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After a Century: National Forest Management in the Intermountain Region at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
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At the turn of the twenty-first century, slightly over a century had passed since enactment of the Forest Service Organic Act in 1897. Before 1897, General Land Office (GLO) special agents had made some investigations of illegal grazing and logging on the western states’ public lands.1 After the Organic Act’s passage, supervisors and rangers of the GLO’s Forestry Division administered what were then called forest reserves, previously established under the General Revision Act of 1891. Most activities on forest reserves consisted of logging and grazing. In 1905, Congress transferred the forest reserves from the General Land Office to the U.S. Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture. Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot renamed the reserves as national forests and combined them into nine regions, with the Intermountain Region (Region 4) encompassing forest areas in Utah, Nevada, Idaho (south of the Salmon River), Wyoming (west of the Continental Divide), and small chunks of western Colorado and eastern California. Between passage of the Organic Act and the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act in 1960, the foresters of Region 4 worked with some success to improve the condition of the lands under their stewardship. The major problems they encountered resulted from overgrazing sheep and cattle and an extensive increase of the timber cut during the 1950s. After the passage of the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act, Forest Service employees often called their tasks “functionalism”—the management of various “functions” such as timber, grazing, watershed, wildlife, and recreation to maintain and improve the land conditions.2 Compared to earlier foresters, Forest Service managers in the last half of the twentieth century were increasingly faced with diverse, competing interests vying for position among national forest user groups. Public disagreement over the ways the Forest Service has managed and should manage the lands under its stewardship has created difficulty for foresters. Often the disagreement is portrayed in terms of opposition
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