Forest Service Changing Image With New Policy : Conservation: The agency is emphasizing ecology and less logging. Environmentalists are skeptical.

Patricia Ferrell, a U.S. Forest Service timber management officer, has a new attitude toward logging in the El Dorado National Forest, and she advertises it on a badge pinned to her wool winter jacket.

The badge, borrowed from an anti-drug program, says, “Learn to Say No.”

“In the past, our primary emphasis was on timber growth and yield only,” she said during a recent visit to the upper reaches of the Sierra Nevada. “We are getting away from that now. If we clear-cut at all now, we’ll leave more vigorous young trees and lots of dead (trees and branches). It may look ugly to the public, but it’s important to the overall forest ecology.”

Less logging and more ecology once were frowned on by the Forest Service, but no more. Hundreds of other foresters now share Ferrell’s philosophy, marking a significant change for the Forest Service and the 191 million acres of publicly owned timberland it manages, mainly in the West.

This promises to fundamentally alter the relationship between the agency and the wood products industry, historically its largest client.

What is emerging is a battle that may define the environmental struggles of the 1990s: the attempt to balance the desires of an economically battered industry against its recently discovered environmental consequences.

At their most basic, these new Forest Service policies call for a dramatic reduction in clear-cutting, the economically efficient but scientifically suspect practice of mowing down whole stands of trees. The Forest Service is now calling for a 75% reduction in clear-cuts in national forests as part of a plan to cut the overall annual harvest by 20%.

Clear-cutting would be replaced by what researchers say are environmentally sensitive harvesting methods, and the Forest Service would be more aggressive in protecting old-growth, uncut forests as well as in preventing soil erosion and other environmental damage. More subtly, the plans could mean a shift of power from Washington back to forest supervisors all over the United States.

“The Forest Service isn’t standing here saying, ‘Down with timber! Up with recreation!’ We are trying to be responsive (to public concerns),” said chief forester F. Dale Robertson. “We’re making adjustments in our plans and in our management to provide additional protection, additional habitat for fish and wildlife.”

Although Robertson argues that there will be plenty of trees to harvest, timber interests generally regard his “New Perspectives” program with hostility and suspicion. Any cutbacks, they know, could hardly come at a worse time for the industry. Tens of thousands of workers have been laid off--more than 20,000 over the last decade in Oregon alone, that state reports--chiefly because of the automation of sawmills. There are predictions that perhaps 28,000 more will lose jobs this decade because of efforts to protect endangered species from extinction.

Meanwhile, the lumber-consuming construction industry is in a recession. Housing starts nationwide fell 13.3% in 1990, to the lowest ebb since 1982, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. In Los Angeles, the top West Coast market, analysts said the number of housing starts may have fallen 60%.

At the same time, environmentalists--as well as many dissidents within the Forest Service--remain skeptical of the agency’s commitment to these new policies. They point to the Forest Service’s long and friendly relationship with the timber industry.

“It’s good to see the Forest Service look at this,” said Michael Francis, a forestry specialist for the Wilderness Society, “but just looking at it and talking about it is not enough. Are they going to change their priorities?”

“The Forest Service really does have to prove itself because people are so very cynical about it,” said Robert A. Smart Jr., a district ranger here who supports the agency’s new philosophy.

The immediate impetus for change was the declaration by federal scientists that the northern spotted owl was threatened with extinction. The owl is in danger not because it has been hunted to near-extinction, but because logging has wiped out its preferred habitat--virgin forests in the Pacific Northwest.

As a result, in pilot projects such as the one here in the Placerville Ranger District northeast of Sacramento, rangers are setting aside land for animals and plants that they concede they once ignored--or never knew were here.

Around salmon-rich Shasta Costa Creek in southwest Oregon, another district is proposing to cut timber in a way that mimics the fires that ravage the area at regular intervals. By cutting heavily in irregularly shaped areas, thinning lightly in others and leaving the remainder alone, they hope to harvest enough timber to satisfy loggers and leave enough trees to protect wildlife.

This reordering of priorities is significant because national forests contain half the nation’s softwood timber, timber that is not only a valuable taxpayer asset but also an important factor in determining the price of every wood product from lumber to toilet paper, as well as employment levels in timber-dependent towns from western Montana to Northern California.

The Forest Service has such influence because, unlike the U.S. Park Service in the Interior Department, it is expected to exploit as well as protect public lands. In spite of the agency’s “Smokey the Bear” image, many of its employees acknowledge the Forest Service’s top priority over the last three decades was peddling taxpayers’ timber and helping private loggers cut it down.

Driving the process was a desire that loggers be able to mill public timber at a profit--even if that meant allowing loggers to buy out of contracts they did not like, as Congress permitted in 1984, or selling timber at a loss, as was shown by a recent General Accounting Office report and by others in years past.

The Forest Service’s professed new goal is to scale down the nationwide harvest--the “cut” in the loggers’ lexicon--to meet the agency’s mandate to give equal consideration to water production, recreation, wildlife habitat and wilderness preservation, as well as timber production.

Changes so far have been instituted by mid-level managers in the field with little direction from Washington, Smart and other field personnel said. After long complaining that their suggestions were ignored in Washington in favor of high timber-sale targets dictated by Congress, many rangers are pleased by this change.

Despite this, conservationists and other Forest Service critics--including a large, vocal and growing insurgency in the agency itself--are wary.

They said the new policy has vague goals that work best only in environmentally savvy states such as California and Oregon.

