Eco-Watch Dialogues
2/5/99

The Forest Service as a "Learning Challenged" Organization¹
by Dave Iverson

   The National Forest Management Act of 1976 (NFMA) set the stage for what we might call the "planning era" ² of U.S. Forest Service history. When the agency began RPA/NFMA comprehensive land and resource planning in earnest in the late 1970s, then again in the mid-1980s after a political shift in the White House, planning seemed like the right vehicle to help resolve the debacles that had shut down the agency's multiple use timber management. At least planning seemed like the right vehicle to all but staunch critics like Dick Behan and Sally Fairfax. I mention Behan and Fairfax here because they and a small handful of others we at least given an audience by the Forest Service. Other critics were ignored entirely. To non-critics, a quick fix to the impasse brought about by the Monongahela crisis could be found by amending the Forest and Rangelands Renewable Resources Planning Act (RPA) of 1974. At risk of oversimplifying, the Forest Service worked with the Congress to craft the NFMA as an RPA amendment, then chartered a hand-picked Committee of Scientists to develop an appropriate planning regulation.

   Twenty years later the Forest Service doesn't seem as much in love with planning as it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thank goodness. We may just now be beginning to realize that the type planning we fell in love with was destined to fall from favor, in part because the two prevailing schools of thought on public policy-making at the time, "interest group intermediation" and "net benefits maximization," were themselves at once mutually contradictory and inadequate to the task of defining the public good as anything greater than the sum of individual interests. Both "interest group intermediation" and "net benefits maximization" were embedded into the NFMA regulation, juxtaposed one against another without much thought given to the inherent contradictions and the inability of practicing managers to reconcile one school of thought relative to the other. On reflection, it seems clear that the Committee of Scientists could not grasp the concept of a 'collective public good' beyond what was codified into laws like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water, the Wilderness Act, and the Endangered Species Act. In those days no one seemed to even find a good way to marry "net benefits maximization and "interest group intermediation," let alone find a good fit for those concepts under an umbrella of a "collective public good."

   I don't want to appear to be singling out the NFMA regulation for criticism. On balance, it doesn't appear worse than other policy-making regulation of the time. As American government we seemed to have been operating under a cloud of political confusion, a cloud that is still with us at least in part. It proves helpful that planning in government has been the subject of much dialogue and writing. Out of that dialogue, a wholly new public policy-making approach labeled "civic discovery," has emerged on the scene. I like to think about this as an example of "chaos out of order, order out of chaos" at work, this time generating an advance in public policy development. "Civic discovery" allows practitioners to use good ideas from both the earlier models as needed to help sort out individual interests, but brings into the mix a newly defined concept of public good that transcends but does eclipse private interests. Furthermore, the newer model is based on dialogue, not solely on public administrators acting as judges of the public interest. (See Robert B. Reich, ed. The Power of Public Ideas, 1990., also Giandomenico Majone. 1989. Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Public Process, and David C. Iverson and Richard M. Alston. 1994. "A New Role for Economics in Integrated Environmental Management", in Implementing Integrated Environmental Management, John Cairns, Jr., Todd V. Crawford, and Hal Salwasser, eds, 1994. For a most recent look at this policy dilemma/choice see: Bryan Norton, Robert Costanza, and Richard C. Bishop. "The evolution of preferences: Why 'sovereign' preferences may not lead to sustainable policies and what to do about it," Ecological Economics 24(1998):193-211.)

   But planning and policy-making are the tip of an iceberg of problems for the Forest Service. Today nothing looks quite so simple as it did back then. Even the Forest Service's mission is challenged and hotly contested transformation efforts are in the works. Planning processes have been challenged along with processes for other management functions. Even science, a mainstay of the so-called progressive era, isn't immune to challenge. These few paragraphs are meant to shed some light on these challenges and help all of us better understand why the Forest Service's planning and policy-making work is both complex and politically wicked. Along the way I'll offer some hints on lessons yet to be learned, and where we might look for guidance on what to do.

