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Status of Sustainability for Forests in the United States

John Fedkiw

USDA Forest Service, Volunteer

The United Nations defined sustainability in terms of its broad purpose in1987 (World Commission) and adopted it in 1992 as “Development that meets the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” However, it does not define or explain what constitutes sustainability as a goal and process for human and environmental welfare on the land.  Nevertheless, it is emerging as an overriding 21^st Century goal and process on the land for human and environmental welfare and development, and therefore, for renewable natural resources including forest and their use and management. 

The general concept and process of sustainability is a sequel to and integrates the learning experience associated with the conservation, economic growth and development, and the environmental protection movements of the 20^th Century.  Sustainability envelops them for a balanced pursuit of their purposes in meeting the needs of present and future generations while assuring a supportive environment.  It is at the forefront of resource discussions and management worldwide.  In the United States forest use and management sector, its dimensions and determinants are being pursued from various scholarly, research, and practical perspectives.  But a widely accepted concrete policy definition and understanding of the goal and process for sustainable forests remains elusive (Floyd 2002, 74-77).  

 

Toward a Policy Definition and Understanding

Until there is a policy-level definition and understanding, it will be a challenge to pursue sustainability systematically and objectively, to assess its status, and to communicate about it intelligently.  Hagan and Whitman (2006) in searching ways to assess the status of the biodiversity aspect of sustainability across the forested landscape concluded that “Science plays a major supporting role, but the best of science in the world will not be able to provide legitimacy to sustainable forestry.  Social legitimacy will be won or lost by the inclusion or exclusion of forest stakeholders.”  Hagan and Whitman recognized that the primary challenge for defining sustainability for forests is procedural vs. technical or scientific; that it called for a democratic collaborative process to assure that stakeholders’ values are served.  The Pathway metaphor, understanding, and graphic systems model provides such a societal, policy-oriented definition of sustainability as a holistic goal and process of broad landscape proportions (Fedkiw 2003, 2004).   In that respect it appears to be a unique formulation that also perceives the nationwide pragmatic efforts to address sustainability as gradually moving toward the Pathway societal perception.  At the same time it recognizes that sustainability for forests cannot be defined independently from a pure forestry perspective.  That is because sustainability is a holistic societal concept of broad landscape proportions, where forests are just one component of the landscape.  Thus sustainability for forests depends upon what else society needs or prefers on the landscape.

The Pathway understanding defines sustainability as an aggregate, societal abstraction for three most powerful human motivations and goals:  (1) societal survival, (2) a tolerable, acceptable, or better quality of life, and (3) a supportive environment for present and future generations.  Given the growth of humanity from its beginning on Earth, it is axiomatic that sustainability has been an implicit goal of past generations.  That is why we and six billion plus people are here today.  But, it was not without challenges.  There have been many missteps, shortfalls, and failures, some disastrous, due to diverse causes and human motives along the way.  But successes in building and assuring a future for ourselves and our children and grandchildren dominated the pathway process to our present state of sustainability. 

That pathway was largely pragmatic, i.e., empirical, incremental, and adaptive, in response to the human survival instinct, inherent drive for a better quality of life, and the need for a supporting environment.  Today, increasing limitations on environmental and resource capacity, combined with a growing population and economy, signal an urgency to pursue sustainability more knowledgeably and systematically.  It requires understanding and defining sustainability as a concrete societal goal, process, and pathway to the future and formalizing it as policy at the national and state levels. 

Sustainability as a Goal on the Land and Its Forests.  Sustainability, as a societal welfare goal and a supporting environment on the land and its forests, is a blend of (1) Nature’s attributes: natural beauty, forest ecosystem diversity, and multiple utilities; and (2) people’s needs: amenity services, environmental services, and material goods. The full blend is never found on individual acres or ownerships but encompasses broad landscapes across multiple ownerships, regions, nations and worldwide. Since all nations rely on international trade to meet part of the people’s needs, trade, both imports and exports, are an explicit component of the process of sustainable development.  

