The Wisdom of the Spotted Owl: Policy Lessons for a New Century - Softcover

Yaffee, Steven Lewis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1559632046 ISBN 13: 9781559632041

Verlag: ISLAND PR, 1994

Inhaltsangabe

The controversy over the management of national forests in the Pacific Northwest vividly demonstrates the shortcomings of existing management institutions and natural resource policies. The Wisdom of the Spotted Owl explores the American policymaking process through the case of the spotted owl -- a case that offers a striking illustration of the failure of our society to cope with long-term, science-intensive issues requiring collective choices.

Steven Lewis Yaffee analyzes the political and organizational dynamics from which the controversy emerged and the factors that led to our stunning inability to solve it. He examines the state of resource management agencies and policy processes, providing insight into questions such as:

• What caused the extreme polarization of opinion and lack of communication throughout the 1980s and early 1990s?
• How can the inadequate response of government agencies and the failure of the decisionmaking process be explained?
• What kinds of changes must be made to enable our resource policy institutions to better deal with critical environmental issues of the 1990s and beyond?

By outlining a set of needed reforms, the book will assist those who are involved in re-creating natural resource agencies and public policy processes for the challenges of the next century. In explaining the policymaking process -- its realities and idiosyncrasies -- The Wisdom of the Spotted Owl

provides a framework for understanding policies and institutions, and presents a prescription for change to allow for more effective handling of current and future environmental problems.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steven Lewis Yaffee is a faculty member in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at The University of Michigan where he teaches courses in natural resource policy and administration, negotiation skills, American environmental history, and biodiversity and public policy. His research focuses on understanding and improving public decision-making processes as they influence the management of natural resources, and exploring the behavior of administrative agencies and interest groups as they are involved in implementing public policies. He has worked for more than fifteen years on federal endangered species policy.

Dr. Yaffee received his Ph.D. in 1979 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in environmental policy and planning and has earlier degrees in natural resources. He has taught at MIT and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and has been a researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Conservation Foundation/World Wildlife Fund.

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Two decades of negotiations, lawsuits, court orders, and injunctions have transformed the northern spotted owl issue from a regional land management problem into a national controversy of immense proportions. Despite the best efforts of scientists, land managers, politicians, and citizen activists - spanning, in some cases, entire careers - the dilemma remains unresolved. The controversy over the management of national forests in the Pacific Northwest vividly demonstrates the shortcomings of existing management institutions and natural resource policies. The wisdom of the Spotted explores the American policymaking process through the case of the spotted owl - a case that offers a striking illustration of the failure of our society to cope with long-term, science-intensive issues requiring collective choices. Steven Lewis Yaffee analyzes the political and organizational dynamics from which the controversy emerged and the factors that led to our stunning inability to solve it. He examines the state of resource management agencies and policy processes, providing insight into questions such as: . What caused the extreme polarization of opinion and lack of communication throughout the 1980s and early 1990s? How can the inadequate response of government agencies and the failure of the decisionmaking process he explained? What kinds of changes must be made to enable our resource policy institutions to better deal with critical environmental issues of the 1990s and beyond? By outlining a set of needed reforms, the book will assist those who are involved in recreating natural resource agencies and public policy processes for the challenges of the next century The Wisdom of the Spotted Owlprovides a framework for understanding policies and institutions, and presents a prescription for change to allow for more effective handling of current and future environmental problems.

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The Wisdom of the Spotted Owl

Policy Lessons for a New Century

By Steven Lewis Yaffee

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 1994 Steven Lewis Yaffee
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55963-204-1

Contents

ABOUT ISLAND PRESS, 
Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Preface, 
Introduction, 
ONE - The Evolution of the Spotted Owl Controversy, 
1 - The Birth of a Controversy: 1945—1977, 
2 - Muddling Through: 1978—1981, 
3 - New Science, New Directives, More Muddling: 1981—1984, 
4 - The Forest Service's Last Stand: 1985—1989, 
5 - All Hell Breaks Loose: 1989–1993, 
TWO - Learning from History, 
6 - Tough Choices: A Difficult Issue under Any Circumstances, 
7 - Avoiding Tough Choices: American Decisionmaking Processes, 
8 - Influencing Tough Choices: Actors in American Decisionmaking Processes, 
9 - Insufficient Policies and Misleading Politics, 
10 - Grounded in the Past: Agency Values and Management Approaches, 
THREE - Policy Implications for the 1990s and Beyond, 
11 - The Context for Change, 
12 - Building More Effective Agencies and Decisionmaking Processes, 
13 - Building Better Policies, 
Notes, 
Glossary of Acronyms, 
Index, 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, 
ISLAND PRESS BOARD OF DIRECTORS, 

