Computerized Illustration by Barbara Sekarka 7o the west of the Fort Collins computer center. the Rocky mountains rise in a great wall, and the forest dominates the horizon. Scrub pines cling tenaciously to thefirst roll offoothills. and beyond, on the higher ground, theforest grows thick and darkly lush with conifers, interrupted only by snowcapped granite peaks. At the U.S. Forest Service's national computing center, hard against the Rockies' Front Range, however, scenery is not the main concern. There are no windows in the computer room, just the plain walls enclosing a temperature-controlled, humidity-regulated, electro-magnetically- insulated space the size of a football field where the banks of Univacs work day and night quietly shaping the future of the national forest system. Glenn Farring, who joined the Forest Service twenty-two years ago as a back-country trailblazer and firefighter, works inside the center as a liaison officer coordinating the varied computer uses. Each day he nods hello to the security guard and waits to be accompanied by an escort who will present the proper password; they pause under the scrutiny of the video cameras and wait for the electronic door to be released so they can enter the computer room. Few people have the necessary high- security clearance to enter the inner sanctum. Farring, who remembers his youthful Forest Service explorations of the remote wilderness around Mount St. Helens, reflects, “Back then, I wanted to go where there was no one else. I guess I've made it.” The insulated computer room in which Farring works is the heart of the modern Forest Service. A quarter of the work done there involves collecting raw data from the 155 national forests, regional offices, and research stations spread across the country, as well as the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. A new standardized computer system is currently being installed in nearly 200 far-flung offices, and money has been allocated to add an additional 600 by 1987. “There's, a computer specialist on every forest now,” says Farring proudly, “and computer aides, computer techs, computer operators, a systems man. and a systems programmer.” The person overseeing this computer network— Reagan-appointee John Crowell, who heads the Forest Service— is directing the most intensive planning effort ever assumed by a natural resource agency; rivaling or even surpassing the Machiavellian calculations of defense and intelligence agencies. Although computers have been used by the Forest Service since the late 1950s, critics fear that under Crowell's stewardship the fast-piling data, compiled in 50- to 150-year plans, will not be used to manage the forests, but to mine them. “Crowell wants timber any way he can get it,” forest economist Randal O'Toole says of the former timber industry lawyer, “and by his use of statistics he makes it appear that saving any environmental resource will be infinitely more expensive than timber cutting." At Fort Collins, the information hub, Crowell’s mandated task is of a boggling complexity. The national forests comprise 8 percent of the country’s land area, offer sanctuary to thousands of animal and plant species, provide nearly one- quarter of the nation’s timber harvest, and serve more recreational users than the national parks, all of which is factored into the data-gathering process. Inventories of wildlife and vegetation are gathered from field officers that use satellite tracking, high-altitude infrared photography, and intensive ground surveys. Records of mineral leasing, timber harvests, pesticide spraying and regeneration efforts are all being compiled and centralized as never before. Virtually every animal, every fish, every tree, every bush, grass, fungus, and lichen will be included in the Forest Service's calculations. Every board foot of timber to be taken from the forests, every pound of mineral ore that will be extracted, every person who will camp, fish, swim, hike, or watch * it birds w i " be f '9u red x into the national forest “outputs.” ~ And the common 9 denominator, the £ W common language in W which al1 these apples j | i and oran ges are com- pared and evaluated, is money. How does the Forest Service translates nature’s beauty A and pristine solitude into cold, hard r cash? According to the 1984 Resource Program and Assessment, the current , national plan, a day of hiking through the aspen groves of Colorado’s White River National Forest as the autumn leaves turn gold, or a day of swimming in Arizona’s Roosevelt Lake, surrounded by the red-rock bluffs of the Tonto National Forest, is worth exactly $9. Photographing elk in the high meadows of Wyoming's Shoshone National Forest is assigned a value of $25 a day; the unspoiled water in Oregon’s Rogue River is worth just $.39 per acre- foot. To further facilitate the categorization of the forests, the Forest Service plans to divide the ecosystem into manage, ment units. “Habitat-capacity” models will reduce the needs of a species to a mathematical formula, providing indices that show how many animals a parcel of forest will support, and special units where wildlife can exist relatively undisturbed will be spaced throughout the forests in a pattern that allows for “minimum viable” populations of existing species without undue restraint on timber or mineral production. In the north fork of Bear Wallow Canyon in Arizona’s Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, there wilt be a unit for the nearly extinct Apache trout. In the flathead National Forest in Montana there will be units for a planned “output” of 200 protected grizzly bears. Idaho will have a unit for the 25 woodland caribou remaining in the continental United States. At the same time timber and mineral production will increase. In the West, where the great majority of the national forests are located, up to 90 percent of the prime woods not classified as wilderness will be divided into timber units for efficient cutting. Crowell freely admits that he favors forest “commodities” over what he calls “amenities,” and the computers at Fort Collins will continue to support the rationality of his timber-cutting thesis. In 1905 Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the Forest Service, pledged to make the forests into “useful servants of man.” Crowell’s spin on this pledge has been to create a technological model for forest ecology, the better to master it. The ecosystem, however, is not so easily reduced to computerized bytes. The needs of most wildlife species, their interrelationships and dependencies on theforest habitat are “simply not known,” says Clark S. Binkley, a forestry profes- ,sor at Yale University. In the past few years, a handful of wildlife biologists have begun to document the effects of Forest Service management. They found that wildlife dependent on “old-growth” forests has suffered the greatest damage over the years. Old growth trees are the forest giants, their canopies towering hundreds of feet above the forest floor. To the Forest Service, they are “overmature.” They must be cut down and replaced with younger, smaller, fast-growing trees that will be Clinton St. Quarterly 41
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz