Special Section: The Northwest Forest Plan: a Global Model of Forest Management in Contentious Times

Natural resource extraction and environmentalism are deeply engrained in the social fabric of the Pacific Northwest (U.S.A.) and are often pitted against one another in age-old timber wars that reached a climax in the 1980s and early 1990s. No other species typified these battles more than the Northern Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis caurina), whose listing pursuant to the Endangered Species Act of 1973 ground logging operations to a halt on Northwest federal lands and heightened the debate over endangered species and forest management. Ultimately, this debate resulted in the development of a bold plan intended to break the gridlock over timber versus endangered species management across a broad portion of Oregon, Washington, and California. The Northwest Forest Plan has its origins in a series of scientific assessments dating back to 1990 (Thomas et al.). (All citations in this introduction are to papers in the Special Section.) But it was not until President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and the heads of several federal agencies attended a forest summit in 1993 that the plan came into being. For the first time in U.S. history, a president and his chief advisors spent a full day addressing the leaders of conservation groups, timber industries, and rural communities to announce a shift in federal lands management from decades of unsustainable logging to ecosystem-based management that emphasized biodiversity conservation and endangered species protections. The Northwest Forest Plan emerged shortly after this summit, prepared by a group of scientists under the leadership of a wildlife biologist turned chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Jack Ward Thomas (see Thomas et al.). At the time, President Clinton gave direction to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which collectively oversee nearly 10 million ha of federal lands within the range of the Northern Spotted Owl, to construct a forest plan such that “our efforts must be, insofar as we are wise enough to know it, scientifically sound, ecologically credible, and legally responsible.” The plan was crafted to protect the long-term health of “our forests, our wildlife, and our waterways,” and to “produce a predictable and sustainable level of timber sales and nontimber resources that will not degrade or destroy the environment.” Fundamental principles of ecosystem management, conservation biology, and sustainable economics—applied on a scale never before witnessed in U.S history—became the core elements of the plan. The forests of the Pacific Northwest would be managed under various land allocations (Thomas et al.) that emphasized protection and restoration across a network of reserves (e.g., late-successional reserves) but provided for commercial logging within the matrix. An Aquatic Conservation Strategy was included (Reeves et al.) to protect riparian zones and key watersheds (salmon-bearing streams) and to provide refugia for aquatic species. To complement the coarse-filter (reserve) components of the plan, a fine-filter approach (Molina et al.) was adopted for rare species that were surveyed and then managed with protective buffers to ensure persistence outside reserves where logging takes place. More than 10 years have elapsed since the historic forest summit, and this Special Section explores the upshot from the Northwest Forest Plan relative to social and ecological mandates from the perspectives of some of its key architects and those involved in its implementation. As guest editors, we approached this section from our expertise in the conservation biology underpinnings of the plan (D.A.D.) and its early development and implementation ( J.E.W.). We were both involved in debates during the plan’s development and one of us ( J.E.W.) was a former supervisor of the USFS and National Fisheries program manager for BLM. We view the plan as a model of science-based conservation that is currently caught in the cross hairs of continued conflict over natural resources not unlike what is happening elsewhere on forested lands around the globe.