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.

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)  (Click here to read Bonnicksen's response to Petersen) (Clck 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."

Thomas is an honest guy and I pretty much knew what his answer would be. I also knew - as he surely knew - why the Forest Service wasn't meeting its objective. Put simply, you can't protect late succession forests from any natural disaster, including wildfire, if you aren't doing the thinning and stand tending work necessary to maintain healthy ecosystems. And you can't do the thinning and stand tending work if the regulatory process won't allow it - or if, as is the case, the regulatory maze is little more than a feeding ground for environmental litigators.

Defining healthy forest ecosystems is a lot like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. But there is a common thread in every definition I've seen. Most scientists agree that a healthy forest is one that can sustain itself through time. It has natural self-healing mechanisms imbedded in it that allow for recovery from insects, disease and fire. But there are limits to what these mechanisms can do, and in our mismanagement - dare I say neglect - we have created one helluva mess.

There are only two paths back to the future. We can get busy and fix the problems we've created over the last 50 years - a process many scientists believe will take another 50 years - or we can let nature take its course - a process that could take 300-400 years.

I think most environmentalists understand this, but they can't bring themselves to admit - at least publicly - that we have the science and the time-tested tools needed to pull most of our federal forests back from the brink of ecological collapse.

Environmentalists who oppose active management can't admit that we have the science and the tools needed because it wrecks their "humans are bad, nature knows best" mythology. Thus their insistence on setting aside millions of acres of old growth timber in no harvest reserves [where it will eventually die and burn], and their further insistence on imposing unnatural tree diameter limits in forest restoration projects designed to reduce the risk of catastrophic insect and disease infestations that inevitably lead to catastrophic wildfire.

Environmental groups are "outraged" by "logging in ancient forests" (for the record, there is no green timber sale program in old growth forests), but they are strangely silent where wildfire is concerned. Yet millions of acres of old growth (designated habitat for so-called ‘old growth dependent" species) have been needlessly lost over the last decade. Where is the outrage? Well, if we are to believe the Mike Petersen's of the world, wildfire is a natural event that ought to be allowed to play itself out.

Petersen is wrong on two fronts.

First, while wildfires once played a therapeutic role in sustaining forests through time, they don't now because they are burning well beyond what fire ecologists call "the range of natural variability." They have become killers (Bonnicksen's point) that are destroying both forests and their self-healing mechanisms - the recovery process that allows forests to sustain themselves.

Second, ours is a post-industrial society that has needs (wood) and wants (aesthetic values) that nature can't deliver for the simple reason that nature is indifferent to human need. We no longer live in caves and, parenthetically, we no longer need to wait 300-400 years for a forest to recover from a devastating fire that could have been prevented or at least minimized through forest management regimes that place human need and want above environmental mythology.

Have we made mistakes in the way we have managed federal forests? We certainly have. For too long we ignored easily observed signs that national forests were becoming too dense - a result of the public's desire to control wildfires that were destroying entire towns, killing thousands in their wake. Given the public's still lively objection to releasing the wildfire genie from her bottle, our only choice is to do the thinning and stand tending work nature did [usually with fire] before white settlement began in the West. (Wynsma's point)

Our colleague, Alan Houston, a PhD wildlife biologist in Tennessee, has underscored this fact more powerfully than anyone we know. Consider his observation: "The problem with leaving forests to nature, as so many people today seem to want to do, is that we get whatever nature serves up, which can be devastating at times, but with forestry we have options, and a degree of predictability not found in nature."

Barry Wynsma's take on Forest Service mistakes made is different from mine. He believes the biggest mistake the agency ever made was its failure to recognize the transition in public values that accompanied America's increasing affluence. He may be right - and Mike Petersen would surely agree with him. The agency's "get out the cut" mindset did set off alarms among citizens who saw the widespread use of clearcutting on national forests and thought it was, at best, unsightly and at its worst, environmentally destructive.

