Whats the effect of increasing recreational use of national forest land?
The highest recreational workload in the U.S. is in the Forest Service. We get 850 million to 900 million visitor days each year in the forests. The Cherokee National Forest (in Tennessee) has 10.2 million visitors a year compared to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which gets 10 million and is the most-visited national park. The thing we’ve got to do with recreation is ask ourselves: How do we fund the program? What changes do we make to move the Forest Service from one focused on timber to one that now demands more and more emphasis on recreation? Q: How are you shifting the Forest Service emphasis from timber production? A: There was a time when getting out the cut was very important. I don’t think we can discount that. But we are moving to a system that targets land-based performance measures. Forest managers should be rewarded based on the long-term trends on the land they are responsible for, including water quality, soil stability, basic ecosystem values, the quality of
