Dr. M. Rupert Cutler Bio

Acquisition of eastern National Forests (via the Weeks Act in 1911) was authorized by Congress. But at any rate, the original primary statutory purpose of the National Forest System (1905) was to regulate water flow (reduce flooding). Floods (from widespread clear-cutting of mountain forests without soil erosion control practices) were washing out railroads, and railroad companies were strongly in support of public ownership and protection of watersheds. Timber harvest for local use was a secondary purpose.

The Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act came along much later (1960) and gave wildlife, forage (range), and recreation equal status (theoretically) with water and timber as purposes of the national forests. The Wilderness Act passed in 1964 created the National Wilderness Preservation System, and now over 10 percent of the National Forest System is in the Wilderness System (kind of a congressional zoning overlay system).

The original units of the National Forest System were "proclaimed" by presidential executive order and carved out of the "public domain" in the West. Presidents Harrison and Cleveland started the process; Teddy Roosevelt added the most acreage to the system through this process.

In the East, including Virginia, practically all land was in private hands by 1900. Much of the Appalachians by that time had been logged off once or twice, burned, farmed "to death" (corn after corn, no soil conservation, seriously eroded and gullied, abandoned, not paying taxes). After a study of the condition of Eastern, Appalachian forests in the 1920s, Congress authorized the purchase of private land for national forests, and thus the George Washington, Jefferson, Monongahela, and other eastern national forests came into being, one tract at a time over many decades. With Forest Service stewardship, the gullied, bare, unproductive land came back into trees to provide flood protection, clean water, sustainable commodities including timber, recreation, wildlife habitat, scenic backdrops for urban areas such as Roanoke, and invaluable ecological services such as converting CO2 to oxygen and storing carbon that otherwise contributes to global warming.

Each national forest has a "proclamation boundary" established in order to create a target area for land acquisition. Ideally, all the private land within the proclamation boundary would be acquired over time to create a solid block of publicly owned and managed forestland. Of course this target never was met. Of necessity, federal land purchase agents bought land as it was available, piece by piece, and, while some tracts when combined provided large, easily managed tracts, other pieces remained isolated, awaiting the day when the federal land acquisition program would be fired up again and the land between the large chunks of public land and these small, isolated tracts would be acquired and the little pieces would become part of the big tracts.

Those of us supportive of the role of public land in our private-public land ownership system--supportive because some services of unbroken tracts of public forests such as wilderness, wildlife habitat for species that require old-growth forest, clean water, oxygen production, etc. will never be adequately priced in the market system or managed for in a profit-driven land ownership situation such as a forest products corporation--hope that public land purchase to fill out the national forest proclamation boundaries will be resumed some day.

The Bush Administration is taking the opposite tack, proposing to sell off the outliers of public forest and permanently shrink the future size of the national forests. It is conceivable that the stewardship of the Forest Service to reestablish vegetative cover on these tracts through decades of protective management could be reversed over night by new commercial owners...and then the land, after being abused, could revert to public ownership for recovery again, at public expense.

Not only does this approach reverse decades of work to protect through public ownership and management the vulnerable ridgelines and highlands of the Appalachians from careless logging and farming, it stands in the way of protecting wildlife travel corridors between large public tracts (for species ranging from black bears to salamanders), and it would do away with the public forested open space that increases the market value of housing subdivisions that happen to be located with such an isolated national forest tract at their backs--open to public recreational use.

I serve on the Board of Trustees of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, a state agency that holds conservation easements on some 300,000 acres of mainly private land in Virginia. The purpose of these easements is to keep the eased land perpetually in open space. Much of the counties of Fauquier and Loudoun are in conservation easements because local governments and landowners recognize the value of preventing random, unplanned development in an amazingly handsome natural landscape. Conservation easements--held by the Western Virginia Land Trust and the New River Land Trust as well as the VOF--are becoming increasingly numerous in this region, to the long-term benefit of all who live here.

While the land trust organizations struggle to add bits and piece of Virginia open space to the "protected from adverse development" column, the Bush Administration is proposing a contrary program to return protected open space (national forests isolated tracts) to residential and commercial development. The two programs are at odds: While land trusts protect land, the Bush Administration proposes to dismantle hard-won protection.

In this region, one of the potential effects of development of now-public and protected high forest land is to harm the views from the internationally famous Appalachian Trail. Other tracts on the to-be-sold list could, if developed, harm views from scenic byways and rivers. Remote, unsuitable-for-development tracts could well be reservoirs for rare or unusual fish and wildlife species. An international group called The Wildlands Project is attempting to identify opportunities to protect long, multi-state wildlife travel corridors to allow the return of endangered and regionally extinct wildlife species. One of its plans is for the Appalachians. Every bit of protected public land contributes to its goal.

One requirement of federal law I have not seen referenced in this situation is the National Environmental Policy Act's requirement (Section 102(2)(c)) that an environmental impact statement be prepared and distributed for comment in draft form before any federal project with a major impact on the environment goes forward. Surely an "EIS" is needed on this Administration proposal.


- Dr. M. Rupert Cutler