You and environmentalism- not your father’s “conserve and protect” — “once and done” kind of community engagement
Why You Should Care About Forest Service Engagement
How Can The Forest Service “Show Up” In A Way In Which The Communities It Serves Would Welcome The Agency’s engagement?
Going beyond land management planning — the importance of innovative projects and partnerships
Under current legislation, the involvement of forest services in communities extends well beyond land management planning and includes innovative projects and partnerships to support and benefit local community services and activities that promote the multi-use of outcomes from land and resource management plans.
The National Forest Stewardship Act, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Federal Advisory Council Act, the Healthy Forest Restoration Act, and other legislation provide a framework for including communities in institutional planning.
Local communities are key to the planning process
Many of our state forestry departments actively engage local community members in learning opportunities as providers of local expertise and knowledge. This ensures that as communities gain a better understanding of the Forest Service’s planning process, the communities will better be able to know how and where they can help in the planning process.
It is critical that when federal agencies like the Forest Service or Park Service begin to develop their national plans, they have an opportunity to start receiving input from the communities that they serve as early as possible. [Sources: 0, 6]
Improving Forest Service — community relationships
In particular, HR4622’s requirements are to improve Forest Service — community relationships; strengthen structures and services compatible with land management, and better facilitate land-use planning and decision-making by federal land managers.
The main benefit of this enhanced engagement is the establishment of a strong foundation of relationships and trust that is necessary to successfully collaborate on specific land management planning issues and processes.
Giving voice to the nation’s gateway communities
The Act ensures that communities that are our nation’s gateway to federal lands, including Park Service and Forest Service properties, have a voice in the federal planning process. I would say, to those who may object to this, I think it helps not only to provide the satellite community with an ongoing and reliable economic resource but also to realize that the satellite community is critical to the success of the planning process of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and both the Forest Service and the Park Service. [Sources: 0, 6]
Involving gateway communities in the planning process
HR 4622 will also allow collaborative arrangements and require more coordination between agencies in involving the gateway communities in their planning process.
The relevant role of the US Forest Service as a land management agency is to provide, within their transfer mandate, with the support of habitat reuse, to enable wildlife managers to maintain the viability of a species as defined by that government agency.
The National Park Service’s $12 billion debt is causing most of the bad press, but our other state land agencies are also in the red; The US Forest Service, for example, is facing a $5 billion deficit. [Sources: 4, 5, 6]
Creating local conservation and management plans
Forest plans that cover a broad landscape and can be tailored to the needs of a specific geography, river basin, or community are the optimal scale for creating comprehensive local conservation and management plans.
Likewise, HR 4622 provides ways that the US Forest Service can work more closely with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to develop a clear forest program strategy that actively promotes the recovery of endangered species, as required by the rules, rather than simply supporting primary conditions.
An effective forest management plan provides clear guidelines for identifying, developing, and implementing programs that support wildlife populations, restore ecosystem resilience, ensure sustainable fire protection regimes, and protect public safety and communities. [Sources: 0, 5]
Improving relations between the agency and the gateway communities it serves
It is noteworthy that relations between the US Forest Service and the gateway communities that it serves are improving. Specifically, one such example of this would be the March 1, 2020 signing of a renewed memorandum of understanding MOU) outlining the priorities and expectations of both the country’s counties and the Forest Service. [Source: 7]
Before the signing of the MOU, the (then) US Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen addressed the members f the National Association of Counties (NACo) Western Interstate Region (WIR). She spoke of the ways that the Forest Service is proactively engaging with gateway countries and communities to sustain meaningful working relationships necessary to succeed. [Source: 7]
The Takeaway — How the Forest Service can “Show Up” in the communities with which it engages
She detailed ways that the Forest Service is moving forward to stay meaningfully engaged while acknowledging the shortfalls in such engagement. It was encouraging to note that she reaffirmed the resolve of the Forest Service to look for impactful ways to address those challenges on an ongoing basis. Some of her remarks are helpful to learn how the Forest Service will “Show Up” in a way that the communities it serves would welcome the agency’s engagement:
“We really understand that counties and communities have such a close cultural, social, and economic tie to the land, the national forests, and the grasslands, they’ve always had special importance for those communities in terms of economic health and livelihood,” she said. “We really get that and we’re really trying to get better at this, at recognizing how interdependent these lands are across shared landscapes and throughout communities.”{Source: 7]
She provided compelling details (IMHO) concerning the urgency in “upping the game” of the US Forest Service. Again this is a most encouraging acknowledgment of the need to remain focused on a major component of the agency’s mission to bring “people and communities together to answer the call of conservation”:
“I’m trying to set a really different tone in the Forest Service, and to say we really share the responsibility, we share the ownership, we share the outcomes of what we want to create on these lands,” she said, pointing to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s shared stewardship initiative in 2018 as a catalyst for that, which has resulted in 13 signed agreements and 25 in the works. “This is a way for us to up our game, frankly. But we have a scale mismatch. We’re not responding in a way that matches the size of the challenge, with a billion burnable acres, with catastrophic insects and disease, with a need to amp up our rural economies.”[Source: 7]
Christiansen said that the agency is on track to improve forest conditions, which is all about more proactive forest management. She emphasized the ongoing importance of utilizing every tool and authority at the disposal of the agency.[Source: 7]
It was heartening to hear her full support of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in which she affirmed that the agency would remain science-based and continue to meet its environmental responsibilities, always keeping the public fully informed of this. She stated that the Forest Service intends to always have a clear voice and maintain transparency at all times. {Source: 7]
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Sources
[0]: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-107hhrg79480/html/CHRG-107hhrg79480.htm
[2]: https://rare.uoregon.edu/author/aadelman/page/5/
[3]: https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-7-ken-tate-challenges-public-lands-grazing
[5]: https://academic.oup.com/jof/article/117/1/65/5227990
[6]: https://www.congress.gov/event/109th-congress/senate-event/LC12307/text
[7]:
https://www.naco.org/articles/relations-continue-improve-forest-service
