Give simpler forest rules a chance

If any national forest needed to make use of a new rulebook for developing long-range forest plans, it is the Flathead National Forest.

The history of the Flathead's current forest plan, adopted in 1985, is a textbook example of all the reasons to support the new forest planning regulations approved in January.

We will concede right up front that the new regulations are an experiment and there is no telling how well they will work. We can't be certain that they'll lead to better management of national forest lands, and we can't be sure whether they will put the Forest Service in a more legally defensible situation.

But we can say with confidence that there needed to be a change - any change - in the way forest plans are developed and the way they are modified and implemented.

The old regulations, which came into play in 1982, have produced a mountain of paper so high that it probably required the equivalent wood fiber available on an entire national forest.

The Flathead Forest's 1985 plan took several years of planning and development to produce a whopping environmental impact statement full of assessments of everything from A to Z on the forest.

But even all that analysis wasn't nearly enough.

One would think that after so much work, so much paper, the Forest Service would be able to defend itself from lawsuits.

But that's not how it works. Lots of definition produced lots of litigation.

Any time conflicts arose from the forest plan paper bundle, or when new scientific information became available, a forest plan amendment was in order.

The Flathead pursued 24 forest plan amendments, and most of them required thick environmental impact statement volumes that took at least a couple of years to develop.

The amendment that caused the most profound changes on the landscape, and the most controversy, ironically, was approved through a less time- and paper-consuming review called an environmental assessment.

Amendment 19 established forest road density standards aimed at ensuring grizzly bear habitat security. When the amendment was approved in 1995, forest officials estimated that it would lead to the reclamation or "decommissioning" of 300 miles of forest roads. But they've learned otherwise as Amendment 19 standards have been gradually implemented.

It turns out that meeting the standards requires more than 600 miles of road reclamation.

Perhaps one of the most important problems the new regulations will address is the potential for the Forest Service to underestimate or misunderstand the future impacts of specific planning standards as they are implemented on the ground.

The new planning rules are pretty simple.

They're intended to produce forest plans with a heavy emphasis on strategic goals and "desired conditions" on the landscape, rather than heapings of standards that reduce management discretion.

The new forest plans are expected to be easily adaptable to new scientific information or changes on the landscape, and they come with a system for measuring whether strategic guidelines and goals are being met over time.

For the last 20 years, we've tried living with the most complicated form of forest planning humanly possible.

Now it's time to give simplicity a chance.