The Los Utes case: forestry seeks its soul; frank talk about a bungled timber sale stirs up ghosts of Pinchot and Leopold and poses haunting questions about environmental ethics.

Everyone knows that timber harvesting is a mess business a messy business, hard on sensitive soils and sensitive souls. A badly botched recent timber sale on the Santa Fe National Forest raised questions in my mind about where the ethical soul resides in today's practice of forestry. Can there-and should there-be an environmental ethic for foresters?

The father of the land ethic, Aldo Leopold, started his career here in New Mexico. In Leopold's day New Mexicans knew foresters as heros. They were responsible for the successful rehabilitation of our watersheds from the tragic 19th-century grazing and timbering frenzy that devastated our state. Since the days of Leopold, however, the Forest Service seems to have squandered its heroic stature. For example, last year the agency blundered on the 900-acre Los Utes timber sale in the Santa Fe Forest-and blew it in a fashion that has left everyone disturbed.

The logging began in the winter of 1989 near Los Utes Spring in the headwaters of Capulin Canyon, in the national forest's Jemez (pronounced Hay-muz") District about three miles upstream from the boundary of Bandelier National Monument. To complicate the picture, the Jemez Mountains are administratively fragmented. In addition to the naSkid trails made to access Los Utes oldgrowth timber head up 60-degree slopes to ridge tops and canyon walls.

National forest and a 100,000-acre private inholding, the 30,000-acre Bandelier is administered by the National Park Service.

The ethical aspects of the Los Utes sale troubled me enough to arrange visits with Maynard Rost, supervisor of Santa Fe National Forest; Bud Stephenson, district ranger; Mike Morrison, timber staff officer; and Craig Allen, ecologist for nearby Bandelier.

None of the horror stories I had heard from environmentalists prepared me for the sight of a logging road punched straight up a "protected" watercourse. Skid trails headed off at right angles up 60-degree slopes to provide access to oldgrowth timber along the narrow canyon walls and ridge tops. Nothing I had seen anywhere compared to the way these skid trails had broken the thin organic soil mantle, leaving four-foot-deep channels ground down into the soft pumice.

Mike Morrison said, "There were some old skid trails and roads in here from a previous entry. Those had healed up pretty good, so they figured they could do it again. A new road higher upslope would have done even more damage. We should have required a skyline cable system if we were to log here at all."

Supervisor Rost said, "We won't defend what we did here. Looks like the skidder operator had to use his blade to brake himself while he hauled logs down to the deck below. Those skid roads are dangerous. We shouldn't have allowed him to take that chance. We messed up."

He added, "I asked for the regional forester to appoint a review team, because there was concern about an internal coverup."

Sitting beside sediment-clogged Capulin Creek, we tried to discuss the ethical aspects of Los Utes, but we constantly bogged down in the political, technical, and administrative details that dominate a forester's thinking these days.

Earlier loggers, for example, were guided by a silvicultural prescription called large tree selection. "But then," said Rost, "our silviculturist told us that it would be better for the forest if we managed smaller areas more intensively under what we call integrated stand management. And now we find that the public won't stand for that level of intensity, no matter what we say."

It seems that the decision-making world of today's forester results in political and administrative tunnel vision to the point where ethical questions of individual responsibility can become obscured. Though everyone present said they felt bad about Los Utes, no one could or would take individual responsibility, not just for this particular sale but also for its contribution to possible districtwide cumulative effects.

The Los Utes sale especially rankles long-time forest activists like Sam Hitt, head of a local group called Forest Guardians. Hitt told me, "Los Utes was not an accident. Bureaucracies bear the cultural imprint of their founders. We see a kind of institutional pathology here. When Gifford Pinchot imported German forestry to this country, he left behind its ethical soul, the German concept of guardianship. Today's Forest Service is a machine with no soul. It just cranks out plans and products-and bungled timber sales."

After 10 years of involvement with the Santa Fe Forest Plan, Hitt throws up his hands in disgust, "We environmentalists got sucked into the planning process, and we've been lost there ever since, just as the Forest Service intended."

