How Adaptive Are We?

In 1992, Bruce Shepard accused us of being maladaptive in our management, and probed the depths of entanglement that got us to where he believed we then stood. It might do us good to take a look at his accusations and try to understand where we stand today. Where have we improved? Where, if anywhere, are we still maladaptive? Here is a preliminary list of accusations I drew from Shepard’s remarks:

• Planning: The Solution Becomes the Problem … Beginning with a Committee of Scientists, a novel group created by the NFMA legislation to offer recommendations, the recommendations of this committee were turned into planning regulations, Handbook materials, and Manual chapters that boggle the mind in their detail and their complexity. What had been a simple political warning from the U.S. Congress to do a better job of listening to people was turned into a nightmare. … The Forest Service was facing questions about what ought to be. Some of the questions were fairly commonplace, pragmatic considerations of who is going to win and who is going to lose. Some of the questions tapped deeply held moral concerns.
• …[E]arly and persistent dedication to the use of linear programming models as planning tools epitomizes the inadequacy of "old forestry."
• The problem was not with glitches in the tools of scientific forestry; the problem was with the reliance upon scientific forestry itself. The questions that the Forest Service increasingly faced in the 1970's dealt with how the forests ought to be managed and for whom the forests should be managed. Answers to those questions come not from science but from values and interests. …“[N]ew perspectives” intends to combine both the scientific and the political responsibilities of the public land manager. New perspectives … recognize[s] the value of conflict and debate, the need for change in the sociological as well as the ecological concepts being used, and the need to compliment applied science with applied politics.
  
  That is hopeful. "New perspectives" can avoid the trap I have suggested awaits "new forestry" if "new perspectives" embraces political responsibilities. We have to recognize how much more is being asked in "new perspectives" because what is being asked goes against the grain of both history and personal predilection. It goes against the grain of almost a century of agency history. And, perhaps more importantly, it goes against the grain of foresters who are comfortable with questions that can be answered on the basis of "facts" but who are uncomfortable with questions that can only be answered by reference to values and interests.

Of the three accusations, I believe we have transcended only one, the technical problem with harvest scheduling. Although we need to continue to improve here too, we have finally embraced simulation instead of optimization, and are looking at vegetation and other modeling at various scales.

As for the other two accusations, I believe we still have a very big hurdle in front of us in embracing a new, less-nightmarish planning that simply rehashes the past and rehearses the future to set a stage for adaptive management. And I believe we have another very big hurdle in front of us in embracing the reality that forest management is arguably at least as much about public value choices as it is about ‘science.’ I like to think our public forestry choices are guided by public values, and delimited by science.

For interested readers, Bruce Shepard’s 1992 paper, “Maladaptive Forest Management: How We Arrived at Our Current Situation” is appended below.