0925-B4
John Fedkiw 1
Forest management does not have a systematic understanding or theory about how it advances over the long term to sustainability. This has contributed to the difficulties it has experienced in recent decades in responding to the extraordinary challenges that have come and continue to do so from every side - from environmental, ecological and other resource interests, from shifts in public values and preferences, and from within the profession. The profession is at the point where it needs to make that understanding explicit. The pathway concept offers a framework for defining that understanding.
The pathway concept interprets sustainability as a goal and process. As a goal, it is not a unique target, rather a range of acceptable outcomes as reflected by nature's own course over the millennia and implied by the uncertainties of the future. This leads to the inference that the pathway to the future is broad with bounds or limits reflecting the range of acceptable outcomes. Those bounds are long-term policy decisions and guidelines to sustainability.
Within the pathway bounds there are alternative courses to sustainability. The choices on the course to sustainability within those bounds are day-to-day, year-to-year, short-term management decisions about how to share the bounties of nature among the interested publics. Sustainability is not an issue and therefore, they fairly involve ecological, economic and social trade-offs. The alternative courses reflect different blends of nature's natural beauty, biodiversity and multiple utilities and compatible blends of humankind's amenity, environmental and material needs. This distinction between the long-term policy bounds decision and the short-term decisions on the preferred course to sustainability is an important dimension of the pathway concept, for much of the confusion about today's forest management arises because we tend to address and solve the long-term policy decisions simultaneously with the short-term choice on the preferred course to sustainability.
The forest management pathway to sustainability has been a rocky road for more than three decades-a difficult time for foresters and an end is not in sight. Extraordinary challenges have come from every side; environmental, ecological, and other resource interests, shifts in public values, and the profession itself. They continue with little abatement, despite responsive and enlightened learning experiences. Our difficulties have been and continue to be aggravated by lack of a systematic understanding or theory about how forest management advances over time toward sustainability. We are now at the point, I believe, where we can make that understanding explicit.
This presentation offers a framework of understanding that explains how American professional forest management has been on the pathway toward sustainability from its beginnings. It also explains sustainability as a process as well as a goal. Sustainability cannot be achieved in a single leap. Individual steps leave small marks and their ultimate course and consequences are difficult to predict. Over time the marks become accumulative and more visible. They provide new perceptions and knowledge. New knowledge also emerges from science. Public values and policy change. Nature delivers the unexpected. So, the struggle to live in harmony with our environment is unending-with no scientific or otherwise permanent, short-term solution. Vigilant monitoring becomes a dominant task in steering forest management to sustainability. Old problems are resolved, but new ones appear.
The pathway understanding is as new to me as it will be to you. It emerges from two major studies of the long-term management of our Nation's renewable natural resources, particularly forests. The initial study, researched as Chapter 2 for the President's Council on Environmental Quality Annual Report to Congress, Environmental Quality, 1985, recounted our resource management from presettlement times to 1985 (CEQ 1986; Fedkiw 1989). Its systematic methodology documented who used the resource and what for, the implemention/management, and then, what happened in the following decades. The second study, using the same methodology, researched the management of multiple uses on national forests in greater detail, year-by-year, use-by-use, decade after decade, from 1905 to 1995 (Fedkiw 1998). These studies revealed there were a few things more to be learned about the nature and process of long-term forest management despite more than 60 years of diverse experience in all regions and aspects of forestry in the USA.
This learning experience reinforced my appreciation of successful societies as learning organizations who have recognized the value of adjusting land use and resource management to the changing conditions of their resources, population, and societal needs as well as to emerging new science, technology, and knowledge (The Natural Step 2000). There is a rhythm to our earth, its environment, and our humanity. Though we experience off-beats and missteps along the way, the rhythm dominates the overall development and sustainability of our environment and humanity.
The bottom line of that learning experience reveals that forest management has been on the pathway toward a more fully holistic approach to forest ecosystem management and sustainability from the beginning of professional forestry and the Conservation Movement in America. Our forest sciences, management principles, and policy guidelines put us on that pathway, for they embodied a great deal of the functional and structural aspects and relationships of ecosystems and a long-term horizon. The commitment of resource scientists, managers, and policy leaders to assuring the permanence of our renewable resources reinforced their effectiveness.
Sustainability, as defined by the United Nations Brundtland definition, is widely accepted as a goal for the future with a focus on defining a path to that future (WCED 1987). But take a second look at the definition: "Development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." It leaves no question about the meaning of sustainability as a goal for the future. But it also links sustainability with the present generation. Thus, it implies there has been a pathway to the present as well. Do we really have sustainability today?
Historically and conceptually, it seems clear humanity has found a way over the millennia, however imperfect, to sustain a growing population and a supportive environment. In the beginning it is said we were one human, then two, a billion by 1850, then three billion in 1960 and questioning whether our environment could support the six billion people predicted for 2000. But here we are and expecting many more by 2150. It seems clear that humanity has faced old problems of sustainability and ameliorated or solved them, only to be faced with new ones. Generally, it has done so empirically and incrementally in response to the human survival instinct and our inherent drive for a tolerable or better quality of living. We have learned to adapt and surmount challenges to survival and the quality of living we have strived for, not always without serious failures, but nevertheless, as a growing population. It seems self-evident that humankind has learned to survive and provide for a tolerable or better quality of living and supportive environment, however imperfectly.
