Charting the waters.

The recently released 1990 RPA Program is a significant step forward in strategic planning for the nation's forest and range resources. The Forest Service, in focusing on the role of its programs as well as on the host of major policy issues that define the agency's decision-making environment, is grappling openly with the fundamental questions of its identity and function in a rapidly changing world.

Past RPA programs focused on annual resource-output goals and budget targets. The failure to attain these objectives became readily apparent early in the five-year life of each program, implying a failure of RPA planning and making the exercise largely irrelevant to policymakers and field resource managers alike. The primary focus on near-term outputs, resource by resource, impeded the development of an integrated resource-management approach. It also resulted in minimal attention to future resource conditions the very heart of the agency's responsibilities for resource conservation and stewardship.

The 1990 RPA Program takes a different tack, reexamining the current roles of the Forest Service programs in light of current resource data and major policy issues. In a break with past tradition, an array of important policy issues from clearcutting to global climate change are dealt with explicitly and forthrightly. The responses will not elicit unanimous praise or agreement, but therein lies much of their value. The language is clear and relatively unequivocal, the agency no longer attempting (often futilely) to duck controversy by hiding behind vague and ambiguous terms. This is a welcome reaffirmation of the Forest Service's role, as defined in Section 1 of RPA, as a -leader in assuring that the nation maintains a natural-resource-conservation posture that will meet the requirements of our people in perpetuity. "

In response to these policy issues, and to the new information contained in the assessment, the 1990 program plots a fairly clear course that can be summarized in four major priorities:

"Round out" Forest Service programs through an added emphasis on recreation, wildlife, and fisheries. In every RPA Program to date, the Forest Service has tried to stimulate investment in its noncommodity resource programs, but additional appropriations and program emphasis generally did not materialize. The backlog of improvements to recreation facilities continued to grow, and the proportion of recreation sites maintained to basic standards continued to decline. Fish and wildlife management activities were not so much habitat improvement as they were mitigation of the deterioration caused by commodity-production activities-and were increasingly carried out indirectly through timber appropriations and timber-harvest deposits.

The situation has begun to turn around in recent years with the advent of forest plans that describe the needs in greater detail, and with increasing use of creative financing schemes. Public/private cost-sharing partnerships with corporations and citizens' groups have given greater leverage for every taxpayer dollar spent. For a detailed look at some of the best of these partnerships, see the Focus" section in the center of this magazine.) In response, Congress has actually been willing to spend more on these programs, allaying earlier fears that private funds would be seen as a substitute for appropriations.

Maintain commodity production at environmentally acceptable levels. That the Forest Service should follow such a precept seems obvious until one looks around at the number of influential interest groups exerting renewed pressure on the agency through Congress to do otherwise. The program calls for no substantial immediate reductions in timber harvest levels, but apprises us that regional reductions may be necessary in the future in response to concerns over environmental quality, habitat needs of threatened or endangered species, or the need to reduce below-cost timber sales.

In calling for a fundamental shift toward partial cutting techniques in timber harvesting, the 1990 program finally establishes that moving away from a predominant reliance on clearcutting is Forest Service policy as well as a requirement of the National Forest Management Act. In the pressure-cooker environment that Forest Service resource managers operate in, however, even this long-awaited measure carries its dangers. Simultaneous pressures to avoid clearcutting and to minimize the number of below-cost timber sales and meet Congressionally assigned timber-sale targets create perverse incentives that can result in perverse timber management.

The shelterwood system is perhaps the most widely applicable silvicultural technique on the national forests for even-aged management that maintains continuous tree cover, minimizes type changes without burning or herbicides, and protects soil, water, and other environmental values. However, prescriptions for "modified" or "aesthetic" shelterwoods appearing on some national forests are designed to make the sale pay by removing everything of value in the first cutting. These prescriptions, though presumably written by professional foresters, are the clearest imaginable recipe for high-grading, one of the "market failures" that originally justified public ownership of national forests. Such prescriptions will result in a degraded forest environment, even from a timber-production standpoint, and they illustrate the dangers of responding to near-term political pressures and output targets instead of focusing on desired future resource conditions.

