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- Title
The Future of the National Forests.
- Authors
Nelson, Robert H.
- Abstract
This article focuses on the future of national forests in the U.S. The crisis in the management of this vast federal domain reflects a faulty set of fundamental principles. With first principles being called into question, the whole national forest system is coming open for reexamination. Some of the main alternatives include privatization of forest lands, transfer of lands to state or local governments, major reorganization of the federal forest system and other basic departures from current arrangements. With a culture grounded in scientific management and a utilitarian world view, the U.S. Forest Service has found it difficult to respond to these circumstances, informing and refereeing a debate on the social values that should properly be reflected in forest management decisions. The vision of scientific management inherited from the Progressive Era, however undermined by events, still explains many of the features of the existing national forest system: the centralization of forest management authority at the federal level, the emphasis on comprehensive planning as the proper basis for national forest decisions, the frequent use of command-and-control regulatory strategies, the forest agency ethos of the authoritative professional, the view that politics is an unworthy influence on agency actions and the expectation that rational analysis will provide a single definitive answer all across the nation to many if not most forest management and policy questions. Deciding the future of the national forests thus involves a complex set of tradeoffs. There are matters of legitimate scientific question where the federal government may have the greatest ability to marshall the scientific evidence. All this suggests that there is no one management regime best suited to all the land in the national forests. The thrust, however, should be toward a major decentralization of responsibility.
- Subjects
UNITED States; FOREST reserves; FOREST reserve management; INDUSTRIAL management; UNITED States. Foreign Service; FOREST management; FEDERAL government
- Publication
Society, 1996, Vol 34, Issue 1, p92
- ISSN
0147-2011
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/BF02697010