Word: timber
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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...
...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...