When the