The public forests of tomorrow - forest predictions for the 21st century

American Forests, Sept-Oct, 1992 by Carl Reidel

I've always enjoyed speculating about the future. It's a delightful mental exercise that sharpens our imaginations and creative abilities. And though it can be a serious exercise, an active sense of humor is almost essential. Overly serious computer model builders should not attempt it without supervision.

During the past year, at various gatherings celebrating the centennial of the 1891 law that created the national forests, I was asked to speculate about the future of these public lands. I defended my fanciful prognosticating as a worthwhile exercise to help us discover how some seemingly insignificant short-term issues may prove very important a century hence. It's sort of like sighting in a rifle. A very small variance in the line of sight will make a huge difference in the point of impact at 100 yards.

And you have to pay attention to outside influences. The winds of change often blow softly, but they can alter things surprisingly far off in the future. Who, for example, would have thought that a 22-year-old naturalist who set sail for the South Pacific in 1831 would change the way we perceived the natural world and ourselves? Not even Darwin himself could have dreamed how important his travels on the Beagle would become.

So, let me do a bit of prophesying in the hope that you will be provoked to envision your own fantasy for the national forests a century hence. And in the process, hopefully, you'll reexamine your assumptions about the purposes of these public lands and the forces now shaping their future.

THE PAST IS PRELUDE

FIRST, CONSIDER WHAT THESE PLACES CALLED THE NATIONAL FORESTS WERE LIKE IN 1890. THAT MIGHT GIVE US SOME HINTS AS TO WHAT THE CRITICAL INFLUENCES MIGHT BE WHEN WE ZOOM PAST THE PRESENT INTO THE LAST DECADE OF THE 21ST CENTURY.

Most of the areas that are now national forests were uninhabited public lands (and actually still are, a very rare situation in this crowded world!). There was almost no logging, except in those areas in the East that would be purchased later in the next century. There was some unregulated livestock grazing, few controls on the consumptive use of wildfire, and no exotic insects or diseases. In terms of air, water, and soil pollution, these lands were almost pristine landscapes compared to the present. They were largely inaccessible ecosystems in a relatively natural state with a far wider range of biological diversity than exists today.

There were no engineered roads; few trails; no improved campgrounds, toilets, showers, fences, lookout towers, signs, information centers, forest plans, Environmental Impact Statements, handbooks, timber sale appraisals, or rangers; in sum, no national forests.

And, as painful as it may be for those of us who have served in the Forest Service to acknowledge, these lands were in far better shape than they are today. The reasons they were in better shape before they were designated national forests are not, however, as obvious as some critics of the Forest Service might claim. Without a doubt, these lands would be in far worse shape today if Gilford Pinchot hadn't "invented" the Forest Service.

The reasons for their systematic exploitation are to be found mostly outside the forest boundaries in a complex, yet immature, urbanizing society with an insatiable need for natural resources. In 1892 we were about as far from the Civil War as we are today from the Vietnam War. We were an isolationist nation with little interest in world politics (as some say we still are in 1992). The frontier had just officially been closed, and we were looking to science for new horizons.

There was virtually no regulation of the economy, although the Grangers and Populist William Jennings Bryan were arguing for a graduated income tax, labor laws, sound money, control of railroads and communications, and popular election of the Senate. It was a roller-coaster, bust-and-boom economy in which no one paid income or sales taxes and millionaires were being created by new technology, the exploitation of natural resources, and the cheap labor of children, women, and immigrants.

Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller had total monopolies on steel and oil production and never paid a cent of personal taxes. Most of the nation's energy, food, transportation, and communications were totally controlled by private corporations with no public regulation of product quality, worker health and safety, or resources exploitation and environmental pollution.

We can now look back and see the beginning of the build-up of atmospheric [CO.sub.2] and the beginnings of declining biodiversity worldwide. Passenger pigeons were still flying, but were already doomed to extinction. From a population numbering in the billions, the species dwindled to just one; it died in a zoo in 1914. While the future national forests were fairly free of pollution, America's cities and society were in sad shape.

The cities were knee-deep in horse dung, with open sewers, unsafe drinking water, severe local air pollution from coal and wood smoke, rampant bacterial pollution, and wholly inadequate health care. There was defacto slavery for blacks, Native Americans, women, children, and the elderly. No women and few minority persons voted.