collaboration and public involvement

Recommended Reading: BLM Negotiation Strategies Document

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Kudos to BLM for this excellent document ..  at a glance, it is a comprehensive overview of the landscape of collaboration and conflict resolution.   The photos included are excellent also. The below section talks about the competitive style of negotiation, thoughts which are similar to what I said in this morning’s post but expressed way more articulately.

Negotiators who use a competitive approach aggressively advocate for their position and are disinclined to accept any agreement other than that which satisfies their preconceived goals. Using this approach, the objective is to “win,” if need be, at the expense of other parties. For natural resources issues, competitive approaches can lead to intractability as negotiators focused on winning their positions may miss opportunities for discretion, compromise, or common interests, thus unnecessarily escalating a dispute to litigation or appeal.

The competitive approach is also less likely to take into account preservation of the relationship between the negotiating parties. As such, while competitive negotiators initially may succeed in winning their positions, the approach quickly becomes less effective in future negotiations with the same parties. In managing public lands and resources for multiple-use, the BLM often is in a position to negotiate with the same stakeholders multiple times in multiple situations. Competitive approaches from either the Bureau or stakeholders can create an adversarial relationship, thus decreasing the potential for success in future negotiations.

Reflections on Dispute Resolution via the Courtroom: Field Trip to 10th Circuit Court of Appeals

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Yesterday morning we visited the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to listen to the appeal of Judge Brimmer’s decision on the 2001 Rule.

There were three judges presiding,Anderson, Murphy and Holmes.  Since this is Women’s History Month, I have to point out that all the lead counsels, and all the judges were male.  The ratio of female to male judges in the Tenth Circuit is 3/20   or 15% based on their website, so the latter is not surprising.

Only some topics were relevant to our discussions of the planning rule.  One was the degree to which the concerns of the public during commenting need to be taken into account, and to what extent  decisions can be predetermined in advance.   I think it was Judge Anderson who said “Presidents are entitled to say let’s do this; that’s why they’re elected.” And there was also some discussion about inclinations, predispositions, predeterminations, and I think I also heard predestination (??).

One of the points made by the Wyoming attorney was that the analysis in the 2001 was  not site-specific enough to be meaningful .  I think it was something along the lines of “NEPA does not give you a pass because it’s hard to do the work”  quoting a 9th Circuit case on that.  Just another illustration of the problems of  programmatic  EIS s and the question of  “how specific does it need to be to allow site specific decisions without site specific analysis.”

I also heard echoes of our ongoing conversation on local places- how can you know about what is best for a creek and a landscape if you are dealing with millions of acres in a short period of time? But whether good land management decisions for specific units can be made nationally  is not fundamentally a legal question.

There are a couple of cultural differences worthy of note between the courtroom level and the kind of collaboration we work with day to day.  The first is that it is more adversarial. People win and they lose.  The judge doesn’t say “what can we walk out of here today and live with?”.  The second is that people care about trees and fire protection and wildlife, but the discourse is mostly about documents and analyses and relationship to statutes- not  what we can agree on to encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment (NEPA section 101). When the judge and counsel talk about say, bark beetles, fuel treatments or coal mining,  they don’t seem to be clear on the facts (or counsel is intentionally unclear to slide by on their point), and certainly the structure of the process at this point does not allow for further fact-finding (15 minutes per side, in this case).

Third, is that compared to public comment and even discourse on this blog,  only some people are allowed to give their opinions.  So, for example, science is filtered through the legal profession, e.g.,  ” the 2001 rule was based on science.”

At the end of the day, I was feeling like perhaps this was not the best place for public land conflicts if it could be avoided.   The question is whether it could be. I remembered that some states,  for divorces, require mediation before they are allowed to go to court.

Here is the rationale for that in Utah (my translation is in italics):

Why is mediation required?

