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Forest Service must change, supervisor tells environmentalists By MICHAEL MILSTEIN Gazette Wyoming Bureau WEST YELLOWSTONE - If public lands and their resources are a savings account, the nation is withdrawing more than it's investing, a top U.S. Forest Service supervisor told a meeting of environmentalists Saturday. "We have to reverse that pattern," Gloria Flora, supervisor of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in Nevada, said at the annual meeting of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition in West Yellowstone. National forest timber must be valued not just for its raw potential as cut-and-stacked boards in a lumber yard, but for its role as wildlife habitat, its ability to process carbon dioxide into oxygen, its intrinsic value for passing hikers and the firm grip of its roots in the soil, preventing erosion that would pollute streams, she said. Instead of pricing a tree based on its one-time market value, land managers should price it based on its long-term role in an ecosystem. "What does it cost to grow a tree for 300 years?" Flora asked. "That's what we should charge for that tree." Before moving to her current job in Nevada, Flora served from 1995 to 1998 as supervisor of the Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana, where she earned national attention by placing much of the Rocky Mountain Front off limits to oil and gas leasing. Environmentalists cheered the move while the oil and gas industry largely condemned it. She told the approximately 300 people at the weekend meeting in West Yellowstone that current U.S. Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck is forcing the agency to change as fast as it can. The land management agency is no longer practicing personnel management by simply "cloning" good bureaucrats or selecting managers based on the "conveyor belt" approach where employees with a certain number of years in a certain number of jobs become managers regardless of whether they are qualified, she said. Dombeck is seeking out and promoting employees who care about the resources and reflect diversity in both thought and experience. From the time she became a district ranger at the Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho, Flora told her employees that she expected them to serve the public with honesty, integrity and a high degree of ethics. "I won't tolerate the opposite behavior because it erodes the credibility we very much want to build," she said. For too long, the Forest Service, industry and even the public has viewed forest resources in linear form: where timber, grazing land or other resources have value only once they are extracted and sold, Flora said. Little attention is given to all the time and energy necessary to produce those resources and protect them over time. "Everything you extract from national forests, including recreation, is subsidized," she said. Sometimes not extracting the resources may be the most financially responsible alternative, she added. "Why can't we pay somebody not to graze on national forest land?" Flora said. "That would save me a lot of money on restoration." And she said the timber companies that log national forests must be willing to compensate the public not just for the timber they take, but also for the long-term environmental costs of logging. "If they're affecting the stream, they ought to be paying to fix the stream," she said. The national forest mandate for "multiple use" goes hand-in-hand with the companion mandate of "sustained yield," which means that public lands can produce resources only at sustainable levels. But she said that both land managers and the public have to realize that they may not understand ecosystems well enough to know exactly what level of use is sustainable. "We don't understand what's going on out there," she said. "We should err on the side of conservation, recognizing this ignorance we have." One questioner complained that some old-school Forest Service officials remain resistant to the approach Flora advocates, deferring to industry and permitting off-road vehicles to effectively blaze their own roads. "Shame on them," Flora said. "They're dinosaurs. They'll die."
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