It's a beautiful thing to behold - a forest plan that is only 153 pages long, including the glossary and indexes, and only about a half-inch thick.

Bravo for brief (sort of) forest plan

For certain, what's in the Flathead National Forest's proposed forest plan may not be pretty to many people. There may be too much wilderness. There may not be enough emphasis on timber production.

But it's a given that those types of things would be subjects for debate, no matter what.

What's remarkable is the shape that the forest plan proposal has taken under new planning regulations that were adopted by the Forest Service last year. They put an emphasis on zoning the forest, with a strategic rather than tactical approach to achieving "desired conditions" for those zones.

The product is a stark contrast to the bulky, detailed forest plans that were developed in the mid-1980s by all national forests.

Those documents came with voluminous environmental impact statements that took, in many cases, several years to develop.

It was a ludicrous approach, attempting to project and assess the environmental impacts of strategic policies that would be implemented over more than 15 years. The Forest Service immediately tripped into a swamp of lawsuits challenging forest plans, and the litigation kept on coming as national forests, over time, were unable to comply with the practically endless detailed provisions in the plans.

The draft version of the Flathead Forest's 1986 plan involved an incredible 17 "alternatives," and once one of those directions was selected for a final plan, there were appeals - and eventually lawsuits - over everything from old-growth habitat to grizzly bear habitat to snowmobiling access. The plan has since been amended 24 times, mostly as a result of challenges, and most of the amendments are hideously huge monuments to what Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth calls "analysis paralysis."

The point here is that having a forest plan that resembles a tax code is bad public policy for public lands. Forest plans should be intelligible to an average, interested member of the public, and should not require more reading time than the Bible.

That's especially true when the public is intensely interested in forest management, as the public is here in Northwest Montana. It's ironic that the Forest Service has long been a leader in encouraging and soliciting public involvement when it makes policy decisions that end up being complicated pieces of shelf art that are mainly read by potential litigants and lawyers.

The new, slimmer version of long-term forest plans may indeed have problems, and they may be fodder for lawsuits just like the old plans. But at least they will be more simple - and understandable - to the public, in whose name they were written.