Mediation is appropriate in family (resource) related matters because it encourages collaborative problem solving by the parties. Mediation provides the greatest opportunity for direct communication and the sharing of information that can be critical to the successful resolution of disputes and when children (land decisions) are involved, the implementation of parenting agreements (and monitoring of those decisions). Mediation offers an environment well-suited to identifying and addressing the strong emotional issues associated with divorce and parenting conflicts (people’s livelihoods, and deeply held feelings and values for land and Nature). Mediation is structured to focus parties on a common interest: the resolution of the disputed issues and when children (the land) are involved, the future of their children (public lands). The informality and flexibility of the mediation process allows issues to be discussed that might otherwise be raised in a more adversarial or narrowly-focused process.

The benefits of mediation include:

  1. You directly participate in finding solutions to the issues in dispute;
  2. Mediation allows you to resolve your case more quickly;
  3. Mediation is less expensive;
  4. Mediation promotes relationships and you will end the process with a better relationship with your former spouse (other people and groups who are interested in public lands); and
  5. Mediation is less stressful than court.

I would add only that  you and the disputants know more about the details of the issues at hand and are likely to resolve the dispute in a more meaningful way to both of you and to the land.

We tried this, partially at least, as part of the objection process under the 2005 Rule but never worked out all the details before the Rule was enjoined (this happened twice, we were stopped during the objection process).

Putting Your Dot on the Map

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They are “remembered landscapes.”

Nearly every weekend when I was growing up, my parents, my two sisters, our large family dog, and I would get in the car and head to my grandparents’ house in St. Maries, Idaho.  The trip was usually pretty boring for a kid, but we always got excited when we got to the White Pine Scenic Drive in the St. Joe National Forest.  The highway carved through the forest creating a tunnel effect, and in the middle was a sign along the highway that said “cool spring.”  Even the dog somehow knew when we were getting close to cool spring.  We’d stop, get a drink, walk into the woods a bit, and marvel at the dense trees with moss growing everywhere.  Down the road was the tallest white pine tree in the world, but that was just a boring statistic to a kid.   The statistics didn’t matter, but the place was special.

Today the sign is gone, cool spring is gone, and the trail has been expanded for motorized use.  White pine is incredibly susceptible to blister rust and many trees have died.  The large tree has fallen over.  My dad and my niece got their picture taken by the incredibly huge roots.  It doesn’t matter that the forest has changed, but the place will always be special.

When I was working in the Black Hills, I once talked to a county commissioner on the Wyoming side.  She told me that when she was growing up, her dad loaded up the Studebaker and headed up a road that isn’t even recognized as a road today.  They would reach a large meadow and have a picnic lunch.  Today, that meadow is overgrown with dense small trees, and probably needs to be thinned.  The place is special, but her experience is gone.

In Colorado, Monarch Pass feels like it’s on top of the world.  From the top, you can see an expanse of trees that seems to go forever.  For folks that have traveled on U.S. 50 from the east, this is their continental divide experience.

In the San Juan Mountains of Southwest Colorado, you can go on a hike from the desert to a meadow with a stream running through it, and look up at snow capped peaks as high as you can imagine.  It’s unreal that you can see desert and tundra at the same time.

Social scientists often group participants in a forest planning process as members of a “community of place” or “community of interest.”  I don’t have a direct economic or social stake in how forests in Idaho are managed.  I don’t even live in Idaho any more, but I am still connected to a “place” in a forest along a 12-mile stretch of highway.

Before 1976, the Forest Service conducted “unit planning” with units roughly the size of ranger districts.  In part to increase the working circle of potential timber harvest to assure a continuous supply, NFMA established Forest Plans.  But Forests often were too big for the community of place.  Then, the scale of planning grew even bigger.  The St. Joe and White Pine Drive were administratively split between the Clearwater and the new monolithic Idaho Panhandle National Forests.   The area around cool spring fell on the Clearwater side.  The old Forest Plan put White Pine Drive in a scenic corridor management area, but the area was too small to show on the forest plan map.  The Clearwater has now combined with the Nez Perce to complete one large planning effort.

The area in the Black Hills fell into an inventoried roadless area subject to the 2000 roadless rule.  Monarch Pass was designated in the Westwide Energy Corridor EIS as an important corridor.  The multi-state decision doesn’t mention how the corridor entirely covers the Monarch Pass Ski Area.

