[House Hearing, 107 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]



 
               PROCESS GRIDLOCK ON THE NATIONAL FORESTS
=======================================================================


                           OVERSIGHT HEARING

                               before the

                      SUBCOMMITTEE ON FORESTS AND
                             FOREST HEALTH

                                 of the

                         COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES
                     U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                      ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS

                             SECOND SESSION

                               __________

                             June 12, 2002

                               __________

                           Serial No. 107-126

                               __________

           Printed for the use of the Committee on Resources






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                         COMMITTEE ON RESOURCES

                    JAMES V. HANSEN, Utah, Chairman
       NICK J. RAHALL II, West Virginia, Ranking Democrat Member

Don Young, Alaska,                   George Miller, California
  Vice Chairman                      Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts
W.J. ``Billy'' Tauzin, Louisiana     Dale E. Kildee, Michigan
Jim Saxton, New Jersey               Peter A. DeFazio, Oregon
Elton Gallegly, California           Eni F.H. Faleomavaega, American 
John J. Duncan, Jr., Tennessee           Samoa
Joel Hefley, Colorado                Neil Abercrombie, Hawaii
Wayne T. Gilchrest, Maryland         Solomon P. Ortiz, Texas
Ken Calvert, California              Frank Pallone, Jr., New Jersey
Scott McInnis, Colorado              Calvin M. Dooley, California
Richard W. Pombo, California         Robert A. Underwood, Guam
Barbara Cubin, Wyoming               Adam Smith, Washington
George Radanovich, California        Donna M. Christensen, Virgin 
Walter B. Jones, Jr., North              Islands
    Carolina                         Ron Kind, Wisconsin
Mac Thornberry, Texas                Jay Inslee, Washington
Chris Cannon, Utah                   Grace F. Napolitano, California
John E. Peterson, Pennsylvania       Tom Udall, New Mexico
Bob Schaffer, Colorado               Mark Udall, Colorado
Jim Gibbons, Nevada                  Rush D. Holt, New Jersey
Mark E. Souder, Indiana              Anibal Acevedo-Vila, Puerto Rico
Greg Walden, Oregon                  Hilda L. Solis, California
Michael K. Simpson, Idaho            Brad Carson, Oklahoma
Thomas G. Tancredo, Colorado         Betty McCollum, Minnesota
J.D. Hayworth, Arizona
C.L. ``Butch'' Otter, Idaho
Tom Osborne, Nebraska
Jeff Flake, Arizona
Dennis R. Rehberg, Montana

                      Tim Stewart, Chief of Staff
           Lisa Pittman, Chief Counsel/Deputy Chief of Staff
                Steven T. Petersen, Deputy Chief Counsel
                    Michael S. Twinchek, Chief Clerk
                 James H. Zoia, Democrat Staff Director
               Jeffrey P. Petrich, Democrat Chief Counsel
                                 ------                                

               SUBCOMMITTEE ON FORESTS AND FOREST HEALTH

                   SCOTT McINNIS, Colorado, Chairman
            JAY INSLEE, Washington, Ranking Democrat Member

John J. Duncan, Jr., Tennessee       Dale E. Kildee, Michigan
John E. Peterson, Pennsylvania,      Tom Udall, New Mexico
  Vice Chairman                      Mark Udall, Colorado
Mark E. Souder, Indiana              Rush D. Holt, New Jersey
Michael K. Simpson, Idaho            Anibal Acevedo-Vila, Puerto Rico
Thomas G. Tancredo, Colorado         Betty McCollum, Minnesota
J.D. Hayworth, Arizona
C.L. ``Butch'' Otter, Idaho
                                 ------                                














                            C O N T E N T S

                              ----------                              
                                                                   Page

Hearing held on June 12, 2002....................................     1

Statement of Members:
    Hansen, Hon. James V., a Representative in Congress from the 
      State of Utah..............................................     6
        Prepared statement of....................................     8
    Hayworth, Hon. J.D., a Representative in Congress from the 
      State of Arizona...........................................     4
    Inslee, Hon. Jay, a Representative in Congress from the State 
      of Washington..............................................     1
    McInnis, Hon. Scott, a Representative in Congress from the 
      State of Colorado..........................................    10
        Prepared statement of....................................    11
    Otter, Hon. C.L. ``Butch'', a Representative in Congress from 
      the State of Idaho.........................................     5
    Tancredo, Hon. Thomas G., a Representative in Congress from 
      the State of Colorado......................................     2
    Udall, Hon. Mark, a Representative in Congress from the State 
      of Colorado................................................     9
    Udall, Hon. Tom, a Representative in Congress from the State 
      of New Mexico..............................................     3

Statement of Witnesses:
    Bosworth, Dale, Chief, Forest Service, U.S. Department of 
      Agriculture................................................    12
        Prepared statement of....................................    15

Additional materials supplied:
    U.S. Forest Service Report ``The Process Predicament'' 
      submitted for the record...................................    37
    McCormick, Mary, Staff Assistant to the Deputy Chief for 
      Research and Development, Forest Service, U.S. Department 
      of Agriculture, Article from The Oregonian submitted for 
      the record.................................................    62













     OVERSIGHT HEARING ON PROCESS GRIDLOCK ON THE NATIONAL FORESTS

                              ----------                              


                        Wednesday, June 12, 2002

                     U.S. House of Representatives

               Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health

                         Committee on Resources

                             Washington, DC

                              ----------                              

    The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10 a.m., in room 
1334, Longworth House Office Building, Hon. Scott McInnis 
[Chairman of the Subcommittee] presiding.
    Mr. Hansen. [presiding.] The Committee will come to order. 
I am hesitant to start this meeting as the Chairman of the full 
Committee, but we understand that Mr. McInnis, the Subcommittee 
Chair, is coming down from Bethesda right now and is hurrying 
down here. Possibly if the colleagues on the Committee wouldn't 
mind if it would be a good time to give our opening statements 
before we turn to Chief Bosworth, and with that in mind I turn 
to the Ranking Member, Mr. Inslee from Washington.

  STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE JAY INSLEE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN 
             CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF WASHINGTON

    Mr. Inslee. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thanks for joining us 
Chief. We are always glad to have you here. Mr. McInnis has 
been very involved in the fire efforts in Colorado, too. He has 
been a busy guy recently. We hope that your agency is doing the 
best possible in that regard and good luck in that regard. I 
may parenthetically, I think there is some bad news out there 
for future fires with the global warming prospect that we face. 
There is a new report out about the potential droughts that we 
face in the west. I am afraid that we might be in for a few 
decades of this until we get a handle on global warming.
    I look forward to your testimony today. I would just make a 
couple comments briefly about it. One of the things that 
strikes me on this topic of management and efficiency and 
decisionmaking in the Forest Service, if you step back from it, 
it looks to me like one of the things that has driven this 
issue is that essentially, we have had a bit of change of 
mission in the Forest Service in the last couple of decades and 
that we have been going through a culture shift, both 
nationally and in the Forest Service that are associated with 
our laws, and that is a transition from looking at our forests 
predominantly for resource extraction industries to now valuing 
and representing and using the other good assets and resources 
of the forests for recreation and good quality water and open 
space and habitat for wildlife.
    And it strikes me that this shift we are still in the 
process of doing that to reach a new balance in our forests. 
And in that process, I don't think it is surprising that we 
have had controversy in that regard, that there has been 
questions about the right decisionmaking and that there has 
been litigation when the Forest Service is not, at least 
according to some citizens view, following the law. I don't 
think it is surprising that we have had controversy about the 
decisionmaking in the Forest Service as we have gone through 
this cultural shift.
    Second thing I want to say, I think there are a lot of 
things, and I look forward to your testimony that the Forest 
Service can be doing, even absent legislation to ease this 
decisionmaking, because I really believe, and I have seen it up 
in the northwest where if the Forest Service decides to listen 
to the public and listen to the values the local public has 
been advocating, they can avoid a lot of controversy.
    Let me give you an example. By moving away from some of the 
controversial old growth proposed timber sales in the 
northwest, down the lower slopes of newer growth thinning 
operations where we can have cuts that are noncontroversial. It 
is a management decision, I think the Forest Service can and 
should be making, and we look forward to talking with you about 
how to do that, and perhaps even from a legislative standpoint 
about how to make those type of transitions. I look forward to 
your thoughts about how we move in those directions. But bottom 
line is, I think we will come out of this hearing with a 
finding that listening to the public will help us get over a 
lot of these problems, and of course, that is something we will 
be talking about the roadless rule with you too in that regard. 
Thank you, Chief, and thank you Mr. Chair.
    Mr. Hansen. Gentleman from Colorado, Mr. Tancredo.

STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE THOMAS G. TANCREDO, A REPRESENTATIVE 
             IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF COLORADO

    Mr. Tancredo. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There is little that 
can actually focus one's attention on this kind of a problem 
like an 80,000 acre blaze going on in one State as we sit here 
and speak today. People perhaps don't understand exactly what 
that really means putting it in perspective for people who live 
out here. 87,000 acres, which is what we have now is twice--is 
actually 135.9 square miles, which is about twice the area of 
Washington, D.C. That is what is involved in one blaze so far 
in Colorado, and there are, of course, several others that are 
ongoing. This is an incredibly tragic situation, caused, we 
believe, by a careless campfire being unattended. Out of every 
single tragedy, there is something that we can hope for in the 
way of a positive development.
    In this particular case, I think it is perhaps going to be 
helpful--this congregation is going to be helpful in getting 
people to the table and understanding that there are ways in 
which these kinds of fires can be dealt with, can be minimized. 
We will always, of course, have and should, of course, have 
fires. They are healthy part of the ecosystem. But these kinds 
of fires, fires we are talking about here, the ones we had just 
in the recent past, Hi Meadow, Buffalo Creek, Snaking Fire, 
these are not healthy fires. These are fires that do far more 
damage to the ground and the surrounding ecology than would 
have been the case if it had been able to be a fire burning in 
more of a natural surrounding, that is to say, in a less 
densely forested area.
    And the way in which that better management policy can be 
developed, better management of forests can be developed is 
through cooperative effort on your part and ours what we can do 
to help you overcome the inertia that exists within the agency.
    That is what I want to hear today, and I am hoping that you 
are going to be able to help us figure out what we can do to 
move away some of the obstacles that prevent the analysis 
paralysis that we have heard so much about. I think the concept 
of charter forests is one way to attack that problem, greater 
flexibility to the forests management idea and operation.
    But I am interested in knowing what you will tell us about 
that. And it is fascinating, I have a picture here of the High 
Meadow fire and where it burned and where it stopped in 
Colorado, and something I am going to pass along here to my 
colleagues. If anybody is still questioning whether or not 
management, forest management can work in order to minimize the 
destructiveness of these kinds of fires, this is, I think, 
proof positive that it can be done. Where the forests had been 
thinned, where we had been working, we saw the fire line stop 
almost immediately. You know the fire came out of the tree 
tops, burned lower to the ground and eventually put itself out.
    We know it can happen. We know we can do it and that is the 
most disconcerting thing. We know how to manage forests a lot 
better. The problem is that extreme environmentalists on one 
side and bureaucratic inertia on the other have prevented us 
from doing so. That is just my observation at this time. And I 
would sincerely appreciate, and I am certainly glad you are 
here today to give us your observation.
    And the last thing that I would like you to comment on is 
the proposal I introduced last night to increase fines for 
people who do, in fact, start campfires in areas where they 
should not. Believe this or not, the first night of the Hayman 
fire when helicopters were taking water into the fire, they 
overflew seven other camp fires in the same area. When some of 
these people were contacted, they were willing to sort of chip 
in the five bucks a piece to pay the 25 dollar fine. So I would 
like to hear your comments on that too.
    Mr. McInnis. [presiding.] I will keep it real tight on the 
opening statements because I want you to have an opportunity.

   STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE TOM UDALL, A REPRESENTATIVE IN 
             CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO

    Mr. Udall of New Mexico. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me, 
first of all, just say that to my colleagues in Colorado that I 
know what you are experiencing. We had the Cerro Grande fire 
and a number of fires in New Mexico in 2000. As your fires rage 
right now, we have thousands and thousands of acres also 
burning. So we are once again in a fire situation that is out 
of control on this. And as the Chief knows, these catastrophic 
fires are a different kind of fire. I mean, you talk to the 
incident commanders and they say they haven't seen fires rage 
like this. They have their own weather conditions and they burn 
in a way that is out of control and it is something we really 
need to tackle.
    And I guess my message to you, Chief, and you know this, 
but to the public, is this is a long-term situation. We need to 
commit the resources over the long term to make sure this is 
done. We are not going to get out of the conditions that my 
colleague from Colorado talked about in a couple of years. I 
mean, we have gotten into this situation over 100 years and it 
is going to take us quite awhile to get out of it, so we need 
to have that long-term commitment. And once again, my 
sympathies to Colorado and what you all are going through.
    Mr. McInnis. Thank you.
    Mr. Hayworth?

 STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE J.D. HAYWORTH, A REPRESENTATIVE IN 
               CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF ARIZONA

    Mr. Hayworth. I thank you, Mr. Chairman, and my colleagues 
and Chief, we welcome you today and we thank you for coming 
down to visit with us during the course of this hearing. Mr. 
Chairman, my colleagues, it strikes me that someone may join us 
via television. Aside from the obvious anguish of the fires 
that we see in the west might be worth going into some 
background just to point out that so much of the land in the 
west belongs to the Federal Government.
    So, for example, Gila County, Arizona, 97 percent of the 
county owned by some governmental entity, not all the Federal 
Government, but still, when you consider that roughly 3 percent 
of the county is private property, it is problematic because 
when you are dealing with questions of what might be called in 
an urban setting, zoning or property management, in the western 
United States, the landlord in many cases is the Federal 
Government.
    And I would second the comments of my colleagues today as 
we are dealing and confronting with the fire danger. Chief, we 
pointed out and as fires rage in southern Arizona, perhaps not 
as dramatic, but certainly as devastating in our own way what 
we are seeing right now in Colorado, I think it is important to 
reiterate that we have seen what has been characterized here as 
a rather elegant politically scientific term of bureaucratic 
inertia. And translate it to everyday language, that is, folks 
in government service choosing through delaying tactics not to 
carry out the will of the people and constitutional officers 
and sometimes by delay, subverting the law of the land.
    The challenge we confront on the fires is obviously one 
that in terms of public policy triage is front and center. But 
there are other issues that emerge, Mr. Chairman, and I think 
next week we will hold a hearing to go more in-depth on the New 
Education Land Grant Act, which we passed unanimously through 
this House, which was passed by the Senate and signed into law 
by President Clinton on December 28 of the year 2000.
    And I think Mr. Chairman, in my opening statement, I would 
be remiss if I didn't point out a perfect example of the type 
of bureaucratic inertia and the type of change in culture we 
need to see in the Forest Service that is long overdue. We put 
together a conference in Phoenix in the fall of last year for 
Arizona school districts that were interested in applying for 
land conveyances under the New Education Land Grant Act to 
convey nonenvironmentally tale sensitive public land at a low 
cost to these districts.
    I have to report to this Committee, and again, I will go 
more in-depth next week in the hearing, the conference was met 
with major resistance from the Forest Service. In fact, 
although Forest Service officials had initially confirmed that 
they would participate in the conference and certainly they 
have a key role in providing information to school districts, 
they apparently decided to sabotage the event by not showing up 
at the conference without giving notice to me or any member of 
my staff save a last minute message on a staffer's cell phone 
on the voice mail.
    Finally, upon my personal demand that they do so, two 
officials did make an appearance at the conference and 
proceeded to outline various hoops the school districts must 
jump through and pay for in order to qualify for a land 
conveyance. As it turns out, local Forest Service personnel had 
a presentation complete with power point slides ready to go for 
the conference, but they were told at the last minute by 
bureaucrats in Washington not to attend the conference 
presumably because implementation procedures were still 
unclear. The reluctance by the Forest Service to implement the 
law aside from efforts of the Forest Service to make 
conveyances more costly for school districts can only be 
interpreted as an effort to frustrate the obvious intent of the 
law. This is a prime example of bureaucratic inertia. Now to be 
fair for purposes of full disclosure, I am hardened by the fact 
that in Georgia, the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest, the 
first land grant will be completed under this Act next month. 
But right now in Arizona, we have a couple of applications that 
they are just sitting as victims of bureaucratic inertia.
    I say this, Chief, because we want to work with you and 
there needs to be a culture shift and if it must begin in the 
Forest Service, let it begin now to implement the law of the 
land and to put an end to the unelected deciding what laws they 
will follow and what laws they will ignore. I look forward to 
your testimony and I thank the Chairman for the time.
    Mr. McInnis. Mr. Otter?

      STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE C.L. ``BUTCH'' OTTER, A 
       REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF IDAHO

    Mr. Otter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome Chief. I as 
you know just walked in and I only got to hear my colleague 
from New Mexico and my colleague from Colorado and now Arizona 
and it is extremely frustrating I am sure in the short time in 
your office you already know that. And we have all got our 
ideas on how to probably break down gridlock. Unfortunately for 
some gridlock it is exactly what they want. But for others, 
those who lost their jobs and for the school districts that 
have closed down in Idaho and the 888,000 acres that burned up 
2 years ago and now lays waste and is devastating our fisheries 
and is devastating our water shed and really creating quite a 
bit of havoc in those water sheds, those of us that live on the 
land out there and for the most part try to represent what is 
good for the land, we want gridlock over with. And I am not 
exactly sure--I wish I had the magic wand I could wave. My Lord 
didn't grant me with the wisdom to come up with the solutions 
to all these ideas. But I would hope that most of your energies 
would be directed toward overcoming gridlock. If we have to 
bring everybody to the table, however we have to do it, I think 
we ought to set a time line and say by this date, it is going 
to be over with because I think unless we set ourselves a drop-
dead date on when we are going to have processes that will 
allow us to defend ourselves from hazards that we would not 
allow to exist anyplace else, potential devastation to water 
sheds and fisheries and communities and jobs and those sort of 
things, we would not allow that to happen anywhere else.
    If that same disastrous overgrowth, if that same disastrous 
hazard existed in Washington, D.C., we would marshal every 
forest--we would deploy every talent and every piece of 
equipment at our disposal in order to eradicate that potential 
disaster.
    And so I am frustrated, as I am sure you can hear that 
frustration in my colleagues. Whatever we do, let us get it 
over with. Gridlock is actually serving the intentions of a lot 
of folks. To do nothing is exactly what they want. But it is 
also devastating communities and it is ruining lives. It is 
ruining water sheds. The very thing we seek to protect is now 
being devastated.
    So I look forward to hearing your comments, but I really 
look forward to hearing the date or the time or the years or 
the months that you are prepared to set and say by this time, 
we are going to have this thing behind us and we are going to 
go forward. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And once again, Chief, 
thanks for being here.
    Mr. McInnis. My apologies to the Chairman, I should have 
called on you first. Chairman, opening remarks?

STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE JAMES V. HANSEN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN 
                CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF UTAH

    Mr. Hansen. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Let me just 
say if you go back and read the charter of the Forest Service 
from 1905 up to today, much of it is predicated on one word and 
it is called ``manage.'' and we give these folks the tremendous 
responsibility to manage the Forest Service of America. As I--
and I have known Dale Bosworth for a long time and I feel 
comfortable with him as Chief. I know how capable he is. He 
worked in areas of Ogden, Utah, an extremely capable man and I 
don't think we can do better. I also know in BLM, if I may talk 
about that for a just a second, Kathy Clark is also a very 
competent young lady and has a very good knowledge of things; 
and between the two of them, we worked some of this out.
    But we are talking about the frustrations we have and we 
all got them. There is a lot of frustrations out there right 
now. You know, I would challenge members of the Committee to go 
on the next break to take half a day and go to your local 
forester and have him show you the forests. You are going to 
find more fuel load than we probably ever had in the history of 
the forests. I am not trying to place any blame on anyone, but 
some folks remind that we don't clean the forests, we don't 
thin the forests and don't have prescribed fires.
    And as you know, we are going to have a hearing in the full 
Committee which will talk about the amount of lawsuits that 
have been filed against the Forest Service and the BLM and how 
it has bogged them down. And I am sure Chief Bosworth will be 
at that meeting. I think you are going to be amazed of what 
these people tell you. Right now they spend 40 to 60 percent of 
their time filling out charts with NEPA trying to take care of 
that. So a lot of that rests here in Congress. We probably have 
made such a fudge factory for a lot of these folks to go 
through that we got to start straightening up some of the these 
things so they can do what they were asked to do in 1905, which 
worked then and will work today, and that is, manage the 
grounds of America.
    When you got that many people working on NEPA problems--and 
now add to that and I am sure the Chief will give us better 
information at our next hearing, there is 5,000 legal actions 
pending against the Forest Service right now as of May 2002. I 
was talking to Kathy Clark, and I said how much of your budget 
do you spend on litigation? She said just a tad over 50 
percent. So we are going to give all this money to the BLM and 
they are spending it on litigation.
    No disrespect for the American trial attorneys have found 
anything besides tobacco and asbestos to go after and to file 
one lawsuit on top of another, which really are predicated on 
some of our extreme environmental groups. Let us say to our 
managers of the public land, let us let them have the 
opportunity to manage the forests. Let us see them clean the 
forests.
    Remember back, and boy, this will really get you if you 
remember this, but there used to be something called the CCC 
boys, and they went in and they thinned the forests and cleaned 
the forests and the forests looked pretty good. And now we have 
dead fall and fuel load like you can't believe. Of course we 
are going to have fires. We have a very fine forest supervisor 
retire not long ago in the State of Utah, and his name is Hugh 
Thompson, and is now working for natural resources. Hugh had 
the Dixie Forest.
    Dixie Forest years ago, when the first pioneers came in the 
valley, there was nothing. And they started planning. The 
Forest Service went in and created one of the most beautiful 
forests there is in America called the Dixie Forest in southern 
Utah. And then up by Cedar Breaks they had an infestation of 
something called the pine beetle, and Hugh wanted to go in and 
cut out about 17,000 acres. No, got a lawsuit just like that. 
Stopped him. The trouble is those little beetles just kept 
eating away and finally got through the first one, another 
lawsuit. Now I would just challenge any of you, and as an old 
pilot and I go down there occasionally and fly over it and you 
know what you got? You got dead sticks. It looks like dead 
toothpicks all over the place.
    And I started thinking about the time we had a really great 
forester here in the 1980's, and we are talking about the 
Uintah Mountains, and there was a fellow from one of the 
extreme environmental groups, and he said don't touch it, leave 
it alone. Don't even come close. And this forester said I don't 
have a dog in this fight, but let me tell you what is going to 
happen. If we don't go in and clean out that infestation of 
pine beetles, you are going to have a dead forest and I will 
guarantee you will have a fire. He said I can guarantee you 
will have a fire and that beautiful green carpet that you don't 
want touched will be an ugly dirty mess.
    And his next comment was, and I think you can guarantee you 
will have a flood. And if you are going to do it nature's way 
that we keep hearing around here, it will take 100 years before 
you will see that forest back to what it was. This gentleman 
doesn't have the option of just letting it go. He has to take 
care of the forests as the BLM has to do. I just say to my 
friends here this is an extremely important issue that we have 
in front of us today, but I wanted to add the dimension of we, 
Congress, have created a lot of this fudge factory ourselves. 
And one thing we could move into would be rule 28 of the civil 
procedure on how these lawsuits are filed, and I would urge the 
Committee to do it.
    Mr. McInnis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Hansen follows:]

  Statement of The Honorable James V. Hansen, Chairman, Committee on 
                               Resources

    A little over a month ago, the Resources Committee held a hearing 
on the future of the Forest Service. Secretary Veneman and Chief 
Bosworth told us about their vision for the Forest Service and what 
changes would have to take place to keep the agency working to protect 
and enhance our National Forests.
    One of the most important issues that surfaced in that hearing was 
the excessive gridlock, or ``analysis paralysis,'' and the hampering 
effect it has on the Forest Service's ability to manage the nation's 
192 million acres of National Forests for all Americans. I look forward 
to hearing more about Chief Bosworth's report today that details this 
problem.
    I've worked closely with the Forest Service for many years, and 
have a good relationship with many of the people who make it run. I 
worked with Chief Bosworth when he was the Regional Forester in Ogden, 
Utah, and know that he is very capable of leading this organization. 
I've been impressed by the outstanding men and women that are the 
regional foresters, forest supervisors and district rangers. I know 
they're great leaders and managers, and that they have only the best of 
intentions for the nation's forests.
    But today, the Forest Service leaders can't lead and the managers 
can't manage. This has nothing to do with their abilities as leaders or 
managers, but has a lot to do with the way that we do business here. 
Often, this Body passes laws that begin with good intentions. By the 
time these laws are interpreted and put into place, they end up only 
making things worse. Over the years, more and more restrictions have 
been placed on managers, and their ability to make management decisions 
has slowly diminished.
    If that isn't bad enough, add frivolous appeals and years of 
confusing and contradictory court interpretations, and the result is 
gridlock. Instead of being able to make and implement good management 
decisions, the Forest Service spends 40% to 60% of their management 
time preparing NEPA documents, meeting other statutory and regulatory 
requirements, and preparing agency decisions to withstand possible 
appeals and litigation. This does not include time spent defending 
those decisions in the courtroom. Just as a side note, in May 2002, 
about 5,000 legal actions were pending against the Forest Service.
    The result of this gridlock is poor management, or no management at 
all in some cases. For example, regardless of the urgency, a 34-cent 
stamp can hold up a badly needed timber sale for years. Take the case 
of the Dixie National Forest in Southern Utah. For more than a decade 
the spruce forests in the Dixie have been under siege from bark 
beetles. When the epidemic began, the Forest Service began to offer 
timber sales in an attempt to contain the bark beetles. However, 
although these timber sales would likely have improved the health of 
the forest by reducing the spread of the beetle and the number of dead 
and dying trees, the timber sale decision in 1994 was appealed. As was 
the timber sale decision in 1995. And the sale decisions in 1996, 1997, 
1998, 2000, 2001, and 2002. The result? Fat beetles and dead trees. 
Like a slow moving wildfire, these beetles destroyed every spruce in 
the area, and left them standing. Anyone that has driven through the 
Dixie National Forest in the last ten years will attest to the 
decimation of this once beautiful forest.
    Sadly, the ramifications of this tragedy extend past the dead 
trees. Adjacent landowners now face an extreme fire hazard. Wildlife 
habitat has been destroyed, including potential habitat for the goshawk 
and spotted owl. Hikers must find another place to recreate. Passers-by 
are left with a dreary visions of a standing forest of dead trees. And 
the beetles have now spread into the Cedar Breaks National Monument.
    The point is that gridlock doesn't only affect projects to improve 
the health of the forest or just timber sales. It affects the Forest 
Service's ability to manage endangered species habitat, grasslands and 
ranges, watersheds, trails, campgrounds, minerals, roads, and a host of 
other important multiple uses that occur on our public lands.
    The Forest Service was once known for the local managers' ability 
to manage the forests. Let's let them do it again. We have the right 
people on the ground. We have great leaders and managers. But they need 
to be allowed to lead and manage. I look forward to hearing Chief 
Bosworth's report and his recommendations.
                                 ______
                                 
    Mr. McInnis. Members, we keep having members come in, so I 
am going to allow two more opening statements on your side, two 
more on this side and I am closing off opening statements and 
you can submit it for the record. We take all this time we are 
not going to get to hear from the Chief and that is who we want 
to hear from. We all hear from each other all the time. So Mr. 
Inslee, I will go in the order of how they are seated. Mr. 
Udall, you came in next and I will go in the order you showed 
up.

  STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE MARK UDALL, A REPRESENTATIVE IN 
              CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF COLORADO

    Mr. Udall of Colorado. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will make 
my comments very brief. I did want to echo the concerns of my 
colleagues from Colorado, particularly Mr. Tancredo and Mr. 
McInnis, when it comes to the Hayman fire and the situation we 
now face in Colorado. And, Chief, I am looking forward to 
hearing your comments. I also support what my colleague, Mr. 
Tancredo, has proposed when it comes to increasing the fines 
for campfires that shouldn't have been set in the first place, 
and the incredible damage they can cause.
    All of us in the Colorado delegation have worked on the 
fire plan and fuel reduction efforts over the last couple of 
years. And I want to emphasize again that we need to get those 
resources into the urban wildland interface, the so-called red 
zone. And I am eager to do all I can to help the Forest Service 
and work with my colleagues to see if that is the case. This is 
a long term problem. We are in it on a marathon basis. This has 
been developing certainly for 100 years. We have more to learn 
about the forest ecosystems and the best way to manage those 
forests. But if we can pull together and find our common 
ground, I am optimistic we can reduce these hazards and return 
our forests to a healthier condition. I thank the Chief for 
coming up to the Hill today.
    Mr. McInnis. Mr. Udall, if you don't mind, I will let you 
yield your 3 minutes and 45 seconds to Mr. Holt.
    Mr. Udall of Colorado. I would be happy to yield my time to 
my colleague from New Jersey, Mr. Holt.
    Mr. Holt. No. I yield. You can yield your time to another.
    Mr. McInnis. Go ahead, Ms. McCollum, you may proceed. Do 
you have an opening statement?
    Ms. McCollum. No, I don't, Mr. Chairman.

 STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE SCOTT McINNIS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN 
              CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF COLORADO

    Mr. McInnis. I will wrap it up, first of all, Chief, I want 
you to know we just finished the White River National Forest 
Plan. And the regulations, the comment period and the things--I 
mean, we have asked for public input in our democracy of 200 
years, frankly, I think has saddled your agency with 
regulations and input. And everybody that I have talked to 
thinks they know how to run that forest better than your people 
do.
    Unfortunately, I think your agency has been somewhat 
bashful or timid about saying hey, why don't we let the experts 
in and instead, we are taking more and more public comment, and 
I will give you an idea. I, as you know, in the White River 
National Forest, was appalled by the alternative that they came 
up with which for the first time in forest planning set human 
use as a lower priority than ecological or biological--any 
ecological or biological use that took priority over any human 
use. So I submitted my own forest plan, which was a very thick 
complicated, detailed document prepared by scientists.
    That was the science. When I went into your office in 
Glenwood Springs, one of the Forest Service employees wouldn't 
even shake my hand. It is embarrassing for me. I put my hand 
out and he said I am not going to shake the hand of someone 
like you. And I am wondering what was happening there.
    Now fortunately, Martha Cattell and Rick Cables and some of 
those people responded. But we also heard that despite the fact 
that the Chairman of the Forest Committee, the fact a 
congressional representative of this district got elected by 
the people of this district, and the fact that his report was 
done with experts, including the former supervisor of the White 
River National Forest, which was my expert who primarily 
authored the report, so to speak, combined with the others, 
this should--some of these people say this comment should have 
the same as somebody off the street who sends a one-sentence 
comment to your agency that says that I either oppose the White 
River alternative or I support it.
    And that is bureaucracy. I know you know this. You came 
into this. You inherited this. On top of that, I have just come 
as you know, all the major--or most major fires including the 
big one right now started in my district in Colorado. Saturday 
night I was interrupted at a dinner to be told that my parents 
home of 60 years had been burned to the ground. That was 
incorrect, but the fire was on all sides of them.
    By the time I got to Glenwood Springs, they said we had 150 
homes in flames. I actually went in and did my own damage 
assessment because, obviously, having lived there I know it 
like the back of my hand. The actual damage was perhaps 30 
homes. That said, I want to tell you your Forest Service out 
there with that fire and with every fire we have had so far in 
my district, which are the major fires we have had out there, 
your agency has been splendid and been there, with their air 
tankers, their people are first class and seems to me that last 
year when we gave you these resources, we hired additional fire 
men and equipment, we are clearly seeing a difference now with 
this fire season over what we saw last fire season.
    So if we can see that kind of improvement in the other 
parts of the agency that we deal with as we have seen in my 
opinion, the dramatic improvement in our fire management that I 
witnessed firsthand and spent the entire weekend with your 
people out there, I think we can make some real progress.
    So it is clear from the comments made by this Subcommittee, 
and fortunately everybody on this Committee has a deep and 
intense experience with Forest Service property all in our own 
ways. In my district, for example, 119 out of the approximately 
120 communities are completely surrounded by public lands. So 
these are experienced voices.
    But you are an experienced leader and I think we can see 
some results. So I look forward to your testimony. And Chief, 
the time is yours. You are not going to be limited to 5 
minutes. We want to hear your discussions and then we will open 
it for two-way discussion.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. McInnis follows:]

  Statement of The Honorable Scott McInnis, Chairman, Subcommittee on 
                       Forests and Forest Health

    Today, the Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health will hear 
testimony from the Chief of the United States Forest Service, Dale 
Bosworth, who will present the findings of a widely anticipated report 
on the decision-making process that guides the management and use of 
our national forests. This Subcommittee and many others have been 
eagerly anticipating the findings of this report for several months, 
and we appreciate the Chief coming here today to present the results of 
this analysis.
    It is altogether fitting that we are having this conversation at a 
time when catastrophic wildfire is quite literally laying waste to 
forests and communities throughout the West. If we're ever going to 
slow this fiery march across the West, we've got to start managing our 
forests. Unfortunately, mortal flaws in the Forest Service's decision-
making process makes widespread and meaningful treatment of our 
national forests a virtual impossibility. The Forest Service estimates 
that 50 million acres of our public forestlands are at high risk to 
catastrophic fire. And yet, because of the cumbersome process 
impediments described in the Chief's report, the Forest Service this 
year will be hard pressed to treat one million acres of those high risk 
areas. Clearly, this glacial pace is unacceptable in the face of such a 
massive threat. Effective management of our forests, then, necessitates 
a substantial overhaul of the way the Forest Service makes and 
implements management decisions. That process, I hope and trust, begins 
with our consideration of the Chief's report today.
    The laws and regulations that govern the national forests are the 
result of more than 200 years of American democracy. Unfortunately, as 
this body of law has evolved and expanded over the decades, policy 
makers and the Forest Service have failed to assimilate the sea of 
relevant statutes, regulations and court decisions into a workable 
whole. We've piled procedure on top of procedure, process on top 
process, and analysis on top of analysis. The result is a mountain of 
congressional mandates, administrative directives and court decisions 
that rival the federal tax code in their complexity and convolution. 
Jack Ward Thomas, the former Chief of the Forest Service, accurately 
refers to this nightmarish bureaucratic heap as ``the blob''.
    As I have said previously, the vast majority of the laws and 
regulations that we're talking about were established with good motives 
and for sound public objectives. Cumulatively, however, this incoherent 
maze of mandates has crippled the Forest Service. The statutory mission 
of the Forest Service is to ``care for the land and serve the people.'' 
Paralyzed by process, shackled by gratuitous bureaucracy, today the 
Forest Service is incapable of living up to that charge.
    So what does all this mean on the ground, in the real world? For 
the answer, look no farther than what's going on in Colorado right now. 
All of us have seen the images of the Hayman Fire on the news, the 
massive wildland fire just outside of Denver that has made scorched 
earth of nearly 100,000 acres in the Pike/San Isabel National Forest.
    For those living in communities like Bailey, Decker, Woodland Park 
and Pine, these images aren't new at all. They saw the same ominous 
images from their back-patios and front-lawns when fire ravished much 
of the same country in 1996 and 2000. Those fires burned 23,000 acres, 
destroyed nearly 100 homes and other structures, dumped several tons of 
sediment into Denver's primary source of drinking water, and filled our 
Rocky Mountain skies with black smoke and soot.
    As bad as these fires were, though, the Forest Service and others 
in these communities new it could get worse. They knew that, as often 
as not, second and third burn-overs are more catastrophic than the 
initial fire. So in August of 1999, they set out to do something about 
it. In collaboration with a broad array of federal, state and local 
officials, the Forest Service set in motion the South Platte Watershed 
Protection, which was focused on protecting adjacent communities and 
Denver's drinking water from another major fire by reducing excess 
forest fuels in the treatment area.
    Like so many other efforts like it, though, this project was 
strangled-out by red tape and inane bureaucracy. Thanks to an 800 step 
decision-making process (according to Forest Service figures), two 
appeals by environmental groups, and a retaliatory appeal by the forest 
products industry who wanted to make sure it had a seat at the table 
when the Forest Service negotiated an agreement with the environmental 
community--the Upper South Platte Restoration Project is almost 
entirely unimplemented nearly 3 years after it was first proposed. 
Today, the area slated for treatment under the plan is on fire, 6 
thousand homes in the area have been evacuated at last count, old-
growth stands in Inventoried Roadless Areas have been reduced to ash, 
tons of sediment are once more being dumped into Denver's drinking 
water, and our blue skies have once again been made black with smoke.
    In my opinion, Colleagues, the Hayman fire is the face of process 
gridlock on our national forests. The Forest Service's fundamentally 
flawed decision-making process didn't start the fire; it appears that 
that was the doing of an illegal campfire. But the unmistakable reality 
is that the Forest Service's inability to make and implement a 
management decision on the South Platte turned a complicated situation 
into a regional crisis.
    Clearly, Mr. Bosworth, the time for reforming this framework is 
past due. Your predecessor Jack Ward Thomas has said that, the General 
Accounting Office in a 1997 report said that, and now with this report 
you have said that. Your challenge--a challenge which we substantially 
share in--is to parlay these words into long-past-due action.
    It is with this that I thank the Chief for being with us here today 
and I look forward to this important dialogue.
                                 ______
                                 
    Mr.  McInnis. And thank you, Chief. You may proceed. Rick 
Cables, by the way, if there were some medal I could give him, 
he was wonderful out there. So my compliments to them and I 
hope you pass that on.

 STATEMENT OF DALE BOSWORTH, CHIEF, U.S. FOREST SERVICE, U.S. 
                   DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

    Mr. Bosworth. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will pass those 
comments on, and I appreciate hearing those and I know the 
folks in the field will appreciate hearing that as well. Mr. 
Chairman and members of the Subcommittee, I really do want to 
thank you for the opportunity to continue the discussion that 
we started several months ago regarding the processes that 
Forest Service line officers face in trying to make decisions 
on the land and in trying to comply with a myriad of laws, 
regulations and standards that end up being imposed. About 6 
months ago, I told you that I would ask the team to update 
former Chief Jack Ward Thomas' study on the Forest Service's 
legal and the regulatory framework, and to take into 
consideration any kind of new laws or new regulations, new 
court decisions that had happened in the intervening years. 
That report has been completed.
    And I am happy to provide that report to you. I would like 
to talk today about the report and I would like to talk some 
about how I expect and how I begin to intend to try to unravel 
the procedural knot in which the Forest Service is bound at 
this time. The report I am giving you today doesn't set out to 
propose solutions, and I want to be clear about this. At this 
point in the report, we didn't want to talk about solutions. We 
want to develop consensus on the problem so we can search for 
the right solution. My big fear would be we would come up with 
solutions in search of a problem and I think we need to do it 
the other way around. And as you see the report, we will find 
out whether or not there is any agreement that we have 
identified the right problem, that it is a problem, and then I 
think together we can move forward to start correcting that.
    Environmental laws and regulations, I don't believe, are in 
conflict. I think the fundamental problem is that the legal and 
the procedural requirements that the Forest Service has to 
comply with haven't been systematically developed or 
systematically constructed over time. They really evolved over 
probably 30 years in response to laws, agency regulations, 
court decisions, public expectations, scientific understanding. 
They don't have very much coordination, little or no 
coordination. So that resulted in three general problems. The 
first I will talk about is excessive analysis. We have created 
a short-term risk-adverse atmosphere, which most of the time 
doesn't properly weigh the more significant long-term 
considerations or long-term consequences of only thinking about 
the short-term.
    The procedural requirements imposed by regulatory agencies 
and the courts just never stop. They just continue to pile on, 
to pile on. And that means you have increased analysis and 
documentation which is costly, it is complex, it is time-
consuming, and often doesn't result in timely decisions. And I 
think Congress and the public has every right to ask at the end 
of the day is the result a better decision.
    I can't think of a better example that illustrates this 
point than a report that is called the Beschta report. It is a 
commentary that was authored in 1995 by eight university and 
government scientists. The paper has never been published in 
any scientific or professional journal, never been subject to 
any formal peer review, but in four cases now, courts have 
concluded the project decisions violate NEPA because the 
associated NEPA documents didn't adequately document the 
agency's consideration of the Beschta report.
    I think it is a good but definitely not the only example of 
an incentive that our line officers feel to fill, overstuff 
NEPA documents with excessive amounts of information, excessive 
amounts of analysis and documentation. It is time consuming and 
costly, but it doesn't really contribute very much in the end 
to the quality of public involvement and land management. The 
question is, Is that what Congress wants? Is that what the 
public wants? Another area is unproductive public involvement.
    A lot of our critics say that we would avoid a lot of our 
problems, if we would only include the public earlier in our 
project planning. I think the reality is that I really don't 
believe there is another Federal agency that provides more 
opportunities for public review and comment on proposed plans 
and projects than the Forest Service does. We try to do it 
early in the process at the very beginning. We involve the 
public all the way through the process through multiple 
meetings, field trips often to make sure we understand what 
people are thinking.
    We encourage competing interests to sit down and reason 
together to try to find ways to accommodate their various 
viewpoints and various objectives. The theory behind the 
approach is that it will lead to more informed decisions and 
those more informed decisions will have more broader public 
support. It can--I don't think it can be reasonably expected to 
mean that the Forest Service has to have unanimous support, 
unanimous support for every aspect of a project if we are going 
to move forward.
    Ultimately, Forest Service officials have to end up making 
a decision based upon a lot of different factors, some of which 
may not be represented. However, the benefits of this dialog 
with the public too often frustrates the public, just like it 
does the Forest Service. Now my testimony that I submitted 
talks about the efforts of the Hiawatha National Forest to 
remove an existing concrete bridge across a creek called North 
Light Creek, that is within the Grand Island Research Natural 
Area.
    This bridge was breaking apart, chunks of concrete falling 
into the creek. The forest closed the bridge in 1995 and 
started scoping on a replacement bridge. There was a fair 
amount of public support. A lot of public support in the 
initial scoping period and in the environmental assessment 
comment period there was substantial, but not unanimous, 
support by local residents, recreation interests, and 
environmental groups for the project. One individual who had 
participated earlier in the process but who had not opposed the 
project appealed it.
    Although the appeal wasn't based on agency's consideration 
of alternatives, the regional office review then found the 
document, at least the documentation of some other 
alternatives, was lacking so the ranger had to withdraw the 
decision several months later. It was subsequently decided to 
consider the bridge project in the context of revisions to the 
research natural area record of the establishment record. And 
the forest's plan amendment took about a year-and-a-half to 
complete, and that one wasn't appealed.
    So now here we are, we are scoping now again for the bridge 
replacement project which began last June. We figure the 
construction of the replacement bridge could begin in 2005, so 
we end up with a single appellant that really overrode broad 
public support for the project when it was proposed in early 
1995 and has placed the bridge replacement back 10 years.
    Again, small bridge, safety issue, environmental issue and 
the question is, Is this what Congress wants? Is this what the 
public wants?
    The third problem is really us, the Forest Service. When I 
testified before the Subcommittee last year, I admitted that we 
are part of the problem. In the work that our folks did to 
develop the report, the team also found that agency leadership 
and management in planning and decision-making needs to be 
improved.
    I have asked our Deputy Chief for national forest systems, 
Tom Thompson, to take a comprehensive reengineering of our 
processes internally to address those parts of the report that 
we can correct internally as an agency.
    Mr. Chairman, I want to close today with pretty much the 
same message I had last year. We are frustrated with the status 
quo. Forest Service employees are committed to protecting and 
improving the quality of the land, the water, wildlife and air 
and with the goals with protecting and preserving this Nation's 
precious historical and cultural resources.
    But I want to be clear that I am not coming here to dump 
the problem in your laps and say this is your problem. I am 
really more here to deliver a promise. We are going to work 
hard and we are going to get this fixed. We will go as far as 
we can. But we will go a lot further and a lot faster if we can 
get your help, your advice and support.
    And I want to be clear that this isn't about going backward 
to the past. This is really a new time. You know the public is 
at a different place today than when a lot of our environmental 
laws were enacted. The science wouldn't let us go back to the 
old ways even if we wanted to. We know more today than we did 
when these laws were passed. But I don't believe when it passed 
these important laws, that Congress really had in mind 
unnecessary and unproductive procedures.
    I don't think that we expected the process to produce 
absolute certainty, and that is what we seem to be in the quest 
of, absolute certainty for every decision. So I am dedicated to 
revising and not just reviewing Forest Service processes to 
provide the best tools and training for our line officers and 
staff. And we will do a better job of managing our processes. 
But I don't want the Forest Service to just get a whole lot 
better at a bad process. I want us to fix the process and to be 
good at managing a good process. We have been consulting 
closely with the counsel on environmental quality.
    This report has their stamp of approval. We have been 
consulting closely with other Federal agencies and departments 
such as Commerce and Interior. They share our desire to improve 
the effectiveness and the efficiency of our processes.
    So today I am asking the members of the Subcommittee to 
look at this report with an open mind and give me a chance to 
work with you to find a way to make Forest Service land 
management decisions in an effective, efficient, and timely 
manner that doesn't compromise protection of natural resources 
that people expect us to manage carefully.
    With that, I am ready to answer questions and thank you 
again for the opportunity to be here.
    Mr. McInnis. Thank you, Chief, for the presentation.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Bosworth follows:]

 Statement of Dale Bosworth, Chief, Forest Service, U.S. Department of 
                              Agriculture

