Howard
Misplaced restoration: How modern U.S. forest policy restores the metabolic rift between
humans and forests
Emily Howard, PhD Candidate
Planning, Governance, and Globalization
School of Public and International Affairs
Virginia Tech
[email protected]
This is a working draft: Please do not cite without permission
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Introduction
The United States is a nation of forests. The nation’s cultural, industrial, and social
identity has been strongly shaped by the presence of forests. Stories from early explorers and
settlers reveal fear, reverence, and spiritual connection to the old and largely unmanaged forests.
A few of these forests have survived the industrial timber industry by sheer impenetrability. The
rest of the forests, however, have undergone a transformation from being part of the human
environment (lightly managed and inhabited by Native Americans) to becoming industrial
commodities heavily managed as timber factories. Since the first European settlers began
harvesting trees for shipbuilding in the late 1600s, forests have undergone a reconceptualization
in order to fit the needs of industrial capitalism. The commodification of forests gained speed
and scale through the 1800s and 1900s during the second industrial revolution. As forests were
exhausted in New England, the South, and the upper Midwest the timber industry and railroads
moved West where forests appeared infinitely stocked with giant trees. Since the 1600s, it is
estimated that 90% of virgin forest has been cleared. In the Pacific Northwest, 80% of the
publicly owned forests are logged. In the United States, the Forest Service estimates that only
7% of pre-settler forest remains (www.understory.ran.org). These startling figures emphasize the
speed of forest clearing and indicate that the relationship between humans and forests have
shifted from pre-settler cohabitation to industrial commodification.
The rise of commodity forestry can be viewed through two parallel processes: the
reconceptualization of the forest as a commodity and as a source of energy for industrial
capitalism; and the reconceptualization of ecological forestry along several historic points from a
counter-discourse to commodity forestry to its scientific basis. I locate these processes within the
theoretical framework of Karl Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift. Looking at these parallel
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processes is a way to view the metabolic rift as it is manifest and perpetuated in contemporary
forest management. Drawing attention to the historic and modern development of forest
management policy within the framework of the metabolic rift opens up a critical conversation
about emergent forest policy and how these processes of exploitation and commodification take
new and familiar forms in forest management.
The metabolic rift is written into the language of traditional Western forestry. In its
contemporary incarnation under the second Bush administration, forestry has been a discursive
vehicle of forest commodification. Alternative forestry perspectives based on ecological
management and restoration trace back to the 1920s and grew in prominence in the 1970s.
However, ecological forestry has not gained the force of a counter-discourse to traditional
forestry. New forestry paradigms retain elements of the metabolic rift in the articulation of forest
management, and traditional forestry employs the new scientific language of ecological forestry
to justify increased logging in national forests. Forestry science and industrial-scale deforestation
have been linked in the United States since Gifford Pinchot grounded the “high theory” of forest
science with the perceived necessity of industrial-scale economic use of the forest. More than a
century later, this assemblage of science and capitalist logic is evident in the language of the
Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA) of 2003, George W. Bush’s legacy of forest
management reform. HFRA takes up the language of ecological forestry but bends it towards
traditional forestry goals in the following ways: HRFA rebrands logging as a prescription for
forest health; Enables forest managers to label forest health issues like fire risks and pest
management as “emergencies” which exempts them from NEPA requirements and other
administrative oversight procedures; and limits the vectors of intervention for organizations,
environmentalists, and citizens concerned with forest management plans. Current forest
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management policy like HFRA and in the Obama Administration’s new Planning Rule reveal the
limitations of ecological forestry to reproduce forests outside of economic use. Ecological
forestry is not, however, entirely lost on traditional forestry. It has been picked up as a language
of legitimation for traditional forestry goals.
HFRA produced a subversive language for the commodification of forests in public
policy. The policy claimed to base the prescriptions for healthy forest management on ecological
forest science. Foresters, environmentalists, and forest scientists have contested the scientific
basis for the HFRA prescription, arguing that the research connecting thinning and salvage
logging to forest restoration were inconclusive at best and inaccurate at worst (Forest Guild
HFRA testimony 2003). Further, studies ranging from the GAO to Congressional testimony from
the Forest Guild provided evidence that post-decision citizen participation and litigation did not
significantly slow forest restoration or economic activities. The new Planning Rule modification
to the National Forests Management Plan proposed by the Obama administration is in part a
response to these criticisms of HFRA. Despite widespread support of the new policy by reform
environmental organizations like The Nature Conservancy and the Wilderness Society, the new
Planning Rule continues HFRA’s approach to limiting participation and litigation. While it
emphasizes making science-based decisions, it does not address the selective use of forestry
science evident in the policy implementation of HFRA. The Rule grants broad discretion to
forest managers to define management tasks as emergencies, which may result in unnecessary
thinning and logging activities. The long history of collusion among the USFS, the timber
industry, and forestry science suggests that a policy of broad administrative discretion may
perpetuate the metabolic rift between humans and forests that has been written into forest
management policy. Of immediate concern is the apparent success of HFRA to conceal
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economically motivated logging under the guise of forest health and restoration, particularly
when these logging activities take place on wilderness protected and inventoried roadless areas.
New policy does not appear to challenge HFRA and the merged logic of capitalism and forest
health. The new Planning Rule will need to be watched carefully to see how forest restoration
and balancing multiple uses on public forests alleviates or reinforces the metabolic rift.
