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About Public Lands Project
Our Vision: The Restoration Century
America's public lands suffered nearly a century of relentless industrial logging and road building that have left our forests and watersheds and countless plants and animals in a rapidly deteriorating condition. It will take heroic effort to restore our national forests and simultaneously revitalize rural communities by creating sustainable economic activities.
The Native Forest Network and other conservation organizations are working to promote bona-fide, ecologically based restoration projects which put people in rural communities to work conducting road removal and watershed restoration activities
Since 2005 marked the Forest Service's centennial, we believe there is a golden opportunity to make the focus of the next 100 years of Forest Service management the "Restoration Century."
While some argue that more industrial logging is needed to restore our forests, we believe the first step in the restoration process is to prevent further ecological degradation by protecting our national forests from industrial logging and other forms of resource extraction.
Next, we need to redirect taxpayer subsidies currently going to support industrial logging towards ecologically-based restoration projects – such as road removal and watershed restoration – with the goal of restoring natural processes and reestablishing fully functioning ecosystems. Only once this happens will we see the Forest Service's management of national forests in step with the desires of an American public who want to see our forests protected and restored.
To help support this goal, the Native Forest Network and other forest advocates have been involved with a three-year bridge-building effort between community forestry advocates and restoration workers.
The goal has focused on developing agreement on an ecologically based framework for restoring our nation's forests that is not only good for the land, but also good for communities and workers. While it has not always been an easy process, it has resulted in us finding a surprising amount of common ground.
One of the results of this process has been the development of a set of Restoration Principles as a national policy statement to guide sound ecological restoration. The Principles are an essential tool for stakeholders and decision-makers at all levels to develop, evaluate, critique, improve, support or reject proposed restoration projects.
Unfortunately, because the Forest Service’s budgets are still tied to industrial logging and resource extraction – not forest protection and restoration – the public’s clean water, wildlife habitat, wildlands and recreational opportunities continue to be squandered.
Just consider these facts:
• There are 445,000 miles of roads on national forests – enough to circle the Earth 18 times – and the Forest Service faces a $10 billion road maintenance backlog.
• An estimated 50% of riparian areas on national forests require restoration due to impacts from industrial logging, roadbuilding, grazing, mining and off-road vehicles.
• Less than 5% of America's ancient, old-growth forests remain.
• 421 wildlife species that call national forests home are in need of protective measures provided by the Endangered Species Act.
Click below to see examples of the Native Forest Network's Solutions at Work.
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