Yesterday I Googled up an effort in Canada that ties a Forest Environmental Management System (FEMS) to local sustainable forest management indicators. It looks much like what I'd expect us to do if we tied our EMSs to much-talked-about "Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Development" approach we've been grappling with in the US. Here's a link to the effort on Whiskey Jack forest. {Note that the "Sustainable Forest Management Plan" is the most relevant thing on this page, but is a very large pdf. So if you view it, give yourself some time for a download. Hint: open in a separate window.}
Local Level Sustainable Forest Management Indicators are embedded in the former pdf, and also more fully developed in a [pdf] available here. {Note: This pdf is fairly large as well}
I'm fearful of these highly detailed approaches. I fear that if we try to jump into this water all at once, we'll be swept downstream, never really even knowing what hit us. It reminds me of a story I heard about Jack Welch' vetoing W. Edward Deming's approach at GE because it was too complicated for them. Deming's approach is dirt simple relative to this stuff. I fear that it may be all one grand-scale 'paper chase.'
A Simpler Way
What I'd rather see us do is to develop a system that at once conforms to ISO standards but also allows us to grow our way into a simpler-way to monitoring and evaluation.
I'd love to see a system that used indicators as simple at the famed Chesapeake Bay "tennis shoe indicator" complimented with more rigorous measurements that are developed more by FS and other researchers than by NFS and national forest/districts. I'd love to see a system that begins (using an automobile example) by attempting to design horse-drawn carriages, then moves to horseless carriages, and in about a hundred years (hopefully 20 instead) moves more to the type automobiles we enjoy today.
I'd love a system that lets a district ranger or forester supervisor say that they want a grazing-systems indicator of, say, "no dirt in the creek." I'd love an open system that would allow someone else to counter with, "I like dirt in the creek, but only when it is due to appropriate trammeling by grazing animals that will break down high stream-banks that have been caused by over-grazing and other ecosystem degrading practices. I like dirt in the creek, but only when it travels only short distances, doesn't completely bury vegetative structure, then helps to build up the steam bottom to compliment stream-bank trammeling."
I'd love to see a system that allows for this type give-and-take across the fences of the back forty, on the tailgate of pickup trucks, in the barroom, and in the coffee shop so that we can gain better perspectives about ecology, economy, society, Nature and more. I'd love to see a system that allows for both approaches, set up in an environment where we can experiment, can learn.
I fear instead that we will once-again create the type over-complexified procedural paper chase that we've had for so long in our planning culture, in our performance accountability and targets culture, and in many other bureaucratic culture forms. I fear that we'll set up systems of tight targeting, monitoring, and correction that disallow the kind of experimentation necessary to stay ahead of changing environments, changing societies, etc.
Can we get there? Is there a simpler way available to us? Will we fight for it? We'll see.
First Steps In R4
In our Region, we are committed to tying our initial EMSs tightly to our Forest Plan Revisions (with some possible add-ons for a very few program areas that want to be 'early adaptors'). This means that we are going to take our largely aspirational deired conditions, along with objectives, guidelines, suitability determinations, and special area designations, etc. and somehow tie them to the various components of EMS.
Later, as we begin implementing the plans, developing sub plans, and so on we'll put some flesh on the 'bare bones' of our initial effort. We are approaching this in stages, both because it makes sense to feel out way through the mazes of EMS compliance, and because we are trying to get our first forests draft EMS packages done in the next three months, by February 2006.
The first trick will be to take our desired conditions statements, etc. and see how we crosswalk them into EMS. If we had been working more diligently on or forest plan monitoring and evaluation, and draft plan approval rationales we might have a less arduous task ahead. But alas I'm afraid that we haven't been doing this. Perhaps we'll know more as to whether this approach makes sense after our Forests meeting Nov. 14-16.
In the meantime I will be searching around trying to figure out what other Regions are trying, and asking them to help us with that search by telling ALL here just what they think might work. Let's work together to design a system so that we (we the people) can learn, can experiment, can play.
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