Mission Challenges

   The US Forest Service has been struggling for some time to redefine its mission. The old "multiple use" mission never really got far beyond multiple use timber management. Although touted by some as a multiple use panacea, a way to get the Forest Service to really practice multiple use, national forest planning could not deliver us from our past. Critics, especially Dick Behan and Sally Fairfax, gave us plenty of notice that there was cause for concern. But their words largely fell on deaf ears. Later, even those of us who had high hopes that the debates surrounding NFMA planning would serve to center the American people on a new mission for the Forest Service had to abandon that dream. Instead of an either/or resolution to what was then defined as a 'national' v. 'local' dilemma, we have now embraced concepts of multi-scale planning and administration and are beginning the long journey of learning what there is to know about that game. But multi-scale planning is not central to this "mission quest" so we need to back track a bit.

   Some year ago Forest Service line officers met in Tucson, AZ and Snowbird, UT to try to sort out what was happening to them. Out of these Sunbird and Snowbird conferences emerged the catch-phrase "Caring for the Land and Serving people" that some still believe to the be Forest Service mission. Alternatively there are those who still cling to the belief that "Taking an ecological approach to multiple use management" does the trick. But both of these, along with the newer slogan of "collaborative stewardship," do little to help us define who we are and what we are about. This does not mean they are bad slogans. It just means that to the extent that they are useful they are slogans for everyone working on sustainability agendas. We still haven't figured out how we, the US Forest Service, will offer unique contributions to this journey toward sustainability. Even Chief Dombeck's recently proposed "roads and roadless areas policy," good as it might be doesn't really help us define how we are different from other ecosystem stewards. Policy can be useful both to help us integrate with movements we need to align with, and to help differentiate us from the crowd in defining our 'niche.' We still have work to do in both arenas, but seem to have largely overlooked the latter. Still, we need to credit Dombeck and Co. in recognizing the need for policy pronouncements at all. Many of Dombeck's predecessors seemed to forget that they even had policy tools in their political toolkit. In this vein, a forest supervisor friend once told me that, "The Forest Service is 50 years of tradition unhindered by progress." In the policy arena this certainly has been the case.

   A while back I challenged the agency to think hard about the concept of "niche" in order to help define our mission. Could we define A U.S. Forest Service Niche? I haven't seen much progress toward that goal. Not even much discussion. Then again, policy deliberation hasn't exactly been a high priority for the Forest Service. Perhaps part of the reason is that it isn't our responsibility, not solely ours, to define our mission. Perhaps part of the problem is that we haven't yet figured out where administrative agencies fit in the overall "separation of powers" paradox that defines governance in the US in general and government planning in particular. For whatever reason, mission challenges are still very much with us.

Planning Challenges

   A problem with ‘mission’ is just one stumbling block in our path. Another is 'planning'. So far, we have failed to learn the lesson that there is a difference between complex problems and wicked problems (see: G.M. Allen' and E.M. Gould. 1986. "Complexity, wickedness, and public forests." J.For 84(4):20-23, also Henry Mintzberg. 1994. The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning). According to Allen and Gould, politically wicked problems can not be solved by any multi-step planning process designed to "collect more data, build bigger models, and crunch more numbers ... [expecting that] surely the right answer would be forthcoming." Allen and Gould suggest that the Forest Service's general operating norm for planning--more data, fancier analysis, more computing power, more scientists--reflects a "naive hope that science can eliminate politics." This problem went unresolved--is still unresolved--because our 'professional arrogance' wouldn't allow us to admit that national forest management and planning is 'political'. When Dale Bosworth (then Regional Forester, Intermountain Region) and I were talking about this last year, he told me that it had come to him only recently that what others labeled as 'arrogance' was simply our professionalism. In the Forest Service we were operating under the belief that we were trusted stewards of national forests' land and resources. Surely we must have some answers. Surely the American people wood look to us to know what to do. Surely our RPA/NFMA/NEPA processes would help us shed light on the many problems we face and find ways to resolve them.

    Unfortunately, we don't really have the trust of the American people that we once thought we had. Worse, our planning processes are inadequate at best and wrong-headed at worst as Reich, Allen and Gould, and others have pointed out. By the way, even though I've not highlighted the works of Behan and Fairfax I do not mean to diminish their contributions in sounding alarm calls. Better that we wake up late than never.

