A Vision for the U.S. Forest Service

Goals for Its Next Century

Roger A. Sedjo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317328063
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Originally published in 2000, this title is a collection of engaging, nontechnical contributions of scholars, policymakers, and forestry officials providing broad reflections on the agency's past and future, contemporary perspectives about the use and stewardship of public lands, and insightful analyses about the science involved in the practice of scientific management. The authors offer challenging ideas for evaluating the performance of the U.S. Forest Service, reshaping its mission, enhancing its effectiveness, improving internal morale, and increasing public participation in the agency. It is a valuable resource for policymakers, professional foresters, and any student interested in Environmental Studies.

1

Marion Clawson and America’s Forests

A Lifetime of Commitment

Roger A. Sedjo

For twenty years, Marion Clawson and I were colleagues at Resources for the Future (RFF). I first met Marion when I began my career at RFF in the late 1970s. At that time, he was more than seventy years old and “technically” retired. I knew of Marion by virtue of his professional reputation and also knew that he was still among the most active and productive researchers at RFF. Of course, Marion never really retired.

During my first decade at RFF, Marion arrived in the office early every morning. He produced about one book every two years. At any point in time, Marion had one book at the publisher, was in the process of writing another, and was thinking about a third. Over the next ten years, Marion published five more books, the final one (in 1987) his memoirs. He continued to write occasional papers and came to his office regularly until his death in the spring of 1998 at the age of ninety-two. He remained a close colleague and friend to the end.

Marion’s work was of academic interest but also policy-relevant for many of the pressing public lands issues of the time. Marion garnered a respect from the policy community that researchers rarely attain, perhaps because early in his career, he had been closely involved with the same kinds of management issues he later addressed from a research perspective. Although Marion did not go out of his way to enter the political fray, when he did become involved, he typically drew the attention of the policymakers and the agencies.

Many of Marion’s forays into forestry cast light on inefficient public management practices. Using the agricultural model developed in his early training, he concluded that inputs were justified only if they generated outputs that were of greater value. He criticized the Forest Service for spending large amounts of money to improve forests on marginal sites, where the returns on investment were low. He also criticized the Forest Service for not maintaining an appropriately high level of harvest on public lands. He was not alone in this criticism. In his 1983 book, Marion noted with approval that “the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the General Accounting Office (GAO) have repeatedly pressured the Forest Service into making larger timber sales in order to accelerate the rate of harvest of old-growth timber” (Clawson 1983, 82). After all, in the early 1980s, with the absence of a widespread perspective that old-growth stands were inherently valuable, most economists maintained that rational, efficient multiple-use management should include the felling of most of these trees for timber use and the subsequent regeneration of lands for additional forest harvests. Old-growth values could be captured in parks and protected areas that were already set aside. The issues of the time involved how rapidly old growth ought to be liquidated, how best to regenerate the forest, and how to accomplish these goals cost-effectively. Marion willingly entered this debate.

Marion was a remarkable man. His lifetime spanned almost the entire twentieth century. His interests included a host of important areas and topics, most if not all of which had to do with the interaction between human beings and natural resources.

THE EARLY YEARS

Marion Clawson grew up in Nevada. A product of western America, his earliest memories were of life on the small ranch where his father was a rancher and miner. Marion’s interest in ranching was reflected in his academic work. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in agriculture in 1926 and a Master of Science in agricultural economics in 1929, both from the University of Nevada.

In essence, Marion had two full careers. His first was as a civil servant, initially in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He started out doing agricultural research out west and eventually moved to Washington, DC. During World War II, he earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He joined the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 1947 and became its director in 1948. In 1953, he was fired as director of the BLM by the incoming Republican administration, a feat of which he was quite proud. This termination provided him the perfect opportunity to start a second career.

A FORAY INTO FORESTRY

After spending two years in Israel as a member of a foreign economic advisory staff, Marion began his second career as a researcher with RFF. He had published three books prior to his RFF tenure. The first two, published in 1947 and 1950, were about agriculture. In his third book, Uncle Sam’s Acres (Clawson 1951), he shifted his focus to the topic that would become the subject of the majority of his work from that point: public lands. His first RFF book, The Federal Lands: Their Use and Management (Clawson and Held 1957), was about land. During the early part of his RFF career (roughly 1955 through the early 1970s), Marion’s work covered a host of topics, including agriculture, soil conservation, and urban land policy. However, the principal focuses of his work were land issues and outdoor recreation; his contributions to these areas were substantial.

