such practices by stating that if after various 

 maneuvers to increase the value of a sale to 

 the purchaser "the sale still will not produce a 

 normal profit margin, it should be considered 

 a submarginal block of timber and not of- 

 fered for sale." If the recommendation had 

 stopped there, no one could quarrel with it. 

 But it went on to say that then, "The allow- 

 able cut should be achieved by preparing 

 some other block for sale" (Worrell 1963, p. 

 64). That submarginal block of land should 

 never have entered into the calculation of al- 

 lowable cut in the first place, and cutting tim- 

 ber elsewhere simply is not justified. The kind 

 of coordinated inventory referred to earlier is 

 a part of the solution to this problem. There 

 is strong evidence, however, that priorities are 

 being set as a result of undefined but also 

 unmistakable pressures on the decisionmaker. 

 The comments of the Bitterroot National For- 

 est Task Force are relevant here: 



There is an implicit attitude among many 

 people on the staff of the Bitterroot National 

 Forest that resource production goals come 

 first and that land management considerations 

 take second place. The desire to keep the land 

 productive has always been an implicit ob- 

 jective in Forest Service management. Anyone 

 who says otherwise has a faulty sense of 

 history. . .The emphasis on resource production 

 goals is not unique to the Bitterroot National 

 Forest and does not originate at the National 

 Forest level. It is the result of rather subtle 

 pressures and attitudes coming from above. 

 While the goals of management on the National 

 Forests are broad and sound, the most insistent 

 pressure recently has been to increase the 

 timber cut on these National Forests in order 

 to make more timber available to ease the 

 shortage of housing materials. The insistence of 

 this pressure is indicated by the fact that the 

 Forest Service is required, once a week, to re- 

 port accomplishments in meeting planned tim- 

 ber sale objectives to its Washington Office in 

 order to keep the Secretary of Agriculture, 

 Congress, and outside groups informed of prog- 

 ress in meeting timber cut commitments (USDA 

 Forest Service 1970, p. 9). 64 



Considerable effort has been made by the 

 Forest Service in the very recent past to erase 



64 See also USDA Forest Service 1971, passim. For 

 an example of the not so "subtle" pressure being 

 exerted on the agency see Economic report of the 

 President, February 1971, "Timber Resources," p. 

 134. 



the public's impression that timber produc- 

 tion goals are foremost in its scale of impor- 

 tance. The pervasive force of such goals in the 

 agency patterns of thought is still evident, 

 however. The Review of Timber Appraisal 

 Policies (Worrell 1963), mentioned above, 

 argues that the interdependence between the 

 Forest Service and the private mill operator or 

 lumber industry in a community may even 

 call for selling timber at economic losses, with 

 a "profit deficit allowance" as a "last resort 

 means of maintaining a dependent firm or 

 community" (p. 34). In such a policy, the 

 place of sustained yield and allowable cut cal- 

 culations is difficult to see. Although it is 

 clear that no statement in the legislation spells 

 out the purposes of timber sale, it is equally 

 clear that cutting timber is not a "functional" 

 operation of the agency to be pursued under 

 any and all conditions. As we have seen, the 

 legislation calls for the cutting of timber if, 

 and when, it can be shown that such action 

 will increase the total realizable value of the 

 FOREST. Any evidence in the legislation that 

 the survival of a local mill is a primary con- 

 sideration is subject to the broader ecological 

 direction provided in the MU-SY Act and the 

 NEPA. 



Forest Service Directives 



The existence of priorities established with- 

 out reference to an overriding goal also must 

 be recognized in Forest Service policy on 

 restrictive directives. These have been kept at 

 a minimum, with the aim of reducing the 

 problems that arise when directives are so spe- 

 cific that they have to be constantly modified 

 to fit special situations. This policy has the ef- 

 fect, however, of making directions and guide- 

 lines vague or subject to wide discretionary in- 

 terpretation. In discussing legal aspects of 

 cooperative road agreements between the For- 

 est Service and private owners, Bayles (1964) 

 identifies an illustration. He feels that addi- 

 tional regulations are needed to determine the 

 basis of cost-sharing between the parties to a 

 cooperative access road in the National For- 

 est. Former Secretary Hardin's regulation con- 

 cerning this issue provides that 



When roads are constructed under cooperative 

 agreements to meet mutual needs of the United 



50 



