime soon, and that the Forest Service is already engaging stakeholders in adaptive governance discussions/policy actions. On the other hand public interest groups may not go along, if only beause the wicked problems surrounding “species viability” will not be quickly tamed. If the species viability questions can be addressed in (or around) a “simple rule,” public interest groups may move their attention to other arenas. There is a long-standing tradition in American government of leaving laws on the books long after enforcement of these laws makes sense. Think about how long city governments kept laws like “a hitching post will be provided every X feet along Main Street” on their books.

Finally, if the Forest Service chooses to embed adaptive governance in the NFMA rule, it can serve at once as a wake-up call to the Congress to revise RPA/NFMA and simultaneously relieve forest-level burdens now imposed by an anachronistic planning rule—currently the 1982 planning rule. It can also serve as a means to rebuild trust!

I’m betting on a simple tweak of the Draft rule, but hoping for one of the other two paths.

Toddi Steelman on Science and Politics

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At a recent TED lecture at North Carolina State University, Professor Toddi Steeman talked about three science myths: “Science Determines Policy,” “Science is Objective,” and “More Science Leads to Consensus.” Steelman titled the talk, “My Jihad Against Scientific Fundamentalism.” Beginning about 7:50 into the presentation Steelman talks about so-called “Climategate,” as one of two case studies where misplaced emphasis on science frustrates policy development and problem solving. Here is a “snip,” [hastily transcribed from audio, beginning at 12:57]:

More, better, new science cannot provide objective answers to value-based questions. Science is actually pretty good at helping us understand problems, but is really not so good at helping us understand solutions to those problems. … Politics is the realm where we shape and share our collective values as a society. And politics requires different forms of knowledge, including local knowledge and public preferences. …

Knowledge like “public preferences” and “local knowledge” are often dismissed outright when we talk about environmental issues because they are seen as flawed in some fundamental way. They are seen as biased or not objective or not neutral. In that type of framing science is actually seen to be a more perfect form of knowledge … seen as … less biased or more objective or more neutral. … And under that type of framing [science] is a preferred or privileged form of knowledge in environmental decision-making. … The question is, Should it be that way?

Under that type of framing politics is really vilified. It is seen as a dirty, spin-filled, nasty practice full of compromise and collaboration in the absolute worst sense of those words. And because it is portrayed that way or framed that way it is easy to dismiss these other forms of knowledge….We are sort of left with having science to fill this gap. … But the question is, Should it be that way? …

Science can’t tell us what to do as individuals or as a collective society in the face of a changing climate. We have to make those hard decisions and engage in that debate collectively. And yet we continuously look to science to provide those answers for us. So the question again is, Why? Why do we do that? …

We continue to place these expectations on science—that science really cannot meet. And in doing so we really do an enormous disservice to science. …What we really need to do is to elevate the political dialogue in our society and to take the expectations on science down a little bit. …

We could continue to perpetuate the [three science myths above]. … And in doing so we do an enormous disservice to science … Or, the alternative vision is to acknowledge what those myths are and to embrace politics and the really constructive role it can potentially play for us. And in doing so what we could do is accept what science can do and what its strengths are, as well as what local knowledge can do for us, as well as what public preferences can do for us. And in leveraging all three of those knowledge types perhaps get better purchase on some of these contested claims in the environmental arena. Because the challenges we face in our environmental arena are so wide and so challenging we need all the help that we possibly can get.

Fixing the Rule: An Adaptive Governance Roadmap

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If adaptive governance, i.e. adaptive management applied to public lands, might help move beyond ongoing forest wars, how might the Draft NFMA Rule (pdf) be improved toward adaptive governance? This post outlines my ideas for improving the rule. Ultimately, I’d like to see us vet this proposal when more fully developed, against the Forest Service’s Draft Planning Rule, Andy Stahl’s KISS Rule, and any other proposals that may be floating about. But before I put pen to paper, I’d like to get feedback on my ideas. Here is how I propose to “fix” the rule:

Background Notions

  • No matter what NFMA rule is put in play, it needs to be written by lawyers. Court challenges will not cease no matter what rule is in force.

  • I like the idea of adaptive governance, but also believe that adaptive management as applied to public problems is the same thing. I do not have a strong preference for which words, “adaptive governance” or “adaptive management” are used to described the process. I will use “adaptive management” here. There are many pathways that might be taken to adopt an adaptive governance approach to management. It may be that embedding adaptive governance into the NFMA rule is not the best path forward. I’m willing to listen to other possible pathways, and even alternatives to any adaptive governance pathway. But I still believe that the Draft Planning rule fails as adaptive management, and can not provide a useful path forward.

