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Playground or Preserve?
As the Forest Service Approaches Its 100th Birthday,
the Agency Faces a Major Identity Crisis

by Nancy Watzman

From the tiny town of Montezuma, Colorado, a jumbled mix of eclectic, brightly painted shacks and shiny new mountain homes, it is five miles along Forest Service Road 285 to the top of Webster Pass. On a September day, under a lapis lazuli-hued sky, my fiance, Mark, and I grind up the road on our mountain bikes. The bright sun shines on the severe mountain slopes, setting alight red and orange tundra. Clear water dances down a rocky streambed, dashing by groves of delicate aspen glowing a luminous yellow.

All this beauty belongs to us. We are in the White River National Forest, part of the Forest Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and as citizens of the country, we own the land. And it's just a fraction of our real estate portfolio. The nation's national forest system has charge of 192 million acres nationwide, an area larger than Texas, larger than the countries of France, Belgium, and Switzerland combined. Nationwide, the Forest Service runs 155 national forests and 22 national grasslands in 42 states.

As we pedal slowly, climbing higher with each stroke of our feet, we pass rotting log shacks and piles of tailings, the remnants of old abandoned mines, relics of the Forest Service past. The road itself, like hundreds of thousands of miles of roads that wind through the national forests, is also part of this past, built for mining and access to timber in the forest, not for mountain biking. On our bikes, we embody the challenge that the Forest Service faces in the future. So do the motorcycle riders who race by us, the four-wheel drive trucks that lumber by, and so do the people building their dream mountain homes close to the boundary of the forest.

Recreational refugees from Denver, about 75 miles east, for us national forests are places to enjoy nature's beauty. We bike, hike, camp, and ski in them as much as our busy schedules allow. We visit the national forests more frequently than the national parks located in the state because they offer more variety and thinner crowds. So do a good number of the 3.5 million other people who call the Denver region home. Colorado's national forests receive nearly ten times as many visitors as its national parks do.

What is happening in the national forests near Denver is repeated in Los Angeles, Seattle, and other areas where urbanites are seeking their fun in the nearby forests. In 1946, the Forest Service hosted 18 million visitors; in 1999, the number was one billion. The economic value of recreation, in fact, far outpaces that of timber harvests, the traditional "product" of the nation's forest system. The Forest Service estimates that in the year 2000, the national forests will generate $110.7 billion in revenue from recreation, compared to $3.5 billion from timber.

As the Forest Service approaches its 100th birthday in 2005, the agency is at a major crossroads. Chief Michael Dombeck sought sweeping green reform of the agency, long criticized for putting the needs of the timber, mining, oil and gas, and grazing interests before conservation concerns. He called for a moratorium on building any new roads in the forests, and for the preservation of 43 million acres in areas without roads so that they will remain roadless. He proposed to do away with the timber trust funds that encourage sales even though they boost agency budgets. He put forward new environmentally friendly regulations for forest management plans, which govern how much logging, development, and recreation can occur and where. No wonder Dombeck received a standing ovation when he spoke at a convention convened by the Wilderness Society in September.

Yet all is not serene and green either inside or outside the Forest Service. The Forest Service chief serves at the pleasure of the administration and policies enacted by one chief can be undone by the next. There is a contingent of "old guard" Forest Service staff who started their careers at a time when the agency served primarily as a service agency for industry, who would be happy to revert to the old. The timber, mining, oil and gas, and grazing industries continue to lobby against strong environmental protection for the forests, and they use every opportunity to push for increased use of the land. Their allies in Congress, fueled by industry campaign contributions, push their agenda.

Meanwhile, the increasing numbers of people using the forests for fun---people like myself---pose new environmental and management challenges. There is a danger that the agency, in catering to the recreational industry, will repeat the pattern of dependence it has established with the timber industry. The Forest Service already subsidizes the nation's ski industry, which lobbies constantly to expand resorts and develop real estate that can damage wetlands and threaten wildlife.

On a smaller but still significant scale we can harm the forests if we are not careful. We mountain bikers can cause erosion and damage if we ride on wet trails or create new, unofficial ones. A family's dream mountain home built near a forest can become so much tinder in a natural wildfire, yet the Forest Service will be expected to protect it, no matter the cost. And off-road vehicles (ORVs), snowmobiles, and other motorized vehicles are noisy and polluting. The Wilderness Society, in fact, calls ORVs "the single fastest growing threat to the natural integrity of our public lands."

Yet the Forest Service has no consistent vision of---or authority to---manage these challenges. At stake is no less a question than the very rationale for the entire agency. "We still haven't answered the question---for what and for whom is the Forest Service?" says Jack Ward Thomas, who served as Forest Service chief from 1993 to 1996.

Laboring under a mandate of "multiple use" with an overlay of environmental laws to satisfy, the Forest Service tries to be all things to all people. It has a practical, can-do culture, in which the staff pride themselves in balancing the needs of everybody, from the timber executive to the ski resort developer to the local off-road vehicle club to the environmental activist. This balancing act sometimes works in the short term. But over time, it produces ugly, festering conflicts with no clear resolution.

Many are the policy proposals to "fix" the Forest Service, ranging from merging it with the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management to abolishing it all together and turning over the forests to local control. But what is missing from the debate altogether is a bold, gutsy proposal to give the agency a clear, new conservation mandate, and the financial means to carry out the mission.

In this age of policy incrementalism, the environmental movement split between defending Dombeck's initiatives and criticizing the agency for not going far enough. Some groups, such as the Sierra Club, have called for an end for all commercial logging in the forests. Though this would be an enormous, sweeping change, it is attacking a negative rather than creating a framework for the Forest Service to put conservation first. It therefore neglects other issues facing the agency, such as the environmental challenges posed by recreation. Any big vision is considered politically unviable, a non-starter on Capitol Hill, particularly with a Republican president and Congress. Yet if there was ever a time when big thinking for the Forest Service's future is needed, it is now.

On that September day, Mark and I finally pulled ourselves up to the top of Webster Pass. Up on the narrow ridge, we could see the Rockies rolling off in every direction, like wave after wave in a massive ocean of stone. It is a humbling sight---and a tremendous responsibility for us landowners. FIRE!

On May 4, 2000, Park Service officials working at Bandalier National Monument, in New Mexico, set a forest fire.

This was a "prescribed burn" --- a fire meant, ironically, to control fire, by clearing out underbrush in the overgrown forest. In recent years, the Interior Department and Agriculture's Forest Service have experimented with such fires in an attempt to mimic the natural cycle of fire that occurred in the West before the Forest Service launched its war on forest fires at the beginning of the century. Environmentalists and scientists point out that forests that once were cleared routinely by natural fires are now thick with debris ready to catch a spark and burn long and hard.

Soon after the fire was set that May day, a strong wind kicked up, blowing at more 50 miles per hour, and the fire raced out of control. It burned for more than a week, covering 48,000 acres, destroying more than 200 homes, and burning part of Los Alamos National Laboratory, a nuclear weapons lab.

Though the Los Alamos fire started through a botched attempt at fire prevention, it proved to be only the first of thousands of fires that ripped across the American West during the hot, dry summer of 2000, most of them started by lightning strikes and other natural causes. By autumn, nearly seven million acres had burned, more than twice the ten-year national average, about 30 percent on Forest Service land. Unlike the old days, when forest fires used to burn primarily on uninhabited or sparsely populated land, increased development caused these fires to threaten people's homes.

The western fires quickly sparked a political conflagration in Washington, DC. Western Members of Congress seized on the disasters to criticize the Forest Service. "It is fair to blame the federal government for failing to act to remedy this situation when they have known the severity of the problem for over 10 years,'' charged Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage (R-Idaho) at a September field hearing in Missoula, Montana. In her last race for Congress, in 1998, Chenoweth-Hage collected more than $64,000 in campaign contributions from the timber industry, more than any other member of the House.

The fires had occurred, said Chenoweth-Hage and other critics, because the Forest Service had neglected to allow enough timber to be cut. The forests were overgrown and unhealthy, not for lack of natural fire, but for lack of logging. The Forest Service should let in the timber industry to get trees, pronto.

