PLACERVILLE, Calif. — Frank Mosbacher spreads out a map of the Eldorado National Forest. Here, he says, is one of the most heavily visited wilderness areas in the country, over there the road used every summer for a massive Jeep jamboree.
Around the map the federal Forest Service spokesman moves, pointing: 800 private cabins on leased lots, hydropower sites that feed Sacramento utilities, timberlands that produced enough wood every year to build 10,000 tract houses, until concerns about the California spotted owl slashed logging levels earlier this decade.
A mountainous patch of pine and fir that is spread out between Placerville and the southern end of Lake Tahoe, the Eldorado offers a primer on the tangle of demands and pressures bearing down on the 12 million acres of national forest land that range across the Sierra Nevada region.
Less than an hour's drive to the west, in a federal building in Sacramento, a U.S. Forest Service team is trying to sort out those demands, engaged in a painstaking effort to plot the future of the Sierra's 11 national forests. The outcome will be a test of the agency's recent attempts to redefine itself and replace its past penchant for chopping down trees with a broader, more environmentally sensitive approach.
Timber companies, environmentalists and back-country users are waiting anxiously to see which way the balance tips, lobbying furiously for their interests.
"We've got people across the country watching how we do this," said Brad Powell, who this winter as the regional U.S. Forest Service head will help select a management plan that will become the blueprint for how much timber is cut, how much old-growth forest and wildlife habitat are protected and which roads are closed--in short, how a wide swath of the Sierra is used.
Stretching from the Modoc south to the Sequoia, the national forests included in the planning effort are used by more than 30 million visitors a year and cover about 40% of the Sierra Nevada range. In the past, each has been managed separately, resulting in a patchwork approach that varied according to the training and temperament of whoever ran the forest.
The new plan, formally known as the Sierra Nevada Framework for Conservation and Collaboration, would for the first time treat all the Sierra forests as a single unit.