Science Challenges

   As technocrats, it seems that when we get into trouble we search our Progressive Era science roots and conclude that, "Science will find the answer." We certainly seem to have done so during the forest planning process. And we did it again when we reached the RPA/forest planning impasse. When we switched gears and launched our big-deal assessment/plans that today have eclipsed the forest plans in terms of controversy, we seemed to have forgotten to ask ourselves, "What lessons did we learn from the earlier effort and what lessons did we fail to learn?"

   At the impasse of RPA/forest planning, when the environmental community got good at setting up what some of us like to call "master switches" that turn out our plan/project lights, we began to think in terms of large-scale assessments and plans as a way out of that dilemma. We super-sized on scale and doubled-down on science. Other than that, though, what was different in our approach? Had we learned either our politics or our science lesson?

   I argue that we haven't learned our science lesson. It is folly to assume that, "Science will find the answer," as if science alone were the key to resolving social problems. Such thinking hasn't been helpful to medical practitioners, engineers, even scientists when challenged to help explain the cultural mess we've gotten ourselves into relative to sustainability. Even though people haven't given up on science altogether it still viewed very much as a two-edged sword--capable of aiding either the forces of darkness or of light. Scientists are hard pressed to show that their brand of science--no matter what brand--is likely to serve the forces of light more than the forces of darkness. Maybe it is time for us to rethink our stance on science, to reposition it to put science in dialogue with management and to put both in dialogue with the public (again, for a contemporary approach to making this work see: Bryan Norton, Robert Costanza, and Richard C. Bishop. "The evolution of preferences: Why 'sovereign' preferences may not lead to sustainable policies and what to do about it," Ecological Economics 24(1998):193-211).

   In addition we may want to pay some attention to the warnings and sage advice Donald Ludwig , Ray Hilborn and Carl Walters. Science 260(2):17 classic Uncertainty, Resource Exploitation, and Conservation: Lessons from History, April, 2, 1993. Ludwig and friends suggest that we should: 1) Include human motivation and responses as part of the system to be studied and managed, 2) Act before scientific consensus is achieved, 3) Rely on scientists to recognize problems, but not to remedy them, 4) Distrust claims of sustainability, and 5) Confront uncertainty. That is a pretty handy list of recommendations to keep in mind.

   I do not want to leave the impression that I am against science. I just have a perception that too often the Forest Service and other government agencies abuse science by setting it up as a primary driver of social policy, rather than as a delimiter -- helping to define the fit between people and organizations and Nature. I need to clarify my last thought. We must recognize that Nature is a human construct and that we are indeed part of nature even though we sometimes don't seem to recognize that rights and responsibilities accrue to us as 'part of nature' since we are so powerful (technologically) relative to other species and such a dominant presence across the landscape. Science is very important. But we live in a moment when we are rethinking many science fundamentals and relevant contextual framing, and reconsidering many linkages between disciplines in a renewed search for connections, even "consilience." A brand-new expose on science, nature, history, culture and our search for "consilience" from the Enlightenment forward can be found in Edward O. Wilson. "Back From Chaos," The Atlantic Monthly, March 1998.

Addressing the Challenges

   To address these challenges, we will have to explore new approaches to management and planning. Since the Forest Service is fundamentally challenged with regard to learning, the challenges will be more difficult. In developing these thoughts I struggled with two terms. I toyed with the idea of using "impaired" instead of "challenged," but decided after much thought that even though it is hard to imagine the Forest Service being able to learn when saddled with mountains of "directives," decades of bureaucratic entrenchment, and an aging workforce, I still decided to go with the more forgiving term "challenged."

   I offer two sources of inspiration that may help us find our way forward. The first is Kai Lee's "gyroscope," the forgotten companion to his "compass" in his book Compass and Gyroscope. The second source of inspiration is found in "sustainable development planning," or "green planning." that is ongoing at many scales simultaneously throughout the world. I believe that it is time we joined with others to do what to this date we have jealously guarded as a domain we ought to control--planning.

