The Forest <i> and</i> the Trees

In recent years the U.S. Forest Service has spent millions of dollars in drafting 50-year development plans for the 191-million-acre national forest system, as required by Congress in the National Forest Management Act of 1976. The Forest Service might have done better just by listening to Zane G. Smith Jr., recently replaced as the chief Forest Service officer for California for the past nine years.

The 1976 law was designed to bring to a halt the destructive logging practices undertaken by the Forest Service and private timber companies in the name of balanced forest use and good management. The plans were designed to force the recognition of recreation, conservation and fish and wildlife amenities as well as logging in the management of the national forests.

Alas, too many forest plans have been written merely to justify and rationalize the old view of the national forests as havens for the timber companies to make a buck--a buck that too often included a hefty subsidy from American taxpayers.

Smith knows better, and it may be that his failure to endorse such practices without a murmur led to his replacement as the chief forester in California. He has a chance to spread his view to the entire Forest Service, however, if those in charge in Washington will listen to him. Smith has been assigned to develop a new recreation strategy for the Forest Service.

“A lot of people feel the Forest Service has not kept up its policy on recreation,” Smith said in an interview. “What we would like people to think about when they think of the Forest Service is outdoor recreation rather than timber harvesting . . . . The problem in the forests is becoming stewardship, or the public just won’t let us cut timber. They want to use the wood we cut, but they don’t want to see us compromise our soil, water, wildlife and visual resources.”

Well put, Forester Smith. This is the way the Forest Service should have been thinking in the decade since the passage of the National Forest Management Act. There are, it must be said, other Zane Smiths in the Forest Service--many of them in California--but too often their voices are cries in the wilderness. Smith, for instance, says that any increase in national forest timber production must come through better technology and planning and not just through cutting more trees wherever they happen to be.

Asked what advice he might give to his successor, Smith said that it would be to maintain communications with a wide variety of state interests because “the national forests are such an integral part of California’s well-being.”

If Smith’s successor and the entire Forest Service follow this man’s advice, the national forests truly will serve all the people in a balanced and thoughtful way.