Emphasize research to expand our understanding of forest and rangeland ecosystems. This recommendation echoes those of a just-released National Academy of Sciences report on forestry research which found that, in many instances, basic scientific knowledge about the functioning of natural ecosystems is inadequate to support decision-making. The NAS report recommended a fundamental shift in the motivation for forestry research, from one based on the agricultural model of improving commodity production to one based on understanding how to maintain healthy, functioning ecosystems that also produce commodities. The RPA Program goes further to emphasize research on how the options available to resource managers can be expanded through finding greater compatibility between various resource uses. This could well result in a complete re-thinking of the "paint-by-number" land allocations that have characterized our approach to multiple-use management over the past three decades.

Respond to global resource issues. The Forest Service has been under pressure to respond to global environmental considerations that may have impacts on renewable resources in the U.S. Thus the program dedicates the agency to improving its understanding of the influence of global climate change on American forests-and the role these forests might play in mitigating climate change. It represents a good start on a number of important issues that have been recognized belatedly by most of the U.S. resource-management community, but one hopes there will be a broader approach to global issues in the RPA assessments and programs to come.

Respected foreign-policy analysts have stated that international security issues will soon be defined more in terms of environment and natural resources than in terms of strategic defense. What role can or should U.S. forest resources play in the global resource economy? How might our ability to influence the demand for tropical timber be considered in debates over domestic timber-supply policy? A host of heretofore domestic policy issues take on a very different appearance when considered from a global perspective. The program has an important role to play in setting that agenda.

The 1990 program will serve much more effectively as a lighthouse, a firmly grounded beacon toward which the Forest Service can steer despite whatever crosscurrents and adverse winds it may encounter along the way. This may be the first RPA Program to serve as a useful and concrete reference point for Forest Service resource managers themselves, right down to the ranger districts.

The Forest Service has been forced to re-examine its values and motives through national forest planning and now, more broadly, through New Perspectives (see New Perspectives' on page 48). Though all of what New Perspectives will mean is still being determined, the 1990 RPA Program may be the best and most comprehensive statement to date of the course the Forest Service is trying to chart. GS-9s in field offices around the country, climbing into their pickups on a Monday morning, will be better able to do what they do by having a clear vision of why they are doing it. The Forest Service is a field organization, and the 1990 program's ability to guide and inspire the daily activities of those GS-9s may ultimately be its greatest value.

The 1990 program is a leadership document. Citizens working with the Forest Service at the local level have observed that the travail of national-forest planning has produced an agency of "beleaguered weathervanes"-officials have been so pummeled by interest groups on all sides that they simply follow the path of least resistance, without apparent goals or professional values. A surprising number of forest plans were prepared with only minimal involvement-or understanding-by the line officers who will be responsible for implementing them. By contrast, significant portions of the final 1990 program are known to have been penned by the chief of the Forest Service-personally.

Listening to citizens who participated in forest planning around the country and across the interest-group spectrum, an observer frequently hears that they did not expect that any one interest, including their own, would be fully satisfied by the planning decisions. Ironically, involvement in forest planning has given many citizens a new respect for the complexities and difficulties of public resource management.

One hears that the public expects leadership from resource conservation professionals. Perhaps we're about to turn that corner. With help from the 1990 program, perhaps Forest Service resource managers can again be leaders, making decisions on the basis of clearly articulated roles and values and then standing behind them-not hiding behind constraints and coefficients and claiming 'the computer model made me do it."

It is the nature of organizational leadership to be one part personal vision and another part the articulation and validation of changes already taking place among-and initiated by-the rank-and-file of the organization. Many of the changes described in the 1990 program, and now being explored further through New Perspectives, are already taking place in the field. The 1990 program provides the rest of us with the most refreshingly unequivocal statement yet on how the Forest Service views itself, its responsibilities, and its future.