Story and photos by PAUL FATTIG
Mail Tribune

The U.S. Forest Service, rooted in controversy when it was born 100 years ago this year, can expect to tap into conflict in its next century, says an award-winning history professor who has spent much of his adult life studying the agency.

After cutting its administrative teeth over the contentious grazing issue its first 50 years, then chopping into a timber harvest controversy the next, the agency likely will face water wars in the future, predicts Char Miller, chairman of the history department at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

"But it’s always in hot water — it has to be," Miller said in a telephone interview Friday from Pittsburgh.

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"It’s healthy to have people on the outside scrutinizing this public agency," he explained. "Ultimately, this is an expression of democracy. When an agency no longer feels it’s under scrutiny, that’s when we’re in trouble."

Miller, 53, the author of "Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism," will give a lecture on the agency’s history beginning at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Rogue River Room of the Stevenson Union at Southern Oregon University in Ashland. Pinchot was the agency’s first chief and is credited with charting its destiny.

Miller is on a "Centennial Road Tour" for the agency. His presentation is "Why the Forest Service was a radical experiment."

A two-hour documentary on the agency, "The Greatest Good," will be shown at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Medford library and 7 p.m. Thursday at SOU. All events are free.

Miller, who has a doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University, has written several other history books and is co-author of "The Greatest Good: 100 Years of Forestry in America."

He depicts Pinchot as a colorful character who counseled and battled every president from Grover Cleveland to Harry S. Truman. Pinchot was appointed the agency’s first chief by President Theodore Roosevelt.

"Having a president who shared your views, covering your back, that is every agency head’s dream," Miller said.

From the outset, the agency was guided by Pinchot’s philosophy, he said.

"Where conflicting interests must be reconciled, the question will always be decided from the standpoint of the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run," Pinchot wrote.

However, what was determined to be the greatest good shifted over the first century, Miller said.

In 1905, the focus was on grazing, followed by restoration of burned, cut-over and grazed-over landscape, he said.

"Its job then was planting trees, not harvesting," he said.

A huge shift in policy began immediately after World War II when getting out the timber cut became crucial, he said.

"Many private holdings were tapped out and the national forests became a logical place to cut," he said.

From an average annual harvest of about two billion board feet on national forestland, the building boom following the war increased the annual cut to 12 to 13 billion board feet, he said. That boom continued until the late 1980s when the national environmental movement, which began in the 1950s, undercut the harvest, he said.

"Until then, timber was king internally in the agency," he said.

"But many foresters within the agency felt the forests were being overcut," he said. "The agency didn’t really know how to respond. It was being clobbered politically. It kind of fought a rear guard action."

The agency is now back to harvesting a little less than two billion board feet a year, similar to its pre-war harvest, he said.

"For the foreseeable future, it’s not going above that," he predicted. "It doesn’t have the resources. Fire (suppression) is taking all the money.

"And, frankly, there is no market for it," he added. "It’s cheaper to buy wood from foreign countries like Indonesia."

But Miller says the result is the exportation of an environmental debt. Overcutting abroad, like overcutting at home, is not sustainable, he said.

"It’s a kind of environmental suicide for somebody else," he said. "But Americans have been very slow to recognize and act on that paradox.

"We want our forests to ski, hike, hunt or fish, but we don’t want them logged," he added. "We want everything but we don’t want to pay for it."

However, that conflict may be swamped by the coming battle over water, he said.

The single largest source of fresh water in the nation, between 6 and 8 percent, comes from national forests, he said.

Many large cities in the West depend on water from national forests, creating a potential conflict between rural and urban lifestyles, he said.

"That source will get more pressure," he said of the demand for recreation, timber, grazing and other resources.

Yet he and others believe it may also be an opportunity for the agency to reinvent itself.

"There is the real possibility for the Forest Service to reframe its mission and political luster around water," he said.