Reframing/Rewriting the NFMA Rule

  • Rewrite the “Purpose and Applicability” (219.1) (and also the “Summary” and “Overview” in the Federal Register run-up to the rule) to include reasons for a move away from narrowly framed forest planning and toward broader public engagement to address forest management’s wicked problems. Include a discussion of decision containers [See, this note] and how the public needs to help natural resource managers frame discussions/resolutions, including scope and scale. Allow wicked problem discussions/resolutions to well-up to appropriately sized containers so that people don’t have to grapple with policy at local scales, where such does not makes sense. Include “all lands” decision-making where and when appropriate, allowing for responsible officials to include but not be limited to Forest Service officials.

  • Define adaptive management, then do a near “global replace” of “planning” with “adaptive management.” A beginning point for a definition of adaptive management might be:

    [Adaptive Management]: linking a broad range of actors at multiple scales to deal with the interrelated dynamics of resources and ecosystems, management systems and social systems, as well as uncertainty, unpredictability, and surprise. Adaptive governance focuses on experimentation and learning, and it brings together research on institutions and organizations for collaboration, collective action, and conflict resolution in relation to natural resource and ecosystem management. The essential role of individuals needs to be recognized in this context (e.g., leadership, trust building, vision, and meaning); their social relations (e.g., actor groups, knowledge systems, social memory) and social networks serve as the web that tie together the adaptive governance system. It has cross-level and cross-scale activities and includes governmental policies that frame creativity.

    From “Adaptive Governance of Social-Ecological Systems”, Carl Folke, Thomas Hahn, Per Olsson, and Jon Norberg, Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 2005. 30:441-473 (pdf)

  • Keep “forest plan,” but define as suggested by the Clinton era Committee of Scientists: “A loose-leaf notebook that contains all of the policy directions, strategies, and implementation proposals from decisions that have been made at all levels of the planning process. It is the official repository of decisions big and small that have been made and reviewed in the strategic and landscape-level planning processes.”

  • Keep the tie to the FS Strategic Plan, but add more responsibility at the Chief’s office to make sure that adaptive management is real—a cultural change, more than just words—and something that “the Forest Service does”, not something delegated to a single staff group like “planning” or “ecosystem management.” In short, position most responsibility for RPA/NFMA to the Chief and/or Secretary of Agriculture.

  • Replace “three levels of planning” (219.2) with “multiple levels of adaptive management assessment, monitoring, and decision-making.” Make sure that “all lands” assessment, monitoring, and decision-making, done in concert with appropriate collaborators is the logical choice when such makes sense. [See, Why Three Planning Levels?]

  • Keep the idea of “standards and guidelines” (219.7) but make the development and revision of both “situational” at appropriate scope and scale. The idea is that most would be developed at levels other than a “national forest.” Still, forest supervisors would be charged to show how such standards apply to decisions they make. Similarly for assessment and monitoring information, as well as for policy decisions and legal authorities.

  • Add the idea of a “forest niche,” that would be reviewed publicly at, say, five-year intervals. [See, A Forest Service for the 21st Century Who Are We? to better understand niche idea for the Forest Service as a whole.]

  • Abandon the idea of “desired conditions,” instead allow for simple “scenario planning” that would embrace the idea of emergent unfolding future as opposed to managing toward a desired future. Note that this idea interfaces with the idea of “niches” above and does not preclude working toward betterment. It just moves the “betterment” debate into the policy arena and away form the land planning arena. [See: Whose Desire? What Future? Why?]

  • For specific requirements of NFMA law, craft wording to require the WO (and it’s bevy of legal counselors) to find means to comply with said requirements as expeditiously as possible at scale and scope as close to “national” as possible. For example, the requirement for an Allowable Sale Quantity might be set nationally at zero, with provision that all timber volume flowing from the national forests be determined via adaptive management and in the context of, say “ecosystem stewardship contracting,” or equivalent internal process.

Followup

I still intend to work up a complete rewrite of what I’ll call a “Draft NFMA Rule” soon. But I would like your feedback on these ideas now.

I have been chatting with a friend about the “Pre-Decisional Administrative Review Process” (219.50-59). We believe that if collaboration were much improved and allowed for multi-scale adaptive governance, the whole idea of “pre-decisional review” makes no sense, and perchance neither does any “appeal process.”