Over time, the blend changes with population and economic growth, shifting demography, and people’s needs in kind, quality, and quantity.  Other dynamic influences include science, technology, markets, feedback experience, people’s values and Nature’s vagaries.  Thus, the past Pathway to sustainability and it resource landscape has been dynamic and remains so for the future. 

In the past Century, for example, U.S. population quadrupled while the Nation’s forests remained almost stable at 750 to 760 million acres (Haynes 2003) as they responded to growing needs of a growing population and economy. The forests, however, were greatly altered, in some places more than others.  Nevertheless, under conservation management and growing environmental protection they remained resilient and responsive to improving forest management sciences and protection.  Old problems were solved or ameliorated but new ones emerged.  Their resilience was sustained although their capacity was increasingly taxed.

The dynamics of the forest pathway to sustainability in the 20th Century is difficult to recall, observe, or measure directly.  Its complexity, dynamics, and holistic nature as a goal and process of landscape proportions requires that it be researched and studied historically over time, horizontally across the landscape, and holistically in terms of nature’s bounties and people’s needs.  A growing body of contemporary mainstream literature reveals the long-term nature and aspects of forest and other resource use and management (Bonnicksen 2000; Council of Environmental Quality 1986; Fedkiw 1989, 1998, 2003, 2004; Fedkiw and Cayford 1999; Frederick and Sedjo 1991; MacCleery 1992, 2004; Sample 2004; Sampson and Hair 1990; Trefethen 1975). 

Sustainability as a Process on the Land.  For the present and at any one time, there can be only one blend of Nature’s attributes and people’s needs on the landscape.  For the long-term, the millennial course of sustainability indicates a changing and wide range of acceptable landscape outcomes or blends.  A scientifically determinable, specific long-term landscape target that can or must be assuredly achieved cannot be defined.   Instead, the future is represented by a range of feasible outcomes, a continuum of forest management and use outcomes---from intensive management consistent with conservation to a low intensity of management and environmental protection.

Nature does not set limits or bounds to the range of societal use and management of landscape resources but society does.  It does so in response to concerns for societal survival, quality of life, and a supporting environment.  In primitive societies, those bounds tend to become part of their culture.  In developed societies, they are defined in public policies that reflect the public’s perception of forest resource capabilities and limits in the light of current science and knowledge, technology, markets, public values, forest conditions and societal dependency on the forests. 

In this way, it is society that defines what constitutes sustainable forest landscapes compatibly with other needs across the broad landscape.  This is a fundamental principle and needs to be widely understood and appreciated.  As yet, however, it has not been explicitly embodied in renewable natural resource policy, legislation, and governance except in the State of Minnesota where it is embodied in its Sustainable Forest Resources Act of 1995 and implemented across its private and public lands and ownerships (Fedkiw and Rose 2007).

The most recent updates of policy bounds for renewable natural resources emerged from the central thrust of the environmental movement.  They include the federal legislation and related guidelines and standards for clean air, fishable and swimmable waters, no net loss of wetlands, endangered species protection, reservations for wilderness, wild rivers, scenic areas, and much more.  All involve bounds and limits on forest use and management 

The Process of Sustainability Involves Two Types of Policy Decisions.  The range of feasible landscape blends of people’s needs and nature’s bounties calls for two distinctly different societal decisions for implementing sustainability.   

(1) The long-term policy decisions and guidelines for the pathway bounds and limits, as described above, and

(2) The choice of course and blend of nature’s bounties and people’s needs on the landscape within those bounds.  