CHAPTER 1

The Birth of a Controversy: 1945—1977

While the spotted owl controversy matured as a major public policy dispute in the mid- 1980s, its origins lie in the context of the styles and objectives of forestry and forest policy as they developed in the 1950s and 1960s, and in the change in values and national politics in the 1970s. Just as our individual behavior is guided and constrained by the genes of our ancestors, public policy choices are influenced and often defined by historical trends. In the spotted owl case, battles in the courts and the Congress in the 1980s and early 1990s reflected in part decisionmaking styles and patterns of behavior that had been established many years before. These traditional behaviors included:

• An overwhelming adherence to timber production as the primary organizational objective of the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management in western Oregon and Washington;

• A tendency to view resources other than timber, such as wildlife or recreation, as either secondary or adjuncts of the timber management program;

• A proclivity to try to find solutions to difficult choices through elaborate technical analyses and planning processes whether they were warranted or not; and

• The development of a FS organizational image and style as a tightly controlled, "Can Do" agency that ironically made change in direction more difficult.

For the Forest Service, many of these styles were set down as fundamental operating principles by Gifford Pinchot, its creator and first Chief at the turn of the century, but they were expanded upon and locked into public policy in the period following the second World War. While the basic reason for establishing the national forest system was to ensure future timber supplies, not a lot of timber was cut on national forest land before the 1940s. The national forests were by and large sleepy backwaters under little pressure to produce timber because there was an ample supply coming from private lands. Indeed, the Forest Service was under pressure to keep national forest timber off the market so as not to undercut the prices private companies could get for their timber. Less than 2 billion boardfeet (bbf) of timber was cut per year on all national forests before 1940, even though total domestic softwood lumber production exceeded 30 bbf annually in the 1920s.

After the second World War, rapidly rising demand for new homes coupled with declining supplies of timber from private lands led to pressures to open up the vast timber storehouses that the national forests represented, and the Forest Service responded. From the 1940s through the mid 1960s, timber sold from the national forests rose from about 2 bbf annually to approximately 12 bbf. The boom generated revenues for the federal treasury and helped to build state and local economies because a portion of timber receipts is paid to states and localities to support public services such as roads and schools.

The post-War timber boom signified a rebirth for the Forest Service, an agency that had largely served a custodial function in the previous half century. Agency budgets and staff increased, and a strong national constituency emerged to lobby for agency programs, at least as long as they centered on an active timber sale program. Local, state, and federal politicians increasingly recognized the political value of public timber, since it supported local jobs and schools, and helped to satisfy the American dream of lumber-hungry, single family suburban homes. They developed relationships with the forest products industry and the Forest Service, which reinforced the economic forces in support of an enhanced timber program.

For the Forest Service, these trends tended to exalt timber from its position as king to that of a deity. The organization's leadership was increasingly timber-oriented, its measure of success became how well a line officer could "get the cut out," and its new recruits were primarily foresters or forest engineers trained in programs that tended toward more specialization with less understanding of the broader social objectives that the public lands serve and that founding father Gifford Pinchot sought. An enhanced emphasis on timber production was rational and productive for the Forest Service no matter what model of bureaucratic behavior you subscribe to—the agency as budget-maximizer, turf-maximizer, or political power-seeker. For the Forest Service in the 1950s and 1960s, the objectives converged, making timber management the overriding organizational guiding light.

On the surface at least, the Forest Service remained committed to the hazy concept of multiple use as developed by Pinchot at the turn of the century, but it tended to promote other resource objectives as adjuncts of the timber management program. Multiple use came to mean maximum production of resource outputs over the long term: through government's increased use of various forms of cost—benefit analysis, maximum production generally came to mean maximum numbers of things, particularly dollars and user-days.

Agency objectives for wildlife resources on public lands at this time were defined almost exclusively as producing adequate numbers of game animals, activities that fortuitously were consistent with the enhanced focus on cutting timber and measuring agency benefits by counting user-days. For example, to grow a lot of deer, wildlife managers sought to create openings in the forest that would provide browse. Openings provided via timber cutting hence also generated a lot of huntable animals, and the foresters and wildlife managers marched hand in hand in facilitating the multiple uses of the national forests, uses for which there were both markets and political support.

Demand for all forms of outdoor recreation boomed after the second World War, and the Forest Service was not unaware of this national trend. While forest recreation had been encouraged since the early days of the agency, the Forest Service expanded its efforts in response to a perceived national need, and an accurate sense of a new and potentially large political constituency for forest management oriented toward providing recreation...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ISLAND PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1994
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1559632046
• ISBN 13: 9781559632041
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 458
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar