Barker: Early Forest Service chief viewed resource as social tools

Idaho appears to be rising out of the worst throes of its greatest economic crisis since the 1930s.

Unemployment is dropping and economic activity is growing in many regions of the state. But in the forested counties the future remains bleak.

Unemployment is highest in counties like Adams and Idaho where national forests make up much of the land mass.

These are areas that have never been rich. But beginning with the post-war building boom, and carrying through the late 1980s, the forest products industry turned trees from the national forests into lumber, jobs and livelihoods for several generations of Idahoans.

National policy and long contracts attracted investment into places like St. Anthony, Orofino, Salmon and St. Maries. Many factors led to the end of this bounty. The industry became more mechanized and that reduced the number of workers.

Canadian timber replaced American. And environmental battles over water quality, endangered species and roadless lands put a nail in the coffin of the national forest system as it was envisioned.

The combination of political consensus and laws giving the U.S. Forest Service access to its own revenues were dismantled during those forest wars, changing how 20 million acres in Idaho and more than 190 million acres nationally are managed.

This system was largely created during the Depression by Franklin Roosevelt’s Forest Service Chief Gus Silcox. Silcox, the consummate bureaucrat, was efficient, good with his staff and the people he served.

He’d been in the agency during the formative year of 1910, before going to the U.S. Army and, later, the timber industry. But he viewed the raw capitalism of the industry in the 1920s as counterproductive to the values and promise of democracy and forestry.

Silcox became what we would now call a social engineer. He saw the forests as tools for creating rural community stability and helping people rise from poverty.

“Except for industrial centers, our most serious social problems are now in forest regions from which future citizens will in large measure come,” he wrote.

Today there is no overriding vision like this. President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill sunk $85 million dollars into Idaho from the Forest Service since 2009.

It funded timber mills, bridges, trails, timber management, habitat improvement and many other projects that were expediently approved because they were ready. They didn’t have time for a new idea.

Collaborative groups like the one in the Clearwater and Nez Perce forests have come together to propose projects that have attracted growing federal funding. These groups include former foes in the timber wars and offer a promising path forward.

Additional funding came from the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act — a program that supports counties that previously received funds from timber harvests on national forests. Some have suggested energy or climate policy could provide a basis for a new forest policy.

But there isn’t the kind of overriding social imperative that Silcox offered and used to lay the groundwork for the management of forests in the second half of the 20th century.

At a time when many are questioning the progressive values that led to the establishment of the national forests, its hard to see from where a new program could come.

Silcox simply believed that if forests were sustainably managed, they also could sustain the communities they surrounded. Today there is a growing consensus for collaborative restoration work that includes logging. That fits Silcox’s vision.

But there is little taste for social engineering.

Rocky Barker: 377-6484