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Current Articles Commentary:
The Forgotten Forest Product: Water STEVENS POINT, Wis. - My daughter, Mary, is a Peace Corps volunteer in a village in Mali. Each day she gets a small amount of drinking water, which she must purify, plus two buckets of water for bathing. We are far more fortunate here in the United States, a relatively water-rich nation. Yet even here, water restrictions have become the norm in some parts of the country - in the East, where supplies once seemed inexhaustible, and in the arid West, where a number of states, along with Mexico, routinely fight over the trickle from what is now the parched Colorado River. Given such realities, I am puzzled that water rarely enters the debate as the Bush administration and interest groups argue about roadless areas, logging and forest fire management. For water is perhaps the most important forest product. Forests generate most of the water in the country, providing two-thirds of all the precipitation runoff - the water that comes from the sky - in the 48 contiguous states. Some 14 percent of all runoff comes from the roughly 190 million acres of our national forests, which take up only 8 percent of the land. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 60 million people in 3,400 communities in 33 states rely on national forests for their drinking water. Millions more depend on state and private forests to facilitate the refilling of aquifers from which they draw their water. A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt recognized the vital connection between forests and water. When Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the first United States Forest Service chief, set up the national forest system, they talked about managing for the greatest good for the greatest number - for the long run. This was in response to the cut-and-run era of timber harvests that left the United States with 80 million acres of denuded forests known as clear-cuts, mostly in the East and upper Midwest. Roosevelt, Pinchot and other federal policymakers were most concerned about preserving the long-term timber supply and the watershed function of the forests. Yet in modern times, this connection has been lost. When I was in the Clinton administration, I participated in more than 100 Congressional and public hearings and fielded thousands of questions about forest policy. Then, as now, water rarely surfaced as a forest management issue. Yet water from our national forests has an economic value of more than $3.7 billion a year, according to a Forest Service report issued in 2000. How do forests produce and preserve water? The complex array of trees, shrubs, ground covers and roots slows runoff from rain and snow, and water is purified as it percolates through the soil and into aquifers. By slowing runoff, forests also reduce floods and erosion, minimizing the sediment entering streams and rivers. Mature forests do this work best. They have the best soil, and their mixed canopy - a mosaic of open and closed spots among the treetops - allows for snowfall accumulation and eventual runoff. Old trees also use less water for growth than young trees do. And as intact forests better regulate water chemistry and temperatures, they enhance habitats for aquatic species. (In many streams this means better recreational opportunities, such as trout fishing.) New York City has some of the best water in the world because it maintains healthy forests in its Catskill, Delaware and Croton watershed system. The E.P.A. recently warned that New York would have to spend more than $6 billion on a purification plant if it failed to protect those watersheds. It comes as no surprise that the Bush administration is proposing new forest-management policies. New administrations always bring new policies. What's unfortunate, however, is that some of these policies effectively abandon Theodore Roosevelt's long-term goals. Roosevelt valued open-space preservation and resource conservation. That's why I support the recent ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which upheld the ban on building roads in roughly 60 million acres of national forest. Maintaining these areas is both prudent and conservative, especially given the explosive rate of urban expansion and the rapid decline of open space. New national-forest planning regulations should now specify that the remaining old-growth public forests should not be harvested, since these wild lands provide the cleanest water in the country. Rather than wasting energy on the rancorous, tired debates about road building in the wilderness and old-growth forest management, the focus should be on how to let our forests do their job of producing high-quality water. Given our water supply problems, this should be the highest priority of forest management. Mike Dombeck, a professor of global environmental management at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, was chief of the United States Forest Service from 1997 to 2001.#
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