by Dave Skinner

The Lolo, Bitterroot and Flathead national forests are expected to produce new forest plans by 2006. The new plans must be practical, workable documents that once again give to forest-dependent communities national forests that are a national asset, not a disgrace.

The U.S. Forest Service has announced that Dr. Charles W. Sperry will act as the community involvement leader, responsible for facilitating, collecting, and synthesizing public comment. At first glance, Dr. Sperry appears to be well qualified for this assignment, with over 30 years of forestry and economic development experience. He has degrees in forest engineering, applied behavioral science, and economics.

He has led focus group discussions that analyzed public attitudes toward wildfire policy, and developed case studies on community sustainability. He is a private economic development consultant, the president of the Rocky Mountain Center for Economic Democracy in Florence, and a director of the National Network of Forest Practitioners.

A casual reader might conclude that Dr. Sperry’s credentials are ideal. However, a closer examination of his work shows a close relationship with the eco-forestry wing of the environmental movement that compromises his ability to act as a neutral facilitator.

I first started looking more closely into his background after Dr. Sperry mentioned that he had done work for Friends of the Wild Swan, an environmental group known for bringing litigation against the very forest plan that Dr. Sperry has been appointed to help update.

With national forest policy such a highly-charged issue in Montana and elsewhere, it is absolutely critical that the public comment be handled in an objective, evenhanded manner by proven experts in facilitation who have no axes to grind. Dr. Sperry seems to have several.

In his 1999 “Collaborative Paradigm” paper, a sidebar on rural poverty on page six indicates a bias against commercial timber: “The relationship between the Forest Service and timber interests fit West’s description of cooperative domination...” While mostly accurate as a description of the old Forest Service culture, this sidebar does not mention another external constituency widely seen as a driver of rural poverty: environmental litigants.

His paper, “A New Collaborative Paradigm,” is limited in its suggestions for rural communities. Dr. Sperry and his co-authors write that beyond recreation, communities should consider stewardship contracting, small-diameter timber, rustic furniture manufacturing, ecotourism, cultivation of shiitake mushrooms and other alternative forest products, such as herbs, bark, and rocks; and wood pellets.

All of these have already been tried, and even these limited options are threatened by environmental litigation. According to GAO, every stewardship contract proposal in Region One that could be appealed in 2001-02, was appealed. Realistically, “alternative” markets are extremely limited and seasonal, as are associated livelihoods. They cannot be expected to develop the sustained demand a sustainable community will need.

Dr. Sperry has written that “a significant degree of distress within rural communities can help promote worker cooperatives,” which was a main focus of his Rocky Mountain Center for Economic Democracy. The center’s goal was defined as “a social condition in which all citizens have, and exercise, equal opportunity for meaningful participation in decisions regarding the production and distribution of the means for their material well being,” and its focus was launching worker-owned and -managed businesses.

In a 1987 progress report, Dr. Sperry wrote: “History shows that worker cooperative movements do best when those involved feel a significant degree of social, political, or economic distress. That is, when external circumstances force them to look within themselves and their own local resources for help.”

Dr. Sperry is a board member of the National Network of Forest Practitioners, whose mission is “to promote the well-being of rural communities and forests” by establishing harvesting cooperatives and conducting “forest restoration” work supported by federal or foundational grants. The NNFP is participating, under a $3.8 million USDA grant, in a mushroom monitoring project in south central Oregon. Under the project, mushroom monitors “walk the woods and document harvesters’ concerns and provide peer education on ecologically sustainable harvesting practices. In addition, weekly public campground meetings are held where ecological and social concerns are discussed.”

NNFP founder Henry Carey has also launched groups to promote wood product certification standards that would make it impossible for loggers to sell wood products in the U.S. and abroad unless they carry the organization’s seal of approval. Environmental groups, such as the Rainforest Action Network, have staged direct actions against such forest products retailers as Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Staples, and have called for them to adopt the standards.

These standards define compatible uses of the forests as “recreation, ecotourism, hunting, fishing, and specialty products,” excluding all mention of mining and motorized recreation. The group has to date refused to certify timber from Montana’s federal forests. If these groups gain the market dominance they seek, Forest Service holdings will cease to be an economic asset to Montana’s citizens.

In his work for Friends for the Wild Swan, as the president of a group promoting economic democracy and worker cooperatives, and as NNFP board member, Dr. Sperry shows a long history of advocacy for the unconventional, unproven, and experimental – and the affected public in this particular case simply cannot afford to be experimented with any longer.

Any expectations of evenhanded objectivity from Dr. Sperry are not realistic. The Forest Service should release or reassign Dr. Sperry to other duties. The plan revision process must be conducted in a truly balanced manner that will produce forest plans that are scientifically, socially and economically viable and, most important of all, just.

Writer and analyst Dave Skinner runs The Hydra Project from Whitefish, focusing on the destructive effect of environmental politics and money on the West’s economy, culture, and environment. Contact Dave at Box 1486, Whitefish, MT 59937, 406-862-0058, email to: daskinner@centurytel.net.