In October 2000, Congress approved nearly $2 billion in funds for wildfire controls, which could be diverted for increased logging, for the Forest Service and the Interior Department. "The agency and Congress flat out accepted as gospel that the fires were started not by longstanding conditions breeding fire but because of too little logging, that logging will cure the problem," says Nathaniel Lawrence, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

It was deja vu all over again for environmentalists like Lawrence, who had seen a bad fire season in 1995 produce political pressure for Congress to approve the infamous "salvage rider." The 1995 rider had directed the agency to increase the amount of trees offered for sale as salvage, a category that allows loggers to clear out diseased and damaged trees, in this case even if these sales did not turn a profit. The law, however, suspended all environmental laws for these transactions, and the amount of timber cut increased dramatically, despite environmentalists' complaints that the sales were occurring in ecologically sensitive areas. The wildfire controls approved in 2000 did not automatically waive environmental laws for salvage sales, but environmentalists saw it as a bad precedent nevertheless, a sign of how easily the Forest Service can be diverted from its newly-adopted green orientation.

History Repeated

Deja vu is common when it comes to the Forest Service. The conflicts that play out over and over between conservation and industrial use of the land are as old as the agency itself.

In 1891, Congress created the very first forest reserves, which would eventually become the backbone of the current forest system. The Interior Department got the job of managing them. Six years later, Congress passed a law known as the Organic Administration Act, which stated that the forest reserves were there to "improve and protect the forest within the reservation, or for the purpose of securing favorable water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of the citizens of the United States."

Because the forest reserves were meant partly to protect the water supply, many follow the mountain ranges that produce it through annual snowfall. National forests follow the north-south spine of the soft, rolling Appalachians in the east; the lofty but rounded Rockies in the middle of the country; the enormous volcanic cones of the Cascades of the Northwest; and the hard granite Sierra Nevada in the West, where the highest mountain in the lower 48 states, Mt. Whitney, reaches nearly 15,000 feet above sea level. There are national forests on Utah's Wasatch Range, the Wind River in Wyoming, the Olympic Mountains of Washington, the Chugach in Alaska.

In 1898, an ambitious young man named Gifford Pinchot became head of the forest management office in the Agriculture Department. The office had been created more than 20 years earlier almost through accident. The Congressional committee in charge of the Interior Department had sat on a proposal to fund a formal scientific study of the forests in the United States, and so the congressman championing the idea got the money put in an Agriculture appropriations bill instead.

Pinchot was great friends with Theodore Roosevelt, who himself had a romance with all things Western. With Roosevelt's nudging, in 1905, Congress transferred the forest reserves to the Agriculture Department, and the U.S. Forest Service was born. The name change from "forest reserves" to "national forests" was deliberate. Forests, thought Pinchot, were to be used for productive purposes, not "reserved" from commerce. Soon thereafter, Pinchot wrote the statement that would become a mantra for the agency. The nation's new national forests, the directive declared, should be managed to achieve "the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run."

Pinchot drew his ideas from the American progressive precept that science could do anything, and that conservation and production were not conflicting purposes. Rather, conservation meant better production: if the nation took care of its forests properly, the reward would be more timber for cutting, better grass for grazing, more wildlife for hunting. The goal was balance---but balance for human uses, not ecosystem balance, as environmental theory holds today. Pinchot also dreamed that the forests could be self-sustaining enterprises, the costs of their management paid out of timber receipts and other revenue, rather than out of tax money. Though he never succeeded in balancing the books, the ideal that forests should support themselves became part of the agency's culture.

And the Forest Service definitely had a culture, one in which independence and practicality were the highest values. In the first years of the agency's life, rangers were expected to supply their own horses and saddles. Often they wore two hats, serving as state game wardens. They prided themselves in being apolitical public servants, doing what was best for everybody.

At the same time that Pinchot was developing a utilitarian vision of how natural resources should be managed, a competing philosophy was taking shape, of preserving land in its wild state rather than managing it for practical use. In 1890, John Muir, one of the founders of the Sierra Club, had been key in convincing Congress to create Yosemite National Park. Pinchot and Muir were friends at first, but fell out over a bitter dispute concerning the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite, which the city of San Francisco wanted to develop into a reservoir for drinking water. Pinchot favored the city's arguments, while Muir felt the valley should be preserved for its own sake.

Pinchot believed that the national park system Muir had helped inspire should be part of the Forest Service, arguing that a separate park bureau was "no more needed than two tails to a cat." However, the preservationists succeeded in convincing Congress otherwise. In 1916 Congress created a separate agency for parks---the National Park Service---in the Department of Interior.

And so, by the first few decades of the twentieth century, the pattern was set. The Forest Service was the "practical" service agency, which soon added suppression of forest fires to its list of responsibilities. The Park Service was the romantic venture, aimed at preserving nature for nature's sake.

Timber is King

In the early years of the Forest Service, demand for timber harvested from public land remained modest. In fact, one of the concerns of industry was competition from the national forests driving prices down. In the beginning years of the agency's existence, timber sales amounted to less than 100 million board feet, compared to more than 40 billion cut on all land, public and private.

With World War II, that changed. To meet the demands of war, logging on national forests increased. In 1944, Forest Service Chief Lyle F. Watts reported, there had been the largest cut of timber to that point---3.3 billion board feet. Demand for lumber remained high after the war, with construction of new suburbs booming. By 1955, the total wood harvested from national forests had nearly doubled to 6.3 billion board feet. In order to cut all this wood, the timber industry needed roads to get to the trees. Eventually 380,000 miles of roads would criss-cross the national forests, paid for by a combination of subsidies and by direct appropriation of taxpayer dollars.

Over the years, a pattern of mutual dependence developed between the timber industry, the Forest Service, Congress, and local communities. Money was at the core of it. The timber industry came to count on harvesting timber at below-market rates from the national forests. The Forest Service, which, by law, could keep portions of timber receipts in special off-budget accounts, became dependent on logging to pay agency salaries, overhead, and even to fund other projects. Members of Congress from high-timber-production states relied on campaign contributions from the timber industry to help finance their election campaigns.

Since 1990, the timber industry has poured more than $24 million into federal political campaigns, nearly 80 percent of it to Republican candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Another $147 million, three-quarters of it going to Republicans, has come from other industries that have a stake in profiting from Forest Service lands---mining, oil and gas, and livestock interests.

Once in office, Members of Congress from timber states secure seats on the forestry and appropriations committees and use their power to give the Forest Service more money for its timber program. And local communities have profited not just from logging jobs, but also from a kickback of logging receipts that have helped pay for schools and roads.

At the same time, however, the conservation movement has continued to grow, leading to federal policies that appeared increasingly schizophrenic. In 1964, Congress passed the Wilderness Act, which provided protection from development for more than nine million acres of land, to be identified across agency boundaries. The Forest Service, the Interior Department's Park Service and its Fish and Wildlife Service---all got a share. (Not all federal lands were eligible. The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management lands would not qualify for the wilderness system until 1976, with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.)

That same year, the lumber companies logging West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest convinced the Forest Service to allow them to use clear-cutting as the major method of harvesting wood there. The Forest Service was allowing more clear-cutting nationally where, before, the use of "selective cutting" was required. The industry convinced the Forest Service that clear-cutting would create healthier forests, by clearing out "mature" timber to make way for new growth

Clear-cutting, like strip-mining, is just plain ugly. As the timber industry started clear-cutting on more national forests, it fed environmental outrage, which, ironically, helped contribute to the movement's successes in Congress. The long list of environmental laws enacted starting in the late 1960s would have a profound effect on Forest Service, by adding more considerations, all the time, to the agency's multiple use-balancing act. These considerations ranged from the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which requires the government to evaluate the environmental impact of major federal actions, to the Endangered Species Act of 1973; to laws that require the Forest Service to create multi-year management plans.

The real impact of these laws was not immediately felt. During the Reagan years, logging on national forests increased, peaking at 12.7 billion board feet in 1987. About the same time, however, environmental groups began making use of the Endangered Species Act. They filed a series of lawsuits challenging the Forest Service's approval of logging on old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, arguing that it harmed spotted owl habitat. In 1991, Federal District Judge William Dwyer agreed. He temporarily halted logging on 25 million acres of national forests in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Though the Clinton administration negotiated a compromise agreement in 1994, it satisfied neither environmentalists nor the timber industry. (In 1999, Judge Dwyer would rule that the Forest Service violated the 1994 plan, by failing to conduct wildlife surveys before approving logging contracts.)

