Flying to Seoul Today

The Antiplanner is flying to Seoul, Korea, today to speak at a conference tomorrow (Thursday local time) on conflict management and collaborative governance. Apparently, someone heard about the Forest Options Group, a committee of environmentalists, timber industry leaders, and Forest Service officials that I helped organize in the late 1990s. The group urged the Forest Service to experiment on individual national forests with alternative governance models, including collaborative governance and market-driven systems.

My report to the conference may be discouraging. I argue that the timber war that took place over western national forests in the 1970s and 1980s resulted from the fact that the incentives to polarize the issues of national forest management were so great that there was no chance for any conflict resolution. I remember environmentalist friends of mine being hung in effigy, other friends bragging that they had ecotaged logging equipment, and people being fired by the associations they worked for because they dared talk with people on the other side of the conflict.

Conflict resolution groups such as the Quincy Library Group and Forest Options Group only became possible when one side had already lost. In 1991, national forest timber sales fell by 40 percent; by 1995, they were down by more than two thirds. This brought the timber industry to the table out of desperation. At least some environmentalists were willing to come to the table because they did not trust the Forest Service to keep sales low. The agreements reached by groups such as Quincy allowed timber companies to cut at least some timber while protecting many areas important to environmentalists.

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The Quincy agreement faltered for exactly this reason. National forest officials said that they did not agree with the plan put together by the environmental and industry leaders, but in fact they refused to participate in writing that plan. This led a frustrated Quincy Library Group to persuade Congress to legislatively impose their plan on several California national forests. This was followed by several more “place-based agreements being turned into laws. This remains a clumsy way of managing public lands, particularly if agency officials continue to resist the collaborative agreements even after the laws are put in place.

Ironically, the timber war ended because the Forest Service decided to side with the environmentalists. While this decision was not overt, and wasn’t even clear to most participants for many years, agency officials tacitly agreed to reduce timber sales and manage national forests for other uses. I told this story in 1995 when President Clinton fired the chief of the Forest Service who had overseen the greatest reduction in national forest timber sales in history because that chief wasn’t enough of an environmentalist.

The Korea Institute of Public Administration may be holding this conference because Koreans are interested in finding ways to reduce conflicts with North Korea. If so, my paper will be of little help. But people who are interested in resolving conflicts over resources such as forests, water, or minerals may find in the story of the western timber war to provide important lessons for how–and how not–to manage such resources.