This analysis of forest management policy within the framework of the Marxian
metabolic rift is a point of entry to problematize a traditional reading of the healthy forest/human
relationship and to direct the exploration of a reimagined material exchange. Specifically, HFRA
laid the discursive groundwork for a new kind of forest management policy that subordinates
non-economic values of the forest in more subversive ways than previous policies of sustained
yield and multiple-use. HFRA’s legacy is evident in the new Planning Rule, which may further
neutralize the counter-force of ecological forestry. Finally, I argue that the prescription to these
criticisms can’t stop at a call for a healthy metabolic relationship. As forest health is increasingly
written into the very forest policies that perpetuate a metabolically unsustainable human/forest
relationship, the counter-perspective of a “healthy” metabolic relationship must undergo critical
examination and confront what kinds of management techniques a better relationship would
require.
Theoretical Framework
I primarily engage the concept of the Marxian metabolic rift between humans and the
environment as a way to understand the unsustainable material and discursive relationship
between humans and forests. This framework is filled in by my argument that this rift is
perpetuated by twin processes: Forests are reconceptualized as commodities in order for them to
fit industrial needs; and the language of ecological forestry, often taken up in efforts to slow or
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stop the commodification of forests, has been repurposed as a scientific basis for the
commodification of forests. This argument is grounded in an exploration of how forests are
threatened by public policy, industrial deforestation, and the dominance of economic value of
trees. Taken together, the theoretical framework and the policy analysis reveal the manifestation
of capitalist logic in the forest and how this logic mediates a human/nature relationship
predicated on the ceaseless cycle of production and consumption. While I will evaluate each one
separately I see these arguments as part of one conversation about the various ways in which the
discourses of forestry science, public policy, and forest management threaten the idea and
material existence of non-commodity forests.
Historical Materialism and the Metabolic Rift
The metabolic rift has roots in Marx’s discussion of dispossession and alienation started
from in the enclosure movement of the 15th century. Marx argued that the forcible displacement
of farmers and peasants from the country to urban industrial centers in Europe in the 15th century
not only produced an alienated relationship between people (those who owned the means of
production and those who labored for the owners) but produced an alienated relationship
between people and nature. Marx’s theory of dispossession illustrates the point.
We should find that this so-called original accumulation means nothing but a series of
historical processes, resulting in a decomposition of the original union existing between
the laboring Man and his Instruments of Labour…The separation between the Man of
Labour and the Instruments of Labour once established, such a state of things will
maintain itself and reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, until a new and
fundamental revolution in the mode of production should again overturn it, and restore
the original union in a new historical form (Marx 1865, p.5).
In order to feed, clothe, and placate the urban population with consumer goods, the
extraction of raw materials created tremendous pressure on the environment, and extraction
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outpaced natural systems of regeneration. As raw materials, or nutrients, were transformed into
food, fiber, and goods, nutrients became locked inside these products as waste that did not
biodegrade, and biodegradable waste was not returned to the soil so nature could replenish itself.
The restoration of nature therefore became part of the responsibility of the state, which was
principally concerned with ensuring that the flow of raw materials into the industrial metabolism
was not undermined by the self-expansion of capitalism. Marx identified the unidirectional flow
of nutrients from the country to the town as a symptom of the alienated relationship between
humans and nature, in which nature was valued overwhelmingly for its use as a raw material.
Nature within a capitalist system was treated as a “free gift” to industrialism. Marx articulated
this relationship in the biological language of the metabolism. Metabolism, or a “material
exchange,” formed the basis for Marx’s theory of alienation:
Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man,
through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between
himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in
motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands,
in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs.
Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he
simultaneously changes his own nature…It [the labor process] is the universal condition
for the metabolic interaction [Stoffweschel] between man and nature, the everlasting
nature-imposed condition of human existence’ (Foster 2005, p.157).
Labor is the basis of the relationship between humans and nature. Humans make their material
means from nature, and this labor can be beneficial to both humans and nature (a balanced
metabolic relationship) or exploitative and short sighted, the latter of which Marx argued is most
reflective of the modern human/nature relationship.
The metabolic rift framework assumes that capitalism is inherently incompatible with a
healthy human/nature relationship because capitalism cannot self-regulate or consider other
values of nature besides that of use. This perspective is informed by James O’Connor’s (1998)
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theory of the second contradiction of capitalism. The second contradiction of capitalism
argument posits that capitalism is fundamentally at odds with nature because capitalism is
infinitely self-expanding while nature is infinitely self-limiting. Paradoxically, nature is the precondition to capitalism. Without nature as raw materials for production capitalism would cease to
exist. Capitalism is oddly dependent on nature, but capitalism is driven by a pursuit of
maximizing efficient production, and therefore is incapable of introducing limits on its own
efficiency and consumption of nature. Nature will produce less and less “raw material” (trees,
clean water and air, topsoil, etc.) as it is degraded by aggressive extraction and production.
Capitalism destroys the means of its own survival, and in the process the means of human and
non-human survival. This contradiction requires state intervention to manage the capitalist
consumption of nature to ensure capitalism survives without wiping out itself and its consumers
in the process. This theory engages with the metabolic rift because the metabolic rift is
concerned with capitalism depleting nature faster than nature can replenish itself. Marx and
Foster see capitalism as the cause of the alienated relationship between humans and nature. The
second contradiction of capitalism explains why the metabolic rift is unsustainable. In order for
nature to be consumed it has to be considered a commodity. Capitalism locates the value of
nature extrinsically, or in nature’s capacity as a standing reserve of raw material to satisfy
production requirements. The human/nature relationship is at the intersection of the impact of
human activity and nature upon one another. Foster (2000) quotes Tim Hayward to illustrate this
dynamic process: “This metabolism is regulated from the side of nature by natural laws
governing the various physical processes involved, and from the side of society by
institutionalized norms governing the division of labour and the distribution of wealth etc.”
