Former Chief of Forest Service Says It’s Time to Exit

It was time for him to go.

Mike Dombeck counts a list of accomplishments from his four years as Forest Service chief. He helped remove a controversial link between public school funds and federal timber sale revenues. He set up forest-planning rules that put ecology ahead of social and economic uses for the land.

And he created a policy that banned new logging and road construction in a third of the federal forest lands, 58.5 million acres, a key environmental legacy of the Clinton administration.

As the Bush administration took aim at the road ban and his forest-planning rules, Dombeck was calm. He said he was ready to move on, and so is the Forest Service, under a new administration.

“Bush won,” he said just before a hike on a sunny Washington afternoon--miles but worlds away from his old office. “What’s the point if they want to take the agency in a different direction? It was time for me to move on.”

But his legacy is quickly being undone. The ban on road-building won’t take effect because of a decision by an Idaho federal judge to block the rule. Environmentalists pledge to appeal.

The Bush administration had planned to let the ban take effect and later revise it to allow more input from local interests--ideally to allow roadless decisions on a forest-by-forest basis. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, who oversees the agency, said that would be a more “balanced” approach.

But Dombeck, and the conservationists who often supported him, are worried that revisions may mean a reversal.

“If this administration goes ahead and spends its energy on doing things like rolling back roadless [protections] . . . what they are going to find in four years is that they have no legacy,” Dombeck said. “The last four years are going to set the agenda for the next four years.”

Dombeck grew up on the Chequamegon National Forest in northern Wisconsin and has a PhD in fisheries biology. Newly married, he took a job with the Forest Service in 1978.

“We thought, what the heck; let’s try it. At least we’ll get to see some beautiful places,” Dombeck said.

Since then he’s been to every state in the union, the Amazon, Turkey, Mexico and China.

He’s flown with President Clinton to see the destruction from last year’s wildfires that blackened about 7 million acres. He’s been grilled by U.S. senators who thought he favored conservation.

And he’s rafted Montana’s Smith River and ended the day around a campfire with the state’s forest supervisors--talking shop.

At 52, Dombeck retired from federal service in March. Before his exit--which he called his choice--Dombeck wrote Veneman with recommendations for the Forest Service’s future.

He signed off: “Allow Forest Service employees to follow their land ethic and they will provide for ‘the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run,’ ” quoting a turn-of-the-century motto of Agriculture Secretary James Wilson.

Dombeck, after all, wasn’t much like his predecessors.

He came to the chief’s job as a reformer who wanted to restore the forests first, rather than harvest them--a major departure in mission for the agency that governed 192 million acres of forests and grasslands. In the process, he sometimes infuriated industry groups, who argued that the land’s economic and recreational values were being overlooked.

“We favor local control and local input, and it seemed he favored top-down Washington, D.C.-controlled management,” said Michael Klein, spokesman for the American Forest & Paper Assn., a national trade group for the forest products industry.

Western Republicans complained too about Dombeck’s mandates.

Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) at one point even called him “at least slightly delusional.”

“What you had was an administration that was bent on destroying an agency and building another,” Craig said.

With Congress, Dombeck’s former aide and fishing buddy Chris Wood said the chief operated on a set of basic premises.

“One, this is their home court and you are not going to beat them. Two, answer their questions politely and respectfully. And, three, get out of there as quickly as possible,” Wood said.

Despite tension, Dombeck was able to work with Craig as well as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to get rid of a long-standing link between logging and school funding for counties with tax-exempt federal forests, allowing the counties to get the funding without cutting trees.

For Dombeck, the issue was protecting the land.

His forest-planning rules, which the Bush administration is also editing, were designed to manage forests in a way that puts ecology ahead of economic and social uses.

Dombeck pushed to end road building in some areas to clear up an $8.4-billion backlog on road maintenance on the 386,000 miles that weave through federal forests.

“We are accustomed to thinking in short-term cycles. You think eight years, that’s a long time. But even the youngest of the trees are 30 years old,” he said.

Dombeck is tackling new, less stressful, issues now. His wife told him he’s regained his sense of humor.

The other day he walked through Riverbend County Park in Fairfax, Va., which hugs the Potomac River, in total anonymity.

“Finding some good stuff?” Dombeck asked a class digging through the mud. A puppy barked at his dog, Murphy, a black Lab.

“Yep,” one man replied.

This is where Dombeck loves to be, among the trees and fish and deer that make up the forests he protected.

He’s working with Wood and another colleague on a book that looks at America’s land use since the 1800s. The working title is “Conquest to Conservation.”

Dombeck hopes to tackle the kind of writing that reaches “the soccer kids and the moms at home and the moms at work.

“That is where the education job in conservation lies,” he said.

Though Dombeck has been flooded with job offers, he doesn’t want to be a lobbyist or work for an interest group. “Teaching is much more neutral.”

He said he also plans to spend more time hunting, hiking and fishing, as he recalled his favorite fishing tale, which in some ways reflects how he got through the last four years: On a trip to Ontario, he caught a muskie that weighed more than 40 pounds and was 53 inches long.

“With fishing you only remember the good days,” said Dombeck, whose friends call him Muskie Mike. “There is this thing in our psyche. It’s called survival. You don’t remember the days you didn’t catch anything. You just remember the days that you did.”