Marion’s first major involvement in forestry was as one of several authors of the Report of the President’s Advisory Panel on Timber and the Environment (President’s Advisory Panel 1973). Among other things, the report called for “the Federal agencies concerned with forests to prepare a comprehensive nationwide program of forest development and timber supply….” Years later, however, Marion opined that the report had had a significant effect on the development of the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), which was passed in 1976. Although the report was attributed to the entire advisory panel, Marion wrote much of it himself. He had been approached by Paul McCraken, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, to participate on the panel. Although Marion protested that he had little experience in forestry, McCraken had persisted. At the time it was published, the report was not overwhelmingly influential. It was delivered to President Richard Nixon as the Watergate hearings were heating up and got lost in the general chaos that ensued.

This experience marked a turning point in Marion’s already diverse and illustrious career. After that panel report, Marion went on to write eleven more books, eight of which were on forestry. In the 1980s, RFF President Emery Castle confided to me that after the panel report, he had occasionally suggested to Marion that he return to some of his earlier interests. “But,” Castle said, “Marion just doesn’t seem to be interested in anything but forestry.”

Perhaps Marion’s most influential book on forestry is Forests for Whom and for What? (Clawson 1975). In this book, Marion addressed public forest land issues ranging from timber production to timberland withdrawals from harvest, examining these issues from the perspective of an economist interested in both the commodity and nonmarket outputs of the forest. He addressed not only issues of economic efficiency but also cultural and social acceptability and the consequences of forest production on income distribution. In many respects, this modest book was an early primer on forest economics, forest issues, and forest policy. Although it was published almost three decades ago, Forests for Whom and for What? still is frequently cited in the literature.

Much of Marion’s work on forests focused on the public forest land and the National Forest System. His books in this area include Forest Policy for the Future (Clawson 1974), The Economics of National Forest Management (Clawson 1976a), and The Federal Lands Revisited (Clawson 1983). Marion’s concerns involved raising questions as much as providing answers—for example, “to what uses lands should be put” and “how best to manage lands for those ends.” In this context, the mix of federal, state, and private lands is important. Also important are questions such as how many federal dollars should be spent on various desired uses and how these lands could be managed efficiently to meet these ends. And finally, if land disposal or acquisition by the federal estate were desired, how could this best be accomplished?

The peak of Marion’s influence on forestry probably came during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In his final book on forestry, The Federal Lands Revisited (Clawson 1983), Marion again addressed the management of the federal forests. Two very influential articles in the journal Science preceded this book. In the first article, “The National Forests—A Great National Asset Is Poorly Managed and Unproductive” (Clawson 1976b), Marion argued that the National Forest Service devoted too many resources to poor lands and too few resources to high-productivity sites. In the second article, “Forests in the Long Sweep of American History” (Clawson 1979), Marion showed how the nation’s forests had recovered, far beyond what even the most optimistic analysts had anticipated, from earlier logging and land-clearing abuses. His argument was that the American forests were in far better condition than commonly supposed, largely because of their natural resiliency, which he felt was consistently underestimated. A healthy and dynamic U.S. forest system was recently “rediscovered” (Wernick and others 1998).

In the early 1980s, with the absence of a widespread perspective that old-growth stands were inherently valuable, most economists maintained that rational, efficient multiple-use management should include the felling of most of these trees for timber use and the subsequent regeneration of the lands for additional forest harvests. Only toward the latter part of the 1980s did the fate of the spotted owl seriously enter the discussion of old-growth forest values. Quickly, the ongoing debate was substantially modified via the constraints of the Endangered Species Act—the viability provision of the federal regulations—and large areas of old-growth forest were set aside for spotted owl conservation. Marion’s view was that if one of the roles of the Forest Service was to produce timber—and he argued that this mandate went back to the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 (see Clawson 1983, 72) and straight through the NFMA of 1976—then they ought to do it efficiently.

Marion tended to view the NFMA with cautious approval. Like John Krutilla, another giant in the field of forest economics whose career overlapped Marion’s at RFF, he broadly interpreted the 1976 act as requiring management consistent with economic maximization (Clawson 1983, 181). However, Marion was uncomfortable with the planning language, noting that “while requiring such balancing of costs and benefits in the planning process,” it “only implicitly (not explicitly) requires that the resultant plans shall govern the actual administrative actions of the Forest Service” (Clawson 1983, 181). This problem was rediscovered in a GAO report (U.S. GAO 1997), which noted the prevalent absence of implementation, and also was noted in the Committee of Scientists’ report (USDA 1999).