    Mr. Chairman:
    Thank you for this opportunity to continue the dialogue we started 
late last year on the difficult, costly, confusing and lengthy 
processes that Forest Service line officers must follow to comply with 
the laws enacted by Congress, implementing regulations and procedures 
put in place by the Forest Service and other agencies, and standards 
imposed by the courts.
    Six months ago, I told you I had tasked a team to update former 
Chief Jack Ward Thomas' study on the Forest Service's legal and 
regulatory framework to take into consideration new laws, regulations, 
and court decisions since the study was prepared in 1995. That report 
has been completed.
    Today I want to discuss the report and how I intend to begin to 
unravel the procedural knot in which the Forest Service is bound. As I 
have said before, I need the Subcommittee's help if I am to be 
successful. This knot is no less tightly tied than the Gordian Knot of 
ancient Greek mythology. And unlike Alexander the Great, I cannot 
simply draw my sword and cut it.
    By design, the report I'm giving you today does not contain 
specific recommendations for changes in Forest Service policy or 
guidance, the regulations or policies of other Federal agencies, or 
laws. Frankly, I felt that doing so would distract all of us from the 
more immediate task at hand: fully appreciating and agreeing on the 
existing legal, regulatory, and management framework under which the 
Forest Service must labor to get work accomplished.
    Before we can begin to agree on solutions, we need to have general 
agreement that the current framework is not conducive to this agency 
getting the work that the Congress and public expects done, in a 
reasonable amount of time and at a reasonable cost. I believe that 
report makes a persuasive case that the existing framework is an 
impediment to those ends. Unless we can change the existing framework, 
it is only going to go from difficult to impossible to get work 
accomplished on the national forests and grasslands.
    The Team concluded, correctly I believe, that the difficulty of 
complying with the laws, regulations, and management procedures are not 
primarily the result of conflict between the laws. Rather they arise 
from the piecemeal imposition of regulations, court decisions, and 
internal agency process requirements over time. Over the several months 
that the team conducted its review and analysis, it generally agreed 
with the 1995 Task Force Report's findings that the legal and 
procedural requirements the Forest Service must comply with have not 
been systematically constructed. Rather, they have evolved over time, 
in response to laws, agency regulations, court decisions, public 
expectations and scientific understanding with little or no 
coordination. That circumstance results in three general problems.
1. Excessive Analysis
    Regulatory agencies take very seriously their obligations to 
enforcing the statutes under their jurisdiction and they are properly 
reluctant to allow projects to proceed absent documentation of the 
anticipated impacts. Courts also demand a high level of analysis and 
documentation from the agency's decision documents.
    This has led to lengthy consultation and a short-term, risk averse 
environment, frequently at the expense of far more significant long-
term benefits. That means increased analysis and documentation, which 
is costly, complex and time consuming. The procedural requirements 
imposed by regulatory agencies and courts never seem to abate--they 
just continue to pile on.
    Congress and the public have every right to ask, ``At the end of 
the day, is the result a better decision?'' I don't think so.
    I can't think of a better example to illustrate this than the so-
called ``Beschta Report,'' a commentary authored in 1995 by eight 
university and government scientists. Many members of the Subcommittee 
may not be familiar with this report.
    The authors prepared the paper at the request of the Pacific Rivers 
Council. It offers 21 ``principles and recommendations'' regarding a 
wide range of topics. The topics include: erosion, soil impacts, 
noxious weeds, sensitive areas, effects of road building, reseeding, 
and fire management policies. The paper generally recommends against 
any active management of post-fire areas other than removal of existing 
roads. The paper has never been published in any scientific or 
professional journal, nor has it been subject to any formal peer 
review.
    Nonetheless, interest groups have filed numerous lawsuits 
challenging post-fire recovery projects in part on the grounds that the 
associated NEPA documents fail to adequately document the agency's 
consideration of the ``Beschta Report.'' I have been told that 
information on how to use the report to write comments on proposed 
projects and appeals of project decision documents is available on more 
than 100 Web sites. To date, there have been judicial opinions on the 
``Beschta Report'' in six cases.
    In four of these cases, the Courts have concluded that project 
decisions violated NEPA because the associated NEPA documents did not 
adequately document the agency's consideration of Beschta. In two other 
recent cases, Federal District Courts have ruled in favor of the Forest 
Service. In one case, Native Ecosystem Council v. U.S. Forest Service 
(D. Mont.) (Maudlow-Toston, Helena NF), the Court found that the EIS 
complied with NEPA even though the plaintiffs strenuously argued that 
failure to adequately consider the ``Beschta Report'' violated NEPA. In 
the other case, Center for Biological Diversity v. Andre (D. N.M.) 
(Corner Mountain Fire Salvage, Gila NF), the Court found that the EA 
adequately considered the issues in the ``Beschta Report,'' even though 
the EA did not reference the ``Beschta Report.''
    Hitting .333 is very good in baseball. It's not much of an average 
in natural resource case law. As a result of these 4 decisions, land 
managers wishing to reduce the risk that their decision will be 
reversed in Federal Court should feel compelled to thoroughly document 
their consideration of the ``Beschta Report'' even though the 
underlying land management issues are already addressed. This includes 
documenting why some elements of the ``Beschta Report'' are not 
relevant to the specific proposed project.
    The judicial opinions against the agency have inspired some 
interest groups to demand that the agency consider numerous other 
papers and articles that they assert are relevant to the some proposed 
actions. Sometimes the list of references exceeds 100 articles and 
papers. To minimize the risk of adverse judicial opinions, land 
managers are advised to fully document within the body of the NEPA 
document their detailed consideration of each and every paper or 
article.
    So, when critics assert that the Forest Service is its own worst 
enemy by spending so much time preparing large NEPA documents, I ask 
that you remember the ``Beschta Report''--an unpublished document of 
questionable science proposed for an advocacy group that has never been 
peer-reviewed--but whose consideration now must be documented in 
several if not all judicial districts in order to build a defensible 
NEPA document.
    It's a powerful example of the incentive for land managers to fill, 
or overstuff, NEPA documents with excessive amounts of information--
even if the information is of questionable relevance and does not 
illuminate the reasons for the decision--all in an effort to protect 
their decisions from charges they failed to adequately consider some 
piece of information. As a result of these efforts to increase the 
legal defensibility of decisions, project analysis and documentation 
processes are very time consuming and costly, but the additional 
documentation contributes little to the quality of public involvement 
or land management
    Consider the following from the article, ``Toward a Smarter NEPA: 
Monitoring and Managing Government's Environmental Performance,'' by 
Bradley C. Karkkainen that was published in the Columbia Law Journal 
(May 2002).
    ``...The upshot is that agencies have an incentive to overstuff the 
EIS with information from every available source, regardless of its 
quality, so as to achieve a protective layer of redundancy or 
``overkill'' while at the same time inoculating themselves against the 
charge that they overlooked relevant information. Eighty-three critical 
comments from NGOs, academic experts, EPA or other federal agencies at 
the scoping and draft EIS stages quickly translate into an even more 
bloated final document, as agency managers seek to incorporate, 
recharacterize, or rebut relevant details of the critiques. If high 
quality information is included, it may be diluted or simply lost under 
the avalanche of lesser quality information, vague case-specific 
analysis, marginally germane off-the-shelf studies, reports and data 
sets and boilerplate cribbed from previous EAs.''
    Is that what Congress wants? Is that what the public wants?
    If not, it is something I would like to change for the Forest 
Service.
2. Unproductive Public Involvement
    As the Subcommittee has stated previously (for example, in the 
November 29, 2001, letter co-signed by the Chairman and Mr. Udall (NM), 
the public is vitally interested in community-based land management 
approaches that bridge ideological differences and focus on results. 
Your letter suggested an opportunity to translate that interest into 
legislation authorizing a pilot to implement and monitor innovative 
approaches to land management drawn from communities. The 
Administration's Fiscal Year 2003 Budget included a similar proposal to 
establish pilot forests administered outside the normal Forest Service 
structure. The details of that proposal have not been finalized. The 
idea has merit.
    There is no federal agency that provides more specific 
opportunities for public review and comment on its proposed plans and 
projects than does the Forest Service. These opportunities occur at 
multiple planning levels and include: Federal, state, local and Tribal 
agencies; advocacy groups; user groups; and private citizens. A 
district ranger who wants to seek consensus advice from a range of 
opinion leaders in the community must be extremely careful to avoid any 
technical violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act and that's 
not easy to do.
    We encourage competing interests to sit down and reason together to 
find ways to accommodate their diverse objectives. We try to do it 
early in planning a project. While the decision still rests with the 
agency, the theory behind this approach is that it will lead to more 
informed decisions that have broad public support. It cannot reasonably 
be expected to mean that there is unanimous support for every aspect of 
a project. Ultimately, Forest Service officials must render decisions 
based on a wide range of factors, some of which may not be represented.
    However, the benefits of this dialogue is too often not as 
productive as one would hope. Consider the efforts of the Hiawatha 
National Forest to remove an existing concrete bridge across North 
Light Creek within the Grand Island Research Natural Area that was 
breaking apart and falling into the creek. Although it's signed 
``closed,'' snowmobilers and other non-motorized traffic still use the 
bridge. Visitors not using the bridge cross the creek by scrambling 
down banks, causing bank erosion. The Forest wants to replace the 
bridge with a single-span, 6-foot wide, treated glue laminated arch 
bridge with railings at the existing crossing. The scoping on the 
project started in early-1995.
    There was considerable public support to replace the bridge. At the 
initial scoping period and EA comment period, island residents, 
recreation interests, and local environmental groups all supported the 
project, without exception. The Decision Notice to replace the bridge 
was signed in mid-1998. One individual, who had participated earlier in 
the process, but who had not opposed the project, appealed. Although 
the appeal was not based on the agency's consideration of alternatives, 
the Regional Office review found that the documentation of other 
alternatives was lacking, so the District Ranger withdrew the decision 
several months later.
    The Forest Service subsequently decided to consider the bridge 
project in the context of revisions to the RNA Establishment Area. 
Revision of the Establishment Record and the Forest Plan Amendment took 
1.5 years to complete and was not appealed.
    New scoping for the bridge replacement project began in last June. 
The new EA is underway. Construction of the replacement bridge could 
begin in 2005. So, a single appellant overrode broad public support for 
the project when it was proposed in early 1995 and has pushed bridge 
replacement back almost 10 years.
    Is this what Congress wants? Is this what the public wants?
    It is something I would like to change for the Forest Service.
3. Management Inefficiencies
    When I testified before the Subcommittee last year, I admitted that 
we were part of the problem:
    ``I want to address this problem head on, not engage in finger 
pointing, or blaming everybody but us for the current problem. In 
written reports and hearing testimony, the General Accounting Office 
and others have detailed their views on the underlying causes of 
inefficiency and ineffectiveness in the Forest Service's decision- 
making. No question--we share responsibility for the problem. But we 
cannot fix the current problem by ourselves.''
    In its work, the Team also found that agency leadership and 
management in planning and decision-making needed to be improved. The 
case studies in the report we are submitting illustrate situations 
where process management decisions cost the Forest Service. Sometimes 
distracted managers and line officers have hurt us. There is a clear 
need for us to better train and inform our line officers so that they, 
in turn, can clarify the scope of decisions being made, undertake the 
appropriate analyses required to make an informed decision, and 
adequately document decisions in a timely and cost-effective manner.
    The Forest Service is currently engaged in a number of efforts to 
make the decision process more efficient, including the work done by 
this Team. Others include: revising the planning regulations under the 
National Forest Management Act, updating the agency's categorical 
exclusions under NEPA, a developing an array of tools for assisting 
with NEPA compliance.
    We need to make a substantial investment in technology. Consider 
what I said about the many Web pages that provide information on how to 
use the ``Beschta Report'' to challenge proposed projects. There is no 
reason that the agency can't use the same technology to assist our line 
officers in responding to those challenges, and whatever new ones arise 
at some point down the road. We are doing that. We need to do more. We 
will.
    I have asked Tom Thompson, Deputy Chief, National Forest System, to 
undertake a comprehensive re-engineering of our processes to address 
those parts of the report that we can correct as an agency.
    Mr. Chairman, I'll close today with much the same message as last 
year.
    We are extremely frustrated with the status quo. Forest Service 
employees are committed to the goals of protecting and improving the 
quality of our land, our water, our wildlife, and our air and with the 
goals of protecting and preserving this nation's precious historic and 
cultural resources. But, we find ourselves too often unable to do the 
work that we know needs to be done, the work that Congress and the 
public expect us to do because of unnecessary and unproductive process 
and procedure.
    I believe the report I am providing you today makes the case for 
change. At the least, it makes it hard, if not impossible, to argue 
that current environmental laws and regulations couldn't be implemented 
more efficiently and effectively. Who would argue the laws and 
regulations shouldn't be implemented as efficiently and effectively as 
possible?
    I am dedicated to revising, not just reviewing, Forest Service 
processes to provide the best tools and training for our line officers 
and staff. We will do a better job of managing our processes. But I do 
not want us to just get better at playing a bad game. I want to fix the 
game.
    I expect our endeavors to resolve analysis paralysis will take 
significant effort and a great deal of time and will generate 
opposition. At the end of the day, those who are determined to keep 
projects from going forward, the merits notwithstanding, are afforded a 
considerable advantage by the dysfunction of the our decision making 
process. They will not cede that advantage without a struggle.
    The Council on Environmental Quality, which, as you know, is 
responsible for the NEPA regulations that apply to all federal 
agencies, and the other federal agencies and departments with whom we 
closely work, such as the Department of Commerce, the Department of the 
Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency, share our desire to 
improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our processes. I know we 
can count on their support as we undertake this task.
    Today, I ask you and the other Members of this subcommittee to look 
at this report with an open mind and give me a chance to work with you 
to find a way to make Forest Service land management decisions in an 
effective, efficient and timely manner that do not compromise 
protection of the natural resources we are entrusted to manage for the 
American people.
    Mr. Chairman, that concludes my statement. I would be happy to 
answer any questions from you and the other Members of the 
Subcommittee.
                                 ______
                                 