Around 1.5 million years ago, the Jemez volcano exploded, leaving sensitive, fertile soils derived from a light, ashy rock called pumice. Such were the beginnings of the forested landscape we know today as the Jemez District of the Santa Fe National Forest: a good place for human activities (as the abundance of Indian artifacts suggests) and a good place to grow big trees, especially ponderosa pine, a primary commercial timber species. This is also the only home of the rare Jemez Mountain salamander, now proposed for listing as an oldgrowth-dependent endangered species.

With such values at stake, no one is taking any chances with these forests. Or are they? Forty years after Leopold's death, foresters have arrived at an impasse of increasing competence and decreasing confidence. We know more about what constitutes good forest practices, but we are less confident that what we are doing is right for the land-in the ethical way that Leopold meant "right. "

Sam Hitt's comments raise a perplexing question: "Whatever happened to Leopold's land ethic?" When I was in forestry school, we constantly heard the conventional wisdom that forestry is anything done in the woods, while silviculture is anything done to them. Our coursework had little to do with the value-laden work that is forestry today. Figuring that foresters were doers rather than thinkers, few of us bothered with the philosophy department, although courses about environmental ethics were offered there. Had we taken the time, we might have learned how to judge such ethical questions as, "what should be done in and to the woods?"

For a theoretical approach to environmental ethics, we might first turn to Leopold's The Land Ethic, where he writes, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

Another prominent philosopher of environmental ethics, Holmes Rolston, a professor at my alma mater, Colorado State University, builds on Leopold's ethic by pointing out, "Our ethical heritage largely attaches rights and values to persons, and if nonpersonal realms enter, they enter only as tributary to the personal. What is proposed [in Leopold] is a broadening of value, so that nature will cease to be merely property' and become a commonwealth."

To see intrinsic value and accompanying rights outside our own persons is to advance the ethical frontier. Over time we have progressively universalized the concept of "person" to include (among others) aliens, strangers, children, Blacks, jews, slaves, women, Indians, the deformed, fetuses. The next step seems simple, but simple ain't easy. Environmental ethics asks us to universalize intrinsic value to every ecobiotic component.

Rolston does not propose that we flash-freeze the present ecosystem. He allows for alteration, management, and use since what ought to be is obviously not always what is.

Rolston then goes a step further. For him the eco-bus is already leaving. Will foresters climb aboard or be left behind in the dust? Leopold's injunction to maximize ecosystemic excellences is an invitation to get in gear with the way the universe is already operating. Our choice is to go with the flow, so to speak, or to make the ethically wrong decision that impoverishes what tends to be rich. Evolutionary history tells us that nature has been enriching the ecosystem since the beginning. An environmental conscience evolves at this ethical frontier.

You be the judge. You-the typically informed and concerned reader of AMERICAN FOREST-are what philosophers call a kritikos, or "one able to judge." The question before you is to apply this high-mindedness to Los Utes.

Some background may help. In the 1970s environmentalists like Sam Hitt tried unsuccessfully to include most of Los Utes and the surrounding 11,000 acres-the Dome Diversity Unit (DDU)-in a wilderness proposal. Forest Service records show a history of roading and timber harvest in this DDU that was simply high-grading-taking the biggest and best of the oldgrowth yellow pine and leaving the rest. Although the visual impacts of such "silviculture" were light, it was not good sustained-yield forestry. These practices culminated in an immense sale of 65 million board-feet (MMBF) that in some cases destroyed

known archaeological sites.

In addition to salvage operations after fires and blowdowns (about 10 MMBF), there were three sales in the 1980s totaling about 11 MMBF. The net effect of the last 30 years of timber management has been at least 85 at what level? I asked the district ranger, Bud Stephenson, about this, and he said, "Sometimes our goal is just to reduce controversy. Things have changed in the Forest Service. We used to do what was best for the resource."

Mike Morrison added, "The decision to log Los Utes was made in 1981, before I got here. That was a long time ago in the Forest Service. I wouldn't do it that way again." Morrison also said he functions more as a planner than as a timber person, and his choice was either to monitor Los Utes himself or to work on producing the more than 7,000 pages of documentation that will make the next sale better. He chose the latter. The next sale will be done with a skyline cable system, he said.

