Ruckus In the Woods

By Dick Thompson/Washington

Most people see either the forest or the trees. Michael Dombeck sees logging roads and mining pits--and as head of the U.S. Forest Service, he's in a position to do something about them. Last week Dombeck called for a moratorium on new mining claims on hundreds of thousands of acres of Rocky Mountain forest, and this week he is expected to halt road building on millions more acres of federal land. "Our performance should be based on the long-term health of the land," Dombeck says, "rather than the number of board feet produced."

That may sound reasonable, but it represents a dramatic reversal for an agency that has been so closely aligned with industry that it was known for years as the "U.S. Timber Service." The Clinton Administration, determined that the service turn over a new leaf, appointed Dombeck in 1997. Now he is the point man for a set of contentious land-management issues that will only get hotter as the 2000 presidential election--and the environmentalist candidacy of Al Gore--gets closer.

It would be hard to find someone better qualified for the job than Dombeck. Born in the lake country of northern Wisconsin in 1948, he grew up in the Chequamegon National Forest--hunting, fishing and climbing fire towers. He was a fishing guide, taught high school science classes and earned a doctorate in fisheries biology before working his way up the ranks of the Forest Service. He became the science adviser for the Bureau of Land Management and in 1994 was selected to head the bureau--where he caught the eye of the White House.

The agency he took over was torn by conflicting loyalties, financially dependent on timber sales and tied up in lawsuits charging it with skirting wilderness and endangered-species regulations--charges that the Agriculture Department's inspector general appeared to validate last week. In a scorching review of Forest Service policy, investigators found loopholes in hundreds of environmental-impact assessments written to support timber sales.

Dombeck has tried to cut a new path for the embattled agency. He forced out managers too closely allied with logging interests and began to wean the agency of its dependence on timber receipts. He reordered employee evaluations, putting greater emphasis on how staff members protected water and soil than on how much revenue they produced.

It is his attack on roads and mines, however, that has made him a lightning rod for industry critics and their powerful congressional allies. "His objective is to terminate harvesting in the national forests," fumes Alaska's Frank Murkowski, chairman of the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Murkowski and others have grilled Dombeck in more than 20 hearings, demanded thousands of documents and ordered a major investigation of his agency.

The thorniest problem is those 383,000 miles of timber roads that crisscross the national forests. "They are the heart of a lot of controversy," says Marty Hayden, director of policy for the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund. Environmentalists complain that the roads, cut for the timber companies and maintained by the Forest Service, are degrading watersheds, filling streams with silt and subdividing wildlife habitats. "It is simply time to stop logging our national forests," says Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope.

Dombeck, who has traveled more than his share of forest roads, agrees that they cause problems. But he's not a "zero cut" forester; he believes there's a place for the timber industry on federal lands. Without harvesting, he points out, forests become overgrown and can be destroyed as quickly by fires as they are by overlogging.

The deeper issue, of course, is what the forests are for. A resource for timber and mining companies? A wilderness where people can hunt, fish or hike? Or an ecosystem supporting the web of life? Dombeck hopes a plan being developed by a committee of scientists will offer a model of multipurpose, sustainable forest management. But pushing that plan through Congress and finding a way to finance it may be jobs so big that even Paul Bunyan couldn't pull them off.