The spotted-owl decision marked the beginning of a new era in which environmental protection has trumped industrial desires. The volume of timber cut on national forests steadily declined throughout the 1990s, reaching 3.3 billion board feet in 1997---the same amount reported by then-Chief Watts in 1944. That, despite this decline, taxpayers still lost about $2 billion on sales between 1992 and 1997, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office, is testimony to how Byzantine the system is.

Looking closely at the stories of particular forests shows how the greening of the Forest Service remains a veneer --- and that the policies of decades of catering to intensive use of the land are not easily reversed, not in the least. These are stories not just about forested land, but grasslands, too. The Forest Service has charge of four million acres of prairie in California, Colorado, the Dakotas, Kansas---in all, a dozen states. There is no better illustration of the clash of interests on these grasslands than in the Little Missouri in western North Dakota.

When the New Forest Service Comes to the Old Prairie

"Oh, come to this country,
And don't you feel alarm,
For Uncle Sam is rich enough
To give us all a farm!"
---sung by the Ingalls family as they headed for the Dakotas, from By the Shores of Silver Lake, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

For Scott Fitzwilliams, a District Ranger in North Dakota's Little Missouri Grasslands, every day on the job is a clash between the Forest Service values of old and those of the new. One day in March, gazing out at the grasslands, where oil wells and cows commingle in a very visible embodiment of the U.S. Forest Service's policy of multiple use, Fitzwilliams muses about the agency's relationship with local ranchers.

"It's like the marriage is over," he says. "We can't get along anymore."

Fitzwilliams is one of the new guard at the Forest Service. His master's degree is in environmental planning, not in forestry. He jokes that he joined the agency because of the nice uniforms. He served an eight-year stint in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and arrived at Little Missouri in January 1999. Though he is following the agency's traditional tour-of-duty management career path, things for him are not like the old days, when Forest Service wives followed husbands around the country the way military wives did. Recently married, Fitzwilliams and his wife live together only part-time. She has a chiropractic practice in Wisconsin, "and she makes more money than I do."

Fitzwilliams gets animated when he describes the new 120-mile Maah Daah Hey Trail. (Maah Daah Hey means "an area that will, has been, or will be around for a long time," in Mandan Indian.) It runs through the one-million-acre Little Missouri Grasslands, the largest flat place administered by the Forest Service. Several national mountain biking and recreation magazines have featured it recently, and Fitzwilliams hopes it will draw new tourism to the area.

Such a future is difficult to imagine now. It's a warm day for the season, and dozens of huge, puffy white clouds hang low in a light blue sky. Low, blonde grass wafts in light undulations in every direction. The land here seems vast and empty and used up at the same time. In a morning's drive, covering many miles on the dirt roads running through the southern region of grasslands, I didn't see a single human being. But everywhere there is evidence that people are here. Barbed wire fencing marks out grazing areas. A water hole for cattle is tucked into a cluster of cottonwood trees. Forest Service orders are that rigs and storage tanks be painted tastefully to blend into the landscape. But there is a limit to how much camouflage a paint-job can do to an oil rig several stories high. There is more grazing and more oil production on these grasslands than on any other unit of the entire National Forest Service.

These rolling plains and rocky canyons are where, in 1883, 24-year-old Theodore Roosevelt fulfilled his dream of shooting a bison. He fell in love with the badlands and decided to go into the ranching business himself, joining a partnership to raise cattle on the Maltese Cross Ranch, and starting up a second ranch, the Elkhorn. Later he said, "I would not have been President, had it not been for my experience in North Dakota." As President he helped found the Forest Service. Now the National Grasslands surround the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, 70,400 acres of the prairie, where falcons, elk, antelope, muledeer, bighorn sheep, and prairie dogs make their home.

No ranching is allowed in this park named after Roosevelt. But the surrounding National Grasslands are a different story.

Overgrazing has damaged them. At the end of the grazing season, less than five percent of the rolling prairies are left with any tall grass. Leafy spurge and crested wheat grass---species not native to the area---are taking over, spreading over tens of thousands of acres. The small wooded areas---known locally as "woody's"---that deer and birds depend upon are disappearing. So are wetlands.

For these reasons and more, the Wilderness Society has listed Little Missouri as one of the 15 most endangered wildlands nationwide. The group points out that little of the prairie that once covered two-fifths of the United States remains, that just four percent of North Dakota is public land, and the grasslands represent about half of that.

In February 2000, two local grazing groups, the McKenzie County Grazing and the Medora Grazing Associations, filed a lawsuit against the Forest Service, contesting the agency's termination of its 63-year-old agreement to graze cattle on the Little Missouri. Though the impetus for the agency's unprecedented action was a dispute over documents---the associations refused to hand over certain documents that the agency claimed were needed to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Wildlife Federation---it is, like a marriage gone bad, about much, much more.

The ranchers contend that the document dispute is a veiled attempt to ruin them. The cancellation is "a subversive tactic to implement a highly controversial management plan before receiving comment, addressing criticism or securing approval." The Forest Service is in the middle of a major revision of the management plan for the entire grasslands, last updated in 1987. The ranchers claim that the true motive of the Forest Service is to reduce grazing by an average of 45 percent.

The Forest Service, however, says that the ranchers' fears are exaggerated, that grazing would be reduced for some ranchers but not others, depending on the health of the land. Developed in conjunction with the staff of grasslands in Nebraska and Montana, the proposed plan would designate about 20,000 acres as wilderness and another 122,000 as backcountry areas with restrictions on motorized vehicles. It would also increase protection for prairie dogs, which many ranchers regard as pests.

"We can't trust them," says Dennis Johnson, speaking of the Forest Service. Johnson is one of the grazing associations' attorneys, based in Watford City, population 1,557. North Dakota born and bred, Johnson earned his law degree at the University of North Dakota. Though he is not a rancher himself, his father was, his grandfather was, and his uncles, mother, brother, and sister are. When he drives his truck over country roads nearby, he can identify by sight exactly who owns what piece of land and who owned it before that and who before that.

In Johnson's mind---and those of the ranchers he represents---the Little Missouri Grasslands represent a broken promise and mismanagement, part of a string that stretches back to the late 1800s. That was when the U.S. government gave away 160-acre parcels of the land to anyone who staked a claim to it and farmed it for five years under the Homestead Act of 1862. But a family had a tough time making a living on the arid rolling prairie and rugged badlands of western North Dakota. By the time the 1930s rolled around, when there was also a new influx of population, much of the land was in textbook dust-bowl condition. In these "dirty thirties," many ranchers went bankrupt, and their land was condemned. Many others were barely getting by.

Then the Feds stepped in with the New Deal. The U.S. Department of Agriculture would buy back "submarginal" land---some of it as condemned property, some if it in direct purchases from ranchers. Federal dollars would pay for improvement projects---flood and erosion controls, grass and trees plantings, roads and fence construction, which created jobs in addition to restoring the land. In 1937, Congress passed the Bankhead-Jones Tenant Act, which formalized the land purchase program. The understanding, Johnson and the ranchers believe, was clear: though the government was buying the land, it would still be available for ranchers to graze their cattle---in fact, that would be its purpose.

Eventually, the government bought 11.3 million acres under the program, of which 5.8 million acres were eventually transferred to the Department of Interior. In 1954, authority for administering the remaining 5.5 million acres was transferred from the USDA's Soil Conservation Service to the Forest Service. It would have been difficult then to predict that giving the Forest Service authority for managing the grasslands would change everything.

Because the Little Missouri Grasslands were created from buyouts of private property, a map of the million acres shows a checkerboard of public lands interspersed with private---a legacy of farmers who didn't sell, even in the dirty thirties. A three-dimensional map would show an even more complex pattern of ownership. There are parcels of land where the federal government owns the mineral rights underneath but not the land on top; where it owns the land on top but not the mineral rights underneath; where it owns both the land and the mineral rights, and where it owns neither. (Add to that the fact that it is the Interior Department, not the Forest Service, that oversees the oil and gas production underground, while the Forest Service is in charge of the oil and gas activities above-ground, and the picture is even more complex. This balkanization of management of the very same plots of land makes about as much sense as a map of colonial Africa. The boundaries have an historic or functional logic, but this logic is rarely immediately obvious, and is not necessarily the most efficient way to arrange things.