The choice of course is not an issue of sustainability per se.  It is about what to sustain on the landscape within the policy bounds of sustainability.  It is a matter of societal choice, from the continuum of sustainable resource use and management options, for a preferred long-term landscape outcome.  That is the role of landscape planning and coordination.   It also defines related short-term targets and strategies for the preferred outcome and works to integrate their implementation across the landscape and its diverse ownerships.  It is a necessary joint step in implementing sustainability for, on-the-ground, the management guidelines for sustainability must be implemented jointly with those for the preferred landscape outcome.  In management planning, monitoring, and evaluation as well as in resolving challenges and issues to planning or on-the-ground resource use and management, it is important to maintain the distinction between these two policy decision processes.

Landscape Management for Sustainable Forests

Forest management is science-based, experience-informed, and addresses a particular owner’s or jurisdiction’s purposes in a particular locale and set of forest conditions.   Each forest management project contributes a component to the preferred or another landscape outcome and to the status of sustainability.  Thus, landscape management on the land is a step-by-step process.  Over time, as the population and economy grow and the dynamics of markets, public values, nature’s responses and vagaries, and the underlying science, technology, and feed-back experience evolve, forest management and the forest landscape structure and condition also evolve dynamically.

In the past, when the forest landscape could largely accommodate the diverse user and citizen interests, the use and management decisions were determined primarily by the landowners and jurisdictions and their forest managers.  Under this approach, the long-term forest landscape outcome and structure became indeterminate.  It became a function of the uncoordinated, cumulative outcome of the site-by-site, year-by-year forest use and management across the diverse ownerships and jurisdictions.

During the last half of the past century, however, it became increasingly apparent that the forest landscape and its owners and jurisdictions no longer had the capacity or capability to respond to the growing diversity and intensity of all stakeholder and citizen interests in forest use and management and their long-term landscape preferences.  Users and citizens, exercising their democratic political freedoms to pursue their forest values and preferences, increasingly began to challenge the traditional forest management decision approach on both public and private lands.

The stakeholder and citizen intervention was not entirely without justification.  For the forest landscape, in the sense of dependency as opposed to ownership, belongs to the whole of society, for it constitutes a large part of the supporting environment for human survival and quality of life.  Landowners and public jurisdictions aware of their private property rights and authorities, respectively, resisted but sought ways to accommodate user and public interests through ad hoc public participation procedures.  The conflicts, confrontations, and challenges to site-specific management projects on both public and private lands emerged and accelerated on both public and private lands.  They often produced extended stalemates in forest management due to the prolonged nature of political and adjudicative processes for determining a solution.  Such conflicts and confrontations were often viewed as problems.  But in the larger picture, however, they are primarily symptoms of an underlying problem and raised the issue: Who is or should be in charge of landscape management?

The basic problem was the absence of an enabling framework of governance for identifying preferred societal landscape outcomes and the intermediate goals and strategies for their achievement.  At this time, with the sole exception of the State of Minnesota, there is no integrated, unifying statewide framework for resolving the diverse citizen and stakeholder landscape interests and preferences and working across the ownerships and jurisdictions with their owners and managers (NCSSF 2005).  The basic issue, more often than not, is not about sustainability per se.  It is about what to manage for within the established policy bounds of sustainability.  That is the preferred long-term forest landscape outcome and the near-term goals and strategy to achieve it.  The basic underlying cause of the confrontational problem is an insufficient capacity within the forests, and the limited ability of owners and managers to meet all the diverse preferences of all the people.

Sustainable Forests Governance

A solution calls for an enabling governance framework for defining management guidelines for sustainable forests at the landscape level and a
communal process for identifying a preferred societal long-term forest landscape outcome. In this way, landscape planning and coordination constitute a cultural change and an useful grassroots approach for resolving differences in landscape values and preferences communally among landowners, public jurisdictions, citizens, and stakeholders at the local level of forest issues.

Landscape planning and coordination has become a keystone for implementing sustainability, for it integrates the guidelines for sustainability per se with the near-term strategies for achieving the preferred long-term landscape outcome.  A state role for landscape long-term goal planning and coordination is a logical and constitutionally appropriate approach. 

