Land of Many Uses and Abuses

LOS ALTOS HILLS, CALIF. — To environmentalists, the prospects offered by President George Bush do not look rosy. There has not been an environmentally sensitive Republican Administration since the days of Theodore Roosevelt at the beginning of this century. Ronald Reagan had the worst environmental record of any President in U.S. history, and Bush was intimately associated with the Reagan policies for eight years.

Though he did support one or two clean-air moves, Bush also supported letting the automobile industry delay compliance with nitrogen oxide emission standards, opposed acid rain legislation, approved oil exploration in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, urged repeal of automobile fuel economy standards and backed Reagan’s veto of the Clean Water Act. He chaired three task forces that advocated letting the Environmental Protection Agency relax its phase-down of lead in gasoline, proposed easing EPA standards for hazardous waste facilities and suspended regulations restricting discharge of industrial toxins into sewers. The League of Conservation Voters, assessing Bush’s environmental record, gave him a D. Nearly every time the environment clashed with business profits during the 1980s, the environment lost--and George was there.

Nonetheless, as Reagan before him, Bush declares himself an environmentalist, and, in one statement, seemed to promise change: “I think for too long we’ve given the playing field away to the Democrats on the environment. I want to make the environment a Republican issue.”

That line may have been mere campaign rhetoric. It is without specifics and the emphasis on political advantage, on gaining environmental votes, does not display real concern for the planet’s irreplaceable and gravely threatened air, water and land resources.

Still, until he appoints the people who will carry out his policies, such declarations are all we have to judge whether Bush will deviate from the cowboy policies of his predecessor. Reagan is so dazzled by the entrepreneurial qualities that “won the West” that he cannot comprehend them as environmental rape. Conceivably Bush can. If he really means to put the GOP back into environmentalism--and make it the bipartisan concern it used to be and ought to be--what would a Californian and card-carrying environmentalist like me want to see him do?

It is like pulling on a slippery wishbone. But let us pull, and wish.

I would like to see Bush throw his weight--and bring to his side a large constituency that is suspicious--against oil exploration in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge and oil drilling off the California coast. To make that change, he would have to clean house in the Department of the Interior, from the secretary on down.

As long as we are wishing, why not wish that, for his Interior secretary, Bush appointed someone like Bruce Babbitt of Arizona who, though a Democrat, knows more and cares more about the environment than anyone in Interior since 1980? And what a splendid way to make the Democrats forget the late campaign.

I would like to see him reverse Reagan policy and do something about acid rain--and here Bush has been specific in saying he will. I would like to see on his desk, signed, the Desert Protection Act, rescuing 12,000 square miles of California from careless and often irreparable damage. I would like him to push for wilderness legislation in Utah, Idaho and other states where Reagan’s sagebrush rebel friends have been holding it up. I would like to see him give the EPA back the teeth Reagan pulled.

Finally, as a high priority, I would like to see him work with Congress to bring the National Forest Service, once a bureau with high motives and morale, back into the service of the public. In that bureau’s history he will find some stirring examples of Republican activism on behalf of the environment.

For the national forests are primarily a GOP accomplishment. They were born out of the nation’s horrified reaction to the unauthorized logging that left Michigan a stump patch and sent the pine areas of Wisconsin and Minnesota down the Mississippi as lumber rafts bigger than football fields. Most of that lumber came off the public domain; few ever got a permit to cut it, few paid for what they cut. In one lifetime, Dvan Zaslowsky says in “These American Lands,” we deforested an area the size of Europe.

To save something before it all went, Congress, in 1891, authorized the President to set aside forest reserves from the public domain. Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, promptly reserved 13 million acres. Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, made the process bipartisan by reserving another 20 million. It remained for Republican Theodore Roosevelt to do the most, with a total of 80 million acres.

When the furious timber industry forced through Congress a law forbidding any more such reservations without the legislature’s consent, Roosevelt and his chief forester Gifford Pinchot sat up all night; only after he had put away a final 16 million acres did Roosevelt sign the bill preventing him from doing so.

That principled balking of a powerful group could be an inspiration to Bush, if he let it. For since the 1950s, the Forest Service has been snuggling up to the timber industry it was created to guard against, ignoring or minimizing the other uses it is bound by law to promote.

In the Forest Organic Act of 1897, the national forests were charged with protecting watersheds and guaranteeing a future supply of timber. Grazing almost immediately asserted itself as an established use. Recreation--including fishing, hunting, hiking, camping, climbing, solitude and spiritual refreshment--also had to be accommodated. Visits to the national forests were fairly constant at about 10 million a year until World War II. After the war they went up and up. By 1975, 190 million visits a year were recorded, and now national forests draw more recreational visitors than national parks.

Use was always foremost in Pinchot’s mind-- wise use, benefiting the greatest number over the longest time. The bureau he created has consistently differentiated itself by that criterion from the National Park Service, which it sees as preservationist. That is why, in national forests, the signs say “Land of Many Uses.” In fact, the Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1959 put those various uses into law, listing them alphabetically to emphasize their equal importance: outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed and wildlife and fish habitat. To those was added wilderness preservation. As long as the cut in the national forests was minimal, the uses did not significantly clash. But as private forest lands were cut over, demand for timber from the national forests grew. Since 1950, it has grown steeply, and the practice of clear-cutting--skinning whole mountainsides--increased as well. The symbiosis of the Forest Service and timber industry became even closer, until, in the Reagan Administration, an industry executive was directing the national forests.

While demand for the public’s timber grew, and was met by a compliant Forest Service--even at sales far below cost--the demand for other stipulated uses also became more urgent. The bureau’s foresters felt besieged. They were halfhearted about wilderness studies forced on them because they did not subscribe to the preservationist philosophy they saw behind wilderness. Too often, they overlooked or evaded the intent of the law setting six equal uses. When a Wilderness Society forester examined the 1985 budget, he found resource development and exploitation items (timber sales, minerals and grazing) totaled $600 million. Resource stewardship items (soil, water, watershed, wildlife and fish habitat, recreation and land acquisition) totaled $170 million. Not exactly equal.

The same bias toward timber sales and the expensive roading that makes logging possible (and forestalls wilderness designation), is apparent in plans mandated by the National Forest Management Act of 1976. Those plans will set the pattern for every forest for the next 50 years. Almost every draft has come under attack from environmental groups for the increased cutting and heavy roading proposed.

In most forests, roading and management costs exceed money obtained from sales. With Forest Service help, the public subsidizes the timber industry. Congress itself is to blame for the $50 million annual subsidy to loggers in Alaska’s Tongass Forest, guaranteeing them a rich profit while they devastate--largely for Japan’s benefit--one of the few remaining temperate-zone rain forests.

The bureau must move toward the multiple use it has given mainly lip service to. It must be brought to serve the public good, not that of the loggers. For roading and clear-cutting do harm the watersheds, spoil the scenery, harm the wildlife habitat, destroy the wilderness, fill the spawning streams with eroding silt. And those things matter more, to more people, than the 16% of our lumber that comes from the national forests.

These forests are for use, but not a single destructive use. If the greatest good to the greatest number over the longest time is still the criterion, then the Forest Service needs to be remodeled and given a broader and more humane mandate.

The opportunity is in Bush’s hands.