Kai Lee's "Gyroscope"

   Even if we did change our ways, and fixed our mission, planning, and science problems, the whole idea of our planningwould still set a stage with too many arenas engaging too many actors to effectively work out collaborative stewardship. Take the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project (ICBEMP) assessment/planning effort, for example. What prompted us, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), to largely ignore good initial strides in collaborative planning that were ongoing in that arena, or if not ongoing at least so recently over that they could have been reopened when we began? Kai Lee's book Compass and Gyroscope is a favorite in my library and details planning efforts already at work when be began our foray into the Columbia River Basin. But we either failed to read Lee's book or failed to understand that Lee's "working politics gyroscope" must accompany his "adaptive management compass" for large-scale and/or "wicked" problems. If the public is to be involved, the stage must be set in a way so as not to create too many arenas or to engage actors in too many arenas at one time. One could argue that arena management was exactly what the USFS and BLM had hoped to do with ICBEMP, but why we chose to go it alone in dealing with problems of that magnitude of wickedness remains a mystery. Could it be that we have yet to accept the political nature of these problems, still clinging to a naive belief that, "Science will find the answer"?

   More generally, what went wrong after our forest planning debacle? How was it that we seem to have failed to learn our lesson about wicked problems? Did we not listen to our own forest planning critique? Did our critique miss the mark on wicked problems? Maybe we planners and practitioners listened, but even as we were about to show that we could learn from our mistakes (or at least to test that hypothesis) our scientists jumped to center stage to take their turn in the spotlight. But that would mean that as an organization we failed to learn the lesson that science can not be a driver in public policy-making. What were we thinking as an organization? Did we think we could play the role of White Knight in the Columbia River Basin and elsewhere by separately tackling our piece of the action then patching it into the rest? These are questions yet to be answered.

   In searching out answers, we would do well to read among the many good books written on "planning as social learning" and "planning as organizational learning," and also among the many good books on "adaptive management." It's always dangerous to single out one book, but what the hell. I heartily endorse Lance Gunderson , C.S. Holling, and Stephen Light. 1995. Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions. Within even this one book there are many lessons yet to be learned about ecosystems, institutions and the boundaries that both separate and integrate them. Space doesn't permit, but we ought not overlook the contributions of organizational learning writers like Chris Argyris, Arie De Geus, Joseph Jaworski, Donald Schon, Peter Schwartz, Peter Senge, and Karl E. Weick. Even if we could figure out a thoughtful approach to organizational learning and adaptive management, we still have to tackle the problem of working politics that Lee defines as "gyroscope." This is a lesson well known to Gunderson and friends, but a lesson yet to be learned by the Forest Service.

Green Plans: Sustainable Development Planning

   If we ever do a thorough post-mortem on FEMAT and ICBEMP, which we seem to be studiously avoiding so far, we may yet ask ourselves whether or not the undertakings were really larger than the USFS and the BLM could (or ought to) undertake. If we do, I hope that we will not pass up the opportunity to learn from others who have already learned that, "To have influence on social process you must first give up illusions of control." It is here that I want to champion sustainable development planning, commonly labeled "green planning." At a regional scale, green planning offers us a vehicle for both Lee's Compass and his Gyroscope. To get a better idea what this is about you might want to visit the Resource Renewal Institute's website. In the 1995 Green Plans video it was noted that even though whole countries were beginning to embrace sustainable development planning ideas, it was not likely that the whole of the U.S. would do so right away. Instead, spokesperson Cecil Andrus suggested that we might see a region or a State take on the task first. RRI's Peggy Lauer tells me that right now both Minnesota and Oregon have taken lead steps toward this goal, and other States are interested.

   Please give Huey Johnson and Co.'s ideas on Green Plans thoughtful consideration. When I first saw the Green Plans video I believed that if ever we could learn a few basic lessons, we could join with others and begin to heal the wounds of a fractured, fragmented West. And don't forget to visit the NRCS website for their planning ideas under the Clean Water Act Action Plan. Here too green planning makes a lot of sense. But if we are going to do this together we must begin to do it together. It makes little sense to keep doing it by ourselves or in small isolated groups, often one or two agencies at a time. It is time for us to abandon our comprehensive land and resource planning. We need to join with others to do assessments and monitoring efforts as outlined in the Clean Water Act Action plan, and elsewhere as all assessments can not be expected to fit under any one umbrella. And we should seek out opportunities to work with others on comprehensive planning efforts (at various scales) like other countries have done with green plans type sustainable development planning. Finally, we have to learn how to learn--to learn that "planning as learning" has a great deal to offer management. If we are to find our fit, now and as adapted to blend into an unfolding future, we must learn how to learn.