It responds to the public interest in societal sustainability and landscape development. It strengthens grassroots democracy with a local or state communal process for resolving or reconciling value differences   It achieves an equitable sharing of the natural resource landscape among its citizens, landowners, and managers.  State landscape councils, committees or the equivalent, representing stakeholder, landowner, and other public interests offer a viable organizational option for doing so.

Landscape planning and coordination has been repeatedly recognized as a necessary approach to sustainability without defining a corresponding process for doing so. In 1992, a Society of American Foresters’ Task Force on Sustaining Long-Term Forest Health and Productivity defined its goal as management that includes all values and all forests, regardless of ownerships, but with attention to private property rights.  It recommended “managing these forests cooperatively across ownerships in large landscapes so that goods and services for human use, and ecosystem conditions such as biodiversity and ecosystem integrity, are ensured in a multigenerational time frame” (SAF 1993).  The National Commission on Science for Sustainable Forestry (NCSSF 2005) found and reported that landscape-level information and strategies are necessary for managing sustainable forests across individual ownerships. 

It also reported that government agencies and nongovernmental conservation organizations generally have not established “social, policy, and land management mechanisms for meeting landscape-level goals.”  However, it recognized the Minnesota Sustainable Forest Resources Act of 1995 with its landscape planning component as “a notable exception.”  Although they recognized the need, neither the SAF Task Force Report nor the NCSSF Findings Report explicitly addressed or proposed the need for a State-level enabling governance framework for implementing landscape planning and coordination on the land within the framework policy guidelines for sustainability.

However, various ad hoc processes have emerged for collaborative decision making but are largely specific to particular ownerships or areas and do not address the landscape as a whole. 

Many efforts focus on implementing the Criteria and Indicators of sustainability under the Montreal protocol (USDA Forest Service 2004).  But they do not have a policy or legislative status or an alternative policy level definition for the process of sustainability itself in the United States. 

It is unlikely that a legislative policy for sustainability or sustainable landscapes and forests can be achieved without a meaningful policy understanding and a definition of its process on the land.  That is evidenced by the legislative history (Fedkiw 2007, Wolf 1990) for the passage of the Multiple Use–Sustained Yield Act of 1960 (USDA Forest Service 1993).

The lack of a coordination mechanism across the landscape and the land use development role of states, points toward a statewide democratic governance and process for integrating the diverse interests of their citizens with the multiple benefits and services of forest landscapes, and prioritizing responses to emerging threats to the forest landscape.  The intensity of this need varies among the states, but it will increase with time as the population and economy continues to grow. 

In April 2004, United Nations Forum on Forests convened an international workshop in Switzerland on Decentralization, Federal Systems of Forestry and National Forest Programmes, to address this issue.  In addressing lessons learned, in its publication, ~The Politics of
Decentralization: Forests, People and Power ~(Pierce Colfer and Capistrano 2005), the workshop identified the need for a system of governance for forest management and sustainable forests and endorsed a decentralized approach for its potential to improve participation, accountability, and overall democratization of forest governance. 

It also recognized that “It requires clear, enabling legal and policy frameworks, and basic institutional capacities, including the capacity for resolving conflicts and negotiating among stakeholders with competing interests and unequal power…timely and widely available information as well as resources and mechanisms for upward and downward accountability” (Capistrano and Pierce Colfer 2005).  A national policy encouraging such decentralization and coordination at the state level for sustainable forest or resource landscapes could enhance its development.

References

 
Bonnicksen, T.M. 2000.  America’s ancient forests: from the Ice Age to the Age of Discovery. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 

Capistrano, D. and C. J. Pierce Colfer.  2005.  Decentralization: Issues, Lessons and Reflections, Chapter 18.  The Politics of Decentralization: Forests, Power and People, London: Earthscan.  

Council On Environmental Quality. 1986.  The evolving use and management of our forests, grassland and cropland. Chapter 2 (drafted by John Fedkiw). Environmental Quality 1985, Annual Report to Congress. Washington, DC: Council on Environmental Quality, Executive Office of the President. 