(p.159). Wood products producers are frustrated by a forest metabolism over which they
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historically have had little control. Salvage logging and clearcutting, replacing forests with tree
plantations, and genetically modifying trees are all ways in which the timber industry and
forestry science collude to engineer nature to conform to an industrial metabolism. These various
mechanisms for enhancing the economic productivity of forces exist within the traditional
framework of forestry that I criticize and as a mechanism of ecosocialization to manage the
forest more efficiently to eliminate the need to clearcut forests.
Humans shape nature through the labor required to produce the means of survival.
Nature, in turn, shapes people by requiring a certain kind of labor. The way in which people
labor the land transforms their social, economic, and political spheres (Foster 2000). Industrial
logging and forest management is one such kind of labor that produces certain relationships with
the forest and precludes others. Forests can be described as possessing a metabolism of their
own, more conventionally known as “forest ecology.” W. Scott Prudham (2001) posits that
forests are a fictitious commodity, an idea borrowed from Karl Polanyi:
The crucial point is this: labor, land, and money are essential elements of industry; they
also form an absolutely vital part of the economic system. But labor, land, and money are
obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have
been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them. In other words,
according to the empirical definition of a commodity they are not commodities…land is
only another name for nature, which is not produced by man…None of them is produced
for sale. The commodity description of labor, land, and money is entirely fictitious (p.7576).
Understood through Polanyi, forests are a pre-condition for capitalism. Forests treated as a
commodity are narrowly valued for their use as a raw material for production. This valuation
reduces the human/nature relationship to one mediated by market signals. The perpetuation of
forests as commodities is not a deliberate campaign of the timber industry in a naked power bid
against environmentalists, although creating the language used to rationalize deforestation is
sometimes a calculated process. The commodification of forests also emerges from the history of
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forestry and how forest science has been used to produce extrinsic and economic values of the
forest.
The Discourses of Forestry
Traditional Forestry
Since the first lumber mills opened in the 1800s, forests have been a driving economic
force and a geographic and cultural space of tense relationships among those who work in the
forest and those who prioritize non-economic values of the forest. During this boom of economic
and industrial development, old growth was cut rapidly and with little regard for the length of
time required for new growth to become old growth (at least 200 years). Despite the myth of
endless forests in the rugged west, big trees became less abundant and accessible, and one of the
most notable responses to this threat to the timber industry was from the newly formed United
States Forest Service (USFS). Infamous USFS Chief Gifford Pinchot addressed the issue by
reserving some forests for non-economic use, setting timber harvest quotas, and managing the
forest scientifically for long-term yield rather than short-term profit maximization. Pinchot’s
intention, however, was not to protect forests from economic exploitation. Rather, Pinchot
promoted the application of forestry science to support rational logging. Emergent forest
management influenced by European models in Germany and France were considered by
Pinchot and the timber industry to be too “theoretical” and not applicable to on-the-ground
forestry (Gonzalez 1998, p.274). His close relationship with major industrialists and timber
producers like the Vanderbuilts and Weyerhaeuser granted timber interests unparalleled access to
shaping forest management policy and ensuring the forest conservation was subordinated to the
“working forest.” A working forest was in contrast to one of “non-use”, categories that suggest a
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forest set aside for non-economic use was inert and fallow. A working forest was cultivated and
made productive by industrial scale intervention. This language maintained the conditions of the
metabolic rift in the production of scientific knowledge about the forest and in the ways that
knowledge was taken up by public policy. As the working forest became the basis for forest
policy, the USFS became a vehicle for managing national forests in the interests of the capitalist
class. Pinchot set the stage for a history of forest management policy that would only consider
multiple uses of forests without jeopardizing the growth of the timber and wood product
industry.
Forest policy and forest sciences developed concurrently. Pinchot was among the first
American foresters to approach forestry scientifically, and he studied European models of
sustained yield in the German Normalbaum forests. In 1900 the Yale School of Forestry was
founded, the first post-graduate forestry school in the U.S., which gained significant financial
support from the Pinchot family, as well from Weyerhaeuser, who in 1905 raised funding to
establish a Chair of Lumbering at the school (Gonzalez 1998, p.277). The Yale School of
Forestry influenced the way forests would be studied with an emphasis on scientific management
towards economic development. The school’s close relationship with the timber industry and
Pinchot’s own public campaign to generate widespread public support for “practical forestry”
created a discursive base for subsequent forest management to mobilize forestry science towards
developing forests for optimal harvesting. As the USFS increased its holding of forest reserves,
so too it increased the power of the industrialists over the use of the forests.
Traditional forestry has historically viewed forests as a source of capital. Institutions that
favor traditional forestry include the Forest Service, the forestry profession, and the timber
industry (Hays 2007). Traditional forestry and the timber industry have been long-time co-
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conspirators, which has granted the timber industry unprecedented access to the formation of
forest policy and forest management since the 19th century. Samuel P. Hays (2007) describes the
relationship in detail:
Over the years of the twentieth century, these institutions and their leaders had shaped the
scientific and managerial practices in wood production forestry to the extent that the
word ‘forestry’ in both technical and popular language implicitly meant ‘wood
production.’ The forestry leaders and institutions now were so firmly committed to wood
production that, when confronted by the press of the new objectives in environmental and
ecological forestry, they had difficulty in accepting them. Often they considered these
new ideas as threats to their primary interest in wood production rather than as
opportunities to broaden their vision as to what forests constituted and how they were to
be managed (p.8).