Local ranchers banded together into grazing associations, cooperative groups that negotiate a permit with the government, then allot permits to its members. Grazing fees are a bargain: the current federal rate is $1.35 per cow per month, compared to a market average in western states of $11.10. Half returns to the grasslands to be used for range improvements---fences and water supplies. Up to 25 percent is available to the grazing association for administrative costs; 12.5 percent goes to the county; and 12.5 percent to the U.S. Treasury. For decades, the grazing associations, which are responsible for policing their own members, worked without much interference from the Forest Service.

In the 1970s, when the OPEC oil embargo caused a national shortage, the oil and gas industry came to North Dakota. The same land that intrigued Teddy Roosevelt and that failed farmers miserably sits on top of the Williston Basin, a major source of oil. By the time that boom was over, the half a million acres that had been free of roads were criss-crossed with them. Today it is impossible to go more than four miles within the grasslands without encountering a road.

At present, the oil and gas industry leases about 73 percent of the Little Missouri, for either five or ten-year terms. Another 25 percent is available for leasing. Once a lease starts producing, then the lease is extended for as long as it remains productive. Companies pay royalties on the oil and gas they drill. Fifty percent goes to the U.S. Treasury, and fifty percent goes back the state of North Dakota and the counties, where it is often used for schools and roads. The Little Missouri produces more oil and gas than any other unit of the Forest Service. In 1998, royalties amounted to $14 million; in 1999, the total was $7.3 million, the decline largely due to lower oil prices, according to Forest Service staff. There is a question, though, of whether these companies have paid a fair price.

More than 160 companies have leases on the Little Missouri, ranging from little independents to giants such as Exxon Corp. and Koch Industries, Inc. According to data provided by the Forest Service, Burlington Resources Oil and Gas Company holds more leases than any other company---174, of which more than one-third are now producing. In March 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice joined a lawsuit accusing Burlington Resources Inc., the parent company, of knowingly undervaluing oil extracted from public lands---and therefore underpaying royalties to the U.S. Treasury. The Justice Department's intervention comes in part of a series of lawsuits against oil companies in recent years. To date, the agency has reached settlements with BP America, Mobil Oil, Chevron, Conoco, Oxy USA, Inc., Sunoco, and the former Pennzoil Company, for a total of more than $217 million.

"We have a huge oil and gas program, and the largest grazing program in the whole Forest Service," says Fitzwilliams. "So that was primarily our focus. Frankly, we didn't pay close attention to other resources, like recreation."

In fact, the Little Missouri's oil and gas and grazing programs make it look at lot more like land in the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) than the typical national forest. The Little Missouri's fortunes are closely tied to that of the BLM.

In the mid-1990s, when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's proposals to reform the federal grazing fee program were in full swing, the North Dakota ranchers saw which way the administration was leaning, and tried to do an end run with the help of Sen. Byron Dorgan. In 1996, Dorgan introduced a bill that would remove the National Grasslands from the Forest Service entirely and create a new agency within the Agriculture Department. In other words, treat the grasslands more like agriculture, and exempt them from the Forest Service's planning laws.

Environmental groups protested, and eventually a compromise was worked out. The Forest Service, which until then included the Little Missouri in the Custer National Forest in Montana, set up a new regional office for the Little Missouri Grasslands in Bismarck, North Dakota. The idea was to heighten the clout of the office and make Forest Service officials more accessible to locals in North Dakota.

It was in this context that Cathy Carlson, a grasslands specialist with the National Wildlife Federation in Boulder, Colorado, made her Freedom of Information Act request for records associated with grazing on the Little Missouri. Because the grazing associations essentially had been managing themselves, some of the records she asked for were not in Forest Service files. The Forest Service asked the grazing associations to produce them. Two of the associations, the Medora and the McKenzie, refused.

"The Forest Service ignored the grasslands for 63 years," says Carlson. "The result has been the creation of an insular system. Now they're paying attention for the first time."

Emotions are running high. In February, District Ranger Scott Fitzwilliams' wife found a threatening letter in the mail. Fitzwilliams described it as "certainly threatening" and "very disturbing." It was not the first such incident. Some months before, another Forest Service employee found a pile of dead prairie dogs on his lawn. Grazing association officials told the press that they have admonished their members not to do anything illegal.

Such incidents, however, are becoming part of the job. Between 1995 and 1998, reported incidents against employees and facilities at the U.S. Forest Service rose from 34 to 53, a 56 percent increase, according to a report by a Washington-based nonprofit group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

Forest officials are wary. "This is a traditional conflict between traditional commodities interests and non-commodity interests," says Larry Dawson, supervisor of the Little Missouri Grasslands. "Many Forest Service people who lived through the old growth controversy [in the Pacific Northwest] are saying, ëbeen there done that.'"

In October, Fitzwilliams told Billings County commissioners that the management plan for the Little Missouri, which the agency expects to release in December, would likely reduce the amount of grazing allowed on the grasslands but would not include new areas for wilderness protection. Oil and gas development would continue uninterrupted. Motorized vehicles would be prohibited on 140,000 acres, but ranchers and oil workers would be eligible for permits that would exempt them from the ban.

Fitzwilliams' dream of turning the Little Missouri into a wilderness preserve and a recreational playground for mountain bikers and backcountry hikers seems a long way away. In fairness to the Forest Service, the agency is dealing with a reality on the ground, of grazing and oil and gas development, decades in the making, and, in fact, long encouraged by the agency itself. The Little Missouri's close ties to Interior Department give fuel to the argument that the two agencies should be somehow combined. But would this be the best way to conserve the prairie for future generations of Americans to learn from and enjoy?

There is, after all, this question of national interest. When the Ingalls family headed west in their covered wagon, Uncle Sam was, indeed, rich enough in rolling prairies to give everybody a farm. It seemed like the grasslands went on forever, and what good were they if they weren't farmed, anyway? Now the grasslands have nearly disappeared. It is time to ask whether Uncle Sam isn't rich enough to give us all some prairie. Combining agencies would create efficiencies of scale in management, but it would not accomplish preservation unless the mission of the new organization clearly says conservation comes first.

Selling Fun on the White River National Forest

If the Little Missouri represents Forest Service past getting a shove into the future, the White River is the Forest Service playing catch-up with a future that has already arrived.

The White River became part of the national consciousness in the nineteenth century, thanks to the romantic painter of the Wild West, Thomas Moran. Moran's dramatic paintings of Yellowstone helped convince Congress in 1872 to invent the concept of a "national park" and to bestow the designation on the bizarre landscape of boiling-hot geysers and mud volcanoes. Moran intended that his painting, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, be displayed as part of a triptych that would include the Chasm of the Colorado (the Grand Canyon), and another, the Mountain of the Holy Cross. The Grand Canyon, of course, is now a national park, given that status in 1919, three years after the creation of the National Park Service in the Department of Interior.

The Mountain of the Holy Cross, however, is buried deep in the 2.25 million-acre White River National Forest, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, via the Forest Service. The Colorado mountain gained renown in the nineteenth century because of a naturally occurring "cross" that appears on the northeast face that is visible from miles away---a deep crevice, 1,500 feet long, intersected by a horizontal bench, which remains covered with snow longer than the surrounding rock. At the time, the cross seemed like justification for the great advancement west, becoming "a landmark and almost a clichÈ," as described by as Glenn Griffin, an art critic for the Denver Post.

Manifest destiny aside, the mountain is still a natural wonder, and hardly the only one along the White River. The twin jagged granite peaks of the Maroon Bells, near Aspen, which reflect perfectly in the still waters of Maroon lake, are so popular a paradise that the Forest Service runs shuttle buses from Aspen to cut down on the traffic. Trapper Lake, located in the White River Plateau, was the inspiration for the very idea of protected "wilderness." Back in 1920, Arthur Carhart, an agency landscape architect, objected to allowing summer cabins on the lake. He wrote a memo to his superiors arguing that the area be kept wild. Decades later, the Wilderness Act would codify this idea by giving areas with wilderness designation stronger protection than ordinary Forest Service land.

With its many peaks and meadows bursting with wildflowers, its elk and deer and moose and its trout, its aspen and its lodgepole and ponderosa pine, the White River is ur-Colorado, the kind of Colorado you dream about, the beautiful alpine Shangri La that, when you see it in photos on postcards or calendars, seems too spectacular to be real.