Forest planners have discovered that place matters.  The Medicine Bow-Routt-Thunder Basin has done three plans.  The Pike-San Isabel-Cimarron-Comanche will do two.  There are some excellent examples of place-based planning in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge, Chugach, and GMUG forest planning processes, where forests are subdivided into “places” for planning.  These were discussed in a 2003 workshop in Portland.    The authors note:

“Place-based planning” refers to land and natural resource planning efforts that bring together diverse human values, uses, experiences, and activities tied to specific geographic locations. Although planning efforts have always focused on specific places through land use zoning frameworks, place-based planning is different from other types of approaches. For example, whereas land use zoning segregates dominant uses from one another on the landscape, place-based planning takes a more holistic approach, focusing on identifying current uses, values, and meanings. In addition, place-based approaches tend to take a longitudinal perspective, exploring desired future conditions for the landscape. This approach enables participants to identify a variety of uses that might occur concurrently rather than designating one primary use for the upcoming 10 to 20 years.

Some commentators are concerned that place-based planning and the new emphasis on collaboration are putting National groups at a disadvantage.  Ohio University political science professor Nancy Manring wrote a paper in 2004 about the 2005 planning rule provision that replaced the appeals process with an objection process.   She observed:

“McCloskey (2000), Coggins (2001), Foster (2002), Hibbard and Madsen (2003) and Kenney (2000) all have argued that collaboratives may maximize community-based interests at the expense of national stakeholders and values. As Weber (1999, p. 482) cautioned, “The danger is that such communities will develop a sense of themselves apart from and to the detriment of the nation.” No doubt, it will be easier for communities to develop a separate sense of themselves if representatives of national interests and values are not physically present at the negotiating table. The potential tensions between local and national values – between the communities of place and the communities of interest – are thrown into sharp relief by the realities of collaborative planning without the traditional appeals process as a safeguard. “

At the beginning of the planning process for the San Juan Forest Plan Revision, participants at public meetings were given sticky dots to place on a map.  There was even a parallel process on the web, where you could put a computerized dot on the map.  The idea was that participants could identify their special places, and where resource conflicts might occur.  These sticky dots were used in drawing the the forest plan map.  The Plan will use geographic areas as big as ranger districts, and within the areas, there are subdivisions displayed by using eight development “themes.”  A final Plan is expected next year.

What Have We Learned Since the COS Report?

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Thanks to the generosity of the Society of American Foresters, we can post articles from the Journal of Forestry May 99 edition on this blog. This edition of the journal focused on the COS Report. Today I’ll post the Norm Johnson article here.

Since 1999, we have tried many of the ideas that the COS brought forward. I would be interested in how you all think these ideas have worked.

I will post later this week on my experience with trying out some of these concepts.

FACA Frolics- Or- When an AC Has Your Back

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While I agree that federal agencies may have too many advisory committees, and that the structure of FACA committees may involve large amounts of bureaucracy and paperwork, I think they can also serve a useful purpose. So here is my experience: I was the Designated Federal Official for the Forestry Research Advisory Committee for a year or two, and I also worked with the ACAB (Advisory Committee for Agricultural Biotechnology) and tangentially with the NAREEAB , (National Agricultural Research, Extension, Education, and Economics Advisory Board). I observed advisory committees run well and not so well, making recommendations of great, and little, utility. I experienced the frustrating paperwork requirements firsthand as a Designated Federal Official (trying to get the Office of White House Liaison to accept our nominees, and restarting the process when clearance packages got lost). My most recent experience was with the RACNAC (Roadless Area Conservation National Advisory Committee) as a staff person involved with the Colorado Roadless Rule, which entailed all the fun and none of the bureaucracy for me.

