Managing Multiple Uses on National Forests, 1905-1995 A 90-year Learning Experience and It Isn't Finished Yet

This project, Managing Multiple Uses on National Forests, 1905-1995, was undertaken with the direct support and approval of the Chief of the Forest Service, F. Dale Robertson, and Associate Chief George M. Leonard and the concurrence of the U.S Department of Agriculture's Acting Assistant Secretary for Natural Resources and the Environment, John H. Beuter. The original intent was to provide a substantive account of what "multiple-use management" was all about in terms of principles, guidelines, and standards followed. The initial outline and proposal were prepared with the advice and guidance of Hal Salwasser, Director, and James Caplan, Assistant Director, of the New Perspective Project. It was justified as necessary documentation to the 1990 Forest and Rangeland Resources Program emphasis on "multiple-use management" as a leading "role" for the Forest Service, particularly the National Forest System.

The approach through principles, guidelines, and standards for multiple-use management proved infeasible because there was no systematic documentation; there were no specific budgets, programs, staffing, organization, accounting, or reporting for multiple-use management per se. A top-down policy approach was infeasible because the policy direction for managing national forests for multiple uses did not give any specific guidelines for applying this policy to specific land areas where management for multiple uses was actually taking place. Upon pondering this dead end, it became evident that multiple-use management was not a system or method as the term and its connotation implied. Rather, it referred to the policy direction to manage National Forest System lands for multiple-use purposes and values.

Because the level and mix of uses of national forest eocsystems changed over time in response to shifts in demands, technology, knowledge, and social values, there seemed to be no other way to cover the subject of managing multiple uses on national forests than to tell it empirically — from beginning to end, 1905 to 1995, use by use, area by area, year by year, decade by decade. Following this approach, it soon became clear that the uses and users were the "drivers" of national forest management; for that matter, of all resource management. Without use and the anthropocentric objective that use or choice of nonuse implied, there was little need for managing national forests aside from protecting and administering public property. So the method of the story and account of managing multiple uses on national forests responded to the following basic questions:

• Who used the national forests and why?
• How were these uses implemented (managed) on the ground?
• What happened (over time)?

From this perspective, managing multiple uses on national forests emerges as the fitting of multiple uses into ecosystems according to their capability to support the uses compatibly with existing uses on the same or adjoining areas, in ways that would sustain the use's outputs, services, and benefits, and forest resources and ecosystems for future generations.

Because the multiple uses were explicitly differentiated into categories (user groups) and because their management knowledge and art were developed by function, the uses were also largely implemented by function on national forests. (There were few user advocates for "multiple use" per se. Users generally advocated their particular interests, usually recognizing the need to "share" the land with other users with different objectives when the uses were compatible and to compete for the land when they were not). That is the way the story of managing multiple uses on national forests is here told. Over time, implementation of overlapping and adjoining uses becomes progressively a matter of technical planning and coordinating; then integrating multiple disciplines; next, interdisciplinary team planning; and now, an ecosystem approach to managing multiple uses. The fitting of multiple uses within the capabilities of ecosystems and compatibly with existing uses became the development of sustainable systems for recreation, wildlife, fisheries, watershed, timber, landscape, range, wilderness, minerals, and many other more specific uses within national forest and rangeland ecosystem. Thus, managing multiple uses became analogous to forest management and the ecosystem approach to management and evolved within a changing framework of the state of the art and knowledge and societal values. The art and the knowledge, for forest management and the ecosystem approach to management, are both dynamic in response to changing uses, technology, knowledge, and societal values.

The modern effort to move from the traditional management for multiple uses to "ecosystem management" or, as it has been expressed and adopted for national forests, to an "ecological approach to management for multiple benefits" can be viewed in an historical context as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary shift — an extension of the evolving management of national forests that began with the Organic Act of 1897 under the administration of the Department of the Interior and continued under the administration of the USDA Forest Service from 1905 to 1995. It is so viewed here in this story of managing multiple uses on national forests.

The Epilogue sums up this story as a 90-year learning experience for national forest resource managers, resource professionals generally, and the American people. With the formal adoption of the ecosystem management approach to managing multiple uses and benefits in 1992, national forest managers are once again "Breaking New Ground" in the tradition of the Conservation Movement as expressed by Gifford Pinchot. The learning experience is now being extended into the future within the ecosystem framework of management.