National Forests Celebrate Centennial : Environment: Modern rangers face new priorities for land’s use. The 100-year tension between loggers and preservationists continues.

When the first national forests were created in 1891, conservationists were worried that the unchecked westward march of cut-and-run timber barons would leave the nation without lumber, water or wildlife.

This year, the U.S. Forest Service celebrates the centennial of the lands under its care--and environmentalists still are worried. Logging in the national forests continues, and they say wildlife is imperiled.

“It is so bitter, and so ironic,” said Brock Evans, National Audubon Society vice president for national issues. “They are liquidating it all slower in the Forest Service, with a lot more bureaucracy, but they are liquidating it nonetheless. The arguments are all the same.”

The echo of the century-old battle is particularly loud in the Pacific Northwest, home to the biggest timber producers in the national forest system and the northern spotted owl, which has turned the timber industry upside down since it was declared a threatened species last year.

“Eighty years ago, we didn’t understand what we were doing would lead to the gray wolf’s extinction from Oregon, to the grizzly bear’s extinction from Oregon. The difference now is we are able to study and understand the results of our management a lot better than before,” said Andy Stahl of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in Seattle, a leader in court battles to protect the owl.

The forest centennial, being celebrated across the country this summer, dates from March 3, 1891, when Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act.

Within three weeks, President Benjamin Harrison created the Yellowstone Park Timberland Reserve, 1.2 million acres around 19-year-old Yellowstone National Park. It was followed the same year by the White River Plateau Timberland Reserve in Colorado. More reserves followed in 1892 in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, New Mexico and Colorado.

Though it drew little attention at the time, historians now point to the act as a turning point in the national policy on public land: Instead of selling it or giving it away, the government began to hold land in reserve.

The act was born of a mood that began to develop in 1864, when George Perkins Marsh wrote in his book “Of Man and Nature” that too much logging in his native Vermont had damaged the landscape and hurt fish and wildlife.

To feed a growing nation, 190 million acres of forest were cleared for farms between 1850 and 1910, equivalent to all the lands now in the national forest system.

“The villain of the modern world, the automobile, took a huge amount of pressure off our forests, because we don’t have to feed all those horses,” said Doug MacCleery, a Forest Service assistant director of timber management. “Almost a third of agricultural land was devoted to feeding horses and mules. Once that pressure was taken off, we didn’t need to clear it.”

The Forest Reserve Act came at a pivotal time: two years after the Oklahoma land rush turned loose the Sooners in lands once set aside for Native Americans, and two years before Frederick Jackson Turner told the Columbian Exposition in Chicago that the American frontier was gone, erased by settlement.

Western politicians fought unsuccessfully to cut back the President’s new preservation powers, afraid they were being robbed by liberal Easterners of timber, grazing lands and minerals they had earned by trekking across the nation.

Under President Teddy Roosevelt, an avid outdoorsman, the growth of national forests accelerated. One political cartoonist at the time drew Roosevelt as a barber shaking his Forest Reserve Tonic on the sparsely timbered pate of Uncle Sam, and remarking: “It’s getting thin on top.”

The U.S. Forest Service was created in 1905 to run the preserves and now oversees 156 national forests, 19 national grasslands and 71 experimental forests covering 191 million acres.

Norman Maclean described working on what was then the Selway Forest in Montana during the Service’s early days in his short story, “USFS 1919: The Ranger, The Cook and a Hole in the Sky.”

“It was a world of strings of pack horses or men who walked alone--a world of hoof and foot and the rest done by hand,” he wrote.

“Nowadays you can scarcely be a lookout without a uniform and a college degree, but in 1919 not a man in our outfit, least of all the ranger himself, had been to college. They still picked rangers for the Forest Service by picking the toughest guy in town. . . . As for uniform, our ranger always wore his .45 and most of our regular crew also packed revolvers, including me.”

The main jobs of Maclean and his colleagues were running off timber poachers, building trails and fighting forest fires that some years scarred 50 million acres.

Today’s rangers are a different breed. They use computers, four-wheel drive vehicles and a library of environmental laws to seek a delicate balance among competing interests under a creed known as multiple use.

Last year, 263 million people visited national forests from Alaska to Puerto Rico to camp, hunt, hike and fish. The forests also contain 47% of the nation’s softwood timber, 200 species of plants and animals protected by the Endangered Species Act, and 80% of the nation’s wilderness.

The harvesting of the national forests is not new, though these lands did not become a big contributor to the nation’s timber supply until after World War II. They now account for 23% of the nation’s lumber and plywood.

Responding to the growing public concern for the environment, the Forest Service has begun reordering its priorities, pushing recreation and wildlife higher and timber lower. The agency had been planning to sell less timber from national forests even before the spotted owl controversy.

That the dispute even exists is a tribute to the founders of the national forests, said John Hendricks, coordinator of the centennial celebration.

“Irrespective of how the Forest Service is managing the national forest system,” he says, “the fact is that 100 years ago, we were given the options that we have today, to discuss and explore whether we want more wilderness, whether we want more land for endangered species, more recreational options. It would all be moot if it had gone into private ownership.”

And he poses a simple question: “Can you imagine someone setting aside almost 200 million acres today?”