Critics also argue that while the Forest Service backpedals from a 30-year affair with clear-cutting, its proposed alternatives may be no better.

“These changes represent a mere drop in the bucket of what is going to be needed across the entire national forest system,” said former Forest Service employee Jeff DeBonis, who quit the agency to found the 4,000-member Assn. of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

Long-range Forest Service planning documents also say that while the amount of timber to be put up for sale is expected to fall, the Forest Service plans to offer enough to let the amount sold and harvested remain at record high levels.

Industry representatives doubt that timber supplies will remain as high as they have been because Forest Service sales usually fall short of plans and even then are challenged by environmentalists for being too high.

“I don’t think they’ll ever make their critics happy,” said Mark E. Rey, director of the American Forest Resource Alliance in Washington. “Every new proposal is met with disdain from people who say, ‘Same wine, new bottle.’ ”

“Are we even looking at the broader issue of where our (timber) needs are going to be met?” asked David Ford of the National Forest Products Assn. “The answer is no. Yet we are the biggest consumers of wood products worldwide.”

Because of this, Rey argues that reductions in national forest harvests may backfire on environmentalists. If lumber supplies get tight enough, people may ask to have large parts of the national forests devoted exclusively to logging--as others areas are devoted to recreation, wildlife habitat and other uses.

This would doom the agency’s “multiple-use” concept.

“The concept of ‘multiple use’ may have run its course as we have become a more participatory democracy,” Rey said. “I would be surprised . . . if it survived the decade. . . . You tell them (environmentalists) you can produce trees, wildlife, water and recreation from the same piece of land, and they look at you like you’re from Mars.”

Robertson acknowledges this, and while he embraces the new Forest Service policies he also has been quick to stress, “We are not going to get out of the timber business.”

The United States simply needs the wood. The Western Wood Products Assn. reports that in 1989 the nation harvested 36 billion board-feet on private lands, 12 billion on national forests and imported 14 billion, mostly from Canada. That is just finished lumber. Paper, chemical and other uses chewed up even more trees.

To meet the rising demand, Congress has steadily ratcheted up timber sales in national forests. They rose from 3.5 billion board-feet in 1950 to 13.4 billion in 1970. In the late 1980s, the target hovered around 11.5 billion, and the actual harvest was more than 12 billion--a record.

Key to the harvesting escalation was clear-cutting, which the Forest Service introduced at the beginning of the boom in the 1950s.

The wisdom of clear-cutting came to be questioned over the last few years as scientists in and out of the Forest Service investigated how forests work, how they regenerate and how they nurture other animal and plant species.

What these scientists, led by Jerry Franklin of the Forest Service Research Station in Seattle, found turned forestry on its head.

Contrary to scientific dogma of the 1950s, they discovered that old-growth forests are not stagnant but are remarkably vibrant ecosystems that can hold more organic matter per acre than the densest rain forest.

The Forest Service, which spent the whole decade preparing long-range plans for each national forest, incorporated these new theories, and timber goals in many forests were reduced significantly. Critics argued that the reductions did not go far enough.

Such disputes, plus the fight over the future of the spotted owl, have focused national attention on the Forest Service.

As a result, a half-dozen bills have been introduced in Congress to attempt to steer Forest Service policies one way or another, from the pro-conservation Ancient Forest Protection Act by Rep. Jim Jontz (D-Indiana) to the pro-logging National Forest Plan Implementation Act by Rep. Les AuCoin (D-Oregon).

Timber interests dismiss the activity as “the worst form of ad hoc-racy,” because each bill addresses only a small part of a large issue. “Congress is demagoguing the forest issue,” Rey said. “They haven’t dealt with the agency in any searching way since they passed the National Forest Management Act.”

Environmentalists see legislation as the only way to force the Forest Service to follow through on reform. “They’re basically responding to overwhelming pressure--from Congress as well as the courts and the public,” said George Frampton, president of Wilderness Society.

Forest Service employees are leery of laymen in Congress getting too involved in running the forests.

“Laws have been in place for years to do this (reform timber practices),” Smart said. “But it wasn’t done because the policy didn’t support it.”

Now, he added, the policy does.

NEW FORESTRY PRACTICES Clear-cutting All trees and brushy plants are removed, except those along stream banks. Large trees are used for lumber, and the rest is chipped for paper or other uses. Area is eventually replanted with seedings. Advantages: Economically efficient, requires only infrequent entry with heavy equipment, seedlings don’t have to compete with old trees for light, water of nutrients. Disadvantages: Very unsightly, habitat for most non-game animals is lost, once trees grow they are all the same height, blocking sunlight from the ground and preventing growth of ferns and other species. Shelterwood cutting Most trees and some brush are removed , except along stream banks. A few old trees and growth are left standing, either scattered evenly across the site or in clumps. Advantages: This method has some of the same advantages as clearcutting, as well as allowing old trees to reseed the area with native seedlings. Shade is provided to seedlings needing it. Disadvantages: Can be unsightly, habitat for some rare plants and animals are disturbed and possibly destroyed. Selective cutting Only a few selected trees are taken each year, none from stream banks. All brush, broken branches, dead needles and other material are left on the ground to decompose. Advantages: Visually attractive, land still useful for recreation, minimal loss of plant and animal habitat. Encourages natural reseeding, results in forests with trees of all ages and more complex forest environment. Disadvantages: Less production and more expensive, requires frequent entry by people and machinery, new trees grow more slowly because they must compete for sun, water and nutrients. Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service