On every level, it’s time to increase the public’s direct involvement with federal decision making and one area that is of vital importance and urgency is our forests. Below is an email from Frank Carroll of South Dakota’s Black Forest Advisory Board…a solution?

Dear Peter -

I was rehired on the Black Hills National Forest in March of 2003 as a senior staff officer for the forest supervisor (I have 26 years of service in the FS and 5ive years in private industry). One of my duties was to serve as the committee management officer for the nascent Black Hills National Forest Advisory Board (A creature of the Federal Advisory Act Committee Act serving at the pleasure of the Secretary of agriculture and charged with advising the FS about key forest issues. I had nothing to do with its formation but I have been a key participant during the entire life of the Board to date.

The Board resulted from a combination of events beginning with the 80,000 plus acre Jasper Fire that threatened Custer, SD, and was the largest fire in the BH in recorded history. The march of massive killing fires that began in southern Idaho in 1986 finally found SD with a vengeance and people were quite shocked. This forest is small at 1/2 million acres and over a tenth has burned in stand replacing fires since 2000.

Forest and political leadership was reeling. The Governor in person showed up at fire camps during this and subsequent fires, state and Federal, to run the show in an astonishing lack of confidence in Federal firefighters and leadership. The situation deteriorated to the extent that Senator Dashle finally stepped in with the notion of bringing more citizen participation the FS leadership in the form of a group of people who would provide advice and counsel on our toughest issues which served a couple of purposes; first, it gave public concern a very public face in the form of these very prominent SD and WY Board members, people like the former speaker of the Wyoming House, the man who led the charge for gambling in Deadwood, the guy who saved Ellsworth AFB, prominent business, American Indian, and environmental leaders, and others who represented a wide band of SD and WY opinion including local government. Second, the Board became a sounding board, literally, to help us consider our most difficult issues with a heavy duty focus group, as it were, and surface land mines before they blew up.

The way the Board works is, we asked for nominations and got over 300, both from individuals and groups, and then selected a 15 member board, now 16 members to include WY natural resource agencies, and those people were vetted both by us (Senator Daschle and the SD and WY delegations informally), and the Secretary of Agriculture. We then proposed to the Board that the issues we needed the most help with were with what the Chief of the Forest Service called the Four Threats; fire and bugs, the loss of open space, invasive species, and uncontrolled off highway recreation.

You may recall that at this time Senator Daschle and others were looking for a solution to an impasse in which environmental groups had stopped FS efforts to manage a serious outbreak of mountain pine beetle (some of the environmental groups were from the Bitterroot Valley). He passed legislation that allowed us to go forward with our plans, but it was too late to do much more than clean up the bodies in the morgue. People were tired of the complete failure of various sides to agree, especially in the face of the disastrous fires and insect attacks we were experiencing, and were growing increasingly alarmed at the OHV situation. The BH is open to cross country travel unless closed and we have around 10,000 miles of user created and forest system routes on our forest now, over 3 miles of routes per square mile, a situation that cannot be sustained.

In this environment, the Board has been (my opinion) strikingly successful in identifying and then communicating with the public about what has happened and what needs to happen to achieve balance in forest management.

For example, after recommending sustained action to get out ahead of fires and bugs by thinning aggressively, especially around our communities, serious challenges to our planned timber sales and fuel reduction plans stopped (not entirely…the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance and the Audubon Society continue to hold us to high standards where our projects are concerned, especially when they are in the open forest, further away from communities) and we have been able to achieve remarkable success in thinning overcrowded forests and creating a much better picture for fire and bugs in selected areas.

More remarkable still, the Board recognized early on that the off highway vehicle issue was huge and took action to begin public involvement on OHV issues in 2004 and especially beginning in 2005, holding their own well advertised and well attended public meetings, taking testimony from anyone who wanted to participate, and then forming a subcommittee on travel management which made 11 recommendations to the parent Board which then passed those recommendations to us. Those recommendations and the intensive public involvement formed the basis for our current travel planning effort, scheduled for decision in the Fall this year.

Applicability to Montana or other States?

I have worked in five FS regions and for five years as a lobbyist and communicator for a forest products company in two states, and I have to say that I believe this Board may offer the best hope yet for breaking some of the intractable issues of forest management. Citizen boards made up of respected members of the community and key groups and local and State govt. can vet issues and FS approaches to issues, push them out on the stage to see how they are received, and then make recommendations that are already well supported by most people.

Of course there are still considerable differences in people’s views and the Board often has dissenting votes (we break log jams by majority votes), but the record of success when honest people of goodwill and high purpose gather to help manage the public forests speaks for itself.