Here are a couple of reasons I think a formal collaborative group for the planning rule might be useful.
1) Commitment to the process. The formality of a FACA committee means that people (generally) take their responsibility seriously and put the time in to really work on the issue and understand it. Being a FACA committee is not the only way of getting this commitment (certainly the Colorado Roadless Taskforce had that commitment, but it was not within the federal structure) but formalizing it as opposed to having a generic kind of group seems to help. Perhaps this is because, as a FACA committee, the group can make formal recommendations.
2) Today, “bipartisan” is on the lips of many. Especially for planning rules and roadless rules, there has been a history of public policy as ping- pong ball from administration to administration. A set of recommendations from a collaborative group gives an opportunity for recommendations beyond partisanship. It also potentially gives political cover for the next administration not to mess with it. The bipartisan Colorado Roadless Rule Taskforce recommendations carried forward across governors of different parties. Most of us just want a planning rule that we can live with that will stick. The “will stick” part can be helped by a FACA committee.
3) Navigating the clearance process. Many agencies weigh in, some with strange and peculiar worldviews, and if you want your rule cleared, you have to go along or the Department has to spend political capital. If the recommendations left the FACA committee and the Department went along with them, it would be pretty transparent where the changes came in. Then advisory committee members could potentially set up educational meetings with the recalcitrant agencies, or call upon their own favor networks to facilitate progress.
4) Raising the level of dialogue. Some individuals will come to a public meeting and comments about how bad a certain idea is (along the lines of “my views are clearly based on goodness and light and yours are venal and unprincipled”). I have seen the RACNAC ask useful questions like “how would you change the proposal to improve it?” that served to focus the dialogue. In one case, a person had flown in to a public meeting who clearly didn’t know the topic and hadn’t been briefed and didn’t seem to have a clue about how to improve the proposal or on anything that would veer off the written statement. The agency itself would probably have simply felt uncomfortable asking for higher level input, as our role is not generally to question or improve public comments but be hospitable to the public and listen. Having expectations for, and hopefully, generating, substantive discourse would add greatly to an involvement process.

5) Providing media cover. Members of a FACA committee can say all the things about their recommendations in colorful ways that agencies probably can’t.. and defend their recommendations in the media. This keeps the agency from becoming either a punching bag, or perceived to be defensive and argumentative.

In summary, then, a FACA committee, in my experience, can provide all kinds of useful support and cover for a complex, divisive issue and is worthy of consideration. The only addition I would have would be to include some kind of peer-to-peer discussion with agency staff or a formal devil’s advocate, as to the practicality and economic cost of the recommendations.

Some would argue that this should be a committee of scientists, but I think the STS literature and particularly Mark Brown’s book “Science in Democracy” leads us to the conclusion that representational would be best (as was the RACNAC).

P. S. I think that Brown’s book is great, but is a bit heavy on the canon of political theorists for most casual reading. I haven’t thought about Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau since I worked on the 1995 RPA, where we tried to place them along Pinchot, Leopold and Muir to describe the “serving people” part of “caring for the land and serving people.”

Adaptive Governance and Forest Planning

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Army Officer at Nine Mile Camp, Mt. Baker National Forest, 1933, photo by W.L. Baker

The more we look at the literature, the more evidence we find that our current NFMA management system doesn’t align with the current thinking about land use management.  We gravitate toward adaptive management, but we don’t quite grasp it yet.

A slight twist on the adaptive management idea is the concept of “adaptive governance.” The word “governance” instead of “management” recognizes the collaborative aspects. It’s similar to the idea of “adaptive co-management”  that Dave Iverson has described in his post here and here on this blog, citing the summary from the Resilience Alliance.

The concepts of adaptive governance are worth considering in the forest planning and management system for a couple of reasons. First, it includes the idea of learning-oriented planning similar to what Jim Burchfield proposes in his earlier post on this blog. Second, the role of science is different. Instead of relying on scientific management as the foundation for policy development, adaptive governance integrates various types of knowledge in a contextual manner.  This is similar to what Sharon describes here and here about analyzing specific questions posed by land managers and the public .

In the book Adaptive Governance: Integrating Science, Policy, and Decision Making by Ronald Brunner, Toddi Steelman, Lindy Coe-Juell, Christina Cromley, et. al., the authors use five case studies across the West.  amazon.com oxford journal review

The authors make the following points about adaptive governance:

  • Planning sets goals. You try alternatives. The burden of decision making shifts to monitoring and evaluation and terminating policy alternatives that fail.
  • No policy is permanent because interests, knowledge, and other significant details of the context are subject to change.
  • There is an understanding that politics are unavoidable. Participants assume responsibility and accountability for the policy because they must live with the consequences of implementing it.
  • Best available science is integrated with other kinds of knowledge, including local knowledge.
  • Science must be contextual, necessitating interpretations and judgments that integrate what is known about the context.

