Mike Dombeck
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
November 10, 1997

I am pleased to speak with you today and honored to be named Adjunct Professor on the Faculty at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. I would like to thank Dean Gordon and the Board of Permanent Officers for their kind recognition.

Growing up in the great north woods of Wisconsin and beginning my career as a fisheries biologist in the national forests of Michigan and Wisconsin, I never dreamed that I would one day become Chief of the Forest Service. Many colleagues, including my friend Jack Ward Thomas, told me this was perhaps the most difficult job in Washington.

It is easy to understand the reason for my friends’ warning. From conflicts between development and conservation to the imperative of preserving endangered species while helping local communities adapt to changing social and economic conditions, the challenges of this job are formidable. But I like to take the long view.

The debate over how to manage this nation’s great forests began well over a century ago. In response to public outrage over the devastation of forests in the Great Lakes and a growing concern over flooding and the need to protect watersheds, Congress passed the Organic Administration Act of 1897. Through the Organic Act, which called for the protection and regulation of water flows and a sustainable supply of timber from national forests, the United States became the first country to set aside vast tracts of land for public use and conservation.

Decades later, Congress would act with similar foresight in passing the Clean Air and Water acts, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environment Policy Act and the National Forest Management Act.

In the hundred years since passage of the Organic Act, several generations of Americans have come to view conservation as less a political issue than a matter of public trust. This helps to explain why so many people feel so passionate about stewardship of public resources.

Endangered species issues make the headlines of national newspapers. Water use and conservation are pre-eminent issues for everyone from local planning boards to elected senators. Indeed, conservation has moved from a "special interest" to a national priority.

The unprecedented interest in, and scrutiny of, public land management have prompted proposals to limit public involvement, diminish endangered species protection, even to divest public lands from public ownership. The reason I take the long view is because the controversy surrounding management of our national forests is not new. Democracy rests on a foundation of open debate and public discourse. Our collective challenge – as resource professionals, educators, legislators, and communicators – is to find ways to involve more people, to provide cleaner water, and to make decisions that afford even greater protection of our natural resource heritage.

Addressing these challenges will not, cannot, be accomplished overnight. Only by forming coalitions among communities, elected officials, conservationists and industry groups can we address our central challenge: to understand that we simply cannot meet the needs of people without first securing the health of the land.

Taking the long view, however, does not allow for complacency. The urgency of maintaining and restoring the health of the land must be our overriding priority; failing this, nothing else we do really matters.

Consider:

• How much could we reduce municipal water treatment costs and property damage from floods if all our forested watersheds performed their basic functions – capturing, storing and safely releasing clean water?
• How much more forage would be available for wildlife and livestock if noxious, exotic weeds did not blanket many public rangelands?
• How much more healthy, productive, and diverse would our forests be if they were not subject to increasing levels of insect and disease or to unnaturally large, stand destroying wildfires?

These questions can only be answered by not allowing poor stewardship to diminish the land’s productive capacity.

About now you should be wondering what, if anything this talk has to do with its title, "To See the Forest for the Watershed." Well, for many years, we in the Forest Service "saw the forest for the trees." The production of commodities – primarily timber – drove our budgets, our priorities, and our reward system. This must, and is, changing. In the past ten years, timber harvest on Forest Service managed lands has gone from approximately 11 billion board feet to four billion, in part because of public controversy. Between 1988 and 1996, the area harvested by clearcutting dropped by 80%. Over the same period, clearcutting has declined as the preferred method of timber harvest by over two-thirds, from 39to 12%

Other uses of national forests are growing rapidly. For example, in 1980, 560 million recreational visits were made to national forests. That figure grew to about 860 million by 1996. Today, recreation on Forest Service managed lands contributes $112 billion dollars to state economies and local communities each year. Nationally, recreation and tourism provide a trade surplus of $22 billion dollars; the country’s single largest positive trade sector. These trends represent some of the major changes in public expectations and use of our nation’s public forests and grasslands.

Our record of commodity production, is not something to be ashamed of. Timber from Forest Service lands helped to win World War II and to build homes for returning service men and their families. It fueled the industrial growth of this nation. It helped to sustain economies and resource dependent communities. It helped the United States become a society of single-family homes. But our management priorities must keep pace with both our scientific knowledge of ecological systems and society’s values.