The Forest Service saw itself as the advocate of the timber industry. Even the Forest Service’s
interest in sustained yield and long-term harvest at the beginning the 1900s was less about
protecting forest ecosystems and more about their preoccupation with taming the historically
“cut and run” timber industry and anchoring them in local communities. The Forest Service was
increasingly concerned with ensuring that the timber industry would have a long and productive
future. Forestry schools often taught students almost exclusively about commercial tree species,
not comprehensive forest botany (Hays 2007). Traditional forestry had few qualms about
promoting the harvest of large old trees, which would later be valued as “old-growth” or
“ancient” trees. Old trees were commercially valuable but it was not realistic to replant trees and
wait for over one hundred years before harvesting and profiting from the investment. To make
forests a renewable product they needed to be scientifically managed in such a way that retained
forests’ ability to produce, but to produce commercial species in timeframes befitting the timber
industry.
In the late 1800s the Forest Service encountered this dilemma of supporting the timber
industry’s need to extract materials from the forests while balancing the need to keep forests
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alive. The solution to this dilemma was extensive forest management. “Equally significant and
evolving early in the agency’s history was the penchant to eliminate older trees and to replace
them with the fully ‘regulated forest,’ which would be subject to continual careful control from
planting to harvest. Sound forest management, in the eyes of the foresters, could advance only by
removing the old to make way for the new” (Hays 2007, p.11). The Forest Service borrowed
elements of some European models of forestry to determine the function of forests. Prudham
(2005) elaborates:
Drawing on European forestry…sustained yield prescribes the conversion of natural
forests to Normalbaum, or normal forests. A normal forest has been defined as ‘an ideally
constituted forest with such volumes of trees of various ages so distributed and growing
in such a way that they produce equal annual volumes of produce which can be removed
continually without detrimental impacts to future production’ (emphasis added) (p.155).
Normal forests accounted for commercially valuable species and very little else, and traditional
forestry education supported this approach. The triangle of academia, industry, and government
ensured that the normal forest was not just a management technique but was a discourse by
which forests would be transformed from wild and unprofitable to “normal,” predictable, and
highly social. “Nevertheless, the fundamental division of labor was established; the state would
manage the forest and offer the timber for sale, and private capital would process it into
commodities” (Prudham 2005, p.156). This cozy relationship ensured that the alienation between
humans and nature would be reified in institutional relationships and official policy as well as
The language of traditional forestry emphasized trees as commodities. “Traditional
forestry had its own distinctive set of concepts and words, such as the stand; board feet or cubic
feet; saplings, poles, and sawlogs as stages in the age of trees; economic maturity and biological
maturity, all of which revolved around accounting for and managing trees containing commercial
wood fiber” (Hays 2007, p. 53). In contrast, ecological forestry spoke a different language.
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“Ecological forestry introduced new terms associated with species and habitats such as keystone
species, management indicator species, microhabitats, understory species, soil mycorrhizae,
colonization, and retention” (Hays 1007, p.53). These discourses produced different views of the
forest but ultimately were both taken up in public policy. With the passage of HFRA in 2003, the
language of ecological forestry became a tool for gaining legitimacy for the industrial stalwarts
intent on managing forests for extraction and it allowed traditional forestry to rebrand
commercial interests as prescriptions for forest and human health.
Ecological Forestry
Ecological forestry has no specific point of entry into the discourse of forest
management. While the term “ecology” was coined in 1866 it wasn’t until the 1920s and 1930s
that the concept was linked to biotic systems. In these decades ecology became a popular way to
describe systems of feedback loops where information moved across networks via nodal points,
whether that information was computer code or genetic code. Information ecology was taken up
as an analogy to explain the vast exchange of information (both genetic and metabolic) within
complex natural systems. Nature was considered a self-animating system of feedback loops, and
assumed to be capable of sustaining stability. In the 1970s and 80s this assumption about nature
was popularized by both reform environmentalism and Deep Ecology. The ecosystem concept
could be found in environmental policies from National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA)
to the Wilderness Protection Act of 1964. In the 1990s the language of ecological forestry, often
used interchangeably with conservation forestry and restoration forestry, formed the basis for the
“New Forestry” paradigm championed by notable forest scientist Jerry Franklin (Evans 2006).
Ecological forestry as a scientific and normative orientation produced forests as intrinsically and
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biologically valuable. Those who took up ecological forestry advocated that management and
economic uses of forests require integration with biological systems. Forest management
practices from thinning non-economically valuable tree species to clearcutting was considered
dangerous to forest health and stability. This approach produced a supplemental discourse to
commodity forestry, one that pulled from the biological sciences rather than the commodity form
of trees. Hays (2007) describes the new language:
Ecological scientists identified similar issues but usually in more conventional scientific
language. They spoke in terms of disturbance and recovery as general concepts; or
fragmentation with its implications of habitat; or acid rain as a general biochemical
disturbance. The views of scientists were formulated in different venues than those of
forest reformers, in different publications and rarely in formal cooperation. Yet the two
were continually aware of each other, and reformers enlisted the help of ecologists in
drawing up their management proposals. As a result, in the realm of public debate over
forest policies, a loose but reinforcing connection evolved between the two streams of
ecological thinking about forests (p.20).
The ecological approach relied on science to determine what the forest was, and ecology and
conservation biology demanded that human impact on forest health and ecosystems be accounted
for in the forest management decision-making process. This concern was written into the
National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) of 1969, which institutionalized ecological
concerns in environmental management by requiring environmental impact statements (EIS) to
detail how the natural environment would be impacted by human activity and required a list of
alternative uses of the land, including those favoring ecosystem integrity over satisfying an
economic need. Ecological forestry was incorporated into existing forest and environmental
management techniques but as a supplement to the language of traditional forestry, not a
replacement. Incorporating this new language in public policy already shaped by traditional
forestry neutralized the possibility of ecological forestry as a launch pad for serious criticism of
contemporary forest policy.
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The Forest Service, long steeped in its mandate to provide a continuous supply of lumber,
struggled to integrate this new discourse. Managing forests to produce a high volume of timber
not only satisfied key allies in the timber industry but also provided a reliable revenue stream
from timber sales for the Forest Service. Ecological forestry forced the Forest Service to confront
their mandate to manage the forest for multiple uses, including non-economic purposes like
recreation and watershed protection. Ecological forestry became a tool of non-profit and citizen
groups who sought to protect or change the use of forests and other parts of the natural
environment. Environmental organizations and citizen groups filed lawsuits requesting
injunctions to halt logging until the Forest Service or timber companies complied with NEPA,
the Northwest Forest Plan, and other land management legislation. Ecological forestry was
directed specifically at preservation of old growth forests, particularly in the Pacific Northwest,
which contained some of the last old growth in the country. Broadly, ecological forestry did not
dismiss the economic use of forests and was not anti-capitalist. Instead, it was used to integrate
the goals of maintaining healthy, biodiverse forests with the need to harvest trees. Ecological
forestry gained traction from within the growing interest in outdoor recreation, which is closely
associated with white middle class preferences for “pure” vistas and escapes from the city made
possible by the personal automobile. In the 1950s-1970s citizens lobbied Congress for more
protected wilderness areas, especially forests. The social desire for more wilderness protection
took up the language of ecology for conservation.
Despite the integration of environmentally friendly language, forest management policy
maintained at its core the relationships and goals of traditional forestry. The Multiple-Use Act of
1966 remained essentially a program to protect industrial scale tree cutting. Forest policies that
followed President Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan and the Roadless Area Conservation Rule
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undermined the ecological emphasis in determining the right level of board feet available for the
annual harvest. Under the George W. Bush presidency forestry discourses were no longer
competing for dominance within the same forest policy. Instead, they were merged to produce a
more singular goal of protecting economic interests in the forest. As ecological forestry was
reshaped to fit traditional forestry goals, forests, too, were reshaped by the discursive and
physical implications of the convergence of discourses and the practices that followed.
Convergence of Forestry Discourses
Taken together, traditional forestry and ecological forestry form a discourse that relies on
ecological language to justify commercial activity in forests. Prudham (2005) refers to the joint
traditional and ecological forestry approach as New Forestry and describes it as such:
Moreover, it does so in ways that depart from the High Modernist forestry of the
Normalbaum in two main respects: (1) New Forestry rescales forest science up to a
broader landscape scale, linking the old fundamental unit of spatial analysis in forestry
(the ambiguously defined forest 'stand') to other elements of a forested (and deforested)
landscape (e.g., streams, nearby forest fragments, wildlife corridors, etc.), resulting in a
more integrated, ecosystem-like conception of spatial organization; and (2) New Forestry
also scales down in the sense that it targets the management of a broader range of forest
species, moving beyond the simple regeneration of commercially important timber trees
and thereby rendering a greater range of biological diversity and ecological complexity
visible to forest management. The decidedly interventionist, transformative management
orientation of New Forestry was conveyed unequivocally by…Jerry Franklin,
who…derided in 1989 the 'unhealthy' division of the Douglas-fir region landscape
between commodity production and preservation. Franklin then posed and answered his
own question, prescribing a role in management for the New Forestry: 'Are there
alternatives to the stark choice between tree farms and legal preservation? I believe
ecological research is providing us with the basis for such alternatives.'" (p.173).
This is a reiteration of ecological modernization, an umbrella term for the scientifically derived
economic values embodied in environmental policy that seeks to solves environmental problems
through market mechanisms. The logic of ecological modernization has been part of forest policy
since Pinchot’s movement to incorporate ecological values in setting timber harvest levels on
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national forests. HFRA capitalizes on this precedent by doing more than continuing the
balancing act of economic and ecological values; HFRA directs specific ecological science
towards promoting the use of forests for industrial extraction and energy production. HFRA
relies on controversial forest science to rationalize economic goals as good forest stewardship.
Organizations like the Forest Guild and forest scientists like Dominick DellaSala have openly
contested the scientific research used by HFRA that calls for thinning as a means of making the
forest healthy. Taking up these marginal perspectives in national policy elevates them as sound,
proven science while the alternative approach of ecological forestry remains limited as an
approach befitting small, privately owned forests, not national forests.
Ecological and conservation forestry are intended for small forests, mostly privately
owned, where the forest is managed for ecosystem services, aesthetic value, and boutique
logging. Scaling up ecological forestry to national forest management presents challenges of
public ownership and imbalanced relationships of power among the USFS, the timber industry,
and citizens. Given that the primary goal of the timber industry is maximizing extraction, small
logging projects with special emphasis on protecting ecological values like watersheds and
habitats do not appeal as a policy basis for national forest management. It is no surprise that the
selective inclusion of ecological forestry in post-Clinton forest policy has been towards
streamlining logging operations and reducing oversight from citizens and land management
agencies like the Fish and Wildlife Services that have less of a commitment to the timber
industry. Managing the forest for production through the language of ecological restoration has
posed a significant change to modern forest policy, one that has limited points of contestation
both through administrative and legislative changes to public participation and through
manipulating the discourse of ecology towards rationalizing increased economic productivity in
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the forest. Despite significant evidence that the metabolic rift between humans and forests has
consequences beyond forest health, the precedent upon which President Obama is building his
forest management approach is that of increased transformation of forests to raw materials. I now
turn to the specific mechanisms of HFRA that have kept the rift open and upon which the new
Planning Rule is built.
