Home > Major Acts of Congress > National Forest Management Act (1976)

William V. Luneburg

Excerpt from the National Forest Management Act

In developing, maintaining, and revising plans for units of the National Forest System, ... the Secretary [of Agriculture] shall assure that such plans ... provide for multiple use and sustained yield of the products and services obtained therefrom ... and, in particular, include coordination of outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, wildlife and fish, and wilderness.

Today, the federal government owns 192 million acres that comprise the National Forest System. Most of that land is located west of the Mississippi River in the continental United States and in Alaska. It was included among the land acquired by conquest or purchase from various foreign nations during the first seventy years of the nineteenth century. Congress first authorized the withdrawal of this forestland from public entry and disposal in 1891; those withdrawals increased significantly thereafter. There is also national forestland located east of the Mississippi, much of it acquired from private owners. The original purposes of what were first known as "forest reserves" were watershed protection and timber production, and the reserves were regulated for almost eighty years under the Organic Act of 1897 by the U.S. Forest Service located within the Department of Agriculture.

Until the 1940s, national forestland was not extensively used for timber production. However, wartime needs for wood products and the postwar housing boom required significantly increased timber cutting on federal land. At the same time, recreational uses of the National Forest System increased dramatically along with concerns that the timber cutting practices and the forest road building necessary to extract timber were adversely affecting those uses. When Congress enacted the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act in 1960, for the first time it formally recognized recreation as an important, though not an exclusive or dominant, use of national forestland.

In many areas the Forest Service employed clear-cutting as the predominant timber harvesting technique. That is to say, all or most of the trees within a designated area were removed. This practice in the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana and the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia provoked significant controversy and adverse congressional reaction, including the issuance in 1972 of the so-called Church Report (named after Idaho Senator Frank Church) that called for a decrease in the use of clear-cutting and identified certain types of land (e.g., that with fragile soils) where no timber cutting should be permitted. A lawsuit was also brought by the Izaak Walton League of America to stop the clear-cutting in the Monongahela National Forest on the basis that the 1897 Organic Act did not permit it. When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued its decision in 1975 agreeing with the league, clear-cutting was effectively barred in all national forests. At that point, given pressures from the timber industry and environmental groups, Congress was compelled to enact a new and comprehensive statute that would attempt to allow continued timber production without, at the same time, unduly compromising recreational and environmental goals. The result was the National Forest Management Act of 1976 (NFMA) (P.L. 94-588, 90 Stat. 2949), adopted in the exercise of Congress's plenary constitutional authority over federally-owned land.

The NFMA requires that the Forest Service prepare and revise at fifteen-year intervals a Land and Resource Management Plan (LRMP) for each national forest. These plans identify what uses are to be made of each part of a forest (e.g., timber production, protection of old growth forest, wildlife protection, recreation) along with the standards and techniques to achieve those uses. Public participation is required in the development and revision of LRMPs. In addition, the NFMA requires that the Forest Service adopt regulations for the management of the national forests to insure that timber production does not undercut non-commodity uses of the land. For example, LRMPs must "provide for diversity of plant and animal communities." Moreover, clear-cutting can be used only where "it is determined to be the optimum method ... to meet the objectives and requirements of the relevant land management plan" and is "carried out in a manner consistent with the protection of soil, watershed, fish, wildlife, recreation, and esthetic resources, and the regeneration of the timber resource."

Despite NFMA's emphasis on ecological and recreational values, the statute's lack of detail leaves the Forest Service great freedom of choice in managing the national forests. While many individuals and groups have sued the Forest Service on the basis of the NFMA to halt plans or projects viewed as environmentally destructive, they have found the courts to be deferential to the agency's implementation based on the generality and ambiguity of the NFMA's language and the alleged technical expertise of the agency. On balance, however, the enactment of NFMA has helped to insure that the Forest Service deals with the National Forest System in a more environmentally-conscious fashion than might otherwise have been the case.

See also: FEDERAL LAND POLICY AND MANAGEMENT ACT.