Today, I instruct my Forest service employees to "see the forest for the watershed." The production of commodities such as timber will remain an important use of national forest lands. But as I said earlier, we cannot allow production to diminish the land’s productive capacity. Nor can we allow our traditional incentives or budget processes to impede proper silviculture, or range management, or watershed restoration. We must work within the limits of the land.

Healthy watersheds retain flows and are resilient in the face of natural events such as floods, fire, and drought and more capable of absorbing the effects of human-induced disturbances. They recharge underground aquifers. They connect headwaters to downstream areas, wetlands and riparian areas to uplands, and subsurface to surface flows. Floods may then dissipate across floodplains increasing soil fertility and minimizing damage to lives, property, and the stream course.

The benefits of maintaining and restoring healthy watersheds are well documented in a forthcoming book, Watershed Restoration: Principles and Practices, due for release by the American Fisheries Society in several weeks. The book repeats the same message again and again. There is no limit to the good that public and state agencies, local communities, academia, and conservationists can do when they come together in the interest of maintaining and restoring healthy watersheds. .

Written and edited by Jack Williams of the Bureau of Land Management, Chris Wood of the Forest Service, and myself, the book documents multiple case-studies where people have come together to conserve and restore the health of the land that sustains us all. Most of these efforts developed locally; all involve landowners, farmers, and ranchers working in partnership with scientists, environmentalists, government agencies, and a host of local citizens.

People working together to restore their lands and waters; if you help them, this is where you will find your greatest challenges and rewards as resource professionals. Given your training, it should not be too difficult to plan a timber harvest, to conduct a fish survey, to re-seed an old road. What is really difficult is to bring together and place those activities within a shared vision of healthy lands and waters.

There are many reasons to see our forests for our watersheds. We all live within a watershed and all of our actions on the land are reflected by their health. Watersheds are the basic building blocks of ecosystems and of sound resource stewardship.

Without improving the ability of our watersheds to perform their most basic functions, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the costs of increased water treatment over the next fifteen years could exceed $140 billion dollars. Closer to Yale, New York City recently estimated that filtration costs for drinking water from the Delaware River basin would range from $8-15 billion dollars – while only filtering out half of the targeted pollutants.

The message is clear. We cannot meet the needs of present or future generations without first sustaining the health of the land. And, conversely, we cannot secure the health of the land without the support of the people who live on it.

Our most important task is to manage our ecosystems – public and private using the best science and technologies available – in ways that utilize our resources without jeopardizing the opportunity for future generations to have healthy, diverse, and productive lands. This is the essence of sound stewardship.

As more Americans move to urban and suburban environments – approximately 80% of the American people live in towns and cities – they become increasingly disconnected from the land. This trend has profound social and ecological consequences. For example:

• Crime is higher in urban areas without a natural resource base than those with urban forests, parks, and riverside greenways.
• Drinking water and storm-water treatment costs increase exponentially when forests, floodplains, wetlands, and streamside corridors are over-developed.
• Air quality in urban areas is significantly diminished when urban forests are lost.

The author Barry Lopez has a wonderful quote that I think perfectly captures both the social and ecological values of restoration. He says:

Lopez’s quote is particularly relevant today. For many years, our nation’s approach to conservation was based on the premise that we must protect the best of what remains, as Aldo Leopold would say, "to save all the parts." Progressive actions and laws such as the creation of the national forest system, the preservation of wilderness areas, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and the Antiquities Act reflect such an approach.

Though they have served us well and are emulated the world over, these are not enough. We must do more. We know today that we cannot simply preserve our national parks and by extension hope to protect our natural resource heritage. We cannot afford to manage our national forests in isolation of other federal, state, and private lands. We must work in partnership with others to link our communities’ neighborhood creeks and tree-lined streets to the sea-bound rivers, state and national parks and forests.

If ever there was a nation with the technology, the resources, and the will to heal their lands and waters, this is it.

The community watershed restorations such as those depicted in Watershed Restoration herald a new era. An era that will be marked by state and federal agencies working hand-in-hand with interested landowners, and local communities to restore our forests, rangelands, and watersheds. In an era of government downsizing, it is essential that less federal funding does not result in less conservation. Two restoration efforts speak to the value of partnerships and the importance of working with diverse interests.