I asked both Morrison and Stephenson if they were under pressure to meet hard timber targets, to get the cut out. Morrison said, "No, things have changed since that sale was planned. We don't treat this district as a tree farm. In my six years here, we have met our timber target only once. The gun I work under is to produce plans. We don't even talk volume anymore. We talk resource objectives. Forest plans have taken away the philosophy that timber is king."

Supervisor Rost agreed, saying, "Our annual target is 38 MMBF, if and only if we are funded for it. In my time on this forest, we have gotten only 60 percent of the funding requested for timber, so we have never achieved that volume of cut."

Morrison added, "Planners have led our publics to think we can be more accountable and able to do more analyses than we really can do. I'd have to say that our own can-do attitude trips us up sometimes."

Turnabout is fair play. I asked all three men how they felt about the ethics of their critics in the environmental community. Morrison said, "They are lying about the planning process in relation to Los Utes because their real goal is to stop all logging on the Jemez. As a government employee, I can't fight back. I know. I actually looked into it. If I were a private citizen, I would consider a libel action. "

Bud Stephenson said, "If they flat don't want logging, why don't they say so?"

And Maynard Rost added, "Our publics have changed. They come from the cities, and they see only short-term horizons. If they were educated in natural resources like us, we could talk better."

Returning to the specifics of Los Utes, I asked Bud Stephenson how an old skid trail became a road bladed through a creek bed.

He said, "How do you define creek bed? In 1981, our hydrologist saw it as an intermittent stream. Maybe we have a definitional problem here. No one has proved that the increased sedimentation was not natural, and anyway, if we made a mistake with that road, we will put it back together."

And Mike Morrison added, "As for those problematic skid trails, jute netting will stop those soils from moving, and then we will get regeneration from the grasses we'll sow in there."

Simple ain't easy. It is simple to say that what happened at Los Utes is wrong, both technically and ethically, but it is difficult to fix responsibility in a way that will result in better performance next time, which ought to be the goal of any ethical inquiry-just as an effective personnel-management system must have punishments as well as rewards. But an environmental ethics must also admit that in some cases-such as risks taken with poorly understood cumulative effects on forest diversity, with archaeological resources, or with endangered species-there can be no second chance.

Many of the problems at Los Utes resulted from a planning process that bears little relationship to what has gone on in the past, to what lies downstream physically or in the future), and to what actually goes on down on the ground when logging activities occur. The Forest Service has little money for or interest in monitoring the implementation of its plans, so it often reverts to old ways of doing business. When there is timber to be cut, hardly anyone knows or cares what the forest plan has to say. Forest Service personnel seem as numb to forestwide planning as they do to environmental ethics.

During research on this article, I was contacted by a whole subterranean ecosystem of Forest Service "deep roots," employees eager to tell me their version of Los Utes. As grateful as I am to them, I admire the Forest Service employees quoted for speaking frankly to the readers of AMERICAN FORESTS.

What have we learned from considering the ethical aspects of the Los Utes timber sale? The eco-bus is always leaving toward a richer, more diverse, more beautiful ecosystem. The question is, will foresters be aboard?

Latest Word on Los Utes

Since this article was written, a team appointed by Regional Forester Dave Jolly has issued its report on Los Utes, and the Forest Service has developed a plan of action to address the team's concerns. Copies are available from Fred Coe (Santa Fe National Forest, 5051988-6960).

Supervisor Maynard Rost has announced his transfer to the Gila National Forest (Aldo Leopold's old post). Bud Stephenson remains on the Santa Fe National Forest. Mike Morrison requested and received transfer to another forest.

The action plan:

* Admits confusion about the Forest Service's commitment to monitoring.

* Suggests considering transfer of the Dome Diversity Unit to Bandelier National Monument or to status as a National Recreation Area.

* Recommends that the Forest Service admit its mistakes quickly and inform the public that corrections are being made.

* Says to Forest Service employees, Use ecological commonsense, Consider ecological outcomes when reviewing shades-of-gray situations. (If we make a mistake, let's make it on the conservative side.)"