HFRA and Industrial Forestry
The Healthy Forests Restoration Act was kicked off by President George W. Bush, who
announced his Healthy Forests Restoration Initiative from the Squires Fire in Oregon in 2002.
Staged to appear as though he were standing at the site of an active fire, Bush crumbled charred
bark in his hands to emphasize that fires were destructive and that burned trees were useless
remnants of nature’s war on life. Taking advantage of the spate of powerful fires through the
Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain region, Bush rewrote commercial interests as ecological
interests by including logging as part of forest restoration and protection; exempting from NEPA
oversight forest management that included thinning, harvesting, and prescribed burns; and by
stripping away administrative and appeals processes that had previously slowed or prevented
logging on national forests. These changes to forest policy were cloaked in the language of forest
restoration, protection from disease and insect infestation, and concern for human life and
property at wildland-urban interfaces. HFRA was packaged as a response to ecological
restoration and threats to ecological stability. However, HFRA rolled back protection and
identified threats to nature as coming from nature itself (in the form of pests, disease, and fires)
and from environmentalists.
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This discursive move did not go unnoticed. Environmental organizations, both
mainstream and radical, responded immediately to what they considered a misappropriation of
ecological language by the Bush administration.
Considered a giveaway to the logging industry, the Sierra Club’s forest policy specialist
said, ‘This isn’t a compromise, it’s a surrender to the Bush administration and timber
companies, who apparently have no interest in protecting communities from forest fires.’
Similar sentiments were expressed by the National Environmental Trust. ‘This bill
provides a false sense of security for American people. Congress has let politics and scare
tactics drive a wildfire policy that only serves the needs of the timber industry while
ignoring the needs of the community.’ (Vaughn & Cortner 2005, p.174).
On the contrary, representatives from the Society of American Foresters and American Forest
and Paper Association called this legislation a step towards improving forest health and enabling
land managers to protect people and places (Vaughn & Cortner 2005). Media-friendly terms like
“thinning” were used instead of “logging” or “harvesting,” implying maintenance rather than
removal. In a particularly powerful move, timber interests and the Bush administration
repositioned themselves as the guardians of the forest and accused those traditionally associated
with conservation of interfering with the state project of forest health. The Bush administration
branded environmentalists as the greatest obstacle to forest managers’ ability to proactively
protect and restore forests. Advocates of HFRA, chiefly Mark Rey, undersecretary for Natural
Resources and the Environment in the USDA and former Vice President of Forest Resources for
the American Forest and Paper Association, argued that environmentalists exploited the
administrative and appeals processes to advance personal agendas that slowed forest managers,
drained federal money, and left the forests in the vulnerable state that resulted in the fires in 2002
and 2003. By reframing the forest fires as a result of selfish environmental crusading regardless
of real impact on the forest, the USFS could avoid acknowledging that decades of poor fire
management was a powerful factor contributing to the wildfires. Determined to strip
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environmentalists and concerned citizens of a vital set of tools, HFRA limited the vectors of
public participation to pre-decisional input, which made it difficult to appeal a forest
management decision, and exempted many forest management activities from NEPA oversight.
The policy debates framed forest health as an emergency condition. Wild fires caused by
years of mismanagement and epidemics of disease and insect infestation became cause for
immediate action. Taking up the urgency often deployed by environmentalists and from within
the discourse of ecological forestry, the Bush administration and HFRA supporters argued that in
order to save the forests environmentalists would have to stop abusing administrative process
and allow forest managers to restore the forest through silvicultural assessments. Logging
became a solution to declining forest health, and when it was nestled in HFRA’s desire to
“address threats to the forest and rangeland health” (HFRA 2003) it was redefined as a tool of
smart, scientific forest management rather than a mechanized process by which trees are
removed from nature’s metabolism and processed in an industrial metabolism.
Especially vulnerable to the category of “emergency conditions” was Oregon’s RogueSiskiyou National Forest in in the wake of the Biscuit wildfire in 2003. Daniel Ressor (2006)
writes, “The Kalmiopsis Wilderness-Siskiyou National Forest region is home to the largest mass
of roadless areas along the Pacific Ocean, from the Olympics down to Baja. The USFS
acknowledges that salvage logging would disqualify nearly 60,000 acres from roadless
designation. In essence, the present roadless areas would be sectioned off and dismantled.
Furthermore, the salvage efforts would mark the first time, in the lower 48 states, that cutting
would occur in roadless areas designated under the Clinton administration's Roadless Rule”
(http://www.vjel.org/editorials/ED10049.html). This highlights the difference between the
legislative language that promised to protect the ecological stability of forests from zealous
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environmentalists, out of control fires, and pest infestations and the reality that behind the
legislation is the ability to repurpose wilderness land, or “non-use” forests, into “working
forests” for the benefit of industrial timber interests. The administrative transformation of forests
from wilderness areas to logging sites destabilizes the non-economic values of forests. Recategorizing wilderness and roadless areas by deploying ecological forestry is an example of
how the parallel process of reconceptualizing both the forest and forestry discourse co-produce
and co-sustain the metabolic rift. This is now accomplished through forest health policy instead
in multiple-use legislation.
HFRA further protected its reconceptualization of the forest by limiting the democratic
space available to contest the various silvicultural assessments and treatments. These
administrative and legal interventions, while not the most radical or provocative expression of
discontent with the human/forest relationship, at minimum granted reform environmental
organizations space to contest FEIS with counter-scientific research. These lawsuits wouldn’t
seriously challenge the use of the forests for industrial harvest, but it has forced ecological
concerns to be considered more fully in USFS land management decisions. Administrative
appeals are a primary way in which citizens and environmental organizations can insert
themselves in forest management and can introduce other decision-makers who are not part of
the iron triangle of the timber industry and land management agencies. By considering fire
management an emergency condition, HFRA was able to bypass appeals and categorize forest
biomass as a hazardous fuel that required removal.