    Mr. McInnis. I have a couple of points and then we will 
move on for the balance of the Committee. One thing I think 
would be helpful is education at the local management level 
within the agency, kind of advice on you know frivolous 
lawsuits. I know that every time the local forest service and 
the number of forests that I have make a decision, somebody 
always says they are going to sue them. And frankly, I am a 
little concerned that having been a lawyer, I am a little 
concerned that our employees out there are becoming gun shy 
about that. That just throwing that threat at them causes them 
to retreat or reconsider. Most of the threats of lawsuits are 
not sustainable in the courts.
    Now anybody has a right to file a lawsuit, but whether or 
not they win in the end, only a small, small percentage would 
prevail, and only a small percentage of those threats would be 
filed. So I think that is important and I would like your 
comment on that.
    The second thing, if you would just--we have been talking 
about a very broad picture, can you point out what you would 
think would be the most significant factor contributing to the 
gridlock and the stalemate that we are running into today? If 
you would help me with those two and then we will move on.
    Mr. Bosworth. OK. Your question about, or comment about 
forest service people backing off or being afraid to move 
forward because of the threat of lawsuits, that does affect 
Forest Service people when someone says we are going to file a 
lawsuit. But my experience has been that our folks are not 
backing off, but they are spending a lot of time trying to make 
sure that if they do get sued, that they are going to be able 
to withstand that lawsuit. So the backing off may be to do some 
additional analysis to make sure that your documentation is 
carefully done to try to resolve the issue with people that are 
considering the lawsuit.
    And as I mentioned in my testimony, there are things like 
the Beschta report that will pop and then we will go back to 
all of our other projects and make sure we documented the 
consideration of the Beschta report and there may be another 
report.
    So our folks tend to add a lot of stuff into these 
documents to make sure they can withstand a challenge if they 
are unable to resolve it through a collaborative approach. I 
don't think they are afraid to move forward; they are afraid to 
move forward without strong recommendation and without strong 
feeling that they will be able to withstand the challenge.
    In terms of the most significant factors that result in 
some of the gridlock, I think it is very difficult, to try to 
identify one thing that is a big problem. It is an overlapping 
number of things. That is why it is going to be difficult and 
challenging to try to deal with it because there are so many 
things. You cut one string but there are still a million other 
strings you need to cut. You have to figure out what things 
will give us the greatest benefit for the time and effort we 
take to straighten out. The thing that probably frustrates me 
the most would be an analysis that needs to be done simply to 
overcome a challenge as opposed to adding good value to a 
decision.
    I support analysis that is going to help make a better 
decision.
    But I really get frustrated with doing work that doesn't 
seem to add to the value of the decision. I think our whole 
climate of being adverse to any kind of risk is also a problem 
and particularly when we talk about short-term risk versus 
long-term. And I think that is partly there because of the 
regulations that have evolved. We don't want--we don't want to 
take short-term risk, but in the end, we end up with lots of 
long-term risks in some of these ecosystems and you can see 
examples of that in the fires that are burning right now.
    Mr. McInnis. Thank you, Chief. One point I probably should 
have made in my opening statement, I mentioned about the fact 
that the Forest Service employee that I ran into, I want you to 
know that was not one of your management or senior people. It 
was lower level. My relationship with your supervisory 
personnel at every forest at every level even though we have 
not agreed has always been professional. I should note that.
    Mr. Inslee?
    Mr. Inslee. Thank you, Chief. I want to ask you about the 
extent of litigation related to the decisions by the Forest 
Service. I got to do some digging and I found a GAO report that 
said in 2001, out of 1671 hazardous fuel reduction projects 
there were a grand total of 20 projects or about 1 percent had 
been appealed and none had been litigated. Zero had been 
litigated. And then I looked at this issue that Mr. Hansen 
brought up and he said there were 5,000 pending lawsuits at the 
Forest Service, and I went to take a look at what those were 
about and I found that the Forest Service documents said that 
even though you have probably 5 to 7,000 environmental 
assessments on various projects a year, you only have 119 cases 
pending regarding NEPA and 91 regarding the National Forest 
Management Act and a lot of those overlap.
    A lot of those have both NEPA and the Forest Act both in 
them of course. You have got somewhere from one to 2 percent 
that appears to me at most of cases that end up in litigation 
where you have had some environmental assessment. Are those 
numbers from the GAO and the Forest Service about in the ball 
park or what information could you provide us?
    Mr. Bosworth. I would be happy to check those out 
carefully. I was just listening, I don't think they would be 
out of the ball park. They sounded realistic to me, but I need 
to check that specifically.
    Mr. Inslee. Given the fact that you know you have competing 
constituencies interested in the forests, if you are in a 1 to 
2 percent level of controversy that ends up in a court system, 
does that really strike you as unusual or not to be expected 
when particularly when you are trying to do cuts in old growth 
forests?
    Mr. Bosworth. Well, we are going to have lawsuits. That is 
not my concern. My concern is the evolution of the process, the 
length of time that it takes for us to work our way through all 
the process and, in some cases, ends up by itself eliminating 
the project where we never made a conscious decision to move 
forward with the project, but just the fact that it took us so 
long to work our way through and we had the challenges whether 
appeals or lawsuits really end up--the decision ends up being 
made by default rather than having conscious decisions made to 
do the right things. And in many cases, people don't recognize 
that there are environmental consequences, adverse 
environmental consequences to no action.
    Mr. Bosworth. And when decisions are made by default, that 
is not what the people expect from us.
    Mr. McInnis. I want to ask you about a way to try to reduce 
that controversy, if you will, taking the Northwest as an 
example. Many of us out in the Northwest feel that we have an 
opportunity to reduce the controversy by trying to move timber 
harvest activities away from the old growth and mature forests 
down to the younger forests where we can do thinning, which can 
allow both resource extraction--in fact, it has been estimated 
that we can get 600,000,000 more feet out a year in some of 
those lower, younger forests through thinning, commercial 
thinning, and at the same time making it more likely that these 
younger forests will develop quicker into old forest or late 
successional reverse characteristics for habitat purposes. And 
we think this would be good not only for the environment, but 
would be good for reducing a lot of the controversy in the 
Northwest, where people would rather see less cutting in the 
old growth and more in the young growth, if you will. Is that 
something that the Forest Service is considering, is willing to 
talk with us about? What are your thoughts in that regard?
    Mr. Bosworth. Well, I am willing to talk--at any time-- 
about solutions that will achieve a broad base of public 
support that will meet the needs of all sides. I also feel that 
what we thought we had achieved with the Northwest plan 8 years 
ago was the balance that had the support of a broad base of 
folks. It was the plan that was going to move us forward and 
meet the needs of all sides, significantly reduce the amount of 
harvest that was being done, which was fine, and also protect 
the spotted owl and the other species; and yet, that lasted 
about 2 years before it became controversial. And that is part 
of the frustration some of our folks have in trying to work our 
way through in these kinds of things.
    Mr. McInnis. Thank you, Chief.
    Chief, before I go on, I just want to point out that one of 
those 1 or 2 percent that is on appeal is currently on fire in 
Colorado.
    Mr. Tancredo?
    Mr. Tancredo. Yeah. That is really--we can talk about the 
actual numbers, how many or how much of your process is being 
impeded by the appeal and/or litigation process, but let's just 
go through one specific example, the Upper South Platte 
Watershed Restoration Project. 1996 to 2000, we have the 
Buffalo Creek/Hi Meadow fires. They burned a big chunk of 
23,000 acres in Pike and San Isabel National Forest, destroying 
100 homes and other structures; watershed damage estimated in 
excess of $10 million.
    In August 1999, the Forest Service begins to develop a fire 
management plan for thinning in the roadless and roaded areas 
of the Pike National Forest. It goes from 1999 to 2001. 2001, 
in September, environmentalist groups appealed the plan. 
November 2001 to January 2002, the Forest Service negotiates a 
scaled-back management plan with the environmentalist groups. 
March 4th, 2002, on the final day to appeal the plan, that the 
environmentalist groups who helped negotiate the plan to begin 
with appealed it.
    The Regional Forester rejected their appeals on April 2001. 
Of course, there is nothing really now--we anticipated at that 
point in time litigation would be filed, litigation would be 
undertaken by these same groups, because that is their next 
step after all this, all these obstacles that they put in the 
way; finally, they want to litigate. Well, now there is nothing 
really to litigate because the whole damn forest is burning 
down. So there really isn't a reason for them to go to court at 
this present time, but this is one example of how it works.
    And I don't know how many others are out there, but this is 
one too many, and we want to do something about this. We have 
to do something about this. We have to relieve you of the 
burden at the point that we can interject ourselves into this. 
I think that is our responsibility.
    I would like you to comment on the concept of charter 
forests as they may be able to affect--to actually affect the 
decisionmaking process. I know that it really is nothing more 
than a concept. I have a bill; I am not asking you to address 
that bill--you haven't even seen it, we just dropped it 
yesterday--but it is just one idea. Our bill is just one way of 
looking at the whole concept of charter forests. I would like 
you to just tell me what you think about the general idea of 
giving greater flexibility to people on the ground, to people 
in the area to manage that forest, relieving you of some of the 
regulatory burden that is there initially, and whether you 
think this is a way for us to go conceptually, not any specific 
bill or anything like that.
    Mr. Bosworth. Well, first I would like to thank you for 
talking about the South Platte watershed, because I was going 
to talk about it at some point in here through a question, if I 
could, because I think it is an extremely good example.
    Mr. Tancredo. You may. Go right ahead.
    Mr. Bosworth. It is an extremely good example of the 
problem that faces us. If we had been doing field treatment for 
the last 8 or 10 years in there, we would still have a fire. 
That fire would be burning entirely differently than what is 
burning now, and it would be one that wouldn't be threatening 
homes, in my view, if we had been doing the work.
    I have said that we spent $40 million in fire suppression 
costs on the Buffalo Creek fire and High Meadows fire. Do you 
know what we can do with $40 million in terms of trying to 
treat the land? Especially if we didn't spend half of it on 
planning, we would be able to get a lot of work done out on the 
ground that would help communities from catastrophic wildfire 
and help protect municipal watersheds.
    So, I mean--the South Platte is a great example. It is on 
fire right now. You are right, there is no need for us to 
proceed now with fuel treatment because the fuel is gone.
    As far as charter forests, I think that the notion of 
charter forests has a fair amount of potential. I mean, the 
idea of--it is a sort of skeleton idea that we are still trying 
to put some flesh on the bones to really get--and we are 
looking for ideas on how that might work, and I think this 
Subcommittee held a hearing on some of those ideas. And any 
time that we think we can get greater flexibility for our line 
officers in the field, in my opinion, that is good. I believe 
we have good line officers out there that work with the public, 
and so the more flexibility we can give them, I think that is 
good.
    My only concern about charter forests would be I don't want 
us to sit back and wait until we have identified charter 
forests and then 10 years later learn from them before we try 
to fix the process problems that we have right now. So I think 
we need to continue to have the dialog about charter forests, 
about whether it will work, how we might put them together, how 
we might want to do it, but at the same time try to move 
forward with fixing the processes that we have that are very 
difficult to work our way through right now.
    Mr. Tancredo. Thank you.
    Mr. McInnis. Thank you, Chief. I might also point out 
further in that fire that we are experiencing today, which is 
now about 100,000 acres, that also includes acreage that was 
not designated to be thinned, but would have been protected had 
the designated acreage had been thinned--would have been 
thinned. So now we have a pile of ash of areas that we thought 
were in good shape and didn't need to go in there and were 
almost of a wilderness-type setting, and they are gone. And I 
would guess that the youngest person in here--for example, from 
my parents' home, the mountain that they viewed for all of 
their life, that the youngest person in this room may be lucky 
at the later stages of their life to see that same vegetation 
come back.
    So, let's see. Mr. Udall?
    Mr. Tom Udall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chief, you mentioned, when you were asked about gridlock 
problems, what was it that was causing them, and one of the 
things you said was doing work that doesn't improve the 
decision, that you don't--you don't like to do that additional 
work and the costs that it entails. And that seems to me to be 
a really fine balance in terms of the management of your agency 
and your people that are on the front line as to how much you 
do, how much public involvement, and those kinds of things. I 
mean, I don't really see that as subject to a law that, unless 
we were doing something collaborative--as you are aware of, 
there are collaborative--that we are discussing the idea of 
collaborative legislation. And I would invite my colleague, Mr. 
Tancredo from Colorado, to join me and Mr. Simpson and Mr. 
Otter and others that are--and my cousin here that are 
discussing collaborative ways.
    But it seems to me when you talk about doing work that 
doesn't improve the decision, it is hard for us to pass a law 
that says, you know, don't do work that doesn't improve the 
decision. That seems to be a management issue within the Forest 
Service. Could you comment on that? I mean, you know, people--
go ahead, see if you can.
    Mr. Bosworth. OK. Well, first I would like--let me just--in 
terms of the problem, you know, there are lots of parts of the 
problem, but essentially to me the problem is--is that we have 
stone age rules we are working with, and we are in a dot.com 
world today. The rules that we are dealing with were developed 
30 years ago in a lot of cases. When I think back of what was 
going on 30 years ago, you know, I was using a slide ruler, for 
crying out loud. You know, we didn't have things like the 
Internet. We didn't have GPS or GIS. We didn't have the 
capabilities that we have today. And we have a huge amount of 
information today because of the technology changes that we 
didn't have years ago, but yet we still are trying to--we are 
trying to gather all that data, all that information we have 
the capability of gathering, and make decisions using 
everything because we can or because it is there.
    I don't believe that it is Congress's job or 
responsibility, or I have no expectations that Congress solve 
that problem for us. All I want from you is some support and 
some advice on where we might be able to help with some of the 
analysis that is excessive. And, again, a lot of that is 
evolved because of case law, because we lose a lawsuit that 
said we need to go out and gather more data or more 
information. So then on all of our future projects we go out 
and gather that data or do that analysis, and then we lose a 
lawsuit somewhere else that says, well, you didn't consider the 
Beschta Report. And so now we go back, and now all of our 
documents consider the Beschta Report. Then we have a lawsuit 
that says, you need to go gather soil samples in every drainage 
even if you get a log with a helicopter, so we go do that on 
all of them.
    And so it is the continuous piling on of additional 
requirements that we put on ourselves in some cases, or that we 
have evolved to through case law in some cases.
    But, no, I don't expect Congress to pass a law to say that 
this is the limit of your analysis.
    Mr. Tom Udall. Chief, the other thing you mentioned was 
adversity to risk. And I presume you are talking about 
employees within the Forest Service, the way you discussed it, 
who aren't willing to take the risk; and they are worried about 
the short-term, and then that has a long-term impact. I--once 
again, that seems to be an internal management issue. I mean, 
you need to empower your Forest Service supervisors and people 
on the front line to take those risks that need to be taken to 
get the forest healthy, to prevent the kinds of things that are 
happening in Colorado and New Mexico today. And I don't--I 
don't see a specific law there either, you know, passing a law 
saying employees take more risks.
    I mean--and I would be willing to admit, I think Congress 
is part of the problem, because when some of your supervisors 
are courageous and are bold and step out there and do something 
creative, Members of Congress go and get them fired. So, you 
know, it is a--as you move up the Agency and you do those kinds 
of things, it is a tough thing.
    Do you want to comment on that?
    Mr. Bosworth. Well, yeah. I think our organization, like 
any organization, has quite a variety of different views. You 
know, 35,000 employees we have, we pretty much reflect, I 
think, what is out in the general populace.
    I believe that most of our employees are willing to take 
risks, but we put a lot of processes in place that require them 
to do some things that would be risk-adverse. An example would 
be that if we can't predict almost 100 percent what the 
consequence of a decision will be, we are very vulnerable to 
losing a case in court.
    It is impossible to predict 100 percent, and I am not sure 
that it is a smart thing to do, to spend all of our money 
trying to be 100 percent sure of what the consequences are 
going to be. It would make more sense to me to spend a lot less 
money on that, monitor carefully, and make adjustments as you 
go.
    Our processes really don't allow for that. I think things 
like the Endangered Species Act, for example, or at least the 
implementing regulations in our processes really require very 
little short-term risk. In other words, you can't do some 
things that are going to--or may have an effect, or you have to 
be very, very, very careful if you are going to do something 
that may have an effect even if what you are trying to do is 
going to be of a long-term benefit to that particular species.
    So I don't want to throw it all on the fact that the Forest 
Service folks aren't willing to take risks. I think many of our 
folks are willing to take risks, but we have put a lot of 
disincentives in their way to be able to take the appropriate 
kinds of risk.
    Mr. Tom Udall. Thank you, Chief.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. McInnis. Mr. Udall, with all due respect, I am not 
aware of any case where a Congressman called up and got a 
Federal forest employee fired. I don't think that --
    Mr. Tom Udall. Oh, there are numerous instances.
    Mr. McInnis. Chief, do you--
    Mr. Tom Udall. Mr. Bosworth--
    Mr. McInnis. Let me ask you, Chief--
    Mr. Tom Udall. That puts him in a tough political 
situation.
    Mr. McInnis. Mr. Udall, I have the floor. I have the floor. 
Now, it is a sensitive point with me.
    Chief, let me ask you this: If any Member of Congress 
called you up, and on the merits of that complaint alone--not 
on other merits that may necessitate the firing--although, I 
don't think very many Federal employees ever get fired. Chief, 
would you terminate somebody based on a phone call from the 
Congressman?
    Mr. Bosworth. Would I? No, I wouldn't.
    Mr. McInnis. Are you aware if these terminations have taken 
place while you have been in the Administration--
    Mr. Bosworth. I have never been called--
    Mr. McInnis. --because of a call of a Congressman?
    Mr. Bosworth. I have never been asked to fire a Forest 
Service employee by a Congressman. I have been asked to move a 
Forest Service employee or two.
    Mr. McInnis. Well, that is appropriate. I mean, there are 
some times where you--
    Mr. Tom Udall. Oh.
    Mr. McInnis. And let me clarify that.
    Mr. Bosworth. Nobody really understands the--
    Mr. McInnis. Sure. And let me clarify that, Mr. Udall. If 
you have a--for example, in our community, in the community 
that I grew up in, If we have got a forest--and a lot of times 
our forest--our regional forest supervisor is brought in from 
out of the area, and if they have a difficult time with the 
community, and the community is upset, I feel an obligation to 
relay that message to the Chief. But I think that the Civil 
Service System and others give protections out there. So I 
don't want this fear laid out there that all we do is pick up a 
phone and call, and the Chief terminates somebody.
    Mr. Bosworth. And if I may, I would also --
    Mr. McInnis. Go ahead, and then we will go on to Mr. 
Hayworth.
    Mr. Bosworth. I would also like to say that while I have 
been called and asked to move somebody, I have never moved 
anybody based upon a request from a Congressman. Not that I 
don't respect your advice a lot, but --
    Mr. Tom Udall. That is good. Hang in there and keep doing 
it.
    Mr. McInnis. Well, now, to clarify that, he has not gotten 
a call from me to move anybody either.
    So, Mr. Hayworth.
    Mr. Hayworth. I thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    And, Chief, I don't know, maybe some of those calls will be 
coming in in the days ahead.
    To get this out of personalities and the employment 
situation, it seems to me we have an essential problem here. 
Does the process gridlock you have described limit your ability 
as the Forest Service to protect communities, watersheds, and 
old growth forests from the forces of catastrophic fire?
    Mr. Bosworth. I believe they do. I believe that--I think 
that the example in Colorado right now is a good example. If 
our processes were more simplified, we were able to make more 
decisions more timely and be able to get a larger percentage of 
the dollars that are appropriated to us on the ground and less 
in the office doing analysis, I believe we would have many 
situations where a fire would not burn through the area in the 
catastrophic way like it does, and that it would be the kind of 
fire that is much more light on the land. So I think there are 
numerous situations where that would be the case.
    Mr. Hayworth. Chief, I want to thank you again not only for 
coming down to visit with us today, but the chance we had to 
visit informally in the past on some issues. And, again, I 
commend the Chairman of the Subcommittee for next week's 
hearings on the new Education Land Grant Act, and I just want 
to return to that briefly in the time allotted to me.
    Let me congratulate you. I understand that Chattahoochee-
Oconee National Forest in Georgia will complete the first grant 
under the act, passed unanimously by this House and by the 
Senate, and signed by President Clinton in his final few days 
in office. And what is gratifying, at least in terms of this 
Georgia experience, is that the entire process from the school 
district application to the conveyance of the land has taken 
less than a year. And so I think we have an example of how 
things were envisioned as working, certainly as the author of 
the legislation. There is no gridlock there.
    And we have spoken informally, and indeed I have been 
honored this morning to talk to the Under Secretary for Natural 
Resources at the Ag Department, Mack Gray, about what has 
transpired in Arizona. School districts have applied I think 
specifically about the Grand Canyon District. The applications 
have had no action taken on them, and there is a prime example 
of the gridlock and inertia that we are talking about.
    Chief, from your perspective, and the gridlock--and you 
said cause No. 3 is the Forest Service itself, Forest Service 
culture. Could you explain why the similar projects with 
similar intent and identical processes receive such disparate 
treatment?
    Mr. Bosworth. My understanding is--is that the project on 
the Chattahoochee-Oconee actually started--the EA actually 
started 5 years ago under--and I believe they were trying to do 
this under the Township Act. And when the legislation was 
passed, they thought that would be a better tool to accomplish 
it with, and so they moved forward with trying to do it under 
the more recent legislation. But the work the EA--the work I 
complain about the amount of analysis and some of these kind of 
things, that actually started 5 years ago in Georgia, if my 
information is correct.
    Mr. Hayworth. Chief, do you see a difference as well? Some 
of us ran for this job because of what was perceived to be a 
war on the West in an effort to so restrict the use of the 
forest so as to disallow just about every human involvement, it 
would seem, at some juncture. And you mentioned earlier 
litigation. Is there--has there just grown up, in terms of the 
risk-averse behavior, especially in forests in the West--has 
there been a kind of, I guess, a group thing that has gone on 
that says, well, gee, we have to deal so much with the 
litigation, we have to deal with fire danger. Boy, this 
education thing, it is nice, but it is not urgent; therefore, 
its importance drops further down the list in terms of, for 
lack of a better term, public policy triage or priorities?
    Mr. Bosworth. Well, I would have to speculate, because I 
haven't sat down specifically with the folks, our Forest 
Service folks, in, say, the Tonto National Forest to find out 
where they have that in their priority list. I know that when 
those folks on the Tonto National Forest are trying to sort 
through with several million visitors a year that are coming 
onto the national forest, they are trying to be good hosts, 
too, and try to deal with the fire situations like they are 
dealing with, that something like that may not be as high 
priority in their mind. And then, frankly, our funding levels 
sometimes don't allow for some of those lands projects, lands-
type issues. That is one of the areas we are historically 
underfunded in.
    So that may be part of the problem, it hasn't been a higher 
priority. And we have heard you are concerned about it, and we 
are making sure that the folks out there understand that 
concern that we move forward. I think we can work our way 
through and make that work well.
    Mr. Hayworth. Thank you, Chief.
    Thank you, Chairman.
    Mr. Tancredo. But you have to call and get somebody fired 
there.
    Mr. McInnis. Mr. Udall.
    Mr. Mark Udall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chief, I wanted to move, after preliminary remarks, to the 
overall report. But I do just want to say that those of us from 
Colorado, I think, feel today particularly sadness and despair 
in the sense of helplessness when it comes to this fire in 
Colorado. As we look to understand the causes of it and then to 
look toward problem-solving for the future, it is only human to 
begin to look at places to point fingers and place some blame.
    I think there is probably a lot of blame to go around, but 
I think we could also put some of the responsibility on Mother 
Nature for what is happening in Colorado. We are in the throes 
of a 4-year drought cycle. The old-timers say it is the 
fiercest drought we have seen in over 100 years, and we have 
had very dry, hot and windy weather, which has compounded the 
process.
    So my appeal to all of us is to continue to work together 
to find ways to return our forests to a healthier condition and 
prevent, hopefully, these kinds of fires over the long term. I 
think there are a lot of really great ideas to move us in that 
direction, but if we face off and put different groups and 
stakeholders in the corners of the ring, and we have four or 
five different stakeholders in different corners of the ring, I 
don't know that we are going to be able to move in the 
direction you have suggested we can move.
    We just received the report in the last, I think, 24 hours. 
I haven't had a chance to fully digest it. I look forward to 
looking it over. But in your comments you said that you were 
going to begin to act, not just to review things. And what do 
you consider that you would do next along the lines of bringing 
action to the table?
    Mr. Bosworth. Before I answer that, I would like to go back 
to the first part of your comment.
    Mr. Mark Udall. Sure.
    Mr. Bosworth. I don't want and I don't think it is valuable 
to sit back and try to point fingers at somebody that might be 
at fault for this or that. I want it to be clearly understood 
that I believe the environmental laws are good laws, and I also 
believe that most people that question our decisions do it with 
a lot of concern and care about how the land is being managed. 
So when people are questioning our decisions through appeals or 
through litigation, that is part of our democratic process.
    Mr. Mark Udall. Yes.
    Mr. Bosworth. But we don't have to have our processes 
internally so bound up that we can't do those things faster and 
do them with more thought for the future. We--that is why I 
would like to have us take a hard look at these processes so 
that we can make timely decisions and that people will have 
their day in court if they really want to have their day in 
court.
    I also believe that our processes are disincentives for 
people coming to the table to collaborate. You know, there are 
places around the country that--the community groups that are 
popping up all over the country, community-based forestry 
groups that really want to work together, and they are made up 
of people from the environmental side, from industry, from 
business, from NGOs that really want to work together for the 
betterment of their community and for the lands that surround 
their community. Yet our processes are very frustrating for 
them, because they will work together and come up with a 
proposal and work hard to do that, and then it takes us 2 years 
or 2-1/2 years to go through the stuff. You know, they don't 
want to come back and work every night or 1 night a week for 
the next year when it takes us 2 or 3 more years to implement 
it on the ground. So we have got to make some changes that will 
allow those things to happen in a more timely way, to encourage 
that kind of community-based collaboration that results in 
decisions that I believe are more satisfactory for a broader 
range of people.
    Mr. Mark Udall. If I might interrupt you, I think that is 
in part what my cousin, Mr. Udall from New Mexico, mentioned in 
regards to conversations he is having with Congressman Otter 
and others about how we value everybody's input, but create 
that collaborative environment and everybody pull together once 
the decision was made.
    Mr. Bosworth. In some cases if people can get everything 
they want without coming to the table and working in a 
collaborative way, then there is not a whole lot of incentive 
to come to the table. And there are situations where these 
groups will work together, and some will be involved, and then 
we will get the appeals and the lawsuits that will delay the 
activity.
    And so we need to look, and we will look, at ways that we 
can make the community-based collaborative forestry approach 
work better and to have more incentives.
    In terms of steps that I want to take, there are a number 
of things that we need to move forward with very quickly, I 
think. One is that we have got to--as I said in my testimony, I 
want to have our Deputy Chief get a team together to start 
looking at our internal processes. There are some training 
kinds of things that we need to do. Our folks need to be better 
at project management. How do you deliver a project within 
time, within budget? We need to put some training into our 
folks along those lines. I think that we have a person that is 
located at the Council of Environmental Quality right now, one 
of our Forest Service folks, to work as a liaison between us 
and CEQ to see what things can take place within our Forest 
Service regulations that will help, and then what things that 
maybe CEQ could look at within their regulations.
    I met with the Director of Fish and Wildlife Service within 
the last 2 days to talk about opportunities that we might have 
to do to look at our regulations that we live with and the Fish 
and Wildlife Service has responsibility for that will also try 
to see if there is some ways that we can make the process work 
more effectively.
    So those are some of the things that we need to do right 
away.
    Mr. Mark Udall. Excellent. That is helpful to me, and I 
look forward to hearing more about those steps you are going to 
take and working with the Committee to support you in that 
process.
    Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. McInnis. Mr. Otter.
    Mr. Otter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chief, once again, thanks for being here, and I certainly 
appreciate your responses thus far to both sides. I was told 
some time back, in fact I think it was a year, maybe 2 years 
ago, of an incident that happened down in northern California, 
and it seems as though there was a process that the Forest 
Service had gone through to design a program cut, put it out 
for bid. Everything went through the process, and it was 
either--maybe it was a disease, or perhaps it was a salvage, 
and I apologize for not knowing the whole story firsthand, but 
at one point--and I guess it must have been a burn, because we 
know that we have got about an 18- to 24-month window. When we 
burn through a forest, we either get in and get it out in 18 to 
24 months, or it is gone. Is that not correct?
    Mr. Bosworth. That is generally correct. Yeah.
    Mr. Otter. Anyway, there was a drop-dead date on it when it 
wasn't going to be any good.
    Anyway, as the process moved forward, and the bid had been 
let, and the cut was to begin, then a group came in and stayed 
the beginning of the cut, the beginning of the salvage, and 
said, for whatever reasons, maybe not all the rules and 
regulations were followed to their satisfaction. But it went 
before this judge--and this is what was intriguing to me-- and 
the judge says, well--he says, you know, you may well be right. 
Perhaps this report is a bit deficient, and you have a good 
reason to delay this, but I just want to tell you this. You--
this intervening group--are going to put up a $900,000 bond in 
order--just in case we find out that it is not true, and just 
in case that we actually lose what value is there, just in case 
there is an economic damage. And so if you are going to enter 
this as an aggrieved person and delay this process, which 
Mother Nature is going to take her toll within a 24-month--18- 
to 24-month period, then you are going to have to put up a 
bond.
    Do you think that perhaps something like that--that we 
could codify something like that and so some of these--Mr. 
Inslee is right, and I never, ever thought I would hear anybody 
in Congress talk about there is not enough lawsuits. I was kind 
of shocked at that whole process that we went through that we 
need more lawsuits, and 1 percent isn't enough. It is not doing 
enough damage to the process already.
    But anyway, I am wondering out loud here if there can be 
some kind of a sharing of the pain and a sharing of the burden 
for those who would bring lawsuits and then just to delay the 
process, get them to the front door, settle the lawsuit after 
we have gone through all that process. In fact, I one time was 
thinking of introducing a bill in Idaho that said that the 
lawyer that brought the lawsuit, if the plaintiff couldn't pay 
it off, the lawyer had to pay it off, and that didn't get very 
far. We had too many lawyers.
    Anyway, back to my codification. Could we codify some kind 
of that rendering the process more fair or more reasonable?
    Mr. Bosworth. You know, I have given some thought to 
something like this some in the past, although I haven't--I am 
certainly not an expert on the ramifications of something like 
that. I will admit that I am somewhat uneasy of doing anything 
that doesn't allow people to have an equal access to justice, 
although right now it feels to me to some degree like there is 
one side that--you know, there are some people that have an 
interest in national forests that don't have access to the 
courts over some of the decisions that we make, and anything 
that we can do to level that would probably be good.
    I don't know if that is the right solution that you are 
proposing or not. I would be more than happy to give it some 
thought and maybe get back with you and talk with you. I 
believe that anything that we can do, or most anything that we 
can do, that will encourage or create incentives for people to 
come to the table and--or, better yet, come to the woods 
together, with differing positions and points of view, and try 
to search for solutions and collaborate I think is good. If 
something like that would help as an incentive to get people to 
come to the woods and collaborate, then I think that is 
something that should be thought about, because right now there 
are just too many incentives to not come to the table or come 
to the woods and try to sort through what the choices might be.
    Mr. Otter. Well, I think in your earlier statement you made 
it very clear and it was very profound that you are not always 
going to satisfy all sides. And many times folks that are 
engaged in the process, when they didn't get 100 percent of 
what they wanted, and they only got a percent of what they 
wanted, then they still engage in the legal--in trying to get a 
legal decision rendered on the process that their negotiation 
failed at and their collaboration failed at.
    I would just be--my main concern is no matter what we come 
up with to engage in collaboration, no matter how hard we 
extend ourselves across the table, as Messrs.. Udall and myself 
and Mr. Simpson and Ms. McCollum and a few others have done, no 
matter how hard we try, there still is going to be one group 
out there by the name Alf or Elf or something that can still 
file the lawsuit and still stop the process.
    And so if it were truly good, well-intended, reasonable 
people meeting, trying to come to a common-sense solution, and 
if we could count on that, I wouldn't have a problem. But I 
hope that in your process of looking these things over, you 
will look at what we can tweak legally to make those who would 
endanger the entire collaborative process simply by bringing 
lawsuits pay for the punishment that they are delivering to us.
    Mr. Bosworth. I would be happy to look at that and to work 
with you on that. Again, the frustration is that when we try to 
bring people together and try to come up with solutions, and 
then we come up with a solution that all people have bought 
into, and then there are folks that are way outside of that 
that can stop the projects or significantly slow them down to 
where, you know, the decisions are made by default, that isn't 
working, and that is just simply not good government, in my 
viewpoint.
    Mr. Otter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. McInnis. Thank you.
    Chief, if you don't mind, we would like to take--we will 
adjourn this in about 15 or 20 minutes. Is that all right if we 
go another 15 or 20 minutes?
    Mr. Bosworth. That is just fine. I could talk about this 
all day.
    Mr.  McInnis. Very well. I know you have got a lot of 
priorities, and I know you want to pay some attention to what 
is going out there with those fires, but that will give us a 
few more minutes.
    And, Mr. Inslee, you said you would like to make some more 
comments?
    Mr. Inslee. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Just before I ask a question, I want to correct a 
misinterpretation my friend Mr. Otter suggested, that we needed 
more lawsuits. I think actually it is the reverse. In heaven 
there are no lawsuits, and we would like to bring heaven to 
Earth.
    But we have seen in the Northwest repeated instances where 
citizens had to go to court to get the Forest Service to follow 
the law, And this Beschta case that you have alluded to--the 
Chief has alluded to, I think, is one example of that where 
four district courts--it took four judges to tell the Forest 
Service on four separate occasions to follow the law. And now I 
am pleased to hear that the Chief--that you are incorporating 
that new science in your assessment, but it took four judges to 
tell the Forest Service to finally follow the law, and I think 
that is unfortunate.
    I want to ask about the Colorado fire, because there has 
been reference to the Upper South Platte Project, and it has 
been suggested that somehow this cataclysmic fire which is 
causing such devastation in Colorado right now is somehow due 
to your failure, Chief, or Congress's failure. And my 
understanding, in Colorado--although I haven't been there 
during the fires--this is the worst drought in over 100 years. 
There has been absolutely a terrible combination of wind and 
lack of moisture. The fire has jumped the Colorado River and a 
four-lane interstate. It is a huge cataclysmic event, and that 
the South Platte Project, two-thirds of it could have started 
last September. There was an appeal of a third of it last 
September. But at minimum it would have taken 5 to 8 years to 
implement, in any event, and then it appears clear this project 
would not have been done by the time this fire blew up.
    I want to make sure I understand your testimony. You are 
not telling us that if this appeal hadn't have been filed, that 
we wouldn't have a big fire in Colorado, are you?
    Mr. Bosworth. No, not at all. In fact, I think I said if we 
would have been actively managing that 10 years ago and 
accomplished fuels treatment in a broad landscape way for the 
last 10 years, we could have made a difference.
    Mr. Inslee. Right, if we would have started 10 years ago. 
And I think it is important to note that the reason for the 
need for fuel suppression is because the Forest Service and 
Congress and Republicans and Democrats, you know, we didn't 
understand the science, and we put out fires for decades and 
decades and decades, which allowed this fuel to buildup on the 
forest floor, which created these huge dynamitelike conditions 
because we didn't follow the science, and we made rash 
judgments without thinking about the science. And I think one 
of the frustrations we all have in decisionmaking right now is 
that following the science sometimes can be a pain. It is just 
a pain to have to follow the science. But we didn't follow the 
science for 30 years, and now we are in this situation where 
these forests are blowing up. And I just want to make that kind 
of editorial comment.
    I want to ask you one more thing, if I can, and that is 
about the drought in Colorado. According to the report that the 
White House issued about 2 weeks--a week ago or 2 weeks ago 
about global warming, they concluded that, in the best 
scientific minds of the Federal Government--concluded that 
global warming is happening; that it is caused by a large-- 
significant amounts by human activities; that global warming 
will cause significant climactic changes in the United States, 
and among those will be repeated and more severe droughts in 
the Western United States that will have not only the result of 
reducing our irrigation supplies due to lack of snowmelt, but 
would also, as I understand the report--would expose our 
forests to much more cataclysmic fires, as we are experiencing 
in Colorado right now, because of the very low moisture levels 
in the forest. And yet, to the Nation's chagrin, the President 
of the United States said he wasn't going to do anything about 
it. He decided that we just had to get used to it. He decided 
that we just had to have a strategy of adaptation rather than 
facing this, what I consider an imminent threat to our forest 
ecosystems and a lot of things we hold dear in this country.
    But I would like to ask you what the Forest Service is 
doing in its decisionmaking to deal with global climate change, 
what you think are the challenges it poses to you, and 
basically what your advice has been to the President in this 
regard, who, as far as I can tell, has just decided to ignore 
the problem. I would like your thoughts in that regard.
    Mr. Bosworth. OK. I would be happy to do that.
    I would first like to go back to your comments about the 
Beschta Report, because I see the world maybe a little bit 
differently than that.
    First, there were four court cases. Two were decided in the 
Forest Service's favor; two were decided in the other way. And 
the two said that it was needed, you know, that need to be 
referenced, and two said that it wasn't. There is a difference 
of opinion when you go to different courts, and, to me, it is 
not as clear as simply whether we are following the law. The 
law isn't very specific about whether you are going to follow 
the Beschta Report. Our folks, they do the analysis, but, 
again, we end up adding on and adding on and adding on. And I 
believe that makes my point about where we are headed in terms 
of some of these situations.
    And I also would say, as I said in my testimony, the 
Beschta Report was not a peer-reviewed document, it wasn't 
published in a journal, in a scientific journal, it was just an 
opinion piece by some very good scientists, but it was an 
opinion piece. It wasn't peer-reviewed. And yet now we have to 
make sure that we analyze that and consider that and document 
that and put it in the EIS. So I just wanted to clear that up.
    Mr. Inslee. Chief, can I interrupt you just for a moment?
    I am sorry, Mr. Chair. Go ahead. I am sorry. I will come 
back.
    Mr. Bosworth. I was just going to go to the global warming 
discussion. So--
    Mr. McInnis. Gentlemen, Mr. Hayworth would also like a few 
minutes; so, if we can wrap up this exchange in about the next 
3 or 4 minutes, that would be great.
    Mr. Bosworth. Let me just finish on the global warming 
question. We do have research going on in our Forest Service 
research and development program that ties in with global 
warming, but to me one of the most urgent things that we can do 
is make sure that the way we are managing the national forests 
will be managed in a way that will be able to take into 
consideration climate changes.
    If you have--if you had the situation of the national 
forest 100 years ago, there were much fewer trees on the land. 
You know, a lot of these drier pine types we have around the 
interior West may have had 20, 30, 40 trees per acre; now some 
of them have 500, 600, 1,000 trees per acre. When you do have 
drought conditions and you have that many trees sucking up the 
moisture, those trees get weakened. They are more susceptible 
to insects and diseases. They die. You end up with a much 
increased fuel situation.
    And so our job then makes sense that we do the thinning 
from below that needs to be done, that we put fire back in a 
controlled manner, that we keep more of the fuel loading down 
so that when you have the inevitable fires, they are going to 
burn in a different way and not in the catastrophic way that 
many of these fires are burning right now.
    Mr. Inslee. Thank you. We are hoping the President at some 
point will join us in an effort to stop global warming instead 
of just trying to clean up the forest.
    But just one more comment, if I can, Chief, and this is a 
small point, but I need to make it. Where I got the issue-- the 
information about Beschta was your testimony, which says, 
quote, in four of these cases, the courts have concluded that 
project decisions violated NEPA because the associated NEPA 
documents did not adequately document the Agency's 
consideration of Beschta, close quote. I just want to point 
that out, and I am sorry if I misinterpreted your comment.
    Mr. Bosworth. That is correct. Four went one way, and two 
went the other way. That is the actual facts.
    Mr. Inslee. Thanks, Chief. I appreciate it.
    Mr. McInnis. Thank you, Chief.
    And Mr. Hayworth.
    Mr. Hayworth. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am so glad we are 
not playing politics here at this hearing and are all working 
together.
    Let me just make sure I understand, Chief, and maybe this 
is somewhat the chicken or the egg argument. Whatever one's 
dispensation on global warning, if I understood your comments 
just a second ago, to deal with reducing the risk of 
catastrophic fire, if we were to rank how to deal with the 
challenges we confront, effective forest management would 
probably have more to do with alleviating some of the 
challenges we confront than theories in terms of global 
temperature at this juncture.
    Mr. Bosworth. Well, there is no question in my mind that 
the best way for us to be dealing with the potential for 
catastrophic fire around communities is active forest 
management, which primarily would be removing some of the 
material, mostly smaller-diameter material, from below and 
reintroducing fire in a controlled manner.
    Mr. Hayworth. You know, it is interesting to me, when I 
was--and before coming here, as a private citizen I recall 
reading accounts of testimony before this very Committee in a 
Congress where control just happened to be on the other side, 
where folks came here and testified that a fire corridor was 
developing from Idaho to our border with Mexico because of our 
failure to effectively deal with the fuel situation and 
effective thinning and effective management. And I think the 
key distinction perhaps upon which we can all agree, whatever 
disagreements may be the vagaries of being 150 days out from 
the midterm or something to that effect--but who iscounting--is 
the fact that sound science should always be utilized. And I 
know it doesn't happen on your watch, but the Chairman and 
others have made points, and we have seen sadly in Washington 
State the planting and false reporting of Lynx Air, in Fish and 
Wildlife situations by Fish and Wildlife biologists.
    When politics overtakes sound science, no matter the number 
of lawsuits, no matter how close in proximity we may be to 
another political campaign, when we substitute a motion for 
sound science, we sacrifice the well-being and the intent of 
what should transpire, and we see the results in catastrophic 
ways.
    I yield back.
    Mr. McInnis. Mr. Hayworth, I might point out that those 
employees involved in that Lynx thing were not terminated, 
despite any request by Congress; in fact, they got a pay raise 
and a bonus--bonus and a promotion. So I thought I would just 
point it out.
    Chief, let me mention a couple things. I would like to get 
a little more information on the carbon sequestration program. 
I know we don't have time today, but that deals with some of 
the global warming. We got into this global warming issue here, 
and we could have a hearing all on that alone. It is very 
interesting on both sides of that issue, and at some point I 
hope we get to discuss it in the future.
    I want to mention one thing, and that is if you have some 
specific things you think Congress can do to assist you in 
solving the process gridlock--I can assure you that I see as 
much gridlock in Congress as I do in some of these agencies, so 
we are not speaking with clean hands in regards to that. But 
that is kind of the political nature we have. We don't--it is 
kind of tough, but I appreciate that. And, again, I just--I 
just want to tell you, I mean, I was there. I was on Storm 
King. I have been on a number of your situations, your fires 
out there. And you guys, boy, when the siren goes off, you heed 
the call, you have heeded it well, and I just want to 
compliment you and the community.
    And you know what is neat? We had mutual aid. So until we 
were able to get your type on and your professionals in there, 
our local professionals from several different communities 
came, and it was--I guess we were still a little gun-shy from 
Storm King. And for those of you in the audience, that is where 
we had 14 of our firefighters die on the mountain.
    So, anyway, Chief, kudos to you for what you are doing out 
there, and Godspeed for your men and women out there fighting 
that fire. It is a dangerous thing, and we appreciate very much 
your time today. Appreciate the time of the Committee. The 
Committee now stands in adjournment.
    Mr. Bosworth. Thank you.
    [Whereupon, at 11:47 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]

