At the SAF luncheon meeting in July, Kathryn Maloney, Director of Strategic Planning and Resource Assessment at the USDA Forest Service in Washington, D.C., spoke about what the Forest Service is doing to implement sustainable forestry practices.

Maloney observed that sustainable forestry has captured the imaginations of many people, even though we continue to seek answers to fundamental questions about it, such as:

-- What is sustainability?

-- What are we trying to sustain and for whom?

--What must we do to act sustainably? How will we know if we've actually achieved sustainability?

-- How do we communicate the questions and answers to a broad audience?

She mentioned that a June 1998 Forest Service-wide interactive roundtable on sustainable management, facilitated by Chief Dombeek via telecommunication links with field units, indicated strong agency desire to: (a) find answers to the above questions; (b) begin use of the Sustainable Forest Management Criteria and Indicators (C&I) from the Montreal Process; and (c) get beyond dialogue to the "real work."

Management Context

Maloney stated that under the Government Performance and Results Act (Results Act), the Forest Service has been implementing a systems model for planning and achieving desired results. The basic model is seen above.

For Activities and Results

Key points of the model are that:

(1) the outcomes/results of sustainable forest management are identified;

(2) the model is adaptive, it assumes we monitor and adjust actions on a regular basis; and

(3) we begin with the end results in mind.

Forest Service Efforts Underway

Maloney went on to mention some key Forest Service actions to implement sustainable forestry on national forest system lands, and to provide leadership in a global context. A few of the actions mentioned included:

1. Forest Service Natural Resource Agenda: Implementing sustainable forestry practices is one of the four components of the Agenda, that also includes Recreation, Watershed Restoration, and Forest Road System Management.

2. Forest Inventory Analysis (FIA): the FIA will measure one third of the 67 C&I indicators.

3. National Forest System Regions: several Forest Service regions are working to link individual national forest land and resource management plans to the C&I, and are developing results focused performance indicators.

4. (RPA) Forest and Rangeland Resource Assessments: Future RPA assessments will incorporate each of the 7 Criteria from the C&I, and base analyses on C&I indicator data from the Forest Inventory Analysis and other information. There will also be expanded peer review of the assessments.