Retiring Forest Service employee gives thoughts

When Mark Orme first worked at the Targhee National Forest in St. Anthony in 1981, timber sale maps were drawn by hand from aerial photos, and acreages were calculated using a dot overlay counts. Accuracy then could be measured in miles. But it was the best technology available to those working on the Targhee's first management plan. "I can remember in the 1980s when we got the first computers in the forest," he says. Back in 1981 all terrain vehicles had hardly been invented, and the snowmobile industry was in its infancy. Hardly anyone visited the woods in the winter except an occasional trapper. As a member of planning teams for the Targhee twice -- the original and revised plans -- and the Tongass Forest in Alaska once, Orme has seen a shift in philosophy in the public about management of national forests. Not only has the shift been toward more public recreational use, but also toward more litigation by environmental organizations, particularly involving timber sales and road densities as they relate to grizzly bears. As he retires, a U.S. District judge in Montana has ruled all of the agencies working to get the bear "recovered" have failed -- largely because of the uncertainty about the affects of climate change on white bark pine, whose nuts have been a critical major food for the bears. The ruling frustrates Orme. It's almost like a slap in face to wildlife managers and others who have come so far in trying to recover a bear population that stood at about 180 to 200 sows with cubs throughout the Yellowstone ecosystem in the early 1980s. Looking at where the agency has been and where it's headed, Orme thinks the pendulum has swung too far onto the environmental extreme side, with not enough weight given to the need to actually manage the forests for optimal vegetation...read more