Thus, documenting the historical human experience should help us understand how we got here and something useful about the process or pathway to sustainability. That's literally how I stumbled onto the pathway understanding--an understanding that can be extended to every country in the world. It places each nation on a pathway toward sustainability, someplace within its bounds or limits, perhaps verging on its limits, or possibly falling outside of them. Here are a few main steps on the USA pathway.
The Conservation Movement, at the turn of the 20th century, put American forestry on the pathway toward a more fully holistic approach to forest ecosystem management. It introduced enormous changes in values and technology for the management of all natural resources. Though broader than forestry, conservation focused forest management on assuring continuous supplies of forest benefits for people as well as the protection and permanence of the underlying resources. It was not a great leap forward, but a gradual step-by-step process. It brought us to where we stand today. In 1942, Aldo Leopold expounded a new, historically meaningful definition for conservation: "our attempt to put human ecology on a permanent footing (Leopold 1942)." His conservation definition is a perfect analogue for the Brundtland definition for sustainable development. It links past forestry efforts for sustainability with those for the present and future. We are still working on the same pathway.
Other major steps on the USA pathway include: the Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960 broadening the purposes for managing national forests to all renewable resources and the establishment of the National Wilderness Preservation System in 1964. The 1970's National Environmental Policy Act and the first Earth Day signaled major shifts in public values for all resources, including forests, in many ways analogous to the Conservation Movement.
In the 1990's, forest industry adopted the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, an industry-wide policy and monitoring approach for its forestlands. The USDA Forest Service adopted an ecological approach for managing multiple uses. In addition, several independent third party certification programs emerged, offering voluntary, non-regulatory approaches to improving forest management on public and private lands consistent with sustainability.
The pathway goal, mutual human and environmental sustainability, recognizes the interface and interdependence of humanity with its environment. But a specific long-term target for sustainability cannot be defined due to the uncertainties and difficulty of predicting the dynamics of nature and the course of science, technology, markets, social values, and policy. These uncertainties indicate there is a range of feasible sustainable outcomes. Nature's course over the millennia likewise indicates a wide range of outcomes consistent with sustainability.
This is an important understanding. It indicates the goal for sustainability is represented by a range of acceptable outcomes. The range, in turn, signifies that the pathway is broad but bounded by the limits of that range. Those bounds are by policy guidelines for assuring sustainable forest management.
There is a second corollary: within the pathway bounds there are different courses or routes for assuring human and environmental sustainability. What are they? They are different blends of nature's bounties, i.e., alternative mixes of natural beauty, habitat diversity, and multiple utilities with compatible mixes of the amenity, environmental, and material needs that serve humanity.
These corollaries make it clear that management for sustainability involves two distinct types of decisions: the long-term policy decisions defining guidelines for the pathway sustainability bounds and the choice of course to follow within those bounds, largely day-to-day, year-to-year management decisions.
The distinction between the pathway or policy bounds and the preferred course to sustainability is a key aspect of the pathway understanding. Careful differentiation is needed to avoid the public confusion and confrontation that emerges when policy guidelines are not clearly focused on the problem or goal they are intended to address. It is the role of Government to ensure to the extent feasible that conflicts between environmental protection, economic activity, and social needs are mediated in ways that permit resolution of differences in public interests at the ground level day-to-day resource management. The current policy structure in this area, at times, seems to exacerbate confrontations, often leading to judicial solutions rather than management resolution (Fitzsimmons 1994).
For example, the National Wilderness Preservation System legislation left the bounds for the System's total area undefined, and its broad criteria for wilderness made virtually every acre of unroaded or lightly used federal forest land eligible for wilderness designation. The allocation of such lands became an open-ended process and set the stage for conflicts with other purposes and a continuing national debate about the proper management of public lands.
The endangered species legislation offers another example. Its focus on conserving individual endangered species addresses a symptom or indicator of the basic problem, rather than the underlying problem of declining biodiversity. In effect, it has sometimes precluded all other management options in the affected habitat except that considered necessary to protect the immediate survival of the endangered species. In focusing on threats to individual species, the policy has often and perhaps unnecessarily narrowed the choice of courses to sustainability, and may also impair the longer-term biodiversity management solution.
Tradeoff Implications. The distinction between policy bounds and courses to sustainability also reveals that ecological, economic, and social tradeoffs are fair considerations in determining society's preferred course to the future. Within the pathway bounds, sustainability is not an issue. Determining guidelines for pathway bounds also involves tradeoff considerations, for sustainability calls for linking the holism of ecology with the holism of humanity.
