The Best-Laid Plans. Randal O'Toole

      The Forest Service was no stranger to planning, but before the 1970s its plans were short and simple. Most of them focused on calculating how much timber could be cut from a national forest each year. Each national forest wrote such timber management plans (sometimes called multiple-use plans) about once every 10 years.

      Private timber companies tended to cut all the trees in a given forest in a few years, leaving nothing more to cut until the forests grew back. In contrast, the Forest Service had long promised that no national forest would sell so much timber in one year that it would ever have to sell less in some future year, a policy that came to be known as nondecliningflow.⁹ To ensure that future cutting levels did not decline, plans written before about 1960 tended to be very cautious. Managers were conservative in their projections of how fast timber would grow, and they excluded large amounts of land from timber cutting because either it wasn’t economically suitable for timber or it helped to protect recreation, wildlife, or watershed values.

      As the market for national forest timber grew in the 1950s and 1960s, Forest Service managers began using a variety of tricks to increase timber sale levels. They added land to the timber base that had previously been set aside for other uses. They included low-valued timber in the base in anticipation that its price would eventually rise enough to make it economic to cut. They inflated the yield tables that predicted timber growth rates. They changed their method of measuring trees to increase the amount they could sell.

      In 1969, a Forest Service research report called the Douglas-Fir Supply Study revealed that many national forests had overshot their mark.¹⁰ The cutting rates they had set in the 1960s were higher than they could sustain in the future. To keep the Forest Service from immediately reducing timber sales, the timber industry urged that the agency simply abandon its nondeclining flow policy. But in 1973, the chief of the Forest Service sent a directive to the forests requiring them to continue following the policy, even if it meant reducing timber sales now.¹¹

      Meanwhile, in 1970, Earth Day energized all sorts of people who were critical of national forest management. Recreationists hated the growing clearcuts that spread across the forests like leprosy. Wilderness lovers detested new roads that penetrated remote areas. Organic farmers and gardeners living near the national forests felt threatened by the herbicides and other chemicals that forest managers routinely dumped on clearcuts.

      The Forest Service responded to the many local controversies by becoming more centralized. The Forest Service hierarchy has four levels: In the 1970s, about 600 district rangers did the actual on-the-ground management and reported to about 120 national forest supervisors, who were overseen by 9 regional foresters, who answered to the Washington, D.C., chief of the Forest Service. (Due to budget cuts and mergers, the numbers of district rangers and supervisors have declined by about 20 percent since 1990.) As late as the mid-1960s, the chief trusted the district rangers to make most of the decisions about on-the-ground management. When those decisions led to public debates in the late 1960s, the chief progressively moved decisionmaking authority up to the forest supervisors and regional foresters.

      In 1970, President Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act directing federal agencies to write environmental impact statements for all major federal actions significantly affecting the human environment. Many agencies resisted this mandate, but the Forest Service welcomed it, hoping that an open planning process with public involvement would reduce the criticism it had been getting from all sides. In the early 1970s, the Forest Service directed regional and forest offices to write environmental impact statements for at least three kinds of plans:

      • Timber management plans that calculated how much timber could be cut from each national forest;

      • Land-use plans that allocated land to recreation, wildlife, timber, and other uses, usually for planning units that ranged in size from a tenth to a quarter of a national forest; and

      • Herbicide spray plans that analyzed the effects of chemical herbicides, usually written for groups of several national forests.

      To handle the wilderness question, the Washington office itself wrote a national Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE), which analyzed all roadless areas for their wilderness suitability. The Sierra Club took this plan to court, arguing that a national plan could not adequately deal with the nuances of local conditions. When the courts ruled RARE inadequate, the Forest Service followed with RARE II, which the courts again ruled inadequate.

      In contrast to RARE’s failure, splitting up the rest of planning into discrete decisions made each plan appear more manageable. But the interdependency of the plans created problems for both planners and the public. The amount of herbicide spraying depended on how much timber was cut. The level of timber sales depended on the allocations in the land-use plans. The land-use plans depended on the results of the RARE analyses. The amount of land the Forest Service was willing to set aside for wilderness in the RARE analyses depended on how fast it thought timber would grow on the remaining lands, which was calculated in the timber management plans.

      The separation of the herbicide spray plans from timber planning created a particularly gaping hole in the analyses. Herbicides were needed after clearcuts and not generally needed after selection or other cutting methods. The timber management plans, which decided whether to clearcut, ignored the effects of herbicides because they were analyzed in the herbicide plans. But the herbicide plans were only written after the clearcuts had been accomplished. So the planning process never factored the effects of herbicides into the decision to clearcut.

      After Congress passed the National Forest Management Act, the Forest Service decided to collapse all these plans, and their interdependencies, into one comprehensive land-use and resource management plan for each national forest. The then chief John McGuire called the anticipated planning process the “largest planning effort in the western world”—a backdoor allusion to soviet “eastern world” planning that should have made people wary.

      Developed with the help of a committee of nationally known forest scientists, the Forest Service’s new planning process would include national, regional, and forest plans. The national plan would set timber, grazing, and other targets for each region. The regional plans would distribute those targets to the forests. The forest plans would attempt to meet those targets at the lowest possible cost. If individual forests could not possibly meet their targets, they could negotiate a reduction. But they were expected to try to meet them, even if the cost to taxpayers was far greater than the resources were worth.

      The process was almost a perfect parody of Soviet-style government: 5- and 10-year plans, targets, and a complete disregard for profits or value. Anyone who really believed that this process could result in “wise decisions” that would pacify Forest Service critics was in for a rude awakening. Instead, timber, environmental, and other interest groups used the plans as organizing tools to polarize the public and demonize the Forest Service. Members of the public challenged every plan using an internal agency appeals process and, when they lost some of those appeals, often took the plans to court. My job during the 1980s was to provide conservation groups with the technical tools and support they needed to make those challenges.

      2. Garbage In, Gospel Out

      Writing a 150-year plan (or even a 10-year plan) for a 1.5- to 2.0-million-acre forest that produces a wide variety of goods (and bads) that often compete and conflict with one another requires more than the back of an envelope. In the 1970s and 1980s, managers of both public and private forests increasingly turned to computers to help plan their lands, schedule timber harvests, and coordinate resource management.

      A number of competing computer models were available for forest planning, and some might have been more appropriate for certain forests while others would work best on other forests. But as part of its growing centralization, the Forest Service directed all forests to use the same computer program, which was called FORPLAN, short for forest planning. FORPLAN allowed planners to enter information about the forest into the computer and then ask questions, such as “What is the maximum amount of timber that can be cut?” or “How much timber would be cut each decade if the forest were managed to earn maximum profits?” Forest officials gushed that FORPLAN