Politicians Should Not Manage Forests

Forest Service chief Jack Ward Thomas trooped through Spokane the other day, along with an entourage of top administrators. They were stumping for a big bureaucratic planning exercise. It will save the region’s forest ecosystem, they contend, but Spokane’s congressman, George Nethercutt, has placed it all in jeopardy.

OK, we’re all for saving the ecosystem. We agree that forest managers should keep nature’s delicate balance in mind as they oversee valid human activities such as logging, grazing and recreation.

But after decades of planning exercises, environmental studies, litigation and intensifying political polarization, we cannot say that national forests are better off for the experience. Fish runs are in decline. Logged trees are getting smaller. Incendiary brush packs western forests, priming them for catastrophic firestorms. Burned, harvestable trees are rotting on the stump. A new industry - environmental lobbying, litigating and mass-mail fund-raising - has cropped up alongside the dwindling loggers and sawmill workers.

Thomas sees a solution in the Clinton administration’s Eastside Ecosystem Management Project. It aims to assess environmental conditions throughout the Columbia drainage, an area the size of France. So far the project has spent $24 million and busied 300 land managers. Next, it was to produce a blizzard of forest and rangeland policies.

Nethercutt has provided funds to produce a report on the scientific findings. But he wants to look it over before leaping to the policy phase.

The congressman harbors a healthy suspicion toward top-down policy making. White House political inclinations have been known to taint that approach to forest management.

But so have political inclinations in Congress. Remember Jim “Chain Saw” McClure?

The best judges of appropriate forest policy don’t reside in Washington, D.C. They live and work in the forests.

Beyond its healthy skepticism toward vast regulatory impositions, Congress should redesign forest management laws. Local forest professionals should have more latitude and more authority to make decisions that stick. They do need guidelines and scientific data for ecosystem protection. They do need an incentive to hear out local conservationists as well as local logging firms. But they must have more insulation from national political pressures.

Existing laws have replaced the forest industry with a conflict industry. We need to cut down the politics, the bureaucracy, the planning, litigating and paper shuffling, and move toward the local management of a renewable timber, recreation and wildlife resource.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board