The White River is also where the U.S. skiing industry got its start. During World War II, the army trained soldiers of its 10th Mountain Division here. From their base at Camp Hale, between Miniturn and Leadville, they learned how to scale cliffs, orient themselves in a winter landscape, and, most important---to ski. When they returned to the U.S. after the war, they founded resorts such as Vail and Aspen, all on Forest Service land. (Others ran for Congress: former Senator Bob Dole was a platoon leader.)

What began with a group of quirky veterans, however, is now big business. Nationally, there has been an implosion of ownership, and the resorts on the White River are part of the trend. Since 1997, Vail Resorts has owned four of the 11 ski areas in the forest---Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, and Keystone. The company would have bought a fifth---Arapahoe Basin---but the Justice Department's antitrust division wouldn't allow it. Vancouver-based Intrawest owns Copper Mountain, along with several resorts elsewhere on the continent, such as Mammoth, in California, Stratton, in Vermont, and Whistler-Blackcomb, in Vancouver.

The whole area is one big company town. Locals drawn here because of the mountains usually find themselves working for the tourism industry in some shape, way, or form---even if they are philosophically opposed. In the seven-county area surrounding the White River, tourism and service industries provide more than 60 percent of the jobs. Another 20 percent work in construction, building trophy homes and condominium developments, or in finance, insurance, and real estate. Jobs that were once traditional in these mountains---mining, timbering, and ranching---barely show up enough to be counted.

"Most locals are part of the resort economy and struggle with this dilemma every day," writes Renee Aragon, in the Summit Free Press, a local alternative paper, "the waiter who is afraid to write a letter protesting...ski area expansion because he works at the base of the ski hill; the construction worker who is uncomfortable questioning a high-density development because he works on trophy homes for a living."

Vacationing at these resorts is not cheap. At Vail, during peak season, lift tickets cost $59 a day---and that's not counting ski rentals, lessons, hotel, food, and cappuccino. It's no wonder that over half of Vail's visitors come from households with incomes higher than $100,000. International tourists provide about 10 to 15 percent of the business at major resorts, and, on the White River National Forest resorts, there is capacity for 94,000 skiers and snowboarders to be on the mountains every single day. This is where the Kennedys spend their holidays, where Ivana Trump and Marla Maples fought over "The Donald" slope-side. Former Senator John Glenn owns property in Vail; so do Jack Kemp and Ross Perot.

Just like the timber, mining, grazing, and oil and gas industries, the ski industry benefits from subsidies dished out by the Forest Service---though these subsidies have gotten far less attention. And unlike timber, mining, and the livestock industries, whose products contribute to the general economy, it is primarily the wealthy that enjoy the "fun" that is the recreation industry's "output."

The main subsidies to the ski industry are 40-year term leases at sweetheart terms for Forest Service land. In 1998, White River ski resorts paid the U.S. Treasury $7.6 million for the privilege of using public land---an amount that reflects 1.5 to 4 percent of the revenues they earn from operations on the Forest Service land. (Total revenues are a much larger figure, and include money earned from development and activities nearby.) Nationwide, ski areas paid only $18 million to the U.S. Treasury for their use of public lands, a miniscule portion of their profits.

The fees ski areas pay are the product of a little-noticed new law Congress passed in 1996. At the urging of the National Ski Areas Association, Rep. Don Young (R-AK) and Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-AK) introduced bills that revamped the system for calculating the fees. There was no dispute that the old system was complicated and unfair. The U.S. General Accounting Office, in fact, had issued a report in 1993 that charged that the U.S. Forest Service was not collecting fair market value from ski areas. The new law did little to address this and, instead, simply shifted the tab among the resorts. There was no attempt to determine what fair market value would be. Also in the legislation was another sweetener sought by the industry: an exemption from environmental review when ski areas renew their forty-year term leases.

The Forest Service has never said "no" when an existing ski area on the White River has asked to expand its terrain, despite numerous challenges by environmentalists.

The most famous of these expansions is Vail Resorts' controversial "category III" project, which developed 885 acres that environmentalists argued were key habitat for the Canada lynx. In October 1998, Vail suffered $12 million in damage at the hands of an extremist environmental group, the Earth Liberation Front. The Front claimed responsibility for arson at Vail's Two Elk Lodge. Despite the setback, Vail rebuilt the lodge and broke ground for an expansion in July 1999.In January 2000, when the new area, now named Blue Sky Basin, opened, the Denver Post pointed out that it is larger than each of a dozen Colorado ski resorts. Two months later, in March, the Canada lynx made the Department of Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service's list of threatened species.

Between 1987 and 1996, ski areas on the White River increased skiable acres within their permit areas by 77 percent. But the ski resort business is only partly about skiing---the resorts are also aggressively developing the private land they own close to White River Forest borders. Real estate for vacation homes and rentals is where the real money is. The local environmental group Colorado Wild points to a Vail annual report stating that new ski lifts, trails, and snowmaking and other "on-mountain improvements...enhance the value of the company's real estate holdings."

Indeed, real estate prices have soared into outer space. In Eagle County, near Vail, home prices jumped 119 percent between 1990 and 1999, and the median price for a new home was $631,270. Ski resort employees rarely can afford to rent a place nearby, and so they either commute long distances or cram themselves into shared apartments. Vail Resorts has started to build housing specifically for employees, but the shortage still remains severe. Attempts by the town of Vail to develop affordable housing for locals have met with class action lawsuits and protests. Mayor Rob Ford resigned his position in fall 1999 because he was so frustrated by opposition to city plans to build affordable housing.

Colorado's ski areas want to expand still further---all on Forest Service land. The wish list for Vail Resorts includes the ski resort Breckenridge's plans to add 185 acres of intermediate terrain plus a new high-speed quad chairlift, along with the development of 300 acres of the resort's own land at the base of the resort. Keystone, another Vail resort, has a proposal to expand into an area known as Jones Gulch. Steamboat is working on a 770 acre expansion and two new chairlifts; Copper Mountain wants permission to make more snow and expand by 100 acres; Telluride is about to start construction on a 1,500 acre expansion; Arapahoe Basin wants permission to make snow, and Ski Cooper wants a new quad chairlift and to expand by 40 acres.

Though the ski areas on the White River make up just three percent of the acreage in the forest, in recent years they have threatened more wetlands and streams than any other activity in the forest, according the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It is not always simple to predict what kind of damage can occur. Recently, the Army Corps of Engineers found evidence of heavy metals in the drainage that runs through the middle of Keystone. Heavy metals, which are highly toxic, are usually a sign of past mining, but there had been no mining in the area. The best guess is that the water Keystone draws for artificial snowmaking from the heavy-metal laden Snake River is the source of the pollution.

Colorado, of course, is not the only place where the skiing industry is bending Congress and the Forest Service to its advantage. Robert Earl Holding, 73, is a Wyoming-based businessman who made his fortune on the Little America Hotel chain and built on it through the oil and gas station and the ski resorts businesses. His holdings include Sinclair Oil, Sun Valley Resort, and Snowbasin, in Utah, and he is worth some $900 million, according to Forbes magazine. For years, Holding's company wanted 1,320 acres of Wasatch Cache National Forest in Utah, which includes sensitive wetlands. These acres are near the base of his Snowbasin ski area, and the company wanted the land to develop into a four-season resort, with new condos, a golf course, and other up-scale development.

In February 1990, Wasatch-Cache Forest Service Supervisor Dale Bosworth agreed to trade Holding 220 acres of land. Later that year, Stan Tixier, then regional forester, upped the land offered to Holding to 700 acres.

This was not enough land for Holding. According to an investigative report by the Salt Lake Tribune, numerous Utah politicians went to work, putting pressure on Forest Service officials. Many were recipients of Holding's campaign contributions. Between 1993 and 1998, according to the newspaper's analysis, Holding and his wife gave a total of nearly $39,500 to members of the Utah congressional delegation's and to Governor Mike Leavitt's election campaigns. Overall, Holding, his family, and Sinclair executives have given at least $124,720 since 1991 to federal campaigns, parties, and political action committees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Holding also used the 2002 Winter Olympics as leverage. Whatever is good for the Olympics is good for America, the reasoning goes---and it is also very, very good for Holding. In 1995, the International Olympic Committee chose Salt Lake City as the site for the games. Holding's Snowbasin resort is to be the site of the immensely popular downhill and super giant slalom skiing competitions. Holding stands to eventually secure $13.8 million of Olympic contracts for use of Snowbasin and other Salt Lake City real estate.