These guidelines appear to converge with other ideas that we’ve noted on this blog.  There seems to be evidence that this works.  Although NFMA and the previous forest planning rules are grounded in the scientific management process, the 2000, 2005, and 2008 rules introduced the concept of collaboration in all aspects of planning, monitoring, and evaluation, and required the consideration of uncertainty and risk. But what is missing in those rules is the idea that we are committed to using dynamic monitoring and a collaborative evaluation process in order to change policy.  For those that think that the NFMA planning rule is just about writing a Forest Plan, this would be a huge surprise and some would argue, a wake-up call.  Are the concepts of adaptive governance the next step?

Building Public Decisions

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In the early 1990s a few of us — Hanna Cortner, Maggie Shannon, Larry Davis and a couple of us in the Intermountain Region — nudged the Forest Service toward an approach we called “Building Public Decisions”. Today we might call such adaptive co-management or collaborative stewardship, or ??.

In 1993 I ran a little thing by my Eco-Watch network titled Leadership and a Sustainable Future. In my intro to the post, I said, “Jeff Sirmon’s philosophy might be summarized as ‘building public decisions and public trust.’ It certainly seems like the right thing to do.”

In another Eco-Watch post that year — a book review of Dan Kemmis Community and the Politics of Place — I highlighted additional readings from contemporary ‘policy analysis’ arguing as Kemmis had for a return to the Jeffersonian engagement. These were:

The Power of Public Ideas, edited by Robert B. Reich, Harvard University Press, 1990.

Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Policy Process, by Giandomenico Majone, Yale University Press, 1989. (Related to, and pushing forward, some of the ideas in The Power of Public Ideas.)

I said, “They are my personal favorites in policy analysis, synthesis, and governmental choice. It will be interesting to see what some of you think about these and the whole idea of shifting from federalism to more engaging, and participative, forms of government. To embrace Jeffersonian engagement (or public deliberation, as Robert Reich calls it) would transform ‘public involvement in decision making’ into ‘building public decisions.'”

Would that the Forest Service had embraced that future. But it didn’t. As usual there was (and is) a catch, Catch-22. (see also Catch-22 and Maladaptive Organizations).

For all its chatter about collaboration and collaborative stewardship or whatever buzz phrase of the moment, the Forest Service in its bureaucratic center simply doesn’t want to share enough power to collaborate. Look at the NFMA rule rewrite, for example. There is much discussion as to how the agency will collaborate to implement the “rule”, but when it comes to the rule itself, well that is another story.

On the Offical Planning Rule Website, the FS has thrown out a wee bit of material and said “comment by Feb. 16”. Then it has said that the comments are open to public inspection, but essentially blocked that effort by packing them into individual pdf files, rather than into a more easily accessible format. Finally it initiated a blog that isn’t really any more helpful than the comment gatherer.

Let me predict what will happen next. The FS will convene a few scattered meetings to gather yet more comments. Then it will issue a draft “rule.” Then it will defend that rule — a tweak on the 1982 rule — until Hell freezes over. 20 years from now, if any of us are still alive, we will be rehashing this once again—unless we’ve found better amusements.

I hope I’m wrong.

The Blame Game

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Whether we are talking about planning, assessments, monitoring, or any other managerial function it is good practice to also talk about what I like to call the “p” words, psychology and politics. Here is a little tidbit I’ve been thinking about again recently.

How often do we resort to blaming others for our own problems/failings? Think first of international relations and war. Think second of our own families. Think third of the organizations we work for and with. Admittedly, everything depends on everything and relationships are a two-way street. But I still believe that much of our undiscussed, and often undiscussable conflict derives from our own inability to see ourselves as others see us. This too, is a two-way street. Anyone or any groups we are in conflict with usually have the same problem, which we might think of as a special case of “frame blindness.”

(See generally Chris Argyris’ Action Science ideas. For the Forest Service specifically, see my Catch-22 and Maladaptive Organizations, and on “frame blindness” and other decision traps, see How to Avoid Harebrained, Cockamamie Schemes.)

Not only do we too-often think of ourselves as victims, but usually “frame” ourselves as well-meaning heroes — hardworking, fair and sensitive heroes — stopped in our tracks by those who we vilify as enemies, or malcontents, who we to-often view as lazy, inconsiderate, unappreciative, and insensitive. The problem gets worse as each side digs in, nurturing a co-dependency. In organizations the problem spreads as more and more people buy into the blame game, setting up a contagion that afflicts entire organizations.

I just finished a little book, Leadership and Self-Deception (2000, Second edition 2010, Amazon.com link) that captures the organizational “blame game” well. Importantly, the authors give hints on how to move beyond victim/blame both in interpersonal relations, management and leadership, and organizational effectiveness measures.

One key toward organizational betterment is to learn to appreciate people as people, not as cogs in organizational machinery. Another key is to learn how to accept and share responsibility for organizational problems. In an afterword, the authors describe how in applying lessons learned from the book a CEO instituted a new way of tracking and dealing with problems in a company:

Whereas before, he would go to the person he thought was causing the problem and demand that the person fix it, the CEO began to consider how he himself might have contributed to the problem. He then convened a meeting including each person in the chain of command down to the level where the problem was manifest. He began the meeting by identifying the problem. He laid out all the ways he thought he had negatively contributed to the culture that had produced the problem and proposed a plan to rectify his contributions to the problem. He invited the person directly below him to do the same thing. And so on down the line. By the time it got to the person most immediately responsible for the problem, that person publicly took responsibility for his contributions to the problem and the proposed a plan for what he would do about it. In this way, a problem that had gone on literally for years was solved nearly overnight when the leaders stopped simply assigning responsibility and began holding themselves strictly accountable.

See too: Difficult Conversations (1999) (Amazon.com link) (Google Books preview)

None of this is new, of course, both the aforementioned books were written around 2000. In a 2006 Forest Policy-Forest Practice post titled Perplexed by Principles for Process Improvement , I alluded to the “power-over” v. “power-with” dilemma, and reiterated my 2003 suggestion to get us beyond gridlock by beginning the journey toward true collaboration.

Maybe I was planting seeds of thought, maybe I was whistling in the wind. Maybe the time is right now, or is yet to come. But maybe it will never come!

Why ? Despite rhetoric to the contrary, Capital P “Politics” is a power-over game, and US government agency administration is “political”. It used to be that the Timber Barons and their Congressional and Administration lackeys were never far from earshot of anything that the Forest Service did (remember especially the 1950s through 1970s or 80s). Now the game has shifted, and Fire Money (and assoicated power) has more sway, as increasingly does Recreation Money. Maybe we will get a chance for better collaboration, even adaptive co-management as the Resilience Alliance folks call it.

But I won’t be surprised if we don’t. I have been hoping for a “collaborative future” for a very long time, but I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve not fallen into the insanity trap: doing (saying) the same things over and over, and expecting different results.

Returning to more optimistic thoughts, Leadership and Self-Deception got me to thinking about other books like Argyris and Schön’s Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning, (1990) and Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations (2002). (See my 2005 Forest Policy-Practice Fierce Conversations post). Only after learning to own up to and defeat the victim/blame game do we have any chance at other important organizational learning opportunities.

A key question: Is it really possible, or remotely likely that the US Forest Service (or any other large government bureau) will ever be able to move beyond the blame game?

Barriers to collaboration: NEPA concerns?

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Interesting story. from the Billings Gazette.. I noticed a couple of things..

First, the FS process looks good- so having a cooperators group is clearly something that can work well. Right now it is not a requirement of any rule but something that makes some sense (at least it is popular in Wyoming).

Second, the BLM seems to be caught up in concerns of “pre-decisionality”, which is a concern about talking to people violating the NEPA process. Since this is a topic that is worrisome to FS folks, it would be useful to explore further.

