Multiple Abuse

Multiple use is both a philosophy and a legal mandate that instructs federal agencies to manage lands primarily for a variety of extractive products (wood, livestock, oil etc) rather than for the long-term health of the land. It is an ongoing ecological disaster that guides the management of a vast domain of public lands. Its primary benefactors are extractive industry and those who manufacture, sell or ride mechanized off-road vehicles. As I see it, it’s time to abolish multiple use and instead manage all of our federally-administered public lands as nature reserves: wilderness areas, national parks and preserves, national monuments, national recreation areas, national wildlife refuges and lands designated for re-wilding.

The Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act of 1960 (public law 88-517) pertains only to the national forests and BLM lands, leaving national park and wildlife refuge administrators with their own sets of somewhat perplexing and contradictory rules and mandates. Yet the national forest and BLM domains cover a huge chunk of our country, roughly 437 million acres — an area nearly the size of Alaska and Montana combined. When the law was enacted, it included only the national forests; but in 1976, BLM’s charter law, the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), officially made BLM a multiple use agency with a mandate to operate under the stipulations of the 1960 law.

Under the 1960 law, national forests and BLM lands “…shall be administered for outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed and wildlife and fish purposes”. Also, “…some lands will be used for less than all of the resources…”. As amended by Public Law 88-198 at the end of 2003, Congress threw conservation the following bone: “The establishment and maintenance of areas of wilderness are consistent with the purposes and provisions of this (Multiple Use) act”. The Multiple Use-Sustained Yield law also defines Sustained Yield as “…achievement and maintenance in perpetuity of a high level annual or periodic output of the various renewable resources of the national forests (and BLM domain) without impairment of the productivity of the land” (emphasis added). In other words, multiple abuse is about producing lots of goodies for humanity, despite a few token words about wildlife, watersheds and wilderness. Protecting natural values is an afterthought. And “without impairment” is a pipedream. Also, although hard rock mining and oil/gas drilling are administered primarily under different laws (the 1872 Mining Law and the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 respectively), in common jargon the term “multiple use” is generally understood to include mining and oil/gas development.

Multiple Use is a public land management paradigm adhered to with a religious-like zeal by loggers, ranchers, agency personnel, politicians and many other citizens, especially in the rural West. Denigrating it is a great way to make enemies. Yet multiple use was a bad idea when codified as law in 1960 and it’s an even worse idea today. With today’s knowledge of the ongoing human-created sixth great extinction of life on Earth, and the accelerating demise of the planet’s natural habitats, multiple use strikes me as a quaint remnant of early 20^th century wishful thinking: that we humans could log, drill, ride, graze, dam, de-water, dig and bulldoze these fragile lands to our hearts’ content in order to produce huge quantities of resources (“Drill, baby, drill!), while doing little or no damage to the landscape and its dependent fish and wildlife. If that sounds wildly optimistic, that’s because it is. Just because something is widely accepted doesn’t mean that it’s correct. The Earth was once deemed to be flat. Slavery was once widely accepted. So was denying women the right to vote. Most of us now know better, and in similar fashion I believe that future generations will view multiple use as the destructive paradigm that it truly is. Make no mistake, the damage done to our public lands under the guise of multiple use is both real and expansive.

With the exception of wilderness areas and some of the larger roadless areas (at least those that aren’t intensively grazed by livestock), multiple use of national forest and BLM lands has been catastrophic, a failed experiment on a massive scale. Hundreds of thousands of miles of bulldozed roads fragment the national forests and BLM lands, with countless ugly scars gouged across steep fragile slopes, resulting in erosion and weed infestations, plus water, air and noise pollution. Many fish and wildlife populations are declining or already locally extirpated. Much of the BLM domain is an overgrazed eroding chewed up stinking polluted weed-infested cow pasture, and too much of the Forest Service domain is a textbook nightmare of carbon-releasing clearcuts that fragment millions of acres of former old growth forests – lands that were doing just fine storing carbon and providing diverse habitats for fish and wildlife before industrial forestry came along. I could go on; the ecological impacts of multiple use are well-documented by conservation biologists. This brief discussion barely scratches the surface, but you get the picture. Multiple use may work for off-road vehicle, timber, mining, oil and livestock companies, but it’s a proven disaster for wildlife, native plants and the humans who value wild nature.

