group or person. The Forest Service may in- 

 deed be pursuing rational and well-coordi- 

 nated land management policies, but if this is 

 so, then the real problem is a communications 

 gap (some would say a gaping canyon) be- 

 tween the foresters and the general public. 

 There may simply be an enormous public rela- 

 tions problem. 



Both of these explanations of the absence 

 of identifiable goals in Forest Service practice 

 may contain more than a grain of truth. We 

 cannot determine their validity, however, un- 

 til we have explored a third possible explana- 

 tion — the subject of this study. It is that the 

 Forest Service may have failed in the past to 

 fully recognize its goals and the function of 

 goals in the decisionmaking process. R. S. 

 Whaley, a serious student of forest manage- 

 ment problems, may be correct in asserting 

 that 



Our current orientation to solving multiple use 

 problems seems to have the proverbial "cart be- 

 fore the horse." We are concentrating on the 

 quantification of values without a clearcut def- 

 inition of how derived values will be used. A 

 more logical approach involves three steps, the 

 order of which is critical. Step one must be a 

 realistic and explicit statement of goals for the 



development and use of the public resources in 

 question . . . With an explicit statement of re- 

 source management goals, the second step is to 

 develop a valuation system which produces a 

 set of indices related to the measurement of 

 benefits . . . The third step is, of course, the ap- 

 plication of the allocation model and its associ- 

 ated value system to multiple use decisionmak- 

 ing (Whaley 1970, p. 564-565; emphasis 

 added). 



The Forest Service may appear to have no 

 goals because it has not adequately clarified 

 them. The goal of "good forest land manage- 

 ment" is in the mind of virtually every for- 

 ester in the agency, but has never been articu- 

 lated fully enough to be useful in the deci- 

 sionmaking process. Without a clearly stated 

 goal, neither the agency noV its critics can 

 firmly establish that the land is or is not being 

 managed so as to best meet the needs of the 

 American people. This study hopes to (1) de- 

 velop a decision model embodying the goal 

 specified to the Forest Service by legislative 

 mandate; (2) identify some incongruities and 

 weaknesses in the decisionmaking process as it 

 is now carried out within the agency; and 

 (3) indicate present and possible future ap- 

 proaches to eliminating these incongruities. 



3 