 Fedkiw, J. 1989.  The evolving use and management of the nation's forests, grasslands, croplands, and related resources,General Technical Report RM-175.  Fort Collins, CO: Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, USDA Forest Service. 

 Fedkiw, J. 1998.  Managing multiple uses on national forests, 1905-1995: A 90-year learning experience and it isn't finished yet. Washington,DC:USDA Forest Service. 

Fedkiw, J. 2003.  The forest management pathway to sustainability.  Proceedings, 2003 National Convention. Bethesda, MD: Society of American Foresters. 

Fedkiw, J. 2004.  Sustainability and the pathway hypothesis. The pathway to sustainability: defining the bounds on forest management.  Durham, NC:  Forest History Society. 

Fedkiw, J.  2007.  Perspective: Where Did Multiple Use Go? Journal of Forestry 105 (4): 213-14.

Fedkiw, J. and J.A. Cayford. 1999.  Forest management: A dynamic and evolving profession. Forestry Chronicle 75(2): 213-18. 

Fedkiw, J. and G. A. Rose  2007.  Stewardship and landscape coordination for sustainable forests. Washington, DC.  The  Pinchot Institute for Conservation.  Manuscript in process of publication.

Floyd, D.W. 2002.  Forest sustainability: the history, the challenge, the promise.  Durham, NC:  Forest History Society.

Frederick, K.D. and R.A. SEDJO, eds. 1991.  America's renewable resources: Historical trends and challenges. Washington, DC: Resources for the Future. 

Hagan, J. and A.A. Whitman.  2006.  Biodiversity indicators for sustainable forestry: simplfying complexity, Journal of Forestry 104(4): 203-210.

Haynes, W.H., Technical Coordinator. 2003.  An analysis of the timber situation in the United States: 1952-2050.  Portland, OR:  Pacific Northwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service. 

MacCleery, D.W. 1992.  American forests: A history of resiliency and recovery. Durham, NC:  Forest History Society. 

MacCleery, D.W. 2004.  The historical record for the pathway hypothesis.  The pathway to sustainability: defining the bounds on forest management. Durham, NC:  Forest History Society. 

National Commission on Science for Sustainable Forestry. 2005.  Science, biodiversity, and sustainable forestry:  A findings report of the National Council on Science for Sustainable Forestry. Washington, DC. 

National Commission on Science for Sustainable Forestry. 2005.  Science, biodiversity, and sustainable forestry:  A findings report of the National Council on Science for Sustainable Forestry. Washington, DC. 

Pierce Colfer C. J. and D. Capistrano, editors. 2005.  The Politics of Decentralization: Forests, Power and People, by C.J. Pierce Colfer & D. Capistrano, London: Earthscan.  

Sample, V.A. 2004.  Sustainability and biodiversity: the challenge of the future.  The pathway to sustainability: defining the bounds on forest management.  Durham, NC:  Forest History Society. 

Sampson, R.N., and D. Hair, eds. 1990.  Natural resources for the 21st century. Washington, DC: American Forestry Association and Island Press.

 
Society of American Foresters.  1993. Task force report on sustaining long-term forest health and productivity. Bethesda, MD: Society of American Foresters. 
 
Trefethen. J.B. 1975.  An American crusade for wildlife. New York: Winchester Press and the Boone and Crocket Club.

USDA Forest  Service. 1993.  The principal laws relating to Forest Service activities, Washington, DC:  U.S. Government Printing Office. 

USDA Forest Service.  2004.  The Journey of the United States So Far.  National report on sustainable forests-2003.  FS-766.  Washington, DC. P. 113-17.

Wolf, R. E.  1990.  The concept of multiple use: the evaluation of the idea within the Forest Service.  Report submitted under contract No. N-3-2465.  Office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Congress, Washington, DC.  81 p.

World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987.  Our common future. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 
 
 
Posted 4 September 2007

Updated 24 September  2007