In the fall of 1995, Rep. James Hansen (R-UT) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) each introduced legislation that did an end run around the Forest Service and authorized the land swap Holding wanted. Though the Administration had some concerns, testified Gray Reynolds, deputy chief of the Forest Service, in November 1995 before a Senate subcommittee, "[it] supports the objective ... to expedite planning and development at the Snowbasin Ski Area in preparation for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games."

In 1997, not long after Dombeck took over as head of the agency, Reynolds retired after 35 years with the Forest Service. One of the Forest Service's "old guard," he was, according to the conventional wisdom, forced out by the reformer chief. Just a few months later, Reynolds went to work for Holding as Snowbasin's general manager. Asked what he thinks of criticism of his decision to accept the Snowbasin job, Reynolds replies, "Everybody's entitled to their opinion. What I did was legal. It was carefully done, and I protected my personal ethics."

Congress granted Holding's wish. Buried in the Omnibus Lands Bill Congress approved in October 1996 was the legislation granting the land exchange. Besides the 1,320-acre land exchange for "lands of approximately equal value," there were more sweeteners in the new law. Congress exempted the first phase of new development of the ski resort---the addition of snowmaking equipment, new lifts, a new restaurant, and other amenities---from a new environmental review. It also dictated that the Forest Service was responsible for building a new 3.5-mile road that would connect Snowbasin to the state highway. Earlier, Holding had promised to pay for the new road himself.

Forest Service officials said they could not come up with the $15 million needed to build the new road , which will carve 15 minutes off the travel time between Salt Lake City and Snowbasin, from its existing budget. So, in 1998, Senators Hatch, Robert Bennett (R-UT), and Slade Gorton (R-WA) attached an amendment to an appropriations bill that called for the taxpayers to shell out more money for the road. For this effort, the Utah delegation earned the dubious honor of a "Porker" award bestowed upon them by Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI).

Congress was willing to spend $15 million of additional taxpayer funds for the new road --- but, at the same time, is stingy with providing adequate funds for basic Forest Service programs. Timber receipts once helped fund other agency programs, but with logging on the decline, the agency is in a bind financially. Since 1992, the number of permanent employees has declined by 20 percent, to about 28,000 full-time staff. That's one staff person for every 6,900 acres of land. If you visit with a staffer working at the forest level, you will more than likely hear that he or she is expected to do the same amount of work that three people used to do.

Instead of appropriating more funds, Congress has decided to experiment with asking recreational visitors to pay fees to enter the forests. In 1995, it established a recreation fee demonstration project, the brainchild of an industry group named the American Recreation Coalition (ARC), whose 100 members include Walt Disney, Kampgrounds of America, Inc., Fleetwood Enterprises (a leading mobile home manufacturer), the National Ski Areas Association, Yamaha Motor Corporation, the American Hotel and Motel Association, Chevron, Exxon, and the American Petroleum Institute.

Once Congress approved the program, the industry group negotiated a deal with the Forest Service to teach them how to sell it. The coalition agreed to prepare press materials, make presentations at conferences, and produce other promotional materials about the new program. In addition, it agreed to create talking points for use by Forest Service staff in preparing speeches and presentations.

In 1999, with 81 recreation fee sites running, the Forest Service collected $26.5 million. That amount could easily double if Congress gives the program permanent status, according to agency staff. "I have an avowed interest in fees for use in the future," says James Furnish, deputy chief for the Forest Service, in an interview. "The needs of society have not kept pace with the congressional appetite to finance recreational programs on the land. I don't see public recreation ever being the biggest hog at the trough, but I do think people are willing to pay for quality."

Recreation fees may seem sensible, since the people who visit the forests the most pay more for their upkeep. There is a precedent in the Park Service, which has charged for entrance to the National Parks for years. That does not necessarily mean the fees are a good idea. Relying on fees as a major source of cash for the Forest Service sets up an unhealthy dynamic. First, even though recreation fees tend to be low, they are still regressive, hitting poorer families harder than wealthier ones. Second, fees create an incentive for the agency to make decisions based not on what is best for the forest, but on what will increase the number of visitors to the forest.

"Activities tend toward economically viable things," says Francisco Valenzuela, regional recreational planner with the Rocky Mountain Region. "The underserved populations are not helped."

Moving toward a model where Forest users are "consumers" buying a "product" also challenges the essential nature of public lands. Instead of feeling a sense of ownership of the land, and the responsibility of stewardship that comes with it, people may start to feel like they are paying for something and therefore should get whatever they want. This, after all, is what has happened with the grazing, mining, and timber industries. Over the decades, these industries have paid (albeit a subsidized rate) for what they take from the forests. A pattern was set, and now there is an entrenched belief that, because they pay, they deserve what they have always gotten. There is a pointed difference between this attitude and one where visiting the forests or using them for profit is a privelage bestowed by the public, which owns the land.

"[T]he current use of business metaphors like ëcustomer satisfaction,' ...push public agencies toward a private-like conception of themselves," writes Thomas A. More, an employee at the Forest Service's Northeastern Research Station, in an article of the Journal of Leisure Research. "It has been pointed out that a customer is a person who buys something from someone who owns it. This reverses the situation with respect to public lands where the public is the owner, not the customer."

Strapped for cash, the Forest Service is also turning to private industry to provide services that the agency once managed. Already, private companies operate about 80 percent of the Forest Service's campgrounds and recreational facilities. In September 2000, the Forest Service released a new Recreational Agenda, which states that the agency will "consider options that allow for private investments in facilities...that are consistent with the sustainable capabilities of national forest ecosystems."

But how can the agency maintain that "consistency" if it is dependent on private industry to support its most basic programs? It's the same bind that the Forest Service has been in for decades with the timber industry. On the surface, this may not seem evident. The recreational industry has an interest, after all, in maintaining the outdoor experience. A strip-mined mountain or a clear-cut forest is not the sort of place that most people find attractive for a camping trip. Hunters and fishers need forests healthy enough to sustain the deer and trout that they seek.

But businesses exist to turn a profit, and if ecosystem sustainability does not produce for the bottom line, then industry will push to modify the agency's environmental policies. The ski industry is the best example of this. The ski resorts exist on public land, but they have little incentive to provide low-cost, environmentally sensitive skiing to the public. Instead, the need to turn a profit is so fierce that the ski executives are constantly seeking to increase artificial snow making, expand area for skiing, and develop surrounding real estate. More often than not, the Forest Service approves whatever the ski resorts want.

Confronting recreational challenges to the environment is in some ways much tougher than those posed by the timber, mining, and grazing industries. "It's pretty hard to demonize families out there having fun," says Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. "It's harder than criticizing Weyerhauser."

The old battles always involved an "us" and a "them," whether you put yourself in the camp of the environmentalists or the industry. But in the new challenges posed by recreational use of public lands, there is only an "us." As someone who has camped and hiked and biked and skied in dozens of national forests, I know this all too well. I would guess that most people who visit the national forests do not want to harm them. Instead of an agency that is dependent on commercial interests for funding, we need one with expert staff with the know-how and means to help guide the public in preserving the land we all own. This does not mean ending recreation in the forests; it means learning how to seek our enjoyment wisely.

The Future of the White River National Forest

A bright blue autumn sky arches over the shiny high-rises that make up downtown Denver. To the west, a dusting of new snow shines cleanly on the mountains. Here in the flatlands, patches of aspen trees have turned day-glow yellow. In the heart of the city's warehouse district, it costs $5 to enter the Rocky Mountain Snowmobile Expo---1999.

Talk about fun. Inside, people wander among row after row of snowmobiles, admiring their burnished surfaces and sensuous curves. There are booths representing local clubs for folks who ride snowmobiles, ORVs, anything that moves and moves fast. "If speed kills, you're looking at a dead man," reads a t-shirt worn by one man. "Snow is like sex...you never know how many inches you get...or how long it will be," reads another one worn by a woman.

The event, though, is not just an occasion to celebrate speed and snow. It is an occasion to protest. Today there will be a public meeting with Forest Service officials, and Expo attendees are urged to attend to register their opposition to the agency's plans to ban mechanized vehicles from parts of the White River National Forest.

