Jim Robbins

On a crystal-clear June day Tim Love, a district ranger on the Lolo National Forest, pulls over his white SUV along a dirt road to take in a classic Montana view: a soaring forest-draped wall of mountains, broken by avalanche chutes, that slopes down to a forested valley. Grizzly bears, lynx, moose, wolves—the complete assemblage of native wildlife—make their way though these woods on the southern edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

Though it doesn’t look like it, the forest here has been logged—selectively, in sharp contrast to the road-to-road clear-cutting on private land above the national forest. There are other differences on this part of the Lolo. Logging roads that scar the scenery and dump silt into streams have been plowed up and re-vegetated, new culverts and bridges have been built, and campground roads have been improved. “We did 20 years of projects in two years,” said Love.

There is a good news-bad news scenario in the national forests. The good news is that the Clearwater Stewardship Project, as this experiment was called, was designed to thin the woods to create a healthier, more beetle-resistant forest, provide a local mill with logs, and put money into the tapped-out budget of the U.S. Forest Service. The project at least partially accomplished all three goals.

The bad news is that our forests are in trouble. Every stakeholder—from Forest Service personnel to environmentalists to recreation groups—describes a National Forest System so short of funds that trails and roads are not being maintained, campgrounds are closed, and bridges are falling apart. Nor is the Forest Service able to manage the proliferation of ATVs, dirt bikes, and other off-road vehicles.

One problem is the rapidly escalating cost of fighting the increasingly severe wildfires sweeping through the West each year. In 1991 fire-fighting took 13 percent of the Forest Service budget; this year it is projected to consume close to 45 percent. “We’re spending more and more of our budget on fires and less on other things we do,” said Love, citing recreation facilities, maintenance, fish and wildlife habitat, and other needs.

During the past six years, the Bush administration and Congress have made dramatic cuts in other forest programs, reversing progress made in the 1990s. Gloria Flora, one of the first women to serve as a national forest supervisor, notes that during the Clinton years the Forest Service moved away from its focus on logging, which is subsidized by taxpayers in most forests because road construction and other timber-related activities are so expensive. The agency started to take a more comprehensive approach to forest management, with increasing emphasis on protecting watersheds, fish and wildlife habitat, and the qualities that draw hikers, hunters, and other recreation lovers. “It was not only good science, it was good economics,” said Dr. Joe Kerkvliet, a Wilderness Society economist in Bozeman, Montana. A 1997 federal study concluded that nearly 90 percent of the economic value derived from western forests could be traced to recreation, much of it in unroaded areas. The National Forest System now hosts 200 million visitors a year.

The Bush administration believes that logging was reduced too much. The Northwest Forest Plan, created in 1994 to limit cutting that seriously threatened old-growth forests and wildlife that depend on them, led to a 90 percent reduction in timbering. In April, after settling a timber industry challenge to that plan, the administration increased the logging budget for Oregon and Washington forests by 32 percent. Yet funding for national forest recreation programs in the two states has declined nearly 25 percent over the past four years. The president has recommended a further reduction for the upcoming year, which would force the elimination of 300 full-time jobs.

Congressman Norm Dicks (D-WA) is pushing for an increase in the Forest Service budget. When Democrats took control of the House in 2007, he became chairman of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee and led the effort to increase the agency’s Fiscal Year 2008 non-fire-related funding by $102 million, compared to the prior year. That figure is $345 million more than the president proposed. The House legislation includes $65 million specifically to fix or obliterate old logging roads that are damaging watersheds, fish habitat, and drinking water supplies. The Forest Service budget includes only 20 percent of the funds it needs to properly maintain existing roads. Idaho’s Nez Perce National Forest alone, with over 3,500 miles of inventoried roads, estimates it has a $64 million backlog of deferred road maintenance.

“The Subcommittee recognized the substantial impacts of these washed-out roads on fish passage and on water quality, so we created this new account,” Dicks explained recently. “Some of the fish runs that were impeded by the collapse of old logging roads involved threatened species, and the government has a clear responsibility to mitigate the damage to their critical habitat.” (As of press time, Congress had yet to complete action on this legislation.)

Additional funds definitely are needed to curb growing abuse by off-road vehicles (ORVs), according to conservationists and some in the Forest Service. Dale Bosworth, who was President Bush’s first Forest Service chief, identified unmanaged ORV use as one of the four greatest challenges facing our national forests. “These vehicles pose a serious threat to wildlife and archaeological sites,” said Kim Crumbo, conservation director for Grand Canyon Wildlands Council. In addition, ORVs steal the peace and quiet sought by most forest visitors. Crumbo cited a report by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which found that there were more than 5,400 law enforcement incidents in 2005 involving off-road vehicles on BLM lands compared to roughly 900 incidents involving drug violations. The Forest Service is developing plans to keep ORVs on routes designated for their use, but the agency needs to find the will and the money to enforce its policy.

To help compensate for shortages of money and staff, the agency has made extensive efforts to develop partnerships with groups, such as the Backcountry Horsemen and the Boy Scouts, that can provide volunteers for trail maintenance and other needs. The Forest Service estimates that in 2006 volunteers contributed $45 million worth of effort, 80 percent of it focused on recreation, trails, and wilderness tasks. “Volunteers play an increasingly important role in taking care of the national forests,” says Mike Anderson, a senior analyst with The Wilderness Society. “It’s important to remember, though, that volunteers are generally not professionals, and they are only a partial solution to the problem. Washington needs to provide the money needed for our national forests to live up to their potential.”

More and more conservationists are advocating greater emphasis on restoration. Decades of extensive logging and road building seriously damaged the national forests, so there is a real need to properly maintain or decommission some logging roads, restore streams, and thin areas where the suppression of natural fires has left heavy brush and other “fuel” for future fires. Such projects also can pay financial dividends for local economies and save taxpayers money in the long run. However, the restoration activities’ direct economic impact on local communities will be limited, because the value of the timber cut tends to be low, and local economies are more strongly influenced by national and international trends.

“The reality is that we will have limited seed money for restoration—and declining funds for other forest priorities—if we don’t solve the fire expense problem,” said Jaelith Hall-Rivera, a budget analyst with The Wilderness Society. One option is to fight fewer fires in the backcountry that pose little threat to people and homes and instead manage them to help restore those landscapes. These fires will reduce the flammable material that has built up due to decades of suppression, so future fires will be smaller and less costly. The most expensive fires to fight are those near communities, and it is imperative that preventive steps be taken to reduce the risk to homes, Hall-Rivera said. Another option is to move the fighting of major wildfires out of the Forest Service budget, treating such fires the way we do floods and hurricanes.

The national forests make up eight percent of the country. “What a special inheritance!” said Jim Furnish, deputy chief of the Forest Service under President Clinton and now with Rangers for Responsible Recreation, a group of retired federal land managers. “But we are squandering it. Healthy fisheries, wildlife, world-class recreation, and watersheds that provide clean drinking water are in jeopardy. It’s not too late to take a page from Theodore Roosevelt’s book and protect these forests for future generations.”

Jim Robbins lives in Helena, Montana, and writes science and environmental stories for The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and other publications.