Cronon (1999) put it this way: "A humanist environment strives to protect Nature but also other, equally important values: responsible (wise?) use, social justice, democracy, tolerance, community...beauty, good humor, joy." The holistic truth lies not in particular or singular ends, but in the proportion of things. Thus, there are choices in determining pathway bounds and the course to take. As Cronon put it, it's not to leave no marks, but rather, to decide what kind of marks to leave.
Thus, in developing a theory for sustainable forest ecosystem management, there is a need to accommodate and weigh ecological, economic, and social trade-offs together with the uncertainties about nature's vagaries and our science, technology, feedback experience, markets, public values, and policy. The pathway understanding in this way opens a door for developing an applied management counterpart to the discipline of ecology.
Advancing on the Pathway. Progress on the pathway is incremental, adaptive, and interactive. Sustainability is a dynamic goal and process responding to human population growth and survival and aspirations for an acceptable quality of living and supportive environment. It cannot be achieved once and for all time. The use and management of forest ecosystems and the growth and development of humanity evolve step-by-step on the pathway day-by-day, year-after-year. The dynamics and uncertainties of the sustainability goal and process make progress adaptive, an unending learning experience for resource managers, policy makers, and the public alike. Vigilant monitoring becomes essential in steering the course to sustainability. But mutual understandings and communal participative processes are equally important in facilitating optimal ecological and equitable social and economic choices for the pathway bounds and course to the future.
Today, the most difficult societal challenge in managing resources is finding ways to resolve conflicts and differences among resource stakeholders and the interested public over competing resource values. It is not a new problem, for society has used its resources hard. But, it has repeatedly recognized the need to remedy or restore its interface with nature and its forests.
Citizens Role. The current debate remains persistent and resistant partly because it fails to distinguish between the long-term pathway policy bounds and the short-term on-the-ground social choice of course to sustainability. We try to address them simultaneously, but the pathway understanding makes it clear; they need to be dealt with separately.
In a free, democratic society, the people, through elected representatives, express policy preferences, what to do and what to manage for (Resources for the Future 1997). That includes the pathway bounds and the preferred course on the pathway. The long-term guidance is especially important to forest managers due to the dynamic and long-term nature of forest growth and development. It is also important for facilitating day-to-day on-the-ground decisionmaking as a communal process for sharing nature's bounties while integrating communally determined societal needs within those policy bounds. Appropriate and sufficient policy bounds make the choice of course within those bounds a question of sharing forest resources, rather than a sustainability issue.
The Resource Manager. In policy decisions and choice of courses, the managers' role is informing and explaining the resource implications of various options. Managers may also identify policy options for public and policy maker consideration.
On the land, resource managers identify the locales and limits for resource uses and services and implement them compatibly with other uses and services in ways that sustain both the resources and their services for future generations. This is resource management, deciding where and how to implement the preferred course to sustainability and avoid trespassing the pathway bounds. In doing so, resource managers integrate the state of forestry knowledge, science, and technology with the external social forces and values and the highly variable conditions on the land (Salwasser 1999). It includes convening stakeholders to discuss management options and seeking agreement or collaborative solutions that respect the capabilities of the land and the interests of a wide range of stakeholders.
Conclusion. Forest management needs a concept explaining how, over the long term, it goes about restoring, maintaining, and advancing forests to sustainability. Sustainability also needs to be understood as a long-term, ongoing process as well as a goal for past, present and future generations. The pathway metaphor provides such a concept and framework. It integrates the long-term nature of the forest management and sustainability processes in a way that is robust, meaningful, and graphically self-evident for the forestry profession and educators, the public, and its policy makers.
Cronon, W. 1999. Humanist environmentalism: A manifesto. http://www.lib.duke.edu/forest/lecture.html. Last update May 7, 1999. Forest History Society, Durham, NC.
Council on Environmental Quality. 1986. The evolving use and management of our forests, grassland and cropland. Chapter 2 (drafted by John Fedkiw) in Environmental Quality 1985, annual report to Congress. Council on Environmental Quality, Executive Office of the President, Washington, DC, pp. 29-137.
Fedkiw, J. 1989. The evolving use and management of the nation's forests, grasslands, croplands, and related resources, General Technical Report RM-175. Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Exp. Sta., USDA Forest Service, Fort Collins, CO, 66 p.
______. 1998. Managing multiple uses on national forests, 1905-1995: A 90-year learning experience and it isn't finished yet. USDA Forest Service, Washington, DC, 284 p.
Fitzsimmons, A.K. 1994. Federal ecosystem management: A train-wreck in the making. Policy Analysis 217, October 26. CATO Institute, Washington, DC, 33 p.
Leopold, A. 1942. Land use and democracy. Audubon Magazine 44(5): 259-65.
Natural Step. 2000. What is the natural step.
http//www.naturalstep.org/what/what_what.html. February 18, 2000.
Resources for the Future. 1997. Environmental policy is the public's to make and the market to shape. Resources 129: 18-19.
Salwasser, H. 1999. The science and practice of forestry: A historical look. General session opening remarks, National Convention, Society of American Foresters, September 11-15, Portland, OR, 1 p.
World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our common future. Oxford University Press. Oxford, UK, 400 p.
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