Finally, I may probably won’t include language relative to the “species diversity” provisions from NFMA. That will no doubt be the most fought-over part of the rule. Still, I maintain that the adaptive management fight is equally important. In my framing, species diversity is one of the items that the WO and its bevy of legal counselors ought to deal with. In all such “dealing” I believe that such policy review/policy revision ought to begin early, even perchance predating the adoption of a NFMA rule. Why the Forest Service runs so much of its policy development through “NFMA forest planning” remains a mystery to me.

Twenty Years of Forest Blogging

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It was 1989 and the “timber wars” were raging. Having failed to gain voice on any important issues in the Forest Service via traditional channels, a few of us joined with Jeff Debonis to form a non-profit called the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (AFSEEE, later FSEEE). We adopted a three-part mission: to speak up as concerned citizens, to organize, and to protect whistleblowers. Not long thereafter, I began to blog as a Forest Service employee on government time. Not a blog, really, but an email list, that I later named Eco-Watch. I simply passed along forest policy-relevant materials to a rather large email list. By 1992 I began to compile a feedback list of comments and “comments on comments,” that I passed along via my mailing list. The list caused quite a stir in the Forest Service Intermountain Region leadership team, and maybe “higher up.”

Eco-Watch and I somehow managed to be a topic of conversation at many a Regional Leadership Team meeting. Interestingly, the “leadership team” was pretty much split, with a lot of the members supporting my attempt to open up communication via email. Deputy Regional Forester Bob Joslin once told me, paraphrasing: “If [the Regional Forester] mentions your stuff once more time, the next message is going to come from my inbox. … I don’t agree with all you write, but do believe that we [the Forest Service] need to discuss these things.”

I remember numerous tense meetings with my boss, the Regional Planning Director, about feathers that were being ruffled, not only by my emails, but also by my being on the board of that nonprofit organization FSEEE. It got worse once I became president of FSEEE’s board. I once told our Planning Director that if the Regional Forester had a problem with my being a part of FSEEE, I would gladly have lunch with him to discuss it—but that I did not talk about my FSEEE role at work since it was an exercise in free speech as a citizen, not as a public employee. As FSEEE board members and Forest Service employees we knew we were walking a fine line with the FSEEE stuff. Another time I was asked to talk to our Director of Information Systems about the email list. So I did, and he told me that the Forest Service email system had been set up for multi-way communications (after a proposal for top-down communications had been batted about, then batted down by either the Department of Ag or the Forest Service). He also told me he was not going to be a “DG cop” [the DG was then the Forest Service’s computing platform]. He also wanted to know more about FSEEE. He was curious about our daring venture.

Eco-Watch
By 1992, I began to send out follow-up comments and “comments on comments” to my email lists. Eco-Watch was born. The rough and rocky road that connected me to both the Forest Service and FSEEE was paved, in part by my Listserv. And finally near the end of the FSEEE-friendly Clinton Administration, I got approval to take Eco-Watch to the next phase, making it into a Forest Service-blessed Policy Dialogues Forum, via Hypernews. With Mark Garland’s help we put all my email listings on the internet, along with emergent policy dialogue threads. The tracks of this era still reside on the Forest Service servers, here, with numerous broken hyperlinks. Sadly, all the policy dialogue threads are lost, although I did manage to salvage most of them and have them on my own Forest Policy site as Eco-Watch [retaining much of the character of the old site, but linking to “discussion threads” of the past, rather than to ongoing discussion forums]. During this same era we tried to get Mark Garland’s Forest Service in the News to be a partnership between FSEEE and the Forest Service, even a three-way partnership adding in a timber industry group. That discussion was a non-starter. Mark continues to this day with his Forest Service in the News, hosted by FSEEE.

Eco-Watch Policy Dialogues Forum ran from 1999 until its demise in the Spring of 2005—right in the middle of the Bush/Cheney Administration War Games /Homeland Security—when the chant was “If you are not with us. You are against us.”

Why did the Forest Service drop its love affair with Hypernews? I don’t know, but suspect it had to do more with Homeland Security paranoia, than with FS internal politics. But maybe it was simple paranoia over Internet viruses, etc. All I know is that one day the forums were dead, and so too with all other forums that were being hosted on Forest Service Hypernews software. My inquiries into the matter led me to an odd dead end—something like, “It was just too hard to maintain the software.” I still believe that similar software powers many internet forums today, and maybe even Wiki sites. But I let it go. After all, we were at war in the wake of the Sept. 2001 World Trade Center bombings.

Forest Policy – Forest Practice
Early in 2005 I threw together a real blog, Forest Policy–Forest Practice, subtitled ‘A communities of practice weblog.’ My goal was to emulate what others had done by then, in other fields far from natural resources—to engage practitioners in policy/practice dialogues. I reached out to a few old friends and let it fly, this time on my own dime and on servers that couldn’t be shut down by FS bureaucrats, whether by design or by neglect.

We started out OK, but never got it up to steam—just couldn’t muster the participation needed to make it a strong platform for “voice.” Maybe it was me, being my usual flaky self, not getting anything “real” going. But I think not. I think that it was just too new, and some of the “academic” friends I courted were too busy with traditional meetings, publications, trade associations, etc. to be bothered with blogs. Oddly, there are still very few, maybe only one, active discussion blogs on forest policy.

A few of us did kept the discussion alive for several years, but it just wasn’t the “in your face” immediate gratification that the email list or the Hypernews forums had been. I tried a few other things, like a blog tied to Adaptive Forest Management, a theme I continue talking about today. On another blog I chronicled the rise and fall of what I like to call “Planning cast up as Environmental Management Systems” or “EMS cast up as Planning.” Among other things I unveiled in my Forest Environmental Systems blog was a clever little powerpoint about why bureaucrats don’t want to “mess with anything”. Policy wonk Ron Brunner told me that it was the best example ever of why bureaucracies can’t change. The EMS/Planning love affair was short-lived, and the blog only ran for about a year.

A New Century of Forest Planning
Today a few of us are blogging forestry and forest policy, under the guise of “forest planning” here. It will prove interesting to see if/when the Forest Service joins other agencies that allow/encourage many blogs and wikis, by individuals or groups. But it doesn’t seem likely just now.

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I continue to cross-walk to my earlier blogs, but realize that they are pretty much just a place where I store stuff. I also continue to blog matters at the confluence of complex systems, wicked problems, politics, finance, economics, and ecology at Ecology and Economics: a cross-disciplinary conversation and Economic Dreams-Economic Nightmares. Mostly I just dabble at the edges, and continue to hope that more folks will jump in to re-frame politics, science, and public administration in the US and around the world.

Desired Future: Whose Desire? What Future? Why?

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The idea of a “desired future” is found frequently in Forest Service NFMA and NEPA discussions/writing. I decided to see if I could find out where the idea of “desired future” and “desired future condition” come from. It sort of shows up in the 1979 NFMA Rule, mainly w/r/t wildlife populations, but gains a major toehold on FS thinking in the 1982 rule:

Sec. 219.11 Forest plan content. The forest plan shall contain the following: … (b) Forest multiple-use goals and objectives that include a description of the desired future condition of the forest or grassland and an identification of the quantities of goods and services that are expected to be produced or provided during the RPA planning periods

And it has been a part of FS thinking ever since. I can understand back in 1982 that the Forest Service wanted to remake America’s national forests into something foresters would desire, while zoning out Wilderness, Wild and Scenic Rivers, and other “set-asides”. So the idea of “desired future” made sense, at least to foresters who were running the Forest Service back then, some of whom were desirous to see the allowable timber cut increased from 11 to 33 billion board feet.

But to continue to use the language in the 2011 proposed NFMA rule is a different matter. The focus these days is not on increasing “allowable cut,” but instead on restoring ecosystems resiliency. But there is still a hint of what author David Ehrenfeld called The Arrogance of Humanism, 1981 at work here. At least I think so. That is why I’ve advocated for simple scenario planning instead, in part to avoid what I believe to be a “desired future” trap. For an article length view, see Thomas Stanley’s Ecosystem Management and the Arrogance of Humanism, Conservation Biology, 1995 (pdf)

Let’s leave a couple of inquiry questions: Is the idea of “desired future” even needed in forestland adaptive management? Why does this language persist in NFMA rules.

[Update, 4/6/11: I noticed this AM that the Draft NFMA rule refers to "desired condtions" (219.7 (d)) instead of "desired future," or "desired future condition(s)" but the meaning appears identical, at least to me.]

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Related: In Search of Our Desired Forest, John Rupe, NCFP, 2/18/2011