Changing Landscape

No stranger to controversy, outgoing Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt walked to the podium at a Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences landscape management conference Monday and proceeded to refute the basic points of the first two speakers.

Talking with neither notes nor necktie, the former Arizona governor, who once studied geophysics at the University of Newcastle in England, politely but firmly distanced himself from some of the "new ecology" themes presented earlier by Daniel Botkin and Michael Williams.

Botkin, a research professor in the University of California Santa Barbara Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology as well as president of the Center for the Study of the Environment, had spent his time blasting the notion that human exploitation of nature is a largely modern phenomenon, especially in North America.

He gave the example of production problems in New Jersey's Hutcheson Memorial Forest, which had been widely touted as a pristine tract that had never been cut. But Botkin, who served as that forest's caretaker, found that the old-growth oak trees were not properly regenerating themselves there.

"We found no oak regeneration, only maple, which are not supposed to grow there," he said. The cause, he added, was a fire-management policy designed to protect the venerable woods. Searching early records going back to Henry Hudson, he found that Indians had lit fires every 10 years to clear off excess brush and promote the germination of seedlings. "We are the first civilization to see people as separate from nature," Botkin said.

Williams, a professor at Oxford University's School of Geography and the Environment, said Native Americans have been cultivating land and managing forests for the past 12,000 years, and there has been "controlled burning since homo erectus" (an ancestor to modern humans).

Describing the notion of the primeval forest as "a human artifact," Williams said, "the nature we get in this coming century will be the nature we actually make."

Babbitt asked to be "disassociated" from what he perceived were several themes in those presentations. One was that "man apart from nature is archaic romantic fiction;" another was that the notion of nature reaching an equilibrium state "has been so thoroughly disproven by modern science that it's not even worthwhile using it as a reference point."

The departing interior secretary acknowledged that "of course humans have already interacted with natural systems." But he added, "What the romantic fiction crowd doesn't understand is that we're talking about scales."

Since 1492, the scale of human-induced change has increased "by orders of magnitude that have led us to the brink of ecological catastrophe," he argued.

"I reject this casual 'everything is always in flux,' because it leads you to a relativistic view of our relationship to the natural world," Babbitt said. In his view, the way humans have managed resources over the past century "have devastated forest systems and changed the very composition of Earth's climate."

Held in the Fuqua School of Business, the Jan. 8-9 Landscape Legacies conference attracted about 150 historians, ecologists and land managers from across the United States to discuss and define how humans change ecosystems and landscapes over the long term. The event was sponsored by the Nicholas School, the USDA Forest Service, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Forest History Society.

Speaking just before Babbitt, Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck made a lower key presentation that included a quiet announcement of a more expansive policy to protect old-growth timber on public lands.

"What I'm asking the Forest Service leadership and all of us to do over the course of the next year is to develop directions that specifically direct individual forests to sustain old-growth trees and provide for a component of old-growth forests as an element of ecosystems diversity," Dombeck said.

He also hailed President Clinton's Jan. 4 rule that puts almost one third of national forest land off-limits to both new road-building and timber-cutting. Since the Forest Service began in 1891, "over 58 million acres of forest and grasslands remain roadless," he added.

"The president's announcement on Friday reaffirms that longstanding philosophy. In an era where 8,700 acres are being developed every day, it only makes sense that we take the long view to take care of our fragmented landscape."

Discussing the economics of the rule, Dombeck said its impact is "really minimal," with only one quarter of 1 percent of the nation's timber supply and 2 percent of the land affected. "The roads rule does not post a single road," he continued. "It does not block access. It does not post a single trail."

By contrast, between 1,000 and 1,200 miles of existing national forest roads are currently falling into disrepair due to lack of maintenance funding, he said.