Figure 11. — A pack train such as this one setting out on Clear Creek, Boise National Forest, 

 was a familiar sight in the early days of the Forest Service. 



Accomplishments of 



the Multiple Use - 

 Sustained Yield Act 



A review of the past decade shows that the 

 MU-SY Act, in spite of its failure to spell out 

 its intentions in clear terms, has provided the 

 needed element of time. In any institution 

 that is to survive in a dynamic society, change 

 must be orderly and purposeful rather than 

 merely convulsive. The very vagueness of the 

 MU-SY Act made possible new directions. In 

 the period up to the passage of the act, too 

 little effort was made by functionally ori- 

 ented decisionmakers to consider other re- 

 source activities related to their own. This led 

 to internal differences on policy and continu- 

 ing struggles between individual adminis- 



trators. The MU-SY Act, obliging the various 

 functional units to work in conjunction with 

 one another, gave legal backing to existing 

 pressure to view the FOREST as an ecological 

 entity, to be managed on that basis. This pres- 

 sure had been building for some time. Long 

 before passage of the act, the concept of mul- 

 tiple use served as a buffer between both in- 

 ternal and external factions. No longer could 

 the FOREST be viewed solely in terms of its 

 "commodity" elements (Martin 1969). 



Harmonious and coordinated use of the re- 

 sources was not an immediate accomplish- 

 ment. Such a result could hardly have been 

 achieved merely by the passage of a bill, al- 

 though current criticism of Forest Service 

 management suggests that such was the expec- 

 tation. The bill did help to develop an admin- 

 istrative strategy that would allow the conflict 



46 