Three thousand miles separate the heavily urbanized Anacostia River watershed – the downstream reach of which flows through the nation’s capital – from the more rural Mattole watershed in northern California. The Anacostia has been called one of the most polluted rivers in the country; the ecosystem robbed of its most basic functions by channelization, riparian and wetland loss, forest removal, sewer overflows, and other pollution.

The headwaters of the Mattole begin in the King Range among stands of coastal redwoods and flow through Douglas-fir and hardwood forests before emptying into the Pacific Ocean near Petrolia, California.

Following World War II, more than 90% of the watershed’s old growth coniferous forests were logged and an extensive road network developed. Little reforestation was attempted. As a result, by 1980, erosion rates in the watershed exceeded the typical rate of soil formation by more than two orders of magnitude.

The fact that land use practices and past management actions degraded the two river systems is not unusual. Through the Clean water Act, we have in many places reduced point sources of pollution from industry and municipalities. Yet, we still have a long way to go to restore the health of our lands and waters. For example, fewer than two percent of the rivers and streams in the contiguous 48 states remain in a "high quality state." In a forthcoming report, The Nature Conservancy documents that over 40% of our fish and amphibian species are at risk of extinction. This is particularly alarming, as aquatic species are excellent indicators of watershed health.

What links the Mattole and the Anacostia is that restoration efforts in both watersheds are bringing people together to restore their lands and waters, and through the process of restoration are healing their communities themselves.

As a Ph.D., who spent several years doing research, I know that scientific research and study is often slow and painstaking but it is absolutely essential to good stewardship. From a practical standpoint, given the increased scrutiny of, and concern for, national forest management if our plans are not based on the best available science, they will not pass legal muster.

Although I believe that most of our challenges are less technical than they are social, we do have significant scientific hurdles. The application of the social sciences to forest and rangeland management, for example, – actually all natural resource management – is limited.

We need to better understand how local, regional, even international economies drive how people use the land. We need to find more effective ways to display: the economic values of recreation opportunities on national forests; the intrinsic value of undeveloped forests; and the social values afforded to families and local communities by the very presence of public lands. We must find ways to help struggling resource-dependent communities to diversify their economies and to put displaced workers back to work restoring their forests.

A second formidable challenge is expanding our scientific analysis from small areas over limited periods of time to larger scales that include river basins and extend through decades. Through examples in the Appalachians, the Pacific Northwest, and the Columbia River Basin we are learning the value of taking the long view.

Finally, we must develop methodologies for measuring the health of our watersheds. It is one thing to agree as resource professionals that a successful restoration is accomplished when 1) ecosystem structure and function are repaired and 2) natural ecosystem processes operate unimpeded. It is another challenge altogether to determine, fund, and commit to measuring concepts such as ecosystem structure and function over time

Like the barn raisings of old, community-based restorations reconnect people to the land that sustains them. By no means are collaborative watershed approaches a panacea to resolving difficult resource issues. We need the help of Congress to make the annual appropriation process an opportunity to make investments in the land. We need the assistance of the Administration to remind the American people of conservation’s national imperative. We need the participation, support, and honest criticism of citizens. Most important, we, the nation’s oldest federal conservation organization, must deliver on our basic mission of caring for the land and serving people.

But collaborative watershed restoration efforts do provide a new framework for moving beyond the polarization of the debate that too often permeates Washington, D.C. In closing I will restate the findings of Watershed Restoration: Principles and Practices. Successful watershed coalitions:

• Must be balanced among the full array of watershed users and other interests.
• They should identify a scientifically based vision or a collective goal for conserving or restoring healthy ecosystems.
• Finally, they must know that collaboration is a process not an outcome. It should never be used to abrogate decision-making responsibility – whether it rests with federal, state or private landowners. The measure of success of any community-based approach is better decisions on the land and improved working relationships among interests. Effective, long and short-term monitoring is essential.

We can do no less. The American people expect no less. Our collective efforts to restore the health of our lands and waters reflects our nation’s inherent optimism – a belief that ours is a way of life worth passing on, that we respect the gifts of our forebears, and that we are surely leaving a better place for those we know will follow. And, as Aldo Leopold might have said, the basic requirements of membership in the land community.

Author: (Contact) Chris Wood , 202-205-1083

Publish_date: 11-10-97