ENGO litigation in particular represents the fruition of efforts to construct more
participatory, democratic forms of environmental regulation...Undoubtedly, dedicated
activists have made great sacrifices for little apparent personal gain to enforce their
beliefs about right and wrong in the transformation of nature but equally, as Judge Dwyer
was right to point out, to hold the federal government and its land management agencies
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accountable for obeying existing laws such as NFMA, the ESA, and the NEPA (Prudham
2005, p.187).
These processes are important because they provide an avenue for citizen insertion in the
discussion and management of forests. These processes do not, however, crack open the
discussion of what to do about forest commodification. Prudham (2005) elaborates:
…the ENGO campaign of litigation also ignored the issue of commodity production, and
thus how nature might comprise a different set of use values - that is, how the crisis
afforded an opportunity to examine fundamental social relations to nature in ways that
would avoid a strict dichotomy between wilderness preservation and capitalist
commodity production (p.187).
By calling for agencies to act legally rather than explicitly ethically environmentalists have
restricted their criticism to whether or not legislation is acting within its legal mandate, not
whether or not that legal mandate is exacerbating environmental problems. As the new Planning
Rule became a public conversation in 2012, reform environmental organizations from The
Wilderness Society to the Sierra Club have expressed support, but they also have expressed
concern that the new rule limits civic participation, especially after a decision has been reached.
This concern is an extension of criticisms leveled at HFRA and HFRA’s category of “emergency
conditions” which exempts many management decisions, often those that involve thinning, from
NEPA requirements or democratic oversight. Though environmental organizations often went on
record criticizing these aspects of HFRA, these very elements persist in the new Planning Rule.
While administrative and legal processes are important to maintain some citizen access to
decision-making, they do not upend HFRA or seek alternatives to logging. This approach to
environmentalism protects the forest in piecemeal while conceding other parts to the timber
industry. Retaining administrative opportunities for critical feedback is not a radical response, it
did not take aim at forest commodification.
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Despite the shortcomings of structured appeals processes, closing those processes
enabled land management agencies to designate parts of the forest as an emergency state and in
need of silvicultural assessments that often resulted in logging and active management. “Applied
silvicultural assessments,” the opaque umbrella term that includes activities like timber
harvesting, thinning, prescribed burning, and pruning are exempt from NEPA oversight and
reporting for areas of 1,000 acres of less (HRFA 2003). Further, the Secretary of Agriculture and
the Secretary of the Interior “shall not be required to make any findings as to whether an applied
silvicultural assessment project, either individually or cumulatively, has a significant effect on
the environment” (HFRA 2003). These activities cannot be challenged if there is no public
record. Similarly, their efficacy cannot be measured, keeping the government, activists, and
citizens from finding and using data to support claims that HFRA endangers forests.
Conservative elected officials took up support for HFRA’s re-definition of what it means to
protect forest ecosystems. “Newly elected member [of Congress] Rick Renzi (R-AZ) called for
an end to ‘obstructionist environmentalists’ and declared that ‘not to thin [the forests] is a sin.’”
(Vaughn & Cortner 2005, p.158). Once again taking up environmentalism’s language of
responsibility, selective logging as forest protection was considered an ethical action and
refusing to thin or log was not only irrational but it was an endangerment to the very forests that
environmentalists and ecologists claimed to care for. Eliminating legitimate forms of
intervention and re-describing logging as restoration makes forest commodification more
efficient. Support for logging as a tool of forest health enables extraction and limits ways to talk
about deforestation directly. This is a powerful way to assert domination of a particular discourse
while minimizing the effects of another.
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Timber harvesting was not the only way that HFRA identified forests as part of a
commodity chain. Forest product research is part of the public mandate of land management
agencies. HFRA does not “subsidize” using the forest for timber, but rather it “funds” biomass
research and production. Biomass research and production offers funds to businesses willing to
use available biomass to “produce electric energy, sensible heat, transportation fuel, or
substitutes for petroleum-based products…the Secretary may make grants to a person that owns
or operates a facility that uses biomass for wood-based products or other commercial purposes to
offset the costs incurred to purchase biomass” (HFRA 2003). Biomass production and research is
another way of subsidizing the commercialization of matter that comes from the forest. Biomass
is an ecological term that describes volume, weight, and energy from living things or energy
derived from living things. Instead of calling matter removed from the forests fallen logs, shrubs,
brush, or parts of the forest metabolism, “biomass” reduces the parts of the forest to energy, it is
only identified as a contribution to the industrial metabolism and is stripped of its context as a
living or decaying part of the forest ecosystem.
HFRA funds the development of new forest commodification approaches by building it
into the government’s definition of forest protection and health management. Some of this
research includes creating new technologies for silvicultural assessments that can range over a
variety of terrains and manage a variety of tree diameters. HFRA mobilizes public forests and
public agencies towards advancing the private sale and use of public trees. Forests are not only
commodified in the physical process of transforming trees into timber, but the concept of forests
is redefined as a laboratory of products for the private sector. This is not particularly new. As
Hays pointed out in his history of traditional forestry, forestry studies and public forest
management has long been in service to the private timber industry (Hays 2007). In order to
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integrate forests into the industrial metabolism, the public sector is engaged in overcoming the
contradictions between capitalism and forests by eliminating one to sustain the other.
