Forest Fighter

ichael Dombeck, the 14th chief of the U.S. Forest Service, has a vision. In it, the national forests are the nation's leading outdoor playgrounds, where caring managers restore watersheds, harbor threatened species and heal the effects of past logging, mining, grazing and road-building.

Dombeck's vision appeals to many Americans sickened by photos of vast clear-cuts and mud-choked streams. But it also slams the door on a half-century of the agency's history and culture. That frightens small towns and companies that depend on national forests for timber, grazing or minerals. Members of Congress who represent these areas are ready to fight Dombeck's plans, just as they fought the changes pushed by his predecessor, Jack Ward Thomas.

When Dombeck was named to head the Forest Service in January 1997, he waded into a century-long struggle between resource users and resource protectors. Dormant since the early 1900s, this strife rekindled in the 1970s, when environmental groups mounted their first legal challenges to clear-cutting national forests. It was inflamed in the 1980s and 1990s by successful drives to curb logging in national forests in the Northwest and elsewhere. Timber interests retaliated with congressional mandates to boost logging.

The battle continues. This year, rural loggers in Idaho roughed up a band of timber-sale protesters. Environmentalists sued to block mining, logging and grazing. In Congress, green groups attacked the Forest Service's rural road building program. And western Republican members of Congress loaded up spending bills with riders to boost logging and delay forest plans and mining rules, only to have most of their efforts vetoed.

In the center of this maelstrom is Dombeck, a bookish, 50-year-old biologist with big ideas not only to change the philosophy of the Forest Service, but also to radically overhaul its budget and financial systems.

Breaking the Mold

Dombeck contrasts starkly with almost all of his 13 predecessors as agency chief. Most reached the top of the agency by working their way up through the ranks from jobs overseeing timber sales. This helped to entrench the timber program, and by allowing the agency to promote its own, previous administrations gave it rare independence and ability to resist change.

All that changed when President Clinton picked Dombeck's predecessor, Thomas, to be chief in 1993. Prior to his selection, Thomas stood near the foot of the management ladder. A senior scientist who ran a small laboratory, he was best known for taking more land out of the timber harvest base than anyone in the agency's history. He had hammered together the Northwest Forest Plan, a scheme that cut logging in the coastal Northwest by 75 percent to protect the northern spotted owl and other wildlife dependent on old-growth forests.

But even though Thomas differed from the bureaucrats he leaped over, he was no revolutionary. Having spent a career in the Forest Service, he balked at administration demands that he toss out senior managers and established ways of doing business.

If Thomas only cracked the mold, Dombeck broke it. He also came from a science background; he has a Ph.D. in fishery biology and a master's degree in zoology. But after working for the Forest Service for 12 years and rising to head its fishery programs, Dombeck branched out. He worked as a congressional aide and senior staffer in the Interior Department. He ran Interior's Bureau of Land Management for three years. Dombeck took over the Forest Service having seen other ways of doing business and he carried with him a Clinton administration mandate for change.

Dombeck set about the task quietly, but systematically. He removed two top agency managers that Thomas had refused to dump. He brought in a team from outside; his top aide, chief operating officer Francis Pandolfi, came from the Times Mirror Co. And in speeches, testimony and memos, he called for elevating conservation and recreation to the agency's highest priorities.

Dombeck relegated timber production, grazing and community stability, once the agency's top objectives, to the bottom of his speeches, as if they were afterthoughts. Though he opposed the Sierra Club's call for an end to logging on federal lands, he made clear that ecosystem health came first.

"We simply cannot meet the needs of people if we do not first secure the health of the land," he told a House subcommittee.

Land Ethic

Dombeck's words were not radically different from those of his predecessors. Forest Service chief Dale Robertson first advocated ecosystem management in the early 1990s, during the Bush administration, and Thomas brought a new emphasis on caring for the land. But Dombeck leaped ahead.

Dombeck not only urged officials to protect the land, he pressed them to put the land ethic above loyalty to the agency or the interest groups it serves.

"To me, a conservation leader is someone who consistently errs on the side of maintaining and restoring healthy and diverse ecosystems even when--no, especially when--such decisions are not expedient or politically popular," Dombeck said in a letter to all his employees last July.

"It is not enough to be loyal to the Forest Service organization," he said in the letter. "First and foremost, we must be loyal to our land ethic."