One of Marion’s unique intellectual traits was the ability to look at a well-recognized problem from a slightly different perspective. Time and time again, he would challenge conventional wisdom by taking an unconventional view of a problem and coming up with an unorthodox but useful perspective. For example, in The Economics of U.S. Nonindustrial Private Forests (Clawson 1978), Marion demonstrated that much of the difference in productivity between the national forests and the poorly regarded non-industrial private forests (NIPFs) was due to location and age, not management. He noted that the NIPFs are disproportionately located in regions whose climates and other characteristics contribute to modest biological growth. Once adjustments are made for these considerations, the NIPFs perform comparably to the national forests. These findings were not always well accepted, and even I was drawn into some of the rancorous debates—both formal and informal—that ensued. However, Marion’s perspective generated a surge in papers and research on these important forests, which constitute 58% of the total forested area in the United States.

Marion’s views might best be characterized as those of Pinchot-type conservationism, in contrast to the Muir-type preservationism that is ascendant today. Having grown up in Nevada, the son of a miner and rancher who just barely eked out a living from the earth (Clawson 1987), Marion viewed resources as something to be used, but used sensibly. His training as an economist served to add emphasis and rigor to his concerns regarding the importance of the efficient use of resources. Resources were to be used—sustainably.

He appreciated the nontimber values of the forest and supported the idea of multiple-use management. As noted, much of Marion’s early work at RFF was focused on outdoor recreation and its valuation. Furthermore, he understood that a major rationale of public ownership of forest lands was based on the desire for multiple-use outputs, many of which were not valued in the market and therefore were unlikely to be produced in appropriate quantities by the market (Clawson 1983, 136–42).

Marion also recognized the value and role of parks and wilderness. Again, to him, the issue was not whether to establish parks and wilderness but how much and what kinds of natural areas should be established as such. On several occasions, his writings addressed the question of how much forest should be retained and how much and what kinds of lands ought to be made off-limits to harvesting (Clawson 1975, 7, 8, 158, and 159). Even though Marion’s belief in nontimber values and the importance of wilderness to society was strong, he maintained the belief that an important role of the National Forest Service, as explicitly stated in the Forest Reserve Act and the Organic Act, was to provide for future timber requirements (Clawson 1983, 72–77). During the latter decades of the twentieth century, he believed that it was appropriate for us to use those resources.

Although Marion held very strong opinions, he had the admirable ability to rethink his positions. He was a conservationist whom I would characterize as a “New Deal” Democrat. He saw an important role for the federal lands and devoted much of his life’s work to studying and analyzing how they might best fulfill that role. Thus, it came as somewhat of a surprise to me that he seriously considered some of the arguments for the privatization of the public lands that were presented early in the Reagan administration.

In his 1983 book, Marion analyzed the pros and cons of privatization of parts of the federal estate. From my private conversations with Marion, I surmised that some of the reluctant enthusiasm that he exhibited for privatization reflected, in part, his frustration with much of federal management. Also, he recognized that at various times in its history, the federal government sometimes focused on acquiring lands and other times focused on land disposal. It is worth noting that all of the alternatives he suggested and examined (that is, retention in federal ownership with strenuous efforts to improve their management, transfer to the states, privatization of all or major parts of the National Forest Service, transfer to public or mixed public-private corporations, and long-term leasing) were assessed in terms of their ability to provide more efficient land management (Clawson 1983, 177).

Marion was not a consistent “friend” of the Forest Service; he often criticized it for inefficiency. However, neither was he a consistent environmentalist. A Pinchot-type conservationist, Marion never developed an appreciation for the people he called “preservationists,” by which he seemed to mean those who were primarily interested in “locking up resources.” Like other economists, he was concerned with balancing alternative and sometimes conflicting values, and he tended to reject views that focused exclusively on a single value—whether they came from preservationists or timber barons. Logging had its place in the forest, as did other outputs and values.

Marion also had the ability to recognize his mistakes. Many times, he acknowledged how badly he had misinterpreted the public forest experience of the 1950s. The increasing federal harvests of that period—and the associated increased revenues—had suggested to him that the Forest Service could actually cover the costs of its operations and perhaps would generate net revenues to the U.S. Treasury through its timber management (see Clawson and Held 1957).

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Pinchot had promised that the Forest Service could and would g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Marion Clawson and America’s Forests: A Lifetime of Commitment
• 2. What Now? From a Former Chief of the Forest Service
• 3. The Next Decade of the Forest Service: Does the Past Hold the Key to the Future?
• 4. Rethinking Scientific Management: Brand-New Alternatives for a Century-Old Agency
• 5. Forestry in the New Millennium: Creating a Vision That Fits
• 6. State Trust Lands Management: A Promising New Application for the Forest Service?
• 7. Predicting the Future by Understanding the Past: A Historian Considers the Forest Service
• 8. Does the Forest Service Have a Future? A Thought-Provoking View
• 9. The More Things Change…: The Challenge Continues
• 10. Changing Course: Conservation and Controversy in the National Forests of the Sierra Nevada
• Index