Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Engaging the Public in the Latest Round of Rulemaking on Forest Planning

On May 11 and 12, in Washington, D.C. (actually, Rockville, Maryland) the Forest Service convened the last (for now) of a series workshops on forest planning. This most recent workshop followed a series of workshops throughout the country in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of interested parties gathered together to offer the agency their ideas for improving national forest planning and management. As a party to the Lakewood, Colorado workshop and the most recent workshop in Rockville, I’d like to share a few personal observations and conclusions.

First, the Forest Service deserves substantial credit for initiating this remarkable process. The agency wisely chose to hire an outside professional consultant (Meridian Institute) to organize and facilitate public involvement and the consultant performed admirably. Moreover, recognizing that not everyone has the time, inclination, or interest to participate in workshops, the Forest Service has supplemented this more conventional process, with a web page, blog, live web casts of the workshops, and other electronic resources, in an effort to engage a broader audience.

Second, if the first step to addressing a problem is admitting you have one, then the Forest Service seems well on its way to addressing its problem with planning. While the workshops certainly did not dwell directly on past failures, the unspoken premise for much of the discussion was that forest planning is broken. Agency officials seem to get that. Despite several substantial efforts to develop a workable planning process, going back to at least the early 1980’s, land and resource management plans, as they are called, take far too long to prepare and are too often the subject of appeals and litigation. Moreover, they tend to suck most of the energy (and financial resources) out of the agency, with the result that not much is left to adequately assess project level decisions and to engage in post planning monitoring of forest conditions.

Third, the Forest Service seems genuinely committed to engaging the public and hearing how they might improve the planning process. Numerous agency officials at all levels actively participated in both the regional and national workshops and they genuinely seemed grateful for the public’s sometimes disparate ideas for designing a smarter approach to forest planning.

Fourth, the level of dialogue among participants was, on the whole, quite sophisticated, but it was also welcoming toward the views of those with less direct experience in forest planning. Kudos once again to the facilitator, Meridian Institute, for attracting and convening a diverse group, and for structuring an efficient and effective program for engaging participants with varied backgrounds in the task at hand.

A good process, of course, does not guarantee a good result, and time will tell whether this process will fulfill the agency’s goal of developing a better way to do planning. But the prospects for better forest planning are brighter because of the choice of process, and we owe the Forest Service a debt of thanks for offering other agencies a model for effectively engaging the public in this important decision. Now it’s our turn to offer the agency our best ideas for improving forest planning.

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Mark Squillace is a law professor and the Director of the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado Law School. Some of his views on the substantive issues surrounding forest planning are set out in a post titled Rethinking Forest Planning on the Forest Service’s planning blog.

1 comment:

  1. It's good to see the Forest Service working to include as many people as possible in their planning workshops. Broad citizen engagement is crucial for effective management of the National Forests. I'm interested to see how the Forest Service applies these same techniques in dealing with the Hidden Gems Proposal considering the strong feelings on both sides of the issue.

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