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Service discovered a reliable political prescription for 

 increased budgets and staffing. Congress readily appropriated 

 funds for the Forest Service to a hire a large work force of 

 foresters and road engineers to prepare timber sales and design 

 the necessary road system. This funding has allowed the agency 

 to execute its own view of its professional mission — to manage 

 the forests. 



With the expansion of its timber and road programs came the 

 creation of vested bureaucratic and political interests for 

 continuing high timber harvest levels. Timber industry firms, 

 workers and local communities became dependent on national forest 

 timber. A strong constituency for more logging on the national 

 forests was created. A provision of federal law that allocates 

 25 percent of gross timber receipts from the national forests to 

 certain state and county governments is a powerful force causing 

 these jurisdictions to push for maximum harvest levels, without 

 regard to whether harvests lose money for the federal treasury. 



For bureaucratic and philosophical reasons, the Forest 

 Service has incentives to spread it timber management activities 

 across as many acres as possible. This is done regardless of the 

 consequences for federal taxpayers and — in what to many may be 

 a surprising consequence — regardless of the ability of the 

 forests to sustain timber yields in the future. 



On paper, the Forest Service is required to show that its 

 practices will result in "a non-declining even flow" of timber 

 over the years. On the ground, political pressures force the 

 agency to maximize harvest levels now. Forest supervisors know 

 they will be judged on their zdaility to "get the cut out," i.e. 

 to meet their timber sale targets. Many artifices have been 

 produced sustained yield calculations that will support high 

 levels of logging in the present. 



One of the most notorious is the "allowable cut effect," 

 which lets forest manager claim in advance — in the form of 

 boosted timber sale quantities — the prospected increases in 

 timber growth that are supposed to result from management 

 activities such as thinning. On the Tongass one of the so-called 

 "added investments" used to justify a permanent appropriation for 

 the Tongass Timber Supply Fund was "precommercial thinning." 

 According to TLMP, Section 705 and the newly written provisions 

 of S. 327, each year the Forest Service should spend $3.5 million 

 to boost Tongass sale quantities that cannot attract buyers. 



The allowable cut effect does more than artificially boost 

 potential sale quantities. It creates an irresistible incentive 

 for the Forest Service to engage in intensive management on as 

 many acres as possible, even though such investments make 

 economic sense only on a few productive sites. The pressure to 

 maximize current harvest levels causes forest managers to retain 



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