    [The U.S. Forest Service Report, ``The Process 
Predicament,'' submitted for the record follows:]



[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                           EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
    Despite a century of devotion to conservationism, the Forest 
Service today faces a forest health crisis of tremendous proportions:
     73 million acres of national forests are at risk from 
severe wildland fires that threaten human safety and ecosystem 
integrity.
     Tens of millions of acres in all ownerships are 
threatened by dozens of different insects and diseases.
     Invasive species are spreading at an accelerated rate, 
degrading an increasing proportion of forests, rangelands, and riparian 
habitats.
    Unfortunately, the Forest Service operates within a statutory, 
regulatory, and administrative framework that has kept the agency from 
effectively addressing rapid declines in forest health. This same 
framework impedes nearly every other aspect of multiple-use management 
as well. Three problem areas stand out:
    1. LExcessive analysis--confusion, delays, costs, and risk 
management associated with the required consultations and studies;
    2. LIneffective public involvement--procedural requirements that 
create disincentives to collaboration in national forest management; 
and
    3. LManagement inefficiencies--poor planning and decision-making, a 
deteriorating skills base, and inflexible funding rules, problems that 
are compounded by the sheer volume of the required paperwork and the 
associated proliferation of opportunities to misinterpret or misapply 
required procedures
    These factors frequently place line officers in a costly procedural 
quagmire, where a single project can take years to move forward and 
where planning costs alone can exceed $1 million. Even noncontroversial 
projects often proceed at a snail's pace.
    Forest Service officials have estimated that planning and 
assessment consume 40 percent of total direct work at the national 
forest level. That would represent an expenditure of more than $250 
million per year. Although some planning is obviously necessary, Forest 
Service officials have estimated that improving administrative 
procedures could shift up to $100 million a year from unnecessary 
planning to actual project work to restore ecosystems and deliver 
services on the ground.
    The Forest Service is deeply committed to the principles of sound 
public land management in a democracy--long-term planning on an 
ecosystem basis, extensive public involvement, interagency consultation 
and collaboration, and ample opportunities for public redress. In the 
21st century, Americans have the tools and techniques they need to work 
together to stop invasive species, reduce the danger of catastrophic 
fire, restore ailing watersheds to health, and enjoy their national 
forests. Permitted to use the tools and apply the techniques of modern 
management, Americans can look forward to a future of healthy, 
resilient ecosystems all across their national forests and grasslands.
    It is time to tailor the Forest Service's statutory, regulatory, 
and administrative framework to the new era of public land management. 
Part of the solution will be internal. However, the problem goes far 
beyond the range of control of any single agency, or a single branch of 
the government. The Forest Service will need to work with partners, 
both in and out of government, to establish a modern management 
framework. By working together with partners to create and operate 
within such a framework, the Forest Service can focus more of its 
resources on responsible stewardship and thereby improve public trust 
and confidence in the agency's ability to care for the land and serve 
people.
                        THE PROCESS PREDICAMENT
                                 ______
                                 
 how statutory, regulatory, and administrative factors affect national 
                           forest management
=======================================================================

    In December 1995, a severe winter storm left nearly 35,000 acres of 
windthrown trees on the Six Rivers National Forest in California. The 
storm's effects created catastrophic wildland fire conditions, with the 
fuel loading reaching an estimated 300 to 400 tons per acre'ten times 
the manageable level of 30 to 40 tons per acre.
    The forest's management team proposed a salvage and restoration 
project to remove excessive fuels and conduct a series of prescribed 
burns to mitigate the threat to the watershed. From 1996 through the 
summer of 1999, the forest wrestled its way through analytical and 
procedural requirements, managing to treat only 1,600 acres.
    By September 1999, nature would no longer wait. The Megram and Fawn 
Fires consumed the untreated area, plus another 90,000 acres. 
Afterward, the forest was required to perform a new analysis of the 
watershed, because postfire conditions were now very different. A new 
round of processes began, repeating the steps taken from 1996 to 1999.
    Seven years after the original blowdown, the Megram project was 
appealed, litigated, and ultimately enjoined by a federal district 
court. The plan to address the effects of the firestorm--a direct 
result of the windstorm'remains in limbo.
=======================================================================
                              the problem
Caught in a Bind
    The Megram case example,\1\ encapsulated above, illustrates the 
process predicament faced by Forest Service decision-makers at all 
levels. As many Forest Service employees see it, they are caught in a 
bind, where the very procedures they need to follow to get them to 
their goal are keeping them from getting there.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ See Six Rivers National Forest, ``Megram Fire Recovery Plan,'' 
appendix C, pp. C-23-28.
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    Too often, the Forest Service is so busy meeting procedural 
requirements, such as preparing voluminous plans, studies, and 
associated documentation, that it has trouble fulfilling its historic 
mission: to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the 
nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future 
generations. Too frequently, the paralysis results in catastrophe.
    Inspired by conservationism, the Forest Service has, throughout its 
history, been dedicated to protecting and restoring our nation's 
forests and rangelands. Notwithstanding this devotion, today the agency 
faces a land health crisis of tremendous proportions:
     73 million acres of national forests are at risk from 
severe wildland fires that threaten human safety and ecosystem 
integrity.\2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \2\ USDA Forest Service, ``Historical Fire Regimes by Current 
Condition Classes,'' (Washington, D.C.: USDA Forest Service, February 
2001), Website .
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     Tens of millions of acres in all ownerships are 
threatened by dozens of different insects and diseases. In 1999, for 
example, the southern pine beetle infested forests on about 6.2 million 
acres in the South, including many national forest lands.\3\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \3\ USDA Forest Service, Forest Insect and Disease Conditions in 
the United States: 1999 (Washington, D.C.: USDA Forest Service, Forest 
Health Protection, December 2000), Website .
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     The roads maintenance backlog is enormous, with more than 
a thousand bridges classified as deficient in 2000 and more than a 
thousand miles of road becoming unusable on average each year from 1990 
to 1998.\4\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \4\ USDA Forest Service, ``Public Forest Service Roads: ``Seamless 
Transportation'' (Washington, D.C.: USDA Forest Service, April 2000).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     The rate of introduction of new invasive weeds has been 
on the rise since the 1960s; once introduced, invasives such as 
cheatgrass and leafy spurge spread at exponential rates. Today, more 
than 3.5 million acres of national forest land are infested.\5\
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    \5\ USDA Forest Service, Rangeland Resource Trends in the United 
States: A Technical Document Supporting the 2000 USDA Forest Service 
RPA Assessment (Washington, D.C.: USDA Forest Service, 2000), pp. 47-
54.
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     In the West, more than half of the rangeland riparian 
areas on the National Forest System do not meet standards for healthy 
watersheds. Moreover, almost one in ten acres in the Pacific states and 
one in six acres in the Rocky Mountains and Plains states is making no 
progress toward improvement.\6\
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    \6\ USDA Forest Service, Rangeland Resource Trends, pp. 40-43.
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    The Forest Service has taken a number of important steps to address 
these rapid declines in forest health. For example, the agency recently 
completed the implementation plan for the 10-Year Comprehensive 
Strategy for Reducing Wildland Fire Risks to Communities and the 
Environment, in cooperation with the Western Governors Association and 
a host of collaborators from professional organizations, counties, 
tribes, resource users, and environmental interests. The agency also 
has vigorous pest management and watershed restoration programs, often 
in collaboration with federal, state, and private partners.
    Notwithstanding the importance of such cooperative efforts, the 
Forest Service will ultimately fail to reverse rapid declines in forest 
health and increasing wildland fire risks unless the agency is able to 
more quickly achieve results on the ground. And the problem does not 
end with forest health. Issuing permits, improving recreational 
opportunities, addressing deferred maintenance needs, and a host of 
other management responsibilities all require timely, effective 
decision-making.
    Forest Service professionals are deeply committed to the principles 
of sound public land management and the existing framework of 
environmental laws. They support long-term planning on an ecosystem 
basis, extensive public involvement, interagency consultation and 
collaboration, and ample opportunities for public redress. They work 
long and hard to hammer out agreements that everyone can live with.
    But all too often, the regulatory and administrative framework the 
Forest Service is bound by keeps the agreements from going into effect. 
Time, effort, and resources poured into a project might ultimately 
yield nothing but paperwork, competent studies and documentation, but 
no results on the ground. In the Megram case example, after initial 
setbacks, the appeals process resulted in sound documentation for the 
proposed action; yet the project resulted in only 1,600 acres of fuels 
treatments before the 1999 Megram Fire severely burned much of the 
project area.\7\ It is not just a matter of delivering more outputs 
(see the sidebar below); it is about getting anything done at all.
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    \7\ Six Rivers NF, appendix C, appendix C, p. C-23.
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    The essential question is this: Does the Forest Service have the 
statutory, regulatory, and administrative framework needed to cope with 
the land health crisis and otherwise manage the National Forest System? 
Or will process delays keep the Forest Service from reducing hazards 
and addressing emergencies, thereby putting forest ecosystems and 
nearby communities at ever-greater risk--and ultimately preventing the 
agency from fulfilling its core mission?
=======================================================================
                       it's about good government
    The Coconino National Forest in Arizona is home to the northern 
goshawk. In 1996, the forest proposed thinning trees near a goshawk 
nest, partly to protect the bird from fire hazards. The project was 
stopped because environmentalists protested. That year, a catastrophic 
fire destroyed the forest, including the tree with the goshawk nest. 
``There was not a green tree left,'' said a Forest Service biologist. 
``What the scientists said could happen, did happen, right in front of 
my eyes.''*
    If process keeps projects from restoring the land, the land 
ultimately suffers. At stake are wildlife habitat and all of the other 
values that the Forest Service is charged with protecting and 
delivering on the national forests and grasslands. By streamlining 
procedures, the agency can reduce costs and increase its ability to do 
more on the ground for healthy, resilient ecosystems.
    Many values might or might not flow out of that, such as 
recreation, wildlife habitat, and timber. But the particular values are 
incidental to the core purpose--good government. It's about reducing 
waste and mismanagement. It's about efficient, effective service 
delivery.
    * Tom Knudson, ``Playing With Fire: Spin on Science Puts National 
Treasure at Risk,'' Sacramento Bee, 25 April 2001.
=======================================================================
Purpose of This Report
    In 2001, shortly after being named to lead the Forest Service, 
Chief Dale Bosworth appointed a team of Forest Service employees to 
explore whether national forest management is indeed mired in process. 
The team reviewed the statutory and regulatory framework for national 
forest management and examined the agency's own internal processes for 
forest planning and decision-making, based on:
     past reports by internal agency task groups and the 
General Accounting Office (GAO);
     relevant past and ongoing studies, particularly a 1995 
draft report under Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas (appendix A) 
and an ongoing business process analysis of a Forest project (appendix 
B); and
     case examples from Forest Service field personnel (some 
of which are in appendix C).
    In February 2002, the team presented its findings to Chief 
Bosworth. This report is based on those findings. It makes no 
recommendations. Its purpose is simply to set forth the problem: 
Statutory, regulatory, and administrative requirements impede the 
efficient, effective management of the National Forest System. As long 
as they do, the Forest Service's ability to achieve healthy, resilient 
ecosystems and otherwise meet its multiple-use mission will remain in 
doubt, undermining public confidence in the agency.
    The scope of this report is limited. Important questions remain. 
How can barriers to efficient, effective national forest management be 
removed without violating the principles of sound public land 
management in a democracy? Who should remove the barriers, and how? At 
least part of the problem is internal; how much of it can be solved 
through internal agency reforms alone? Should interagency processes or 
even statutes be improved? These are questions for the Forest Service's 
leaders and, perhaps, our nation's democratic process to decide. This 
report makes a start by simply identifying the problem.
    Finally, this report is not a conclusive treatise on resolving land 
management processes. Nor does it fault any particular entity involved 
in forest planning and land management. Rather, it offers facts and 
examines past practices and ensuing results. The Forest Service, over 
its hundred-year history, has earned a reputation for conservation 
leadership and innovation. This report opens a dialogue between the 
agency and interested publics to improve management efficiency while 
managing our natural resources within the spirit of the law.
                               BACKGROUND
Origins of the Problem
    The original purpose of the forest reserves, embodied in the 
Organic Act of 1897, was ``to improve and protect the forest within the 
reservation''\8\ in order to conserve watersheds and timber reserves 
for the nation to call on when needed. The timber reserves were needed 
after World War II. Other timber supplies were exhausted, and there was 
a huge postwar demand for timber to help realize the American dream of 
owning a single-family home. The national forests helped fill the gap. 
From 1960 to 1985, the national forests met about 25 percent of U.S. 
softwood timber needs.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \8\ Organic Administration Act (16 U.S.C. 475), as quoted in USDA 
Forest Service, The Principle Laws Relating to Forest Service 
Activities (Washington, D.C.: USDA Forest Service, 1993), p. 6.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In the 1950s, some people began to question the Forest Service's 
emphasis on timber production. They argued that other uses of the 
national forests, such as recreation, should have equal standing. The 
Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960 provided a framework for 
balancing multiple uses, but it failed to quell growing controversy 
over national forest management.
    At the time, federal land managers and many others believed that 
professional expertise should guide decision-making on public lands. 
The Forest Service took local opinion into account, but its philosophy 
was to ``inform and educate'' the public on what was best for the land, 
in the expectation that people would ultimately ``see the light.''\9\ 
However, the appeal to professional authority failed to satisfy growing 
numbers of Americans. As one study put it, the traditional Forest 
Service approach ``did not provide a way to surface differences, much 
less work through them.\10\ Increasingly, the public turned for relief 
to the courts and to Congress.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \9\ Personal communication with Gerald W. Williams, National 
Historian for the USDA Forest Service, Washington Office, Washington, 
D.C.
    \10\ M. Hummel and B. Fleet, ``Collaborative Processes for 
Improving Land Stewardship and Sustainability,'' in Ecological 
Stewardship, vol. III, p. 99.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In the 1960s and 1970s, Congress passed many new laws and 
amendments to old laws affecting national forest management, including 
the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Federal Advisory 
Committee Act (FACA), the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the Clean Water 
and Clean Air Acts, and the National Forest Management Act (NFMA). 
Congress understood what was at stake. In the national forest debate, 
social values were at issue; the underlying conflicts were often 
political. By facilitating public participation in national forest 
management, Congress sought to create mechanisms for conflict 
resolution, thereby obviating the need for direct congressional 
intervention to resolve disputes. To some degree, Congress seems to 
have favored a complex public process over other, more efficient 
management models.
    Each new law or amendment was driven by sound intentions. Each 
contained provisions that enjoyed broad public support. Some mandated 
integrated management approaches that are widely accepted today as the 
foundation for ecosystem-based management; others encouraged ordinary 
citizens to engage in Forest Service decision-making; still others 
placed more emphasis on individual values, such as undisturbed natural 
settings and native fish, wildlife, and plants.\11\
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    \11\ A relatively recent public survey suggests strong public 
support for noncommercial values on the national forests and 
grasslands. Deborah J. Shields, Ingrid M. Martin, Wade E. Martin, and 
Michelle A. Haefele, ``Results from a Survey of the American Public's 
Values, Objectives, Beliefs, and Attitudes Regarding Forests and 
Rangelands'' (Fort Collins, Colo.: USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain 
Research Station, March 2001).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Each law was intended to strengthen the Forest Service's ability to 
discharge its obligation to care for the land and serve people. In 
response, the Forest Service reformulated its mission, goals, and 
objectives.\12\ Today, the agency focuses on the long-term health of 
the land, in accordance with the principle that conditions we leave on 
the land are more important than what we take away.\13\
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    \12\ A process finalized with publication of the USDA Forest 
Service Strategic Plan (2000 Revision) (Washington, D.C.: USDA Forest 
Service, December 2000).
    \13\ A principle often cited by Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth. 
See, for example, Chief Bosworth's speech at the Forest Policy Summit 
in Grand Rapids, S.D., 15 August 2001 (online at ).
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    In the 1970s, the Forest Service began to change its approach to 
public participation in national forest management. In accordance with 
statutory requirements for more public involvement, the agency's new 
approach was to ``inform and involve.\14\ In practice, however, 
``inform and involve'' often continued the tradition of ``educating'' 
the public and arbitrating disputes among resource users based on 
professional expertise. It failed to stop an intensification of the 
debate over resource use on federal lands.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \14\ Personal communication with Gerald W. Williams, National 
Historian for the USDA Forest Service, Washington Office. The first 
extensive experience with public involvement came following the 
Wilderness Act of 1964, with about a quarter million public comments on 
the Forest Service's proposed wilderness regulations. The Roadless Area 
Review and Evaluation in 1973 generated the next big surge of public 
involvement--about 300 public meetings and more than 50,000 written and 
oral comments. In 1979, the new forest plans under NFMA generated 
hundreds of thousands of responses (such as letters) with millions of 
comments. For example, the forest plan for Oregon's Umpqua National 
Forest alone inspired 15,458 responses containing 215,680 comments.
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    As the conflict heated up in the 1980s, line officers began to seek 
alternative means of conflict resolution. By the early 1990s, the old 
model was giving way to new collaborative approaches.\15\ Today, the 
Forest Service increasingly sees itself as a partner in natural 
resource management. It works within collaborative groups with members 
who openly discuss their differences while seeking agreement based on 
mutually shared values and goals.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \15\ Hummel and Fleet, pp. 99-100. Arguably, the new approaches 
could draw on the Forest Service tradition of informal consultations 
with local communities.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The environmental laws thus helped to end one era of land 
management and inaugurate another. What one study calls ``the period of 
retention and management of public lands'' is yielding to a new era 
marked by ``integrated, ecosystem-based management that transcends 
traditional jurisdictional boundaries.\16\ In the new era, 
opportunities abound for new, more flexible approaches to public land 
management. New scientific insights are paving the way for adaptive 
management on an ecosystem basis, and new developments in information 
technology are making it easier to share information and collaborate 
across jurisdictions on a landscape level.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \16\ R.B. Keiter, T. Boling, and L. Milkman, ``Legal Perspectives 
on Ecosystem Management: Legitimizing a New Federal Land Management 
Policy,'' in Ecological Stewardship, vol. III, p. 12.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Yet, the Forest Service's decision-making process is failing to 
keep pace with these developments. The environmental laws spawned 
thousands of pages of regulations and administrative rules, making 
national forest management far more complex and cumbersome at a time 
when flexibility and agility in public land management are needed to 
capitalize on new opportunities. The requirements include a stream of 
predecisional consultations and analyses, often followed by 
postdecisional appeals and litigation. Line officers often find 
themselves in a costly procedural quagmire, where a single project can 
take years to move forward and where planning costs alone can exceed $1 
million.\17\ Even noncontroversial projects can proceed at a snail's 
pace.\18\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \17\ For example, procedural costs for individual projects exceeded 
$1 million in both the Bitterroot and Santa Fe case examples. See 
Bitterroot National Forest, ``Bitterroot Burned Area Recovery 
Project,'' appendix C, p. C-10; and Santa Fe National Forest, ``Santa 
Fe Municipal Watershed Project,'' appendix C, p. C-19.
    \18\ For example, the planning process in the Morgan Falls case 
example took about 20 months (from August 1999 to April 2001), even 
though it was noncontroversial and there were no appeals. According to 
the line officer, ``The process is frustrating for many local publics 
and employees due to the amount of time it takes to put an action in 
place.'' See Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, ``Morgan Falls Trail 
Reroute Project,'' appendix C, p. C-41.
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Thomas Report
    This problem has long been recognized. In April 1995, during his 
Senate confirmation hearing, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman 
pledged to work with Congress to streamline the Forest Service's 
statutory framework.\19\ Subsequently, Forest Service Chief Jack Ward 
Thomas appointed a task force to review the laws and regulations that 
guide management of the National Forest System. The review was to form 
the basis for a report to Congress. The task force drafted a report on 
how key laws relate to one another and affect national forest 
management (appendix A). The report was not delivered.\20\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \19\ U.S. General Accounting Office, ``Forest Service Decision-
Making: A Framework for Improving Performance'' (Report to 
Congressional Requesters; GAO/RCED-97-71; April 1997), p. 102.
    \20\ According to GAO, ``[Clinton] Administration officials have 
said that they are hesitant to suggest changes to the procedural 
requirements of planning and environmental laws because they believe 
that the Congress may also make substantive changes to the laws with 
which they would disagree.'' GAO, ``Forest Service Decision-Making,'' 
p. 102.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The Thomas Report found two widely held yet disparate views. One 
view is that the various sutes and regulations complement each other. 
The other view is that the statutes and regulationsform a ``crazy 
quilt'' with unintended adverse consequences.\21\ Although the task 
force ``did not find strong oppositional conflict between statutory 
mandates,'' it did find that the legal and regulatory framework had 
``some negative effects'' on ``the effectiveness of the Forest Service 
as a land-managing agency.''\22\ The report identified the following 
adverse effects:
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    \21\ Judge Lawrence K. Karlton characterized the situation as 
follows: ``With the growth of the environmental movement, the tension 
between the power of the Secretary [of Agriculture] to administer the 
surface of the national forests and the right to prospect and mine in 
the national forests became evident. With the passage of the Multiple 
Use Act and other statutes and amendments to pre-existing statutes, the 
unresolved tension has been incorporated into law. Indeed, the crazy 
quilt of apparently mutually incompatible statutory directives are 
enough to drive any Secretary of Agriculture interested in discharging 
his lawful duties to drink. Congress, can, of course lead a Secretary 
to booze, but Congress cannot force the Secretary to drink. Thus the 
Secretary by nature of his rulemaking powers, has the opportunity to 
bring order out of chaos.'' United States v. Brunskill, Civil No. 5-82-
666 LKK (E.D. Cal. 1984), unpublished opinion, aff'd, 792 F.2d 938) 
(9th Circuit 1985).
    \22\ Thomas Task Force, ``Review of the Forest Service Legal and 
Regulatory Framework'' (draft report) (Washington, D.C.: USDA Forest 
Service, 1995), appendix A, p. A-3.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     diminished output predictability;\23\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \23\ For example, ``ESA requires the re-evaluation of on-going 
projects whenever new listings are made, critical habitat is 
designated, or other new information comes to light,'' which can change 
output projections. Thomas Task Force, appendix A, pp. A-11-12.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     disincentives for predecisional dialogue because citizens 
have opportunities for administrative appeals and judicial review;\24\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \24\ For example, the Flathead National Forest faced litigation 
when its forest plan decision was announced in 1986, even though the 
Forest Service conducted additional analysis and hired a mediator to 
facilitate negotiations. Thomas Task Force, appendix A-14.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     legal constraints on using professional expertise and 
consensual group recommendations;\25\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \25\ Under FACA regulations, ``where the Forest Service does not 
have the professional expertise or the necessary information, but knows 
that the expertise or information exists, it can be difficult to get 
the information and recommendations.'' Thomas Task Force, appendix A, 
pp. A-14-15.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     uncertainty in Forest Service decision-making, given the 
vague or undefined parameters of judicial review;\26\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \26\ For example, under a 1994 decision on the northern spotted 
owl, the court ``identified several circumstances that may cause a need 
to reconsider the ROD [record of decision].'' Thomas Task Force, 
appendix A, p. A-16.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     process duplication and management inefficiencies;\27\ 
and
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \27\ For example, the responsibilities of state agencies to oversee 
water and air quality overlap with corresponding Forest Service 
responsibilities. Thomas Task Force, appendix A, p. A-18.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     inefficient cycles of forest plan and project-level 
consultation and documentation.\28\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \28\ For example, regulatory agencies ``are generally unwilling to 
allow projects that comply with forest plan consultation to proceed 
without further review at the project level.'' Thomas Task Force, 
appendix A, p. A-18.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The Thomas Task Force also reported escalating costs connected with 
forest planning and management due to the need for voluminous documents 
to meet potential court challenges.
Business Process Analysis
    Years of experience in project preparation have primed agency 
managers to accept overlapping and occasionally competing processes. It 
has become second nature for a forest's management team to allocate the 
time and resources needed solely for project process. Yet, beyond 
informal discussion and examination, no attempt to quantify the 
required processes had occurred.
    In early 2001, the Forest Service decided to see how procedural 
requirements translate into concrete activities at the project level by 
applying a business process model validated by agency psonnel with 
field experience. The agency chose to analyze all requirements 
potentially applicableto one phase of a timber sale, drawing on the 
perspectives of employees who worked on the South Platte Watershed 
Project in Colorado, one of 15 large-scale watershed restoration 
projects nationwide. The Forest Service's Inventory and Monitoring 
Institute hired a contractor to perform a business process analysis--a 
step-by-step breakdown of the activities involved.
    The initial report delivered to the Forest Service (appendix B) 
summarizes results from the study. The study found that project-level 
decisions involve as many as 800 individual activities and more than 
100 process interaction points.\29\ The report concluded that ``the 
intent of the Agency and governing laws is programmatically aligned,'' 
but that ``[p]rocess interaction between laws is extremely complex--
[and the] project planning process is highly susceptible to recursion/
interruption and even non-completion.''\30\ In other words, the process 
appears to be so complex that it is fragile and prone to failure. The 
final report will show time and costs involved, which promise to be 
extensive; it will be based on a review by the agencies responsible for 
administering the relevant laws.
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    \29\ Inventory and Monitoring Institute and BusinessGenetics, 
``Report Abstract: Reflecting Complexity and Impact of Laws on a USDA 
Forest Service Project'' (preliminary report) (Fort Collins, CO: USDA 
Forest Service, 2001), appendix B, pp. B-7, B-17.
    \30\ IMI and BusinessGenetics, appendix B, p. B-7.
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Case Examples
    The Bosworth Team reviewed and analyzed several real-world case 
examples to help pinpoint some of the problems associated with national 
forest management. The case examples include two fire recovery 
projects, a fuels reduction project, a trail relocation project, and a 
watershed restoration project. Drafted in the field, they reflect the 
views of local line officers; appendix C contains summaries and lightly 
edited full text.
    The case examples tell a complex story. Some of the problems 
described in the case examples were avoidable. One case example partly 
attributes project delays to mistakes made by managers, including a 
failure to change tactics in response to a changing situation.\31\ 
Another case example notes that the project could have been expedited 
had managers given it higher priority.\32\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \31\ Six Rivers NF, appendix C, pp. C-25-26.
    \32\ Santa Fe NF, appendix C, p. C-18.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Nevertheless, a strong common theme runs through all five case 
examples and other materials reviewed by the team: Procedural 
constraints keep national forest management from being as efficient and 
effective as it should be. Specifically:
     multiple layers of interagency coordination, coupled with 
internal administrative requirements that have accumulated over time, 
are delaying time-sensitive projects;\33\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \33\ In the Bitterroot case example, managers spent months 
reviewing roads policy and various environmental statutes and 
regulations ``to provide the greatest chance of success in judicial 
review.'' Meanwhile, fire-damaged timber proposed for salvage harvest 
was declining in value. See Bitterroot NF, appendix C, pp. C-7-8.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     for some groups, postdecisional review opportunities 
(through appeals and litigation) are a disincentive to seriously engage 
in predecisional collaboration on a project;\34\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \34\ See, for example, Bitterroot NF, appendix C, p. C-10: ``Given 
the obvious prospect of judicial review, there was little motivation 
for compromise among interests.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     requirements for environmental analysis go well beyond 
what is required for fully informed decision-making,\35\ partly because 
the Forest Service has locked itself into expectations for analysis and 
monitoring without fully considering the practical and scientific 
limitations involved;\36\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \35\ See, for example, Bitterroot NF, appendix C, p. C-12: 
``However, much of the analysis and documentation prepared to minimize 
litigation risks did not substantially help the decisionmaker.''
    \36\ See, for example, Bitterroot NF, appendix C, p. C-8: ``The 
Forest Service Manual prohibits management actions that lead to 
listings under the Endangered Species Act. There are 12 sensitive 
vertebrates and 27 sensitive plants on the BNF. Uncertainty about the 
population dynamics of most of these species makes the analysis of 
species viability problematic.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     procedural requirements place enormous stress on 
employees at all organizational levels, leading to employee 
burnout;\37\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \37\ See, for example, Bitterroot NF, appendix C, p. C-11: ``Many 
employees would prefer to avoid such assignments because they perceive 
them as unrewarding exercises in paperwork, with a greater chance of 
frustration and failure than of success.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     projects needed for ecological restoration and fuels 
treatment are not being implemented on the ground;\38\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \38\ See, for example, Six Rivers NF, appendix C, pp. C-23-28.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     continually evolving court interpretations of regulatory 
requirements create uncertainty for land managers;\39\ and
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \39\ In the Megram case example, a court threw out the 
environmental impact statement based on its interpretation of 
regulatory requirements. See Six Rivers NF, appendix C, p. C-25.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     project analyses are frequently reworked at high 
cost.\40\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \40\ In the Megram case example, the remanded EA was reworked based 
on a wildlife survey that cost $28,350 for 1,134 acres (about $25 per 
acre). See Six Rivers NF, appendix C, p. C-26.
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                         nature of the problem
    With the advent of the electronic age, the world has become a 
different place. Advances in science and technology have the potential 
to revolutionize public land management. Personal computers, the 
Internet, and telecommunications have created unprecedented 
opportunities for collaboration and flexible decision-making through 
teleconferences, virtual public meetings, and instantaneously shared 
information. Ecosystem-based approaches have opened possibilities for 
cross-jurisdictional management unheard of in the days of administering 
the land strictly within jurisdictional boundary lines. The science of 
adaptive management has the potential to replace traditional linear 
decision-making with flexible, holistic approaches based on feedback 
loops.
    Unfortunately, the Forest Service operates within a statutory, 
regulatory, and administrative framework that has kept the agency from 
fully capitalizing on such opportunities. The Thomas Report, business 
process analysis, and case examples all illustrate the shortcomings of 
a cumbersome procedural framework inherited from the past. Three 
problem areas stand out in particular:
    1. Excessive analysis--confusion, delays, costs, and risk 
management associated with the required consultations and studies;
    2. Ineffective public involvement--procedural requirements that 
create disincentives to collaboration in national forest management; 
and
    3. Management inefficiencies--poor planning and decision-making, a 
deteriorating skills base, and inflexible funding rules, problems that 
are compounded by the sheer volume of the required paperwork and the 
associated proliferation of opportunities to misinterpret or misapply 
required procedures.
Excessive Analysis
    Interagency consultations and environmental studies are 
cornerstones in our nation's system of protecting federal lands. 
However, the associated procedures, as they have evolved over decades 
of experience and legal precedent, are now complex, often costly and 
time-consuming, and sometimes redundant. Ironically, the requirements 
can keep federal agencies from realizing the intent of the law'to 
protect resources at risk.
    Federal land management agencies (such as the Forest Service) and 
regulatory agencies (such as the Environmental Protection Agency, 
National Marine Fisheries Service, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) 
play distinct yet overlapping roles in conserving and managing natural 
resources on federal lands. Decision-making is complicated by the 
extensive environmental analysis and public involvement procedures 
developed under NFMA, NEPA, ESA, FACA, and the Forest Service's appeals 
process. The ecosystem-based approach adopted by most federal agencies 
adds further layers of complexity.\41\ All of these factors, alone or 
in combination, can prevent or seriously delay work from getting done 
to protect species, improve water quality, or restore watersheds.
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    \41\ The Council on Environmental Quality has named additional 
factors that keep federal agencies from embracing ``policies, 
procedures, and activities that would enhance the conservation of 
biological diversity,'' including the disparity between administrative 
and ecological boundaries; institutional infrastructure (separate 
jurisdictions, differing missions); and the absence of regional 
ecosystem plans and strategies that provide specific biodiversity goals 
and objectives against which the impacts of proposed activities can be 
assessed. CEQ concluded--the challenges and obstacles discussed here do 
not preclude serious consideration of biodiversity in NEPA analysis 
within existing institutional arrangements and with presently available 
information. CEQ, ``Incorporating Biodiversity Consideration Into 
Environmental Impact Analysis Under the National Environmental Policy 
Act'' (Washington, D.C.: CEQ, January 1993), p. 22.
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Short-Term Focus
    Forest and rangeland management can, in many respects, be compared 
to a sporting event. Forest Service employees constitute the team. 
Forest plans are like game plans, designed to help the team achieve the 
desired outcome of maintaining healthy ecosystems in the long term. 
Projects are like individual plays in the game. If executed properly, 
they propel the team to victory.
    Regulatory agencies, on the other hand, are like referees. They are 
responsible for enforcing the various environmental statutes, such as 
ESA and the Clean Water and Air Acts, that constitute the rules of the 
game. The primary focus of regulatory agencies is not on long-term 
outcomes (winning the game). They rightly leave that up to the land 
management agency. Rather, they focus on the immediate risks to a 
particular resource, such as a threatened or endangered species or the 
quality of the air on any given day, that is governed by the rules they 
enforce.
    Understandably, the regulatory agencies often seek to avoid any 
risk to the individual resources they oversee. ``Regulatory agencies, 
given their missions,'' former Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas 
has declared in testimony before Congress, ``will always opt to accept 
as little short-term risk as possible and be relatively indifferent to 
long-term dynamic changes in the ecosystem in question.''\42\ By 
contrast, said Thomas, ``[m]ultiple-use oriented agencies, given their 
missions, will usually opt for greater short-term risk with a longer-
term view.''
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    \42\ Jack Ward Thomas, Testimony prepared for a hearing on the 
Northwest Forest Plan, scheduled for October 24, 2001, before the 
Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests of the Committee on 
Energy and Natural Resources.
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    Thomas noted that ``[t]he regulatory agencies' cards trump those of 
the land management agencies.'' Before the game can start, the referees 
must inspect and approve the game plan (forest plan). That might take 
awhile, particularly if the pool of referees is small and over-worked, 
overly cautious, or subject to multiple levels of review. Then the game 
can begin, but it is constantly interrupted before each play (project) 
so the referees can inspect and approve the play in advance. Again, 
that might take awhile.
    And, to further complicate maters, each referee uses a different 
rulebook (different laws and different requirements for particular 
resources, such as air quality or individual species). Adjustments made 
to satisfy one referee might violate the rules of another. If every 
referee can be satisfied--which can be difficult--then the play is 
allowed to proceed; but it might no longer do what it was supposed to 
do: help the team win the game.
    In other words, the regulatory agencies can use their ``trump 
cards'' to change the focus of land management from landscape-level 
conditions desired far into the future to the short-term welfare of 
single resources. As one study has noted, the short-term, single-
resource focus defies ecological insights established decades ago by 
Aldo Leopold.\43\ ``From my observation,'' noted Chief Thomas, ``it 
seems that each time there was a decision to make, it was made on the 
conservative (low immediate risk) side. These cautious decisions, piled 
one on top of the other, finally accumulated to slow management to a 
crawl headed for a stop.''\44\
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    \43\ Keiter and others, p. 12.
    \44\ Thomas, congressional testimony on the Northwest Forest Plan.
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    Two types of examples illustrate the problem:
     Thinning and controlled burning can have adverse short-
term impacts on water and air quality. However, if consultation stops 
such projects, the adverse long-term impacts can be much greater, 
including enormous fires; watershed damage; widespread loss of 
biodiversity and wildlife habitat; and massive, uncontrolled smoke 
emissions.\45\
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    \45\ The focus on short-term effects on forest resources such as 
water quality and fisheries is illustrated by the adverse ruling in 
Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman's Association v. NMFS, 253 F.3d 
1137 (9th Cir. 2001).
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     Roads decommissioning and in-stream restoration (such as 
culvert removal) can adversely affect water quality in the short term, 
although the long-term benefits for waters and lands are obvious. 
Often, such activities are folded into large projects with multiple 
objectives to achieve greater efficiencies. If consultation delays or 
prevents such projects from going forward, managers have a perverse 
incentive not to decommission roads or restore streams, but rather to 
eliminate those components from the project just to get the rest of the 
work done.\46\
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    \46\ Memorandum from the forest fisheries biologist to the acting 
forest supervisor, Gifford Pinchot National Forest, 1 July 1999.
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Management Uncertainty
    Many environmental laws contain provisions that tailor judicial 
review to particular purposes. However, agency actions under NEPA and 
NFMA are reviewed under the ``arbitrary and capricious'' standard of 
the Administrative Procedures Act. Under this standard, evolving case 
law has increased the costs for national forest planning and decision-
making. Part of the increase comes from the Forest Service's efforts to 
supply data and information requested by internal and external 
interests. However, much of the increase is related to management 
uncertainty'the desire to cover multiple eventualities, particularly if 
a case goes to court.
    Since 1969, when NEPA was enacted, the courts have established a 
body of case law. NEPA regulations formulated by the Council on 
Environmental Quality (CEQ) have their basis in early NEPA case law; 
the regulations have had only one substantial change since 1978. Each 
federal agency is responsible for developing NEPA procedures for its 
own particular environmental issues and decision-making processes. 
Forest Service NEPA procedures established in 1992 address some of the 
problems, but many areas of uncertainty remain unaddressed.
    For example, the range of alternatives required for environmental 
assessment and the appropriate way to incorporate adaptive management 
are still ambiguous. Line officers can never be sure when documentation 
is enough (see the sidebar below). They must constantly assess the risk 
of failure in the courts based on case law interpretations. They are 
left with the choice of either spending more time and money on analysis 
to cover a variety of potential court interpretations, or withdrawing 
project proposals for fear of adverse court decisions.
    In the Santa Fe case example, where severe fire hazards in a 
municipal watershed urgently demanded action, project withdrawal was 
not an option. As a result, the forest spent almost 5 years and more 
than $1 million on planning and public involvement, including 
collecting and analyzing extensive information of dubious value.\47\ 
``We needed really good NEPA in order to have a defensible process,'' 
noted the project planner. ``We expected legal challenge.''\48\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \47\ See Santa Fe NF, appendix C, p. C-11: ``ID Team members often 
believe that much of their work is `for the courts' and not 
particularly useful for line officers who make decisions.''
    \48\ Santa Fe NF, appendix C, pp. C-17-18.
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=======================================================================
                 beschta report--when is enough enough?
    An excellent illustration of excessive analysis due to management 
uncertainty is the Beschta Report. Commissioned by the Pacific Rivers 
Council in 1995, eight scientists drafted a paper, ``Wildfire and 
Salvage Logging,'' commonly known as the Beschta Report.
    The paper has never been published in any scientific or 
professional journal, nor has it ever been subject to any formal peer 
review. In 1995, Forest Service scientists and managers expressed 
strong reservations about the report, which contains many 
unsubstantiated statements and assumptions. Nevertheless, the courts 
have sometimes shown support.
    Groups have challenged postfire recovery projects on the grounds 
that the Forest Service has failed to consider the Beschta Report. In 
four cases, the courts have ruled that Forest Service decisions 
violated NEPA because the associated records did not adequately 
document the agency's consideration of the Beschta Report. In two other 
cases, courts have ruled in favor of the Forest Service on this issue.
    In view of the court record, forest planners might feel compelled 
to thoroughly document their consideration of the Beschta Report's 
principles and recommendations, even though the underlying land 
management issues are already addressed in the record. That includes 
documenting why some elements of the Beschta Report are not relevant to 
the specific proposed project.
    The court record has inspired some groups to demand that the Forest 
Service consider other papers and articles supposedly relevant to 
proposed actions. Sometimes the proffered list of references exceeds 
100 entries. To minimize the risk of adverse judicial opinions, land 
managers might feel constrained to fully document within the body of 
the NEPA document their detailed consideration of each and every paper 
or article.
=======================================================================