In August 1999, White River National Forest administrators released a proposed plan for management of the forest. The basic tools for management of the nation's national forests and grasslands are these evaluations of plant life, wildlife, wetlands, and recreation use---every aspect imaginable of the forest. More than two-thirds of the plans for the forests are due for revision in the next three years.

The White River has budgeted $2.4 million over four years to complete its own plan. The proposal is contained in a stack of documents, crammed with maps and tables and text, all of which weighs in at more than 15 pounds. As required, the plan sets forth several different "alternatives," each with a different theme---for example, a focus on recreation, on biodiversity, on timber cutting. The Forest Service indicates which is its "preferred alternative," and the public has a chance to submit comments before the agency makes a decision. The White River has made "alternative D" its preference. It would mean new restrictions on motorized vehicles in some parts of the forest and would limit expansion of ski areas to land already zoned that way.

Back in 1984, when the last Forest Service plan for the White River was adopted, there was no need to consider any restrictions, because there were so few people traveling the forests by motor or bike. Now ORV riders, snowmobilers, and mountain bikers are ubiquitous on the trails in the White River. The Forest Service barely has the resources to maintain about one quarter of the 2,400 miles official roads that wind through the forest, let alone police the hundreds of miles of new trails that have sprung up.

The meeting room at the Expo is packed. People shift and squirm on the folding chair seats, trading rumors and gossip about the Forest Service and what's in the plan. In the front of the room, several Forest Service officials dressed in the familiar brown uniform of the agency settle uneasily into a row of seats. They know they are about to be interrogated.

Jerry Abboud, executive director of the Colorado Off Highway Vehicle Coalition,

presents the ground rules. They are clearly designed to help prevent the situation from getting out of control. People must submit their questions on index cards, which he will read. The Forest Service officials may answer or choose not to answer. "It will not be engaging in a debate," he says, "as much as I'd like to!" There is a burst of nervous laughter.

Then the questions begin. Nearly every single one is hostile.

"Why are you segregating cross country skiing from snowmobiling?"

"What are the cross country skiers giving up?"

"Why does segregation work here when it does not work in the rest of society?"

"How does closing 60 percent of the forest to snowmobiles service the needs of aging people?"

"Why won't the Forest Service copy enough materials for everyone to get a copy?"

"Is there any group that supports this plan besides the Forest Service?"

The Forest Service officials parry all the questions carefully, the way a high school teacher would, speaking broadly of democratic process, saying all concerns will be addressed. They point out there will still be many trails open to ORV and snowmobile riders. But they are not prepared to deal with the obvious anger that many of the people at the meeting feel --- anger that their views are not being addressed, a feeling that the Forest Service has been taken over by environmentalists. Afterwards, Francisco Valenzuela, a regional recreational planner for the Rocky Mountain Region of the Forest Service, shakes his head. "You can't argue with peoples' values," he says.

He's got a point. Forest Service officials are bureaucrats that put a great deal of emphasis on process. If they follow all the rules set out by law, then they feel they have done a good job. But the people at the meeting are not interested in the process, particularly because they feel that they have been screwed. They want to vent.

Several weeks later, in an interview at her office in Glenwood Springs, White River National Forest Supervisor Martha Ketelle explains the opposition this way.

"We have been put in a confrontational position with the culture of the Old West," she says. "There is always a new place to explore. They don't like the idea that the range is getting smaller. These are fourth or fifth generation Coloradoans. They don't want things to change." She insists, however, there is a positive side to the controversy. "Isn't this good," she says, "that we have the people interested. This is the public's land."

Ketelle's public affairs skills are showing. The 53-year-old Tennessee native is a departure, another member of the Forest Service's new breed. First, like Dombeck, she is an "ologist," with an undergraduate degree in geology and two master's degrees, one in hydrology, from the University of Wisconsin, and another in landscape architecture, from Harvard. Second, she is a woman, in an agency that traditionally was the province of men.

Ketelle was hired in 1991, she is quick to say, because of a consent decree dating back to a 1973 gender discrimination lawsuit. To meet the terms, the agency went on a hiring spree, and women like Katelle got the nickname "consent decree women." Ketelle's work experience includes a three-year stint as a legislative aide to former Sen. Jim Sasser (D-TN) and ten years with the Tennessee Valley Authority. She is also a dues-paying member of the nonprofit organization Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

Soon Ketelle's Washington experience will be in demand, as several of Colorado's Congressional delegation jump into the fray. On November 12, 1999, Rep. Scott McInnis (R-CO) calls a meeting at the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce to discuss strategy for White River. Invited are snowmobile and off-road vehicle groups, representatives from Vail Resorts, the Colorado Farm Bureau, and the Colorado Timber Industry Association, among other industry groups. McInnis receives ample campaign contributions from the industries represented. Since 1997, agriculture, mining, oil and gas, timber, and real estate interests have given McInnis at least $150,460 for his election campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Also attending the meeting is Richard Woodrow, now retired, who had Martha Ketelle's job as supervisor of the White River National Forest in 1984, when the agency developed the last management plan. Groups had been invited to submit their concerns to Woodrow, who would put together a new, alternative plan that would reflect the groups' needs and wants.

The juxtaposition of philosophy between the old Forest Service and the new is almost too perfect. During his tenure, Woodrow was well known for his pro-ski and timber industry views. Woodrow believes the direction the Forest Service is taking is all wrong.

"The reason I got involved," says Woodrow, 68, says in a telephone interview, "is I saw a philosophical shift from a national forest for multiple use toward a conservation and Park Service type approach. It's a shift away from the forest for recreation, and that's what the White River forest is for."

Woodrow says he is working as a volunteer, although "a couple of folks are helping me out with expenses---a computer, a fax." He refuses to identify the source of these contributions.

Around the same time that McInnis calls his meeting, Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-CO) also has been busy. Like McInnis, Campbell receives generous campaign contributions from agriculture, timber, mining, oil and gas, and real estate interests---$167,000 over the past six years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In a study by U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Campbell ranked third in the Senate for political action committee (PAC) contributions from companies associated with the Blue Ribbon Coalition. This organization of off-road vehicle enthusiasts, whose slogan is "Preserving our natural resources FOR the public, not FROM the public," receives financial support from companies such as Yamaha, Honda, and Polaris, which manufacture ORVs and snowmobiles, as well as the timber, mining, and oil and gas companies.

Campbell attached a clause to an appropriations bill that delayed the deadline for the official comment period for the White River Forest Plan from December 10, 1999 to May 9, 2000. This change will hike the cost of the process from $2.4 million to as much as $4 million, the Forest Service estimates.

The following February, Campbell calls a hearing of his Senate Energy And Natural Resources Subcommittee on Forests and Public Land. The witness list is heavily stacked toward groups that oppose the Forest Service's plan, including Vail Resorts, the Colorado Off Highway Vehicles Collation, and the White River Forest Alliance. The only environmental group represented is the Aspen Wilderness Workshop.

In his testimony, Andrew Daly, president of Vail Resorts, makes pointed reference to the Forest Service's promises to promote recreation, attempting to hang the Forest Service on its own mission statement. "The Forest Service's failure to balance the single most important recreational and economic activity on the Forest with environmental protection appears shortsighted," he says. "To paraphrase the Natural Resources Agenda, [the plan] may protect the land, but it does not serve the people."

Vail Resorts executives and their families have given $104,288 to federal campaigns since 1991, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

On May 8, 2000, the day before the deadline comment period on the White River plan, McInnis releases his own plan for the White River National Forest, authored by Woodrow, which he submitted to the Forest Service. The congressman calls it "reasonable," and a "blended alternative," drawing the best of all the various plans together into a new one.

Local environmental groups, however, quickly label it as "little more than an industry wish list." A close analysis of the McInnis plan by the White River Conservation Coalition, a coalition of local environmental groups, reveals that it recommends just 16,000 acres for wilderness protection---about one-third the amount proposed by the Forest Service, and just five percent of the 300,000 acres on the wish list of the coalition. The congressman's plan would open 58,000 acres to ski area development, 30 percent more than the Forest Service's proposed plan, which still allows the ski areas to develop land inside their currently permitted boundaries. The level of logging permitted forest-wide would quadruple.