The Forest Service had enough public cache at the time to defend itself against environmental groups that were trafficking in emotion, not fact, but the agency has long believed it should not "take sides" in environmental disputes, so it left its public defense to the timber industry - the predictable result being that the public concluded the Forest Service was in bed with lumbermen, which was not true. What was true was that during the post-World War II "get out the cut" era, national forests were a major source of timber for the country's homebuilding industry. You can say what you will about this, but history demonstrates - beyond all doubt - that it was the Democratic Party - not the Republican Party - that saw the West's great national forests as the economic engines that could drive the country's transition from wartime to peacetime footing. I write about this is a book I just finished titled, The Independents, which chronicles the post-war rise of the West's family-owned sawmilling industry - the very industry that the Lands Council and its peers are killing just as surely as they are killing the West's great national forests.

Petersen and his colleagues need a villain so that they can raise money for their organizations. Again, it's a free country. But there is no evidence to support their contention that the timber industry is still lurking in the shadows, hoping to engineer some means for restoring the national forest timber sale program that went down the tubes when the northern spotted owl was listed as a threatened species in 1990.

I know for a fact this is not true. What is left of the timber industry has only a passing interest in what is left of the federal timber sale program. Most mill owners have driven on and now get their timber from private, state or tribal forests, which is why litigious organizations, including the Lands Council are now more focused on these ownerships. They know the federal battle is over, though Jack Thomas and I both wonder why they insist on walking around the battlefield every day bayonetting the wounded. Does their hatred for free enterprise know no bounds?

Western lumbermen once dependent on federal logs also know the battle is over. Now all they want - for the sake of smoothing out log supply, and thus log prices - is for Congress to finally implement the harvesting plan the Clinton Administration promised them 20 years ago - a plan that was approved by the late William Dwyer, a Seattle federal district court judge who was no friend of forestry or the timber industry.

The Clinton plan allowed for an annual harvest of 1.2 billion board feet in Region 6 [western Oregon and Washington], beyond doubt the most productive Douglas-fir forests on earth. But the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have never come close to the promised 1.2 billion feet, even though the plan represented an 80 percent reduction in harvest. No wonder I can't name a single lumberman in the West who is investing a dime of his [or her] capital in hopes that there will again be a federal timber sale program like the one that prospered for years before the spotted owl was listed. The loser in this sea change is the public because it is the public's forests that need a kind of help that only chainsaws and viable, unsubsidized lumber markets can provide - as they did for nearly a half century.

My sense is that this once lucrative market is gone and will not return unless Congress restores some certainty to the federal timber sale program. Thus far, it has been unmoved by public want or need. Meanwhile, taxpayers are on the hook for a billion-plus dollar-a-year firefighting budget that ought to be invested in restoring forests before inevitable catastrophic wildfire strikes.

Except for modest (and costly) thinning projects in the wildland urban interface - projects that Petersen's group generally supports - nothing is happening on the some 70 million acres of dead or dying federal forest land that are ready to burn or soon will be. What a tragedy - and what a stunning turnabout from the days when the federal timber sale program returned money to the federal treasury every year. That's right. For decades, federal timber management did not cost taxpayers a dime. Nor did it "destroy" forests as is still alleged by the anti-logging crowd.

We've seen dozens of opinion surveys designed to plumb the depths of public desires where federal forests are concerned - and indeed Petersen makes selective reference to one done in Oregon. But he could have helped his cause even more had he told the whole story - the whole story being that the public has been very clear and consistent about it wants from its national forests. Among these wants, none poll higher than clean air, clean water, abundant fish and wildlife habitat and a wealth of year round recreation opportunity.

These are not aesthetic qualities found in forests that have been devastated by loggers or wildfire. But they are consistently found in forests that are managed using time-tested, science-based tools that replicate historic wildfire patterns. We aren't doing it - and we won't so long as Congress continues to concede complete control of the federal forest management process to special interest groups like the Lands Council.

(Email  editor@evergreenmagazine.com  to request a copy of Dr. Tom Bonnicksen's Curriculum Vitae.

Jim Petersen, Executive Director and Co-founder, The Non-profit Evergreen Foundation