Information Levels
    In the past, land managers have made mistakes because they did not 
adequately understand natural systems.\49\ Sound land management 
decisions must be based on enough information to sufficiently assess 
the environmental effects. NEPA incorporates that insight. NEPA 
requires federal land managers to conduct environmental analyses in 
order to evaluate the short- and long-term implications of proposed 
actions, to the extent that such implications are known or reasonably 
ascertainable.\50\
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    \49\ In Oregon's Blue Mountains, for example, ``[i]n their haste to 
fix what was wrong with industrial logging, the [early Forest Service] 
foresters created other problems that proved much more difficult to 
mend.'' Nancy Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares (Seattle: 
University of Washington Press, 1995), p. 135.
    \50\ NEPA sections 102(C)(ii) and (v) require proposals for ``major 
Federal actions'' to include ``a detailed statement'' on, respectively, 
``any adverse environmental effects which cannot be avoided should the 
proposal be implemented'' and ``any irreversible and irretrievable 
commitments of resources which would be involved in the proposed action 
should it be implemented.'' Principle Laws, p. 456.
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    Unfortunately, the courts have increasingly directed Forest Service 
managers to obtain information beyond the agency's own view of what is 
reasonable. Requirements to reopen analysis and rework project plans 
can delay even very small projects (see the sidebar on the next page). 
Natural systems are so inherently complex that they might never be 
fully understood in all of their workings. ``For not only are 
ecosystems more complex than we think,'' Chief Jack Ward Thomas has 
observed, ``they are more complex than we can think.''\51\ 
Environmental analysis is necessarily based on incomplete data and our 
less-than-perfect understanding of natural processes. The question is 
this: How much information is enough?\52\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \51\ Quoted in Michael J. Gippert, ``Integration and Coordination 
of Environmental Laws and Federal Administrative Practice: Forest 
Service Experience'' (Washington, D.C.: USDA Office of General Counsel; 
revised talking points, November 1996), p. 1. Thomas was paraphrasing 
the noted ecologist Frank Egler, who wrote: ``Ecosystems are not only 
more complex than we think, they are more complex than we can think.'' 
Frank Egler, The Nature of Vegetation: Its Management and Mismanagement 
(Norfolk, Conn.: Aton Forest Publishers, 1977).
    \52\ A question raised by the court in Alaska v. Andrus: 
``Predictions, however, by their very nature, can never be perfect; and 
the information available to an agency could always be augmented. The 
question in each case is, ``How much information is enough?'' 580 F.2d 
465 (D.C. Cir. 1978), vacated in part as moot, 439 U.S. 922 (1978).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Opinions differ. For reasonably foreseeable adverse effects, CEQ 
NEPA regulations require only that an environmental impact statement 
(EIS) disclose the fact of incomplete or unavailable information 
regarding the effects, acquisition of that information if reasonably 
possible, and evaluation of the effects based on available approaches. 
An EIS need not discuss remote and highly speculative consequences. In 
Alaska v. Andrus, the court ruled that federal agencies have a 
responsibility to ``predict the environmental effects of a proposed 
action before the action is taken and those effects are fully known,'' 
but that ``agencies may not be precluded from proceeding with 
particular projects merely because the environmental effects of that 
project remain to some extent speculative.''\53\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \53\ Alaska v. Andrus, 580 F.2d 465 (D.C. Cir. 1978), vacated in 
part as moot, 439 U.S. 922 (1978).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    However, some have demanded very high standards of certainty, 
threatening otherwise to appeal or litigate. ``When land-use decisions 
are to be made that have large-scale economic, social, and political 
impacts,'' noted Jack Ward Thomas, ``individuals who stand to lose from 
those decisions typically demand unreasonable degrees of certainty in 
the information on which those decisions are based.''\54\ These demands 
are often supported by references to existing case law. In response, 
the Forest Service has spent growing amounts of time and money on 
increasingly elaborate predecisional speculation about the 
environmental effects of proposed actions.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \54\ Jack Ward Thomas, in an article that appeared in Forest Watch 
(January/February 1992), quoted in Gippert, ``Integration and 
Coordination of Environmental Laws,'' p. 8.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
=======================================================================
               morgan cut: a case of analysis paralysis*
    A good example of what some call ``analysis paralysis'' comes from 
the Wayah Ranger District on the Nantahala National Forest in North 
Carolina, where a stream of new developments has produced years of 
analysis and planning for a small pilot project:
     1992: Public scoping begins for the Hickory Knob timber 
sale.
     1994: The environmental assessment (EA) is released; the 
project area is found to contain cerulean warblers, listed in the 
forest plan as a sensitive species. The timber sale is dropped.
     April 1998: Part of the old timber sale becomes the 
Morgan Cut Reinvention Project, a stewardship pilot project to evaluate 
the use of commercial logging for vegetation management. Proposed are a 
regeneration harvest on 12 acres and thinning on 8 acres. The project 
area contains no cerulean warblers.
     February 1999: Coordination with the regional and 
national offices is completed to tailor the project to the stewardship 
pilot program. Additional analysis covers aquatic, wildlife, and plant 
resources.
     February 1999: The district announces a decision based on 
a categorical exclusion (CE). The decision is appealed and withdrawn. A 
court subsequently eliminates use of CEs for similar small projects.
     June 1999: The district reinitiates scoping. An EA is 
released in November, but a decision is delayed pending analysis 
related to the endangered Indiana bat, discovered in an adjacent 
county.
     September 2000: A forest plan amendment and a biological 
opinion are released, both containing new requirements to protect 
habitat for the Indiana bat.
     September 2001: The forest completes a forestwide 
management indicator species report, in compliance with a recent court 
decision affecting several national forests in the South.
     February 2002: Additional surveys are completed for 
sensitive species. The project's biological evaluation and EA are 
reformatted to meet new regional standards. The decision notice is 
released.
     March 2002: The decision is appealed. The project is 
delayed pending outcome of the appeal.
    New developments forced employees to rework plans for Morgan Cut, 
keeping the project in limbo for years. The EA currently stands at 65 
pages, with an additional 81 pages of specialist reports and an appeals 
record 372 pages long--all for a 20-acre stewardship pilot project 
involving no new roads.
    * Based on a report from the Wayah Ranger District, Nantahala 
National Forest, May 2002.
=======================================================================

