About Forests & People -- National Forests Today

National Forests

For All of Us

America now has 155 National Forests and National Grasslands occupying  around 193 million acres.   The National Forest system extends from coast to coast across the nation.  Each of us has benefited from these forests, and that’s not just a cliche, let’s look at how.   In the last half of the 1800’s the American west was set to have the same fate the Middle East, North Africa and much of Europe had experienced over the previous few thousand years, degrading from forest and crop lands to deserts.  Like those lands, America’s west is semiarid, and the western forests were next on the continent to be cut with no thought of reforestation, and sheep and cattle could graze where trees had been with no limits. The Tragedy of the Commons was set to happen again.  

But, Americans intervened in that subtle downward slide and set aside Forest Reserves to protect the headwaters of the great rivers of the West: the Columbia, Colorado, Missouri, the many other rivers and their tributaries.  These rivers are the watersheds that feed the reservoirs supplying water for Los Angeles, Denver, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Phoenix and other great cities and town.  If those watersheds had been degraded by logging and destroyed by overgrazing, the silt would have filled the irrigation canals and reservoirs.  No water storage, the cities and agricultural fields would have dried up - as happened in the Middle East.  There are no more places in the American West to build great reservoirs, smaller ones, maybe, but the best rout to have prosperous cities and farms is to keep the high mountain and mid-slope watersheds healthy and producing clean water.  The National Forests are the very foundation for healthy watersheds and they are managed to perpetuate clean water as well as recreation, wildlife, timber and grazing.

We owe those forward thinking people at the turn of the 20th century a great debt.  The best way we can “pay it forward” is to keep thinking big and wide and have the courage to choose the long-term good rather than short-term profit - “The greatest good to the greatest number in the long run.” is still the best (only) way to a healthy future.