And for those who worry that converting multiple use lands into nature reserves would create shortages of “renewable” resources, consider this: less than 4% of the wood products and red meat produced in the U.S. come from these multiple use lands. Private lands produce the vast bulk of these resources. But public lands represent our only opportunity to restore and reclaim the expansive natural legacy of healthy wildlands that could produce long term benefits for all creatures, not just humans.

The origins of the multiple use idea probably evolved from the motto of Gifford Pinchot’s early 20^th century fledgling Forest Service: “The greatest good for the greatest number”. Of course, that meant the greatest number of humans, not wildlife. It was entirely anthropocentric. Sure, it was an improvement over the days of unregulated giant-scale strip-logging of entire landscapes that occurred during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. But in this day and age it is obsolete, and when something doesn’t work, the intelligent option is to try something else. In converting multiple use lands into nature reserves, we would be administering public lands for ecosystem integrity, native fish and wildlife, corridors for migration and genetic exchange (genetic diversity), and re-wilding. These should be the cornerstones of public land management.

I mentioned re-wilding. For example, the Forest Service and the BLM administer over a half million road miles, of which the vast majority serve no vital function and are the primary culprits in habitat fragmentation and biodiversity loss in much of the United States. Imagine the re-wilding jobs that we could create with an army of humans with their bulldozers and backhoes ripping out roads, restoring natural contours, re-vegetating damaged lands and restoring roadless wilds! In addition, there are multitudes of opportunities to re-introduce locally extirpated native species. All of this would result in healthy watersheds, thriving fish and wildlife populations and a plethora of multiple benefits to humans, such as cleaner air and water, better hunting and fishing, more room to roam and less community polarization — a serious problem in rural communities beset by the confusing mandates and debates under multiple use.

In his visionary book Half Earth, the late ecologist E.O. Wilson argues that protecting half of the Earth’s terrestrial and oceanic habitats is necessary to stave off the ongoing global ecological meltdown of species, subspecies and populations of native plants and animals and their habitats (I’ll add that a decrease in the human population is also incumbent to any roadmap toward planetary survival). To put Half Earth into perspective, although I am unaware of any recent attempts to quantify the amount of land in the U.S. that is currently under some level of protection, as a result of research I’ve done in the past, I estimate that less than 10% of the U.S. landscape is currently managed primarily for conservation purposes. This does not include roaded multiple use national forest and BLM lands; these lands are not “protected” in any rational use of the term. And less than 3% of our landscape is designated wilderness, the highest level of land protection in the U.S. Clearly, we have a long way to go in order to increase our protected acreage to 50%. Yet with roughly a third of the U.S. landscape under federal jurisdiction, transformation of these lands into conservation lands would be a good start.

For those who believe that Half Earth is too radical, consider this: Homo sapiens is just one out of an estimated ten million or so species of multi-celled organisms on this planet; therefore, it seems to me that allotting half of the Earth primarily to the works of just one species is more than generous. Yet I am not naïve. Political reality is a barrier. I know that proposals such as Wilson’s struggle to find political traction. As will proposals to abolish multiple use of federal lands. And I am aware that given the spasmatic dysfunction of the current administration and its unprecedented hostility toward wild nature, conservationists must continue to work hard to stave off the numerous egregious Trumpean assaults on past conservation accomplishments. I get that.

Yet nothing changes unless we begin the discussion. E.O. Wilson understood that in promoting Half Earth. There are many instances in which so-called “radical” proposals of a given time period eventually became normalized. Like civil rights. Or the very idea of wilderness. Or breaching dams to restore salmon runs – once deemed to be a “radical” idea that is now being carried out in many places. It seems to me, that for the chunk of this planet still known as the United States of America, it is time for public land conservationists to band together to promote the replacement of multiple (ab)use with a legislated mandate to manage the Forest Service and BLM domains as conservation lands; that is, as nature reserves, with varying but real levels of protection including a greatly expanded National Wilderness Preservation System. Future generations of both human and non-human life will be better off for those efforts.

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