Origins of Ecosystem Management

Hike any two-mile stretch of the Bartram Trail through the heart of the Chattooga River watershed. You pass through and cross over the scars of an early environmental crisis that began about 1880 and ended in 1920: old logging skid trails, still-rotting stumps, pine stands delineating abandoned pastures, erosion gullies now healed over with a hardwood forest, fire scars on 200-year old oaks. Here and there you pass through a few acres of very old trees, relics of the old growth forest that once covered the entire Chattooga watershed.

The uniqueness of the Chattooga River watershed is due largely to its great diversity of elevations and land forms. From high elevation oak ridges and granite dome communities to moist coves and riparian forests, about a dozen different forest habitat types occur here, each with its own distinct combination of plants and animals. All of this was very nearly destroyed in the turn-of-the-century crisis. Only fragments of the original habitats remain intact.

The Southern Appalachian National Forests were established in 1920. "Land conservation" and "watershed preservation" were the bywords of those days, and for the next three decades forest management was limited largely to protection and restoration. Today a mature forest has restored itself over much of the Chattooga River watershed, not quite the same forest as before, but to modern conservationists this forest is regaining much of its earlier natural character. The old wounds have begun to heal, and it progresses slowly toward biological maturity.

Ironically, the rehabilitation of the Southern Appalachian forests has created a modern day conflict. This forest in transition has now grown to commercial size, and today timber extraction has replaced conservation as the top priority for national forest management on most of the Chattooga River watershed. At the same time, modern logging engineering has mastered the art of reaching every commercial tree on the watershed, putting at risk even the remnants of old growth forest that were too difficult to access a century ago.

Accelerated timber production over the past three decades, including the clear cutting of old growth forests throughout the United States, has expanded the logging versus conservation confrontation to every national forest in the country. The turning point came in the early 1990s with the political, social, economic and ecological conflict in the Pacific Northwest. A new image was clearly needed for national forest management: a shift from the dominance of timber production to something more palatable to the American public.

The term "ecosystem management" was born out of the Pacific Northwest crisis. It was created by the U.S. Forest Service in 1992 to appeal to and appease all factions. Ecosystem management was supposed to lead to a more reasonable dialog between forest managers and the diverse public and private forest interests. Although largely rebuked by the timber industry, ecosystem management has been generally embraced by the scientific community, by most conservationists, and by many foresters.

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