    The Bitterroot Burned Area Recovery Project is a case in point. 
Despite the need to move swiftly--in part to recover the value of 
removed timber'line officers still had to ``fully document their ``hard 
look'' at all the issues and their full compliance with every 
potentially applicable procedural requirement'' in order to ``withstand 
a federal court's ``searching inquiry'' of whether the [national] 
forest ``adequately considered all the relevant factors.''\55\ The 
adjacent Sula State Forest, which suffered the same fire damage as the 
Bitterroot National Forest and proposed similar treatments, was able to 
get work done on the ground while the national forest was still 
collecting and analyzing information. In the end, opponents did 
litigate, so the national forest's careful study and documentation were 
in part justified. But they came at a considerable cost and risked 
fatally delaying a time-sensitive project. The end result was a 
settlement that did not fully utilize the study and analysis.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \55\ Bitterroot NF, appendix C, p. C-7.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Though necessary under the circumstances, such efforts are of 
questionable usefulness.\56\ As Kai Lee has put it, ``Conflict through 
the courts forced substantial change in the agencies'' decision-making. 
But there was little learning about the environment itself.--[W]hat 
remains is environmental analysis that is often usable, but few users 
and little cumulative ecological knowledge.''\57\ Resources put to such 
dubious use cannot be applied to more productive tasks, such as 
monitoring, assessment, and adaptive management.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \56\ See Bitterroot NF, appendix C, p. C-11: ``Uncertainty over 
what is a legally sufficient level of analysis for particular issues 
and policy directives often leads to levels of analysis and 
documentation greatly exceeding the amount line officers feel is needed 
to make an informed decision. This additional analysis and 
documentation is `for the courts,' and is of little or no use to the 
general public or agency decision-makers.''
    \57\ Lee, Compass and Gyroscope, pp. 103-104.
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New Information
    A related problem is the inherently incomplete nature of 
information on the environment. After analysis is done and work has 
started, new discoveries might be made or the situation might change; 
for example, an endangered species might be found or a fire or flood 
might occur. Under NEPA, if the agency makes ``substantial changes in 
the proposed action that are relevant to environmental concerns--or if 
there are ``significant new circumstances or information relevant to 
environmental concerns and bearing on the proposed action or its 
impacts,'' then such new information can force a project to stop work, 
pending supplementation of environmental analysis.
    And therein lies the rub. The agency interpretation of the terms 
``substantial'' and ``significant'' are subject to judicial review, 
creating fertile ground for litigation. The problem is particularly 
vexing at higher levels of planning and coordination. Forest plans, for 
example, are intended to last 10 to 15 years, a period long enough for 
many changes to occur and much new knowledge to emerge. Another 
challenge is incorporating new information into the larger scales of 
planning and analysis required for eco-regional or cross-jurisdictional 
coordination and collaboration. New information at any scale can 
trigger delay or additional analysis at other scales (see the sidebar 
on the next page).
    Most scientists and land managers agree that adaptive management is 
the answer.\58\ Adaptive management is based on the premise that our 
understanding of ecosystems continually evolves and that unexpected 
events can and will occur. Uncertainty is normal; it need not grind 
decision-making to a halt. ``Adaptive management is learning while 
doing,'' Kai Lee has noted. ``Adaptive management does not postpone 
action until ``enough'' is known but acknowledges that time and 
resources are too short to defer some action.''\59\ ... Adaptive 
management means making decisions using the best information available, 
then monitoring the results, learning from experience, and adapting 
future management accordingly.
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    \58\ For a thorough discussion of the concept and application of 
adaptive management, see B.T. Borman, J.R. Martin, F.H. Wagner, W.W. 
Wood, J. Alegria, P.C. Cunningham, M.H. Brookes, P. Fiesema, J. Berg, 
and J.R. Henshaw, ``Adaptive Management,'' in Ecological Stewardship, 
vol. III, pp. 505-533.
    \59\ Kai N. Lee, ``Appraising Adaptive Management,'' in 
Conservation Ecology 3(2) (online at ).
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=======================================================================
           woodpecker project: a case of open-ended analysis*
    A good example of open-ended analysis comes from Alaska's Mitkof 
Island, part of the Tongass National Forest. In 1995, a landscape 
analysis of the island identified a grouping of potential timber 
harvest opportunities. They came to be known as the Woodpecker Project, 
a proposal to remove 16.3 million board feet of timber and build 8.6 
miles of new and temporary roads.
    In the years that followed, new decisions, policies, and appeals 
required the Woodpecker plans and studies to be constantly reopened. 
Such new developments included:
     In 1997, the record of decision (ROD) for the Tongass 
Forest Plan;
     In 1999, the ROD for the revised forest plan;
     In January 2001, the new agency wide roadless rule and 
roads policy;
     In February 2001, again the new roads policy;
     In March 2001, a court decision to vacate the 1999 ROD;
     In March 2001, a court decision to enjoin timber sales 
pending a supplemental environmental impact statement;
     In May 2001, a court decision to lift the injunction, 
requiring documentation to be reworked to incorporate the latest legal 
and policy language;
     From June to December 2001, interim directives to protect 
roadless values;
     In December 2001, a decision by the regional forester to 
reverse the forest supervisor's decision to proceed with the project 
because the record appeared to include a data error that might be 
significant; and
     In February 2002, court hearings on whether to again 
enjoin timber sales.
    Each new development forced employees to rework documentation for 
the Woodpecker Project. The future promises more of the same; 
litigation could follow, given the roadless issues involved.
    * E-mail memorandum from Betsy Rickards, environmental coordinator, 
USDA Forest Service, Alaska Region, 25 April 2002.
=======================================================================

    However, current procedures can discourage adaptive management. The 
Forest Service takes the approach that complying with NEPA and ESA 
requires making decisions, completing projects, and determining effects 
within a clearly identifiable timeframe. Forest Service rules for 
public participation and administrative appeals are linear and 
inflexible. Without more flexible mechanisms, adaptive management will 
remain at best difficult to incorporate into national forest planning 
and decision-making.\60\
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    \60\ For example, ``[s]topping ongoing and new activities during 
the development or reconsideration of programmatic ecosystem strategies 
operates as a disincentive for federal agencies to practice adaptive 
management.'' Gippert, ``Integration and Coordination of Environmental 
Laws,'' p. 18.
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New Listings
    A special form of new information is the new listing of a 
threatened or endangered species. If a species is added to the 
endangered species list, then activities that might affect it must 
often stop, pending consultation with regulatory agencies.\61\ That 
stands to reason; however, renewed consultation might be required for 
an entire forest plan, triggering a forest--or even regional suspension 
of projects.\62\
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    \61\ Pacific Rivers Council (PRC), 30 F.3d 1050 (9th Cir. 1994).
    \62\ The Supreme Court's ruling regarding the justiciability of 
forest plans has raised questions about the viability of Pacific Rivers 
Council v. Thomas.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The need for such blanket delays is questionable, particularly in 
the electronic age. With detailed databases quickly at their disposal, 
regulatory and management agencies should be able to focus on the 
projects that specifically affect a newly listed species. Other 
projects should be able to proceed without delay.
Administrative Rules
    The Forest Service's own rules, many of which resulted from court 
decisions, require the agency to gather and analyze extensive data 
before a project can proceed. For example, forest planning regulations 
require line officers to maintain ``viable populations of native and 
desired non-native species within the planning area.''\63\ By 
comparison, NFMA requires only that managers ``provide for diversity of 
plant and animal communities based on the suitability and capability of 
the specific land area in order to meet overall multiple-use 
objectives''\64\
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    \63\ 36 CFR 219.19.
    \64\ NFMA section 6(g)(3)(b). Principle Laws, p. 597. The ``viable 
populations'' requirement is also arguably more rigorous than any in 
provision in ESA.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The ``viable populations'' requirement is responsible for much of 
the time and expense that goes into project planning. It means 
analyzing potential project effects on many different species, as 
opposed to a far less time-consuming landscape-level analysis of 
habitat diversity, specifically checking for the needs of individual 
species. In the Bitterroot case example, the national forest evaluated 
the proposed project's impact on ``viable populations'' for 12 
sensitive vertebrates and 27 sensitive plants, a daunting challenge: 
``Uncertainty about the population dynamics of most of these species 
makes the analysis of species viability problematic,'' the line officer 
observed.\65\
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    \65\ Bitterroot NF, appendix C, p. C-8.
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    Former Chief Jack Ward Thomas, currently Boone and Crockett 
Professor of Wildlife Conservation at the University of Montana, has 
questioned the rationale for such ``unreasonable degrees of certainty'' 
in project planning. ``The biology of certain wildlife populations and 
habitat relationships is not conducive to precise estimates, no matter 
how much they are studied,'' he noted. ``The precision of such 
estimates can become only marginally better regardless of how 
politically desirable that may be.''\66\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \66\ Jack Ward Thomas, in an article that appeared in Forest Watch 
(January/February 1992), quoted in Gippert, ``Integration and 
Coordination of Environmental Laws,'' p. 8.
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    Another example of an administrative rule that seems to demand 
unreasonable degrees of certainty is the ``Survey and Manage'' 
requirement in the Northwest Forest Plan. Before a ``ground-disturbing 
activity'' can proceed within the 24.5 million acres of federal land 
covered by the plan, federal agencies must collect detailed data on 
numerous plants and animals in the project area.\67\ For species such 
as mollusks, the knowledge of habitat needs can be extremely limited; 
there might be no more than a single expert worldwide. ``Survey and 
Manage'' can prevent fuels reduction if thinning or prescribed fire 
would temporarily affect suitable habitat or threaten individuals in 
surveyed species. Even more than consultation requirements, ``Survey 
and Manage'' tends to distract from long-term resource conservation by 
focusing management on short-term, single-resource protection.\68\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \67\ Record of Decision for Amendments to Forest Service and Bureau 
of Land Management Planning Documents Within the Range of the Northern 
Spotted Owl (April 1994). Dozens or even hundreds of species might fall 
under ``Survey and Manage'' requirements for a project. ``Under the 
Survey and Manage component of the NFP [Northwest Forest Plan], we have 
learned about the distribution of over 400 species about which little 
was known prior to 1994,'' said Deputy Regional Forester Nancy Graybeal 
in testimony before the Senate subcommittee on Forests and Public Land 
Management, 24 October 2001.
    \68\ See, for example, Six Rivers NF, appendix C, p. C-26: ``In 
fact, ``Survey and Manage'' requirements are typically more inflexible 
than consultation requirements for endangered species.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Moreover, the scientific basis of ``Survey and Manage'' is 
questionable.\69\ Jack Ward Thomas, who led landscape-level studies 
related to ecosystem management in the Pacific Northwest before serving 
as Forest Service Chief from 1993 to 1996, believes that the surveys 
under the protocol are not only exceedingly expensive, but also of 
limited value because they do not provide statistically valid data on 
species occurrence.\70\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \69\ See, for example, Six Rivers NF, appendix C, p. C-27: ``Data 
collection without a research design is usually a waste of time.''
    \70\ Personal communication with Jack Ward Thomas, Forest Service 
Chief emeritus and former leader of the Forest Ecosystem Management 
Advisory Team process.
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Ineffective Public Involvement
    Public participation is an essential part of public land management 
in a democracy. National forest management has always incorporated some 
form of public involvement. Over the years, however, the role of public 
involvement has changed. Since the 1960s, top-down approaches have 
gradually given way to bottom-up approaches based on partnerships.
    Today, the Forest Service encourages competing interests to sit 
down and reason together. The final decision still rests with the 
agency, but a collaborative approach can yield better-informed 
decisions with broader public support than in the past. Collaboration 
takes time, but it can build constructive long-term relationships and 
dialogue, leading to decisions that are sustainable.\71\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \71\ For an authoritative discussion of collaborative approaches, 
see Hummel and Fleet, pp. 97-129.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Of course, collaboration is no silver bullet. Collaboration has 
worked well primarily where it has succeeded in building a basis for 
mutual trust (see the sidebar below). Where distrust remains, results 
have been mixed.
    In the Santa Fe case example, according to the line officer, 
``local constituents simply do not trust the Forest Service to do the 
right thing.''\72\ A suspicious public demanded more information than 
technically needed to justify a relatively simple fuels reduction 
project.\73\ The Forest Service spent nearly five years and more than 
$1 million on project planning. Much of the time was spent on 
collaborative efforts to build public trust and support for the 
project. Given the urgent need for the project, some questioned the 
value of the time spent.\74\
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    \72\ Santa Fe NF, appendix C, p. C-18.
    \73\ Santa Fe NF, appendix C, p. C-18: ``[The public does] not 
accept agency expert opinions on face value. Consequently, the 
information needs were greater for this project than for many others of 
similar size and complexity. There was a demand for `outside' 
scientific opinion, such as that presented by well-known forest 
ecologists at a community forum.''
    \74\ Line officers estimated that, without fuels treatments, a 
wildfire in the watershed would spread to 46,000 acres within two days. 
``The mayor [of Santa Fe], regional forester [for the Forest Service's 
Southwest Region], and others questioned the length of time involved.'' 
Santa Fe NF, appendix C, pp. C-13, C-19.
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    The emerging collaborative approach hinges on the Forest Service's 
ability to hold open discussions with stakeholders. That ability can be 
constrained by procedural barriers associated with FACA, administrative 
appeals, prolonged delays, uneven standards for judicial review, and 
the Forest Service's own uneven expertise in collaboration.
=======================================================================
                   ponderosa pine forest partnership*
    ``Some kind of intervention was necessary,'' said Mike Preston, a 
commissioner for Montezuma County in southwestern Colorado.
    For years, bitter conflicts over timber harvest had slowly ground 
public land management to a halt. Meanwhile, the ponderosa pine 
forest--historically open, with lots of grasses under the big, old 
trees--continued to decline, choked by ``dog-hair'' thickets of 
invading small trees. Catastrophic fires threatened each year to 
incinerate the entire forest and cook the soils, doing long-term 
ecological damage.
    The county decided to try something new. It brought together 
various sides'loggers and environmentalists, state and federal 
managers, college researchers and facilitators--in a collaborative 
experiment called the Ponderosa Pine Forest Partnership.
    Each partner has a mutually shared responsibility for community and 
forest sustainability. Partners build new relationships based on shared 
values, shared knowledge, and constructive action.
    The experiment has worked because the partners discovered a basis 
for mutual trust. Traditional relationships, all too often based on 
mutual recrimination, have given way to new arrangements in which 
ecology drives the economics of forest restoration.
    Based on principles of adaptive management, the San Juan National 
Forest marks trees to be left standing. Then local loggers remove the 
remainder, using ecologically sound techniques. Next come the 
controlled burns. The fires burn off brush and add nutrients to the 
soil but kill few trees.
    The result is astounding. Thousands of acres in the forest's 
ponderosa pine zone have been restored to open, sun-filled expanses, 
with meadow like floors and clumps of large trees. ``It's a much better 
approach to forestry than we've seen elsewhere in the national 
forest,'' said Mark Pearson, executive director of the San Juan 
Citizens Alliance. ``People can get timber products off the forest at 
the same time that they're supporting the ecosystem.''
    * Based on Jim Greenhill, ``Partnership Reduces Fire Danger, Helps 
Forests With Logging,'' The Durango Herald, 9 May 2002.
=======================================================================

FACA Constraints
    One increasingly desirable--and sometimes necessary\75\--option for 
line officers is to utilize broadly representative public groups to 
provide consensual advice on watershed- or landscape-level projects. 
Consensus goes beyond collaboration; it entails agreement reached by a 
group through its own decision-making process. If the Forest Service 
decides to utilize such a group, it is required by FACA to charter an 
advisory committee.\76\ Under USDA regulations, the chartering process 
is usually so laborious and time-consuming that its potential 
advantages have never been fully realized--and, until recently, seldom 
explored.
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    \75\ For example, under the Secure Rural Schools and Community 
Self-Determination Act of 2000.
    \76\ NFMA, 16 U.S.C. 1612(b), provides for the involvement of FACA-
chartered advisory boards in forest planning.
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    In August 2001, new FACA regulations issued by the General Services 
Administration went into effect. The new regulations exempted some 
groups from FACA requirements, including groups with members who are 
not actually managed or controlled by the executive branch, who provide 
individual advice, or who exchange facts or information.\77\
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    \77\ 41 CFR 102-3.40. There are also statutory exemptions, such as 
section 204 of the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995, that exempt 
advisory committees whose membership consists of state, local, and 
tribal elected officials or their designees, and where their meetings 
are concerned with managing federal programs with intergovernmental 
responsibilities or administration.
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    However, when the exemptions do not apply, then the Forest Service 
must still go through the time-consuming process of chartering an 
advisory committee. The alternative is to use methods that do not 
trigger FACA requirements. Such methods would not facilitate the 
consensual approaches that might work best in some situations.
Administrative Appeals
    The Forest Service's procedure for administrative appeals allows 
citizens to challenge a line officer's decision to proceed with a 
project. Although the Forest Service has long had an administrative 
appeals process, none was legally required for the agency until the 
1993 Interior and Related Agencies Appropriation Act.\78\ The Forest 
Service is now required by law to give public notice and an on-the-
record comment period for proposed actions covered by environmental 
assessments and findings of no significant impact.\79\ Other federal 
land managers have administratively established review procedures or no 
appeals process at all.\80\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \78\ 106 Stat. 1419.
    \79\ 36 CFR 215.
    \80\ 43 CFR 1610.5-2. For example, BLM decisions are appealable to 
the Interior Board of Land Appeals, and the National Park Service has 
no appeals process.
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    Administrative appeals can greatly delay a project. For time-
sensitive projects, results can be disastrous. For example, unless 
insect-infested trees are swiftly removed, infestations can spread to 
healthy forests and even to nonfederal lands. In the Southeast, 
southern pine beetle infestations have repeatedly spread from national 
forests to private lands because the Forest Service was unable to 
complete environmental analysis and take action soon enough to prevent 
it.\81\
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    \81\ E-mail memorandum from Robert Pierson, planning director, USDA 
Forest Service, Southern Region, 24 April 2002.
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    Moreover, the opportunity to appeal can discourage collaboration. 
If a group's only chance to affect an outcome is before a decision is 
made, its incentive to engage from the outset in collaborative 
decision-making will be strong. However, if the group can later appeal 
the decision, it can ignore opportunities for predecisional 
collaboration and focus instead on postdecisional challenges. Instead 
of helping parties work out their differences, the appeals process can 
all too easily become a tool for obstruction.\82\
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    \82\ Case examples consistently suggest that appeals do not help 
resolve disputes. In the Megram case example, ``[T]he appeals process 
did not change the forest's decision. It provided neither the means nor 
the incentive to negotiate a resolution that addressed both the Forest 
Service's concerns and the appellants' core objections'' (Six Rivers 
NF, appendix C, p. C-27). In the Indian River case example, ``The 
Indian River, like most rivers on the Hiawatha National Forest, was 
heavily damaged during the log drives of the early 20th century. 
However, the plaintiffs did not want to see any management activities 
within the corridor, even if designed to restore the river system.--
[T]he [high] level of public acceptance [for the project] by the 
majority of stakeholders was not increased by the litigation'' 
(Hiawatha National Forest, ``Indian River Watershed Restoration 
Project,'' appendix C, pp. C-34-35).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In the Santa Fe case example, the national forest spent years 
consulting with the public and tailoring its municipal watershed 
restoration project accordingly. The effort paid off: A broad consensus 
emerged behind the final project decision. However, two groups have 
threatened to challenge the decision. If the challenge materializes, it 
``would illustrate a rather common situation,'' according to the local 
line officer. ``The agency often works diligently and collaboratively 
to design a project acceptable to constituents, only to have 
implementation stalled by a very small minority relying on esoteric 
legal arguments.''\83\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \83\ Santa Fe NF, appendix C, p. C-20.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    However, most collaborative groups recognize that Forest Service 
decisions are subject to appeal but choose to work with the agency, 
anyway. Recent experience suggests that a collective sense of ownership 
flows from decisions reached through collaborative processes. Local 
peer pressure can sometimes--but not always--help influence appellants 
to settle their cases. ``Although challenge is still possible,'' noted 
the line officer in the Santa Fe case example, ``many believe that 
residents and members of environmental organizations that have been 
engaged throughout the process will exert pressure on potential 
litigants to allow implementation to proceed.''\84\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \84\ Santa Fe NF, appendix C, p. C-19.
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Procedural Delays
    For time-sensitive projects, merely delaying implementation can be 
enough to stop work from ever beginning.\85\ The ability of a single 
group to control the process can discourage groups from participating 
at all if it seems a waste of time. In the Bitterroot case example, 
litigious groups ``appeared to many to push the majority of local 
interests out of the picture,'' according to the line officer. 
Thereafter, what was initially a highly productive process of public 
involvement ``seemed to dissolve into a process of litigation.''\86\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \85\ In the Megram case example, a fuels treatment project was 
delayed for more than a year by administrative barriers related to 
appeals. By the time the project proceeded, it was too late; a fire 
burned through most of the project area before fuels could be treated. 
See Six Rivers NF, appendix C, pp. C-24-25.
    \86\ Bitterroot NF, appendix C, p. C-10.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Even if there are no appeals, it can still take a long time for 
work to begin.\87\ In the Indian River case example, the public 
appreciated the need for environmental analysis and public 
participation, but was frustrated by the amount of time involved. 
``Questions arise as to why professional input and documents need to be 
continually revised to deal with new information or concerns,'' noted 
the line officer, ``and why it is necessary to document everything in 
great detail in anticipation of appeals.''\88\ Appeals and litigation 
did result, even though the project--to restore a National Wild and 
Scenic River corridor degraded by use--was relatively noncontroversial; 
the EA generated only five comments, including those from the groups 
that appealed and litigated. It took more than two years after initial 
scoping to finally reach a settlement.
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    \87\ In the case example of the Morgan Falls trail reroute--a 
noncontroversial ``white-hat'' project--planning and analysis took 
about 20 months, a length of time that ``generally amazed and 
disheartened'' local people, according to the line officer. ``The 
process is frustrating for many local publics and employees due to the 
amount of time it takes to put an action in place.'' Chequamegon-
Nicolet NF, appendix C, p. C-41.
    \88\ Hiawatha NF, appendix C, p. C-34.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Public discouragement over procedural delays can prevent the Forest 
Service from forming and sustaining valuable partnerships. For example, 
the National Wild Turkey Federation, through a partnership agreement, 
helps the Forest Service create walk-in areas, plant wildlife openings, 
develop water resources, and conduct prescribed burns on national 
forest land. Many species benefit from the projects, including fire-
dependent plants and threatened and endangered wildlife, such as the 
red-cockaded woodpecker and Indiana bat. Biologists from the Federation 
provide the Forest Service with technical advice and assistance. After 
generating the necessary funds and providing technical support, the 
Federation's members expect the Forest Service to deliver the 
associated projects. Prolonged delays damage the agency's credibility 
as a partner and discourage the Federation from continuing support.\89\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \89\ Personal communication with Dr. James Earl Kennamer, president 
of the National Wild Turkey Federation.
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Standards for Judicial Review
    Evolving case law for NFMA, NEPA, and other statutes has slowly 
defined what is required of national forest land managers. Legal issues 
remain unaddressed or unresolved between jurisdictions, requiring the 
agency to rely on its own interpretation of appropriate legal 
standards. The resulting uncertainty for national forest managers 
constrains cross-jurisdictional collaboration.
    In 1998, for example, 22 years after NFMA became law, the Supreme 
Court addressed the timing of judicial review of forest plans with 
regard to NFMA claims.\90\ Yet questions still remain regarding the 
timing of judicial review for forest plans and projects.\91\ Other 
issues that have not been resolved include:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \90\ Ohio Forestry Association v. Sierra Club, 523 U.S. 726 (1998).
    \91\ See, e.g., Wilderness Society v. Thomas, 188 F.3d 1130, 1133 
n.1 (9th Cir. 1999) (forest plans ripe for review of NEPA claim); 
Heartwood v. Forest Service, 230 F.3d 947 (7th Cir. 2000) (NEPA 
challenge to timber categorical exclusion ripe for review); Coalition 
for Sustainable Resources v. Forest Service, F.3d 1244 (10th Cir. 2001) 
(ESA challenge to forest plan not ripe for review).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     appropriateness of the use of a NEPA categorical 
exclusion if ``extraordinary circumstances'' are present, i.e., the 
``mere presence'' conundrum\92\ (conflict among the 7th and 9th, 10th 
Circuit Courts of Appeal);
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \92\ Whether the ``mere presence'' of an extraordinary circumstance 
(e.g., listed species, steep slopes, or highly erosive soils) 
eliminates the possible use of a categorical exclusion has been the 
subject of considerable debate. See for example Federal Register 48412, 
48414 (20 September 2001).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     use of wildlife population data versus habitat to comply 
with 36 CFR 219.19(a)(6) (monitoring of management indicator species) 
(conflict among the 9th and 7th, 11th Circuit Courts of Appeal);
     application of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to federal 
actions (conflict between D.C. Circuit and 8th, 11th Circuit Courts of 
Appeal); and
     application of NEPA to the designation of critical 
habitat under ESA (conflict between the 9th and 10th Circuit Courts of 
Appeal).
Agency Follow-through
    Despite the Forest Service's professed commitment to collaborative 
decision-making, partners have sometimes found it difficult to work 
with the agency. Problems include a lack of institutional capacity for 
collaboration and an inability to keep commitments.\93\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \93\ Brett KenCairn, ``Public Agencies in Collaboration: A Panacea 
to Gridlock or the Next Big Debacle?'' Report to the Forest Service's 
National Leadership Team (October 2000). KenCairn is the Director of 
Indigenous Community Enterprises in Flagstaff, Ariz.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In some cases, despite major resource commitments by communities, 
the Forest Service has failed to respond in kind. For example, by the 
time the last sawmill closed in Hayfork, California, in the mid-1990s, 
the community had lost more than 50 percent of its wage income. 
Undeterred, community members formed the Watershed Research and 
Training Center to stimulate new employment and enterprise through 
restoration and stewardship opportunities on federal lands. Those 
opportunities are great; national forests comprise more than 70 percent 
of the county, and the need for thinning, fuels reduction, and forest 
restoration is clear.
    The Watershed Center trained local people and developed new, 
environmentally sensitive ways to use and market small-diameter forest 
materials and other byproducts from ecosystem restoration. The Forest 
Service's State and Private Forestry Staff provided considerable 
funding through its Economic Action Program; the agency's Forest 
Products Laboratory gave research help through its extensive programs 
for finding new ways to use unmerchantable forest materials, such as 
small trees and brush.
    Despite all the enthusiasm and support, fewer than 200 acres have 
actually been treated since 1996. The Forest Service's failure to 
proceed with local projects has multiple reasons--bureaucratic process, 
competing regional and national priorities, and a lack of project 
funding and follow-through. Whatever the reasons, the bottom line is 
this: The national forest has not matched local commitment by taking 
decisive action. The result is supreme frustration and discouragement 
in the local community.
Management Inefficiencies
    The Forest Service has a proud tradition of conservation leadership 
and management, dating to President Theodore Roosevelt, who founded the 
Forest Service in 1905. Gifford Pinchot, the first Forest Service 
Chief, described the early Forest Service's record of efficiency and 
effectiveness, including a commendation for sound fiscal 
management.\94\ In recent decades, however, the agency has struggled 
with management problems.\95\ Systematic efforts to improve agency 
performance go back to at least the 1980s.\96\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \94\ Pinchot, pp. 281-299.
    \95\ See, for example, U.S. General Accounting Office, ``Forest 
Service Decision-Making: A Framework for Improving Performance'' 
(Report to Congressional Requesters; GAO/RCED-97-71; April 1997); and 
National Academy of Public Administration, Restoring Managerial 
Accountability to the United States Forest Service (August 1999).
    \96\ Personal communication with Gerald W. Williams, National 
Historian for the USDA Forest Service, Washington Office, Washington, 
D.C. Relatively recent efforts to improve internal processes include 
the ``reinvention'' initiative of the mid-1990s and the process of 
revising the Forest Service's strategic plan, finalized in 2000.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In some areas, the Forest Service has made progress. For example, 
the agency has established standard, reliable frameworks for collecting 
information on nationwide acres at risk from wildland fire;\97\ on the 
status of natural resources on the national forests and grasslands (the 
Natural Resource Information System); and on recreational use of the 
National Forest System (the National Visitor Use Monitoring Project). 
In 1999, to solve persistent accounting problems, the agency introduced 
its Foundation Financial Information System. Together with the Bureau 
of Land Management and other partners, the Forest Service has sponsored 
Service First, an innovative approach that cuts through red tape for 
better service delivery.\98\
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    \97\ USDA Forest Service, ``Historical Fire Regimes by Current 
Condition Classes,'' (Washington, D.C.: USDA Fest Service, February 
2001), Website .
    \98\ See Hutch Brown and Russ Linden, ``Daring to be Citizen 
Centered,'' The Public Manager (Winter 2001-02), pp. 49-52.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Nevertheless, the Bosworth Team identified several internal factors 
that continue to keep work from getting done on the National Forest 
System: poor planning, confusion about planning requirements, a 
deteriorating skills base, decisions to monitor individual species, and 
funding rules.
Poor Planning
    The GAO has advised the Forest Service to better manage its 
planning process by:\99\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \99\ See GAO, ``Forest Service Decision-Making,'' especially pp. 
33-50.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     improving agency accountability for performance;
     improving agency commitment to monitoring and evaluation, 
including standardized protocols;
     adopting the recommendations of internal efficiency 
review teams;
     involving the public more actively at the beginning of 
the planning process; and
     developing common socioeconomic and environmental 
databases for use by forest planners and managers.
    Case examples suggest that poor planning decisions not directly 
related to statutory or regulatory requirements or to the appeals 
process can cost the Forest Service precious time. In the Megram case 
example, time was lost due to management's decision to use provisions 
under the 1995 Rescission Act to expedite a time-critical salvage sale. 
``The forest now believes,'' the line officer observed, ``that the 
forest lost nearly a year through its initial strategy and that using 
provisions under the Rescission Act, particularly for the inventoried 
roadless area, was a serious mistake.''\100\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \100\ Six Rivers NF, appendix C, p. C-25.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Confusion About Planning Requirements
    In 1976, when NFMA passed, the Forest Service assumed that forest-
level plans would meet most or all NEPA requirements for environmental 
studies. That assumption proved overly optimistic as it became clear 
that the Forest Service could not address project-level impacts at the 
programmatic level of evaluation for a 10- to 15-year land management 
plan. After a number of court cases, the Forest Service adopted a 
tiered planning process for developing NEPA dmentation at both the 
forest plan and project levels. The evolution of ecosystem managued for 
a third stage--large-scale environmental analysis--to evaluate the 
effects of managment actions across ownerships and even across states.
    Requirements for multitiered planning and analysis have produced 
confusion about decisions made and documentation required at the 
various scales, especially between the programmatic (forest plan and 
large-scale assessment) and project levels.\101\ For example, a ranger 
district might pour resources into a watershed analysis and produce an 
in-depth, 300-page study, when all that was really needed for 
landscape-level planning was a 15-page overview.\102\ Confusion about 
what is actually required and needed has led to delays and resource 
waste.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \101\ In the Megram case example, confusion over ``Survey and 
Manage'' requirements under the Northwest Forest Plan contributed to 
the remanding of an environmental assessment and associated project 
delay. As the line officer put it, ``The forest had recently come under 
the Northwest Forest Plan, the requirements of which were complex and 
confusing, with little clear direction at first.'' Six Rivers NF, 
appendix C, p. C-25.
    \102\ Personal communication with Forest Service Associate Chief 
Sally Collins, former supervisor of the Deschutes National Forest in 
Oregon.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Deteriorating Skills Base
    From 1992 to 2000, according to a report by the National Academy of 
Public Administration, the number of Forest Service employees fell by 
23 percent.\103\ The most negative competency assessment in the report 
went to the agency's Ecosystem Management Staff, which includes inter-
disciplinary planning occupations. At the very time when the need for 
interdisciplinary planning skills is rising, the Forest Service is 
losing precisely those skills. To complicate matters, the requirements 
for project planning have greatly increased in complexity, particularly 
with the introduction of large-scale environmental analysis, without a 
commensurate increase in training.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \103\ National Academy of Public Administration, Center for Human 
Resources Management; USDA Forest Service Workforce Plan.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Under the circumstances, line officers have difficulty completing 
project planning on time. In the Bitterroot case example, about 60 
employees with a wide range of skills were needed for at least 12 
months of planning work. The needed skills ``are in short supply 
relative to demand,'' noted the line officer. ``There is little 
systematic training to develop these skills, and there are few support 
systems to reinforce any limitations of the team.'' Moreover, stress 
levels are high. ``Many employees would prefer to avoid such 
assignments,'' observed the line officer, ``because they perceive them 
as unrewarding exercises in paperwork, with a greater chance of 
frustration and failure than of success.''\104\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \104\ Bitterroot NF, appendix C, p. C-11.
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Monitoring Individual Species
    Some forest plans and other documents commit line officers to 
monitoring individual species, even though there is no clear idea of 
the feasibility, cost, or potential benefit of doing so. Examples 
include the ``Survey and Manage'' provision in the Northwest Forest 
Plan and the commitment by the Forest Service's Southern Region to 
monitor populations of many species.
    Commitments to monitor individual species are arguably 
discretionary. Moreover, other options are available to protect species 
at risk. However, after commitments are made, they are difficult to 
rescind or even to modify, even when they are found to be inappropriate 
or unworkable.
Funding Rules
    Ecosystem management facilitates projects that serve multiple 
objectives. For example, a thinning project can serve to restore 
wildlife habitat, reduce fuel loads, improve watershed condition and 
function, and produce forest products for local communities.
    Logically, such projects with multiple objectives should be able to 
draw on various sources of funding. Unfortunately, the Forest Service's 
budget rules have not kept pace with changing needs.\105\ Line officers 
have cited the budget structure as a major impediment to the 
cooperative, integrated development of plans and projects.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \105\ Any changes to the Forest Service's budget rules will require 
coordination with the Chief Financial Officer at USDA.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                          scope of the problem
    The Forest Service has created some of its own problems and can 
rightly be expected to solve them itself. However, much of the problem 
lies beyond the Forest Service's own range of control. The Forest 
Service can, for example, do little to change requirements associated 
with federal statutes. These requirements, according to the GAO, have 
made it difficult for the Forest Service ``to predict when any given 
decision can be considered final and can be implemented, increasing the 
costs and time of decision-making and reducing the agencies' ability to 
achieve the objectives in their plan.''\106\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \106\ GAO, ``Forest Service Decision-Making,'' pp. 10-11.
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Workload
    The Forest Service manages 192 million acres of national forest 
land. That amounts to 8.5 percent of the land area of the United 
States, an area the size of the original 13 colonies. The National 
Forest System comprises 155 national forests and grasslands with 585 
ranger districts in 44 states and Puerto Rico.\107\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \107\ Personal communication with Greg Asher, Office of Lands, USDA 
Forest Service, Washington Office.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Under NFMA, the Forest Service is required to prepare forest plans 
for the entire National Forest System. Forest plans are generally 300 
pages long.\108\ Each forest plan is tied to a programmatic EIS 
covering an area of about 1 to 3 million acres. Forest plan EISs are 
about 500 pages long, though CEQ NEPA regulations encourages agencies 
to limit normal EISs to 150 pages. The entire process of preparing and 
finalizing a forest plan can take years; for example, it might take 
five years to prepare a 15-year forest plan. As new information 
emerges, the Forest Service routinely prepares forest plan amendments 
and new programmatic EISs. The agency requires review of environmental 
documentation every three to five years to determine whether it needs 
to be updated.\109\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \108\ Although the NEPA regulations state that a normal EIS shall 
not be more that 150 pages, and less that 300 pages for proposals of 
unusual scope and complexity.
    \109\ Michael J. Gippert, ``Why Can't the Forest Service Make More 
Use of NEPA Tiering, and Why Does the Forest Service Do So Much to 
Comply With NEPA?'' (USDA Office of General Counsel, draft report; 1 
July 1997), in passim.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    At any given time, every ranger district has many projects 
underway. Under NEPA, environmental analysis must precede many ground-
disturbing activities on federal land. The Forest Service produces 
about 5,000 EAs in support of ``findings of no significant impact,'' 
which document the agency's judgment that an EIS is not required. The 
Forest Service produces about 120 project-level EISs per year, more 
than any other federal agency.\110\ EISs can be hundreds and EAs dozens 
of pages long, particularly in contentious cases. Agency requirements 
for documentation are rigorous. At training sessions, the USDA Office 
of General Counsel tells Forest Service employees that the rule for 
judicial review of an agency action is, ``If you did it, but you didn't 
write it down or you can't find it or you can't find it fast, you 
didn't do it.\111\ Documentation associated with one case example has 
reached 10,000 pages.\112\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \110\ These figures do not include 15,000 or more categorical 
exclusions completed each year. Under CEQ regulations, no document must 
be completed for use of a ``categorical exclusion'' because the agency 
has found that this category of actions do not individually or 
cumulatively have a significant effect on the human environment. 40 CFR 
1508.4. An agency may decide in its procedures to prepare environmental 
assessments even though it is not required to do so.
    \111\ Gippert, ``Why Can't the Forest Service Make More Use of NEPA 
Tiering,'' p. 11.
    \112\ The Megram Fire Recovery Plan on the Six Rivers National 
Forest, Calif. E-mail memorandum from Forest Supervisor S.E. Woltering, 
Six Rivers National Forest, 22 April 2002
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The entire NEPA process for a project, from scoping to 
implementation, can normally take more than a year. For example, the 
Morgan Falls Trail Reroute Project was a noncontroversial project with 
a widely accepted need. There were relatively few public comments and 
no appeals. Yet planning for the project, from initial scoping to a 
decision notice, took about 20 months.\113\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \113\ See Chequamegon-Nicolet NF, appendix C, pp. C-39-42.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In some cases, particularly where public interest is high, the 
planning process can take much longer. Planning for the Santa Fe 
Municipal Watershed Project outside Santa Fe, N.M., began in 1997 and 
did not produce a final EIS and record of decision until October 2001, 
a period of almost five years.\114\ If challenges follow, the planning 
process can drag on for another year or more. In the Megram case 
example, delays associated with appeals and litigation have prevented 
most fuels treatments from taking place on a blowdown that occurred in 
December 1995, almost seven years ago.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \114\ See Santa Fe NF, appendix C, p. C-16.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Costs
    What does all the time spent on planning, analysis, and 
documentation cost? Although exact figures are not available, educated 
guesses by Forest Service professionals provide some insight. A 1999 
report by the National Academy of Public Administration, based on 
interviews with Forest Service personnel, estimated that planning and 
assessment consume 40 percent of total direct work at the national 
forest level.\115\ That would represent an expenditure of more than 
$250 million per year, or more than 20 percent of the congressional 
appropriations for managing the National Forest System.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \115\ NAPA, Restoring Managerial Accountability, p. 18.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Of course, not all planning is time wasted. Part of that $250-
million planning expenditure would be money well spent. However, the 
GAO has cited an internal Forest Service estimate that ``inefficiencies 
within this process cost up to $100 million a year at the project level 
alone.''\116\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \116\ GAO, ``Forest Service Decision-Making,'' p. 4.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In the case example of the Bitterroot National Forest, the national 
forest tracked planning costs for its fire recovery project following 
the 2000 fires. Treatments were proposed on about 80,000 acres. With 
some costs still outstanding, Forest Service employees spent about 
15,000 person-days, or 57 person-years, on planning the project.\117\ 
In addition, the national forest contracted for a fire effects study. 
Total costs for analysis and documentation amounted to about $1 
million, including more than $100,000 in printing and mailing costs.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \117\ Bitterroot NF, appendix C, p. C-10.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Are such high planning costs for individual projects justifiable? 
In the case example of the Santa Fe municipal watershed, the planning 
cost for a project covering less than 8,000 acres was more than $1 
million.\118\ At the estimated treatment cost of $1,500 per acre, the 
money spent on planning could have treated more than 600 acres--only a 
small fraction of the project area, but at least some work could have 
begun.
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    \118\ Santa Fe NF, appendix C, p. C-19.
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    Appeals and litigation are related to another procedural cost that 
is often poorly understood. Today, many forests are far denser than 
they were historically.\119\ Restoring healthy ecosystems often 
requires removing some of the trees and undergrowth, which is 
expensive. Where commercially viable, a timber sale can help defer the 
costs. In fact, most timber sales on the national forests are at least 
partly designed to return lands to a healthy condition.
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    \119\ For an authoritative discussion of changes in historical 
forest ecosystems in the West, see Stephen F. Arno, ``Fire in Western 
Forest Ecosystems,'' in James K. Brown and Jane Kapler Smith (eds.), 
Wildland Fire in Ecosystems: Effects of Fire on Fauna (RMRS-GTR-42-
volume 2; Fort Collins, CO: Rocky Mountain Research Station, 2000), pp. 
97-120.
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    The vast majority of timber sales proceed to completion 
unchallenged.\120\ However, some groups have successfully used appeals 
to obstruct timber sales, and Forest Service employees therefore treat 
almost every ground-disturbing project as a potential target.\121\ They 
spend a tremendous amount of time trying to ``bullet-proof'' project 
planning against appeals and litigation. Challenges themselves, if they 
materialize, can be enormously time-consuming. Overall, the delays, 
even if a project is allowed to move forward, can reduce or eliminate 
the commercial value of removed materials, ultimately killing a timber 
sale. Figure 1 suggests a correlation between the rising number of 
appeals in recent years and falling volumes of timber harvest.
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    \120\ Presentation by Ross W. Gorte, Specialist in Natural 
Resources Policy, Congressional Research Service, on 21 May 2002 as 
part of a Congressional Briefing Conference for the USDA Forest 
Service, Government Affairs Institute, Washington, D.C.
    \121\ See, for example, Hiawatha NF, appendix C, p. C-35: ``The 
Hiawatha [National Forest] operates under the assumption that every 
decision will be appealed.--There is a general sense that some groups 
``throw anything at the wall to see if something sticks'' relative to 
issues raised in response to public involvement efforts.'' In the 
Morgan Falls case example, ``This project was not appealed, but the 
level of effort put into the document and background material was made 
with potential appeals in mind.'' Chequamegon-Nicolet NF, appendix C, 
p. C-41.
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    Timber sales can be the only feasible tool a national forest has to 
restore a forest to health. Process-related delays can take that tool 
away. The Megram case example is a case in point. In 1995, the Six 
Rivers National Forest in California responded to a 35,000-acre 
blowdown by proposing to treat the resulting fire hazards through a 
salvage sale. ``As often happens,'' noted the line officer, ``the only 
way the forest could finance fuels treatment was through a commercial 
timber sale that generated enough funds to finance other treatments, 
such as prescribed fire.''\122\
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    \122\ Six Rivers NF, appendix C, p. C-23.
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    Constrained by administrative hurdles, the salvage sale failed to 
proceed until 1998. In 1999, the 59,000-acre Megram Fire burned through 
the area. It was exactly the kind of event that the national forest was 
trying to forestall by reducing hazardous fuels.


[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


    Line officers prepared a postfire recovery plan for treating the 
areas most at risk--a little more than a thousand acres. Again, 
employees went to great lengths to prepare all the necessary studies 
and documentation, only to be taken to court, where a judge threw out 
the EIS. ``Nothing will change on the ground,'' observed the forest 
supervisor, ``other than we'll be able to salvage less because of the 
lost value in the trees.''\123\
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    \123\ Memorandum from Forest Supervisor S.E. Woltering, Six Rivers 
National Forest, 22 April 2002.
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                       need to solve the problem
    The Megram case example and the others treated in this report raise 
serious questions about the Forest Service's statutory, regulatory, and 
administrative framework: Does it produce efficient, effective service 
delivery? Does it permit the Forest Service to meet environmental 
challenges? And does it help the Forest Service build and sustain 
public trust?
Efficiency and Effectiveness
    GAO has concluded that ``the Forest Service's decision-making 
process is clearly broken and in need of repair.''\124\ The Forest 
Service does complete thousands of projects each year, thanks to the 
dedication and perseverance of its employees. However, it can take more 
than a year--and often many years--to complete the planning for 
projects, even for ones that are relatively simple and 
noncontroversial.
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    \124\ GAO, ``Forest Service Decision-Making,'' p. 12.
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    The need for so much planning is questionable. For example, much of 
the environmental information that the Forest Service collects is of 
dubious scientific or practical value. Although it might be needed to 
meet procedural requirements or to withstand appeals and litigation, 
resources spent on process cannot be put to other uses. The opportunity 
costs alone--which might range into the tens of millions of dollars--
suggest a fundamental lack of efficiency and effectiveness in national 
forest management.
Healthy Lands
    Limited resources might be put to better use in restoring healthy, 
resilient ecosystems. Large portions of the National Forest System are 
in poor or declining health. Much more could be done on the ground to 
restore ecosystems on federal lands; in the words of Aldo Leopold, 
``Conservation--is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely 
a negative exercise of abstinence or caution.\125\ Neither ecosystem 
values nor the public are well served when responsible management 
actions take a back seat to process.
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    \125\ Aldo Leopold, ``The Farmer as a Conservationist,'' in The 
River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, ed. Susan 
L. Flader and J. Baird Callicot (Madison, Wisc.: University of 
Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 257.
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    Obviously, some planning is required; interagency consultations and 
environmental studies are certainly needed to ensure that management 
actions are sound. However, consultation requirements--in their current 
form--often shift the focus of management away from the long-term 
health of the land. Moreover, procedural requirements for studies--
again, in their current form--often produce long decision-making delays 
that can prevent needed work from happening before it is too late.
    Most scientists and land managers understand the need for adaptive 
management. Managers can and should take responsible action without 
knowing everything that might ever be known about a piece of land. The 
trick is to carefully monitor the effects on the land and adjust future 
management actions accordingly. Unfortunately, the Forest Service's 
procedural framework is poorly suited to adaptive management.
Collaborative Decision-making
    At its core, the debate over natural resource use on public lands 
is driven by differences over values. Sound science and competent land 
management cannot resolve such differences. In a democracy, interested 
citizens must have ample opportunities for working out their 
differences through a decision-making process that is fair, 
constructive, and participatory. The environmental laws were partly 
designed to help establish that process.
    Today, in the best tradition of our environmental laws, line 
officers are building on statutory requirements for public involvement 
by fostering collaborative decision-making that is both timely and 
effective. Airing differences and finding common ground take time, but 
collaboration ultimately makes national forest management more 
efficient and effective by generating public support for decisions made 
and work done on the ground.
    Too often, though, the Forest Service's procedural framework 
discourages collaborative decision-making. For example, the agency's 
appeals process tends to feed distrust rather than build on shared 
values and goals. Where process favors obstruction, the effects on land 
management can be devastating, shaking public faith in the Forest 
Service's ability to care for the land and serve people.
Opportunities
    Reasonable people will disagree on the nature, scope, and 
complexity of the statutory, regulatory, and administrative hurdles 
facing the Forest Service. However, most people will agree on the core 
values of good government in federal land management: efficient, cost-
effective service delivery; healthy, resilient ecosystems; and 
meaningful public involvement. These values generally transcend 
conflicts among competing groups over specific values associated with 
natural resources on public lands.
    The environmental laws were designed to promote transcendent values 
of good government. Evidence suggests that the laws are not the 
problem. The Thomas Report, business process analysis, and case 
examples reveal no fundamental conflicts among the laws.\126\ The 
problem lies in their implementation through a maze of rules and 
regulations that has evolved over the years.
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    \126\ See, for example, Bitterroot NF, appendix C, p. C-17: ``There 
was no indication that `conflicting laws' were an issue in this case.''
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    The rules and regulations have placed the Forest Service in a 
serious predicament, whereby the process defeats its own purpose. In 
the Santa Fe case example, one Forest Service critic put it this way: 
``I would like to just say that we are very concerned about the risk of 
wildfire in the watershed.--But we will require the Forest Service to 
follow the letter of the law. These laws are established to protect the 
environment.''\127\ In the name of environmental protection, the focus 
has too often shifted from protecting resources to policing processes. 
The problem is this: We are following the letter of our environmental 
laws without infusing their spirit into what is actually happening on 
the land.
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    \127\ Bryan Byrd, Executive Director, Forest Conservation Council, 
quoted in Santa Fe NF, appendix C, p. C-20.
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    Opportunities abound for reviving the spirit of our environmental 
laws. Advances in science and technology have paved the way for a new 
era of public land management through collaboration and flexible 
decision-making. Ecosystem-based approaches grounded in adaptive 
management promise to reverse decades of land health decline and 
restore healthy, resilient ecosystems far into the future.
    The key is to tailor the Forest Service's statutory, regulatory, 
and administrative framework to the new opportunities. Part of the 
solution will be internal; the Forest Service has an obligation to 
reform its administrative processes accordingly. However, the problem 
goes far beyond the range of control of any single agency. Over the 
years, a central lesson for the Forest Service has been the need to 
work with partners. By applying that lesson, the Forest Service can 
strengthen its partnerships and find collaborative ways out of its 
process predicament.
                                 ______
                                 
    NOTE: The report in its entirety has been retained in the 
Committee's official files.

    An article from The Oregonian submitted for the record by 
Mary McCormick, Staff Assistant to the Deputy Chief for 
Research and Development, Forest Service, U.S. Department of 
Agriculture, follows:]

Article submitted for the record by Mary McCormick, Staff Assistant to 
         the Deputy Chief for Research & Development, WO/USDAFS


                Collaborate for healthy national forests

                     AUGUST 6, 2002: THE OREGONIAN

                  BY ROBERT LEWIS JR. WASHINGTON, D.C.

    On July 27 you clearly reported one side of an ever-
increasing debate concerning management of our national 
forests. The crux of your story, ``Scientists chastise Forest 
Service chief,'' focused on a letter by a group of scientists 
criticizing the U.S. Forest Service and Chief Dale Bosworth for 
his congressional testimony on why the Forest Service cannot 
accomplish more on the land. As the Forest Service's deputy 
chief for research and development, I have several comments.
    The six scientists who wrote the letter disagreed with 
Bosworth's statement that a report they prepared, known as the 
Beschta Report, aided in preventing the Forest Service from 
working to restore ecosystem health. The Forest Service has 
clear evidence that the Beschta Report prevented or delayed 
Forest Service management action.
    A compendium of opinions and reviews were cobbled together, 
then passed among similar interested individuals for further 
endorsement, leading to a conclusion of declared fact. This is 
not good science; it is not even science. It is marketing.
    An internal Forest Service review of the Beschta Report was 
conducted by a group of eight Forest Service scientists in 
1995. Each scientist provided independent comments on the 
Beschta Report. A recurring concern by the reviewers in 1995 
was that ``many statements and assumptions made in this paper 
(Beschta Report) are unsubstantiated. In general, this paper 
seems to represent a hasty response to potential fire sales in 
the west [sic 1994]. The literature cited is extremely limited 
and largely ignores existing literature concerning fire, soil, 
and forest health related to forest problems east of the 
Cascade Range.''
    My sincere hope is that the science community will stop 
placing blame and start figuring out how to solve the problem. 
Many agree that we need to thin and/or underburn many overgrown 
forests to make ecosystems healthier and to reduce the 
potential for catastrophic fire.
    Where a fire has already burned through, we might need to 
remove some of the burned trees to prevent another catastrophic 
fire in future years. The Forest Service has more than doubled 
the number of acres treated on the national forests in recent 
years, but we need to do much more. Procedural constraints are 
hindering progress on the ground.
    We should base our decisions on the best science available, 
then monitor the results and adapt our management accordingly.
    All over the country, people are sitting down together at 
the local level to hammer out agreements everyone can live 
with. The Forest Service is only one partner among many. 
Collaborative stewardship and adaptive management hold the key 
to a future of healthy, resilient national forests and 
grasslands, especially when the scientific community works 
together to bring new knowledge to the decision-makers. I hope 
we can collaborate and work toward the same mutually beneficial 
objectives for both public and private lands.

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