Finally, the plan would allow motorized vehicles on many more parts of the forest than the agency's plan. Though legally the McInnis/Woodrow plan has the same weight as any other comment received by the Forest Service, politically it certainly counts far more than others. The impact, too, of what the Forest Service will decide to do on the White River will be widely felt. McInnis notes in his letter to the Forest Service that, "Because it is the most visible Forest to be reevaluated... this forest planning process promises to have a substantial and enduring effect on the way the federal government manages our national forests over the course of the coming decade."

What will the coming decade bring for the Forest Service? Is the agency doomed to reenact the conflict between the conservation ethic and that of multiple use over and over again? Over the years, numerous proposals have been made to "fix" the agency. All of them fall short.

The proposal that most frequently emerges to deal with the balkanization of the nation's public lands policy (or lack thereof) is to fold the Forest Service into the Interior Department. The Taft, Harding, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan administrations all made such proposals. Outside the government, environmentalists, the timber industry, and fiscal conservatives have proposed the idea, though at different points in time.

On the surface, a merger between the Forest Service and the Interior Department's public land agencies makes a lot of sense. Why should the Agriculture Department be in charge of the Forest Service, anyway, when the Interior Department already manages the lion's share of federal public land ---70 percent---through the Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)?

The BLM in particular has a great deal in common with the Forest Service. A 1999 General Accounting Office report pointed out that both the BLM and the Forest Service manage timber, minerals, grazing, recreation and wildlife, are often on land adjacent to each other, have offices in the same locations or nearby, and hire similar people with comparable professional backgrounds. The two agencies already have joint ventures to fight fire, conduct watershed analyses, and manage fish habitat. In a place like the Little Missouri Grasslands, the overlap between agencies is particularly stark, as it is the Interior Department that manages the oil and gas drilling underground, while the Forest Service manages the surface.

A merger makes sense on paper, certainly, because it would address inefficiencies of scale. But it ignores the political dimension of the problem. No matter what the Forest Service is called or where it is located in the federal bureaucratic structure, it faces the same problems unless the conflicts in its basic mission are addressed. It is precisely for this reason that environmentalists and the timber industry alike have made merger proposals at different times. It is not because they agree, but rather because, depending on the climate in Washington at the time, they think the resulting agency would swing more toward their point of view.

A second, increasingly popular proposal, for making management of forests more efficient and also more responsive to the communities surrounding them, is that of local collaboration. In this model, questions of how much timber is to be cut, which trails to be set off- or on-limits to off-road vehicles, whether a ski area should be allowed to expand or not, is settled in negotiation by a coalition of all the "stakeholders." In other words, leave the nitty gritty of forest management to the people who use it most. Libertarian critics of the Forest Service, such as longtime gadfly Randal O'Toole, favor local control, arguing that it would provide more opportunities to apply market forces to forest management. University of Maryland professor Robert H. Nelson, in his book A Burning Issue, went so far as to call for the abolishment of the Forest Service altogether in favor of decentralized management.

There is appeal to this "why-can't-we-all-just-get-along" approach. So much so that Congress leapt at the chance to experiment with it, in 1998 passing a five-year pilot project based on the work of the Quincy Library Group. The California coalition of local conservationists, the timber industry, and community leaders, had gotten together and hammered out a compromise for managing the Sierra Nevada, which involved logging parts of the forests in exchange for protecting other parts as wilderness.

But the getting-along approach sounds nicer than it actually is. First, it ignores the fact that some local interests are more powerful and wealthy than others, and that this is particularly so at the local level.

Citizen groups are usually at a disadvantage compared to local industry. Think of the White River, where the ski industry cannot only afford to hire battalions of lawyers to manage the Forest Service, but also is the biggest employer in town.

The local management approach also disregards the fact that there is a national interest in the forests. Six thousand of the 15,000 comments that the White River National Forest received on its proposed management plan came from out of state. The White River's majestic Maroon Bells are a national treasure, as are the long-grass prairies preserved in the Little Missouri. Would we put together a local committee to manage the National Mall, where the Capitol building and the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian Institution stand? These are places that belong to all Americans, not just those who live nearby.

Continuing with the status quo is also a huge mistake. Timber, oil and gas, mining companies and ranchers will press for continued subsidies for operating on public land. Meanwhile, budget restraints force the Forest Service to repeat the dynamic of financial dependence on the timber industry with the recreational industry. Skiing is enormous fun. So is hiking, snowmobiling, mountain biking, camping --- and I can say so from direct personal experience. But to ensure fun in the future, to ensure that what is left of the continent's wild open spaces is preserved, we need a strong agency staffed with the best scientific and policy talent, not one begging for help from industries with a financial stake in the outcome.

The best present the public could bestow on the Forest Service and its employees on the occasion of its 100th birthday in 2005 is a new mission --- one that unmistakably reorients the agency toward conservation and gives it sufficient taxpayer funds to do the job. Whether the agency remains separate from or is merged with Interior Department agencies should depend on whether the new entity would have such a mission, not just efficiencies of scale. This present would be very expensive --- it would require a lot of political capital to pay for it.

With Dombeck in charge of the agency, national environmental groups were content to work within the existing laws to support his green initiatives and push them further. Dombeck himself has stated that there is ample justification within the Forest Service's own history for emphasizing a conservation ethic, that new authority is not necessary.

This is a short-term strategy, however, because a new chief can reverse all of Dombeck's work. "In every revolution there is a counter-revolution under the surface," says Michael Francis, director of national forest programs for the Wilderness Society. "There's an old guard in the Forest Service waiting to go back to the old ways."

Yet it is the host of environmental laws passed in the 1970s that form the backbone for the greening of the Forest Service and other government agencies. These laws requiring protection of wetlands and endangered species, environmental impact analyses of new actions, and so on, require whoever is chief of the Forest Service to comply. Without overturning these laws, the agency can't go back to the "old ways"---not completely.

"The time is long past for a new try at an overhaul of the myriad laws bearing on public land management," testified Jack Ward Thomas, former Forest Service chief, before the House Resource Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health in September. Thomas called for a commission that would produce draft legislation "upon which debate could center---a platform for defining conservation of the public lands in the new century."

What is needed is new legislation that redefines the Forest Service's mission, to clarify that the agency puts conservation first, that once and for all does away with the subsidies and budget schemes that create incentives for the agency to overdevelop forest service land, and that provides adequate funds for the agency to do its job. This does not mean kicking the public off the land. Instead, it shifts the challenge of the job of the agency from attempting to be all things for all people (and industries), to one that puts stewardship of the land first and then provides access for various types of use of the land. It changes the dynamic so that we remember that we all have a responsibility in maintaining this land, which belongs to all of us, and that access to the forests is a valuable privilege that we bestow, not an inherent right. This is hardly a radical idea; it simply codifies what Dombeck has sought to do, so that the agency has a clear job and is not at the mercy of whatever administration happens to be in power.

In this context, merging the agency with other public lands agencies may make sense. Relying on new funding schemes---such as the recreation fees and partnerships with private groups---is a step in the wrong direction, because it simply transposes the old incentives to develop for logging, mining, oil and gas drilling, and grazing to new ones that overdevelop land for recreational use.

Passing new legislation would be a terribly difficult task. Although the environmental movement was successful in passing a host of new laws in the 1970s, in recent years it has been forced to play defense. Environmental groups have been largely successful in fending off attacks contained in Newt Gingrich's Contract With America, in fighting riders placed in yearly appropriations bills to stymie environmental programs. Getting approval of a tough new environmental law, however, is another matter altogether. As with many public policy issues, environmental strategy, for practical reasons, has become focused on parsing big issues into small, viable ones. When all effort goes into these incremental changes, however, there is no sweeping vision for the future. Even if that vision is never realized, it is useful to describe it, because it helps to shape the debate.

There are signs that the public would be sympathetic. A majority of Americans want strong environmental protection --- a recent Gallup poll shows that 58 percent of the public thinks that the U.S. Government is doing "too little" to protect the environment, and two-thirds believe that environmental protection should be given priority over economic growth. The Republican Congress recently passed an appropriations bill for the Interior Department that is "the most environmentally sound...ever," according to The Wilderness Society, and includes $1.6 billion for environmental accounts, increasing to $2.4 billion over the next six years.

"I remain concerned about the future," Dombeck told an audience of environmental activists this fall. "Who will speak for the wild places?" If we expect the Forest Service to do this job, we need to give the agency and its employees the tools to do it right.