"That's a radical concept," says Andy Stahl of the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

It infuriates timber executives. Jim Geisinger, executive director of the Northwest Forestry Association, a timber industry trade group, keeps Dombeck's letter in his desk drawer so he can quote it with outrage. Geisinger charges Dombeck with flouting the 1897 Organic Act's call for the agency to provide a steady flow of timber.

But perhaps more important than his rhetoric is Dombeck's plan to revise agency financial and promotion systems. Where past agency incentives rewarded managers for producing logs, cows, metals and visitor-days, Dombeck aims to promote those who produce the healthiest streams and forests and most diverse habitats and wildlife. He wants the agency's budget, appropriations and financial management systems to make a parallel shift.

Can Dombeck effect this kind of change? Many people doubt it. He arrived with little political capital; Congress had refused to confirm him as BLM director for three years. As a leap-frogger he is distrusted within his agency, especially at senior levels. And Republicans on Capitol Hill tend to dismiss him as a puppet for Katie McGinty, who as head of the Council of Environmental Quality was Vice President Al Gore's leading environmental policy-maker in the White House.

"Mike Dombeck sold his professional soul to gain his position," gripes Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho.

Thomas is sympathetic to Dombeck's position. A Forest Service chief feels obligations to the agency, Congress, the administration and his conscience, Thomas says. As an employee of the administration, Thomas said, "it's hard in that job not to" follow orders from the White House. Troubled by charges that he was an administration pawn, Thomas said he sometimes rebelled. "I guess I went more on what my gut was telling me," he said.

Dombeck voices less concern about following orders. "I'm part of the executive branch," he says. "I work for [Secretary of Agriculture] Dan Glickman." But even though timber executives see interference from the White House, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior and Commerce departments, Dombeck claims that he has had minimal direction from above, and he welcomes coordination with other agencies.

Indeed, Dombeck's ambitious reach appears to extend beyond his superiors' grasp. Replacing the agency's financial structure and career incentives amid a natural-resource war zone is a task that might humble a Napoleon. To skeptics, Dombeck quotes the German philosopher Goethe, who said, "Every man has only enough strength to complete those assignments of which he is fully convinced of their importance." More to the point, he says, "I didn't take the job to be a caretaker."

A Flair for the Dramatic

So far, Dombeck has shown a flair for both the dramatic public gesture and the hard work of organizational restructuring.

Last Jan. 22, he unilaterally announced plans for a moratorium on road building in those swatches of national forest where the agency has not yet built roads. The decision, which roped off the last refuges of unlogged trees in much of the West, sparked an immediate, angry backlash from rural interests and their champions in Congress. He tried to soften opposition by exempting forests of the Pacific Northwest, southeast Alaska's Tongass National Forest, and a few others, where road building had already shrunk--and where timber users have powerful champions in Congress.

The response was immediate. Dombeck got hit by both sides.

Western senators flayed him for circumventing public processes--the same hearings, studies and appeals they resent when used by opponents to slow logging. En vironmental groups that had attacked road building blasted Dombeck for excepting a few areas from the moratorium.

As criticism mounted, Dombeck slowed down. The moratorium, designed to last 18 months, sat on the shelf for half that time while the agency waded through an outpouring of 65,000 comments on the proposal.

The delays left Dombeck in a limbo of sorts. Both timber and environmental groups wonder why he hasn't moved more decisively to implement his vision. "He hasn't really made any dramatic change," said Geisinger. Stahl, of the environmental employee group, says Dombeck "has yet to make a major natural resource decision."

Agency employees remain divided and often discouraged. Those that hew to the old traditions of timber, mining and grazing are often slowed by the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act and National Forest Management Act. As for those who welcome Dombeck's rhetoric about land restoration and recreation, they aren't getting the money from Congress to make it a reality.

Internal Reforms

But Dombeck may surprise both sides. He has his eye on two crucial levers: money and career incentives. And he doesn't shrink from fundamental reform.

Dombeck has labored to revamp the Forest Service's personnel and financial systems. The word in the timber industry is that Dombeck personally reviews every promotion above the level of district ranger. The good jobs aren't going to foresters, but to biologists, anthropologists, recreation experts and the like, says Geisinger.

Dombeck also intends to tie budget and financial tracking systems to conservation goals, instead of board feet of timber produced or numbers of cows grazed. And in the face of reports that his agency has been unable to account for more than $100 million in spending, his aides talk of both better accounting and "daylighting" spending, making its use visible to all.

Dombeck's toughest job is financing his priorities. He is depending on the public to demand the recreation, conservation and restoration spending he proposes. And it will be expensive. Dombeck argues the costs are overshadowed by the benefits that Forest Service lands provide, including clean water and air, fish and game, recreation, and, at the same time, sustainable volumes of timber, grazing and mining. Water may prove to be the most crucial. Failing to protect clean water in some national forests, notes Dombeck spokesman Chris Wood, could force towns to filter their water at enormous expense.

Despite such talk, the agency's staffing and budget has shrunk as timber revenues have declined. It lacks cash for extensive restoration projects. Congress is especially tight-fisted on costs that do nothing for the mills and logging companies of rural constituents. Western senators scoffed, for instance, at a proposal from foresters in the Columbia Basin to boost forest and stream restoration at a cost of $125 million annually. And some thundered that if the agency didn't intend to produce timber, it shouldn't need much money.

So how does a forest supervisor finance restoration of damaged lands and streams? One way is with more logging. Almost one-third of Forest Service funding comes not from congressional appropriations but from off-budget trust funds refilled by revenues from timber sales, grazing, mining and other commercial uses. By law, a portion of the proceeds of each timber sale is set aside for local use. The cash is supposed to pay for replanting and restoration of lands damaged by logging. In practice it has been used to fund a broad range of agency work, from office expenses to field biologists' salaries.

Dombeck worries about that. "Even though we have decreased the size of our timber program by nearly 70 percent in less than 10 years," Dombeck said in a recent speech, "timber production still very often drives our program priorities, our incentives and our reward system. That needs to change."

He already has proposed to break the link between logging levels and payments to counties. Currently, counties get 25 percent of the revenues from logging on their local national forests. As harvests shrank in recent years, some counties suffered deep losses in road and school budgets, making school teachers into lobbyists for timber sales. The Clinton administration set a precedent for change in 1993, when it gave counties in the Pacific Northwest a guaranteed, but declining, level of payments while it slashed regional logging volume. Dombeck is moving to extend that principle. He proposes to guarantee and perpetuate higher payments to counties, independent of logging levels.

Radical Budgeting

Dombeck is also considering something even more radical: simply eliminating the off-budget trust funds that are filled by logging. "Why shouldn't we put them on-line?" he says, "allowing Congress and the Office of Management and Budget to have a say in how we fund land management?"

Giving up the trust funds would be a high-stakes gamble. It would remove the intravenous tube that keeps the agency going with timber dollars. Although providing more public visibility and control of agency spending could boost confidence in the agency, it also would turn more of the agency's budget over to a Congress whose leaders often don't share Dombeck's vision. The lawmakers could use the funds to beef up timber sales, cut taxes or bolster other agencies.

James Lyons, Agriculture undersecretary for natural resources and environment, who oversees the Forest Service, worries that dropping the trust funds is "a double-edged sword." If Congress took the money away from the Forest Service, the agency would be devastated, Lyons says.

Dombeck says he isn't worried that the money would be diverted from his priorities. He would rely on popular pressure and scientific evidence to shape the funding debate. "I think people care more about public lands today than ever," he says.

Some environmental groups agree. Trading in the trust funds for appropriations is "a risk we're willing to take," says Michael Francis, the Wilderness Society's public lands lobbyist. Francis says his group won congressional backing to reduce road building and logging subsidies. "I think we can win support for restoration, too."

Dombeck has yet to make a public appeal for ending the trust funds, which he has only begun discussing within the administration and on Capitol Hill. But a Dombeck aide says some high-ranking administration officials were "ecstatic" about the idea.

Timber industry executives, however, are appalled. "I don't think Congress should be involved in micromanaging" such spending, says Geisinger, who nevertheless has supported pro-timber riders in legislation.

Senior lawmakers from the rural West seem almost certain to object. Idaho's Craig, who comes from a state that is almost 62 percent owned by the federal government, continues to push for more logging.

"No question that our public wants these public lands treated in an environmentally sound way," Craig says. "But I think they expect that some of these lands be treated as producers of fiber and food."

Noting that timber sales have helped finance the agency for decades, Craig asked, "Is the public willing to subsidize the agency or should they expect it to be a revenue producer?" He worries that Dombeck's drive to restore healthy rivers and forests will slow or stop logging for a while. "But once you stop that," Craig warned, "it will be very difficult to ever start it again."

Rob Taylor covers environmental issues for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.