Conclusion
Evaluating ecological forestry and criticizing it alongside of traditional forestry produces
an uncomfortable view of this supposed counter-discourse to traditional forestry. A quick
reading of the argument that ecological forestry was subsumed by traditional suggests that
ecological forestry had the potential to be a viable counter-discourse to forest commodification if
only it wasn't coopted. But was it a serious retort to traditional forestry? It was never an anticapitalist response, and therefore was always vulnerable to absorption by the prevailing powers.
As Prudham (2005) observes about New Forestry, because it is not an anti-capitalist position it
merely opens up new discursive opportunities for “ecosocialization” of the forest (p.186-187).
Setting up ecological forestry against traditional forestry fails to account for the absence of a
serious critical evaluation of various forestry discourses, environmentalist responses, and the role
of the government in creatively subsidizing private consumption of forests. If Marx’s criticism
that nature’s metabolism is hijacked for commodity production is to be taken seriously, then all
responses to traditional forestry that allow for privatization and commodification of forests need
to be scrutinized. This is not to suggest that there is no place for a labor-based, material
relationship between humans and forests. Indeed, scholars ranging from Marx to Richard White
argue that labor forms the basis for a healthy human/nature relationship and to ignore the
material reality of human embeddedness in nature is as dangerous as overstating humans’ right to
exploit nature. Yet simply arguing that a healthy metabolic relationship is possible through
appropriate labor relationships with the land overlooks what it means to have a “productive”
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relationship with the forest. Productive can take many turns. Managing productivity can be
understood as an extension of bio-power, and the mechanisms for managing forests fall under the
banner of green governmentality.
Not all of the confrontations between forest ecology and industrial metabolic needs are
categorically dangerous. Arguably, growing trees on plantations that are genetically engineered
to maximize yield could keep logging activities out of complex forests. Producing trees expressly
for the industrial metabolism might be part of the solution to restoring a healthy metabolic
relationship between humans and the forest by managing forests with a lighter hand and with less
preoccupation with economic value over ecological. However, there are tremendous risks
associated with engineering trees for wood products, including cross-pollinating genetically
modified (GM) trees with unaltered trees, especially given that GM trees are not engineered to
survive natural forest conditions like fire cycles; Tree plantations displace people and require
existing forests to be cleared to open up the land; Land used for tree plantations produce such
shallow ecosystems that the soil and ecosystems becomes too weak to redevelop tree plantations
into complex forests; and plantations do not provide the range of ecosystem services from carbon
sinking to watershed stability that a forest does. There is no substitute for forests. This kind of
technocratic solution to deforestation is precisely the type of “healthy” metabolic relationship
that needs to be critically examined, and why I argue that calling for a healthy metabolic
relationship underestimates the range of responses and how some of these solutions take the form
of increased management, engineering, and surveillance of forests and forest uses.
Traditional forestry and the timber industry must compensate for the challenges forests
pose as an incomplete or fictitious commodity. They do so through discursively in public policy
and physically through heavy forest management, aggressive fire prevention, and through
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thinning and logging that prioritizes the needs of the timber industry’s metabolism over that of
the forest. Even reforestation, a requirement for sustained yield and long-term profitability, has
been treated as a burden or cost of doing business rather than an investment (Prudham 2005).
This approach bolsters the argument that, “capitalism fails to reproduce the external conditions
necessary for the internal conditions of industrial production” (Prudham 2005, p.12).
Contemporary forest policy refuses to acknowledge the second contradiction of capitalism,
despite scientific and environmental policy language that suggests a heightened awareness of
non-economic values of the forest. HFRA demonstrates the deep and almost insurmountable
conflicts between nature and capitalism.
HRFA’s appropriation of ecological forestry enabled the forestry sciences and timber
industry to access a language that had been used to question their legitimacy and their intentions
for the forest. Mobilizing the language of ecological forestry this way diffused it as a counterdiscourse to industrial forest management and redirected it as a weapon to disarm
environmentalists. Ecological forestry became a cloak for the commodification of forests and a
language to mask the codified attempt to overcome the tension between capitalism and the
forests. The appropriation of ecological forestry is not the primary impediment to repairing the
metabolic rift between humans and nature. Ecological forestry was never meant to re-describe
forests outside of capitalist logic. Traditional forestry found a new way to deal with the
challenges issued from ecological forestry: appropriate the language of ecosystem balance and
forest health towards the traditional ends of supporting the economic stability of the timber
industry. This analysis of HFRA advances the argument that Marx’s theory of alienation can be
found in modern forest management practices. Alongside questioning the reconceptualization of
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forestry in public policy, the questioning needs to accompany the practices of forest management
as well.
The central place of capitalism in forest management policy needs to be addressed
directly if critiques of alienation and the metabolic rift are to be harmonious with critiques of the
commodification of forests. As Prudham (2005) suggests,
If, as Neil Smith asserted in his controversial excursus, the history of capitalism is in part
a history of nature’s increasingly social production, then, as he also argued, the challenge
is not to deny nature’s social production or to engage in romantic wishes for some return
to an original nature. Rather, the challenge is to reimagine a politics of nature’s social
production, to ask what sorts of nature are desirable and who should decide (p.137-138).
This challenge cannot be contemplated in the abstraction of nature but must be situated in nature,
in the very act of labor; otherwise it ignores the unavoidable material relationship between
humans and nature. Just as Marx does not suggest that it is possible to return a stage of economic
or social life prior to primitive accumulation, it is impractical and even detrimental to fantasize
about an original human/nature relationship before alienation. Instead, as Prudham suggests,
people need to debate the value and place of forests in the particular social, historical, and
political context they are in and consider what kinds of nature can be produced free from the
structures of alienation. Any human/forest relationship that maintains a labor-based relationship
with the forest must confront the presence of productive power in the vision for a healthy
relationship, and that relationship must be mirrored in public policy.
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