Mike Petersen Is Wrong

I would not know Mike Petersen if he walked past me. We've never met and, though we share a surname, we aren't related. But Petersen, who is executive director of The Lands Council, wrote me on November 15 to criticize Tom Bonnicksen's "Death of a Forest" essay and to say that "Evergreen Magazine doesn't seem to be living in this century, so please get with it."

I confess that Petersen's note surprised me, first because this is the first time he's ever written us, and second because it takes real courage to criticize a PhD forest ecologist whose vitae is 56 pages long, but Petersen waded in anyway.

He, in turn, seemed surprised when I wrote back and invited him to rebut Bonnicksen's November 11 essay. He has now done so in an essay that reads more like it was written by a mechanical engineer - which Petersen apparently is - than a forest scientist, which he isn't. But it's a free country, and Petersen and his Lands Council members are certainly entitled to their opinions. (Click here to read Mike Petersen's rebuttal to Dr. Tom Bonnicksen's essay titled "Death Of A Forest: Why We Should Care")

In the interest of balance, we asked both Bonnicksen and our colleague, Barry Wynsma, who worked on Idaho's Panhandle National Forest for more than 20 years, for their comments on what Petersen alleged in his essay. (Click here to read Bonnicksen's November 11th essay titled "Death of a Forest: Why We Should Care").  (Click here to read Bonnicksen's response to Petersen's essay) (Click here to read Wynsma's response to Petersen's essay)

We had originally thought about asking Petersen to abide by a set of debating rules familiar to forest scientists who represent opposing viewpoints, but we decided against it because Petersen is not a forest scientist, and it would have been unfair of us to require him to do what he can't legitimately do.

I'm not a scientist either, and I'm always careful to point out that my opinions are based on interviews with scientists who are qualified to discuss what is happening and not happening in forests. Petersen doesn't say anything about his academic qualifications - or lack of them - nor does he say that he is a former Earth First member, a fact that he publicly admitted at a wood utilization conference in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho a few years ago.

It seems unlikely that Mike Petersen and I would agree on much of anything as it concerns the mismanagement of national forests, but it appears we do agree on one thing: the Forest Service is probably broken beyond repair. There are many reasons why, though none is more obvious than the impact of judicial activists who have repeatedly misrepresented congressional intent, creating an impassable regulatory quagmire. Even the simplest projects require a level of analysis that defies logic; and, of course, whatever analysis is done is subject to appeal and litigation.

But there are other more long-standing problems, none more insidious than the Forest Service's decades-old refusal to allow its ground-pounders (its professionally trained foresters) to make decisions based on local ecological conditions.

From its earliest years, the Forest Service has seen itself as a custodian of the federal forest estate, much like the old German forest meisters, a not surprising fact given American forestry's roots in Germany and Austria. It is a top down, command and control organization that does not take criticism easily and has little or no interest in the views of the citizens it should be serving. There are, of course, exceptions to this statement. Many who work at the local level are sincerely interested in citizen views - and know that there are many ways to manage forests, so long as you do not exceed the forest's ability to sustain itself through time.
The problem here - as Barry Wynsma wrote recently - is a failure of Forest Service leadership to lead, to encourage and inspire its troops to do the best job possible in their management of publicly owned natural resources worth hundreds of billions of dollars. (Click here to read Wynsma's essay on Forest Service leadership)

When Jack Ward Thomas was still Forest Service Chief, [disclosure, we are friends] I asked him what he thought the agency's management objective was. He thought for a moment and said, "I think it is to protect late succession forests." To which I said, "Are you doing it?" Without hesitation he said, "No, we aren't."

(Click here to read more of Jim Petersen's introduction)

 

 

 

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