My pragmatic view is that you talk to people and they talk to you, throughout the NEPA process. Unless you convene a formal group (without FACA), you don’t have to worry about FACA. At some point, the decision maker has to go behind closed doors and make a decision, and they and their staff bring all the conversations, formal public comment, views of cooperator groups and make a decision.

What really concerns me is that NEPA can become a reason for “not talking” to people, and I don’t think that is the spirit of NEPA. Anyway, perhaps some of you could shed some light on these concerns- you can see some of the issues that can be raised in this news story.

Forest Planning #2- The Participation-Shed

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Jim Burchfield
January 18, 2009

If genuine, deliberative collaborative processes become an inviolate principle in the development and implementation of a new generation of National Forest plans, then the geographic scale of planning becomes one of the most important early decisions in the establishment of planning rules. I will argue that a vital, but not singular variable in determining a planning area boundary is the capacity of resident populations to participate in ongoing deliberations, “a participation-shed,” if you will. Even though participation has many styles and flavors, the type upon which meaningful collaboration has depended for some time is the form in which people see, hear, touch, and even smell each other – face-to-face deliberation. There is no more meaningful or creative decision environment, in terms of empathy, compromise, and learning, than the physical confrontation with your adversaries and friends. Technology gives us the ability to supplement these direct interactions, of course, and it will continue to provide enormous advantages in exchanging information and ideas, but the virtual world will always fall short of the goal to make progress. Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby.

So how do we design a set of geographic areas that create opportunities for people to get together and confront our very real resource management problems? I would suggest considering a few additional variables that encourage action and the ongoing measurement of consequences. First, watersheds have a logical as well as historical significance in the management of western lands. The availability of clean, fresh water will only accelerate under warming climatic conditions. Second, local government boundaries, such as state and county lines, remain stubbornly stable and administratively unavoidable. We can’t make a specious claims that these “artificial” boundaries don’t count. They do. Finally, we have the administrative boundaries of the National Forests and their dependent Ranger Districts. A planning area requires a leader to convene and guide public discussions. This is often best fulfilled by a trained, responsible federal official, a person who pays attention to the actions emerging from planning and the monitoring and evaluation that follows to adapt to new conditions. The perfect unit for planning on a National Forest would be a place like the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, where the 4th code hydrologic unit happens to coincide nicely with the Ravalli County and National Forest boundary. These cases are rare, so for everywhere else, there will be fudge factors.

What we cannot fudge, however, is the potential for citizens to engage regularly, honestly, and with feeling. Someone has to be able to get in their car after work and attend a well-organized, focused meeting that lasts no longer than two hours, isn’t a lot more frequent than once per month, and gets something done on the ground within a year. This is not too much to ask, and in fact, has been done on many occasions in the past. Yet participation in Forest Service meetings often does not go well, either because of poor meeting design, lack of independent, quality facilitation, a myopia on assessment, and a never-ending ambivalence on the purpose of planning (again, all together now: getting something done to change the future!). Having planning units defined on geographic areas that would encompass recognized, community-centered places would get all of us very far down the path. Just think of all the Ranger Districts that already meet the criteria of being a relatively short driving distance (less than an hour) from the land to be affected. The genius of the National Forest System has always been its administrative decentralization. Let’s use it.

This does not imply that the geographic area is the only unit of analysis in preparing planning documents. Larger scale patterns on regional areas inform more localized decisions and offer critical explanations for potential consequences of actions. Other stochastic, broad-scale disturbances might require rather rapid changes in planning assumptions used on the geographic scale. But then, planning isn’t perfect, which is why it’s an ongoing, learning activity. Allowing people to be able to regularly participate in the decision-making regarding actions, and then to help evaluate whether the future has been changed toward a desirable trajectory allows Forest Service professional to be responsive to the highest quality knowledge and commitment of the most directly affected stakeholders. It will make planning into the political activity that is deserves to be. It will build confidence and capacity among the population. It might even foster a nation of conservationists.

Note: Sharon posted this entry and this was the only photo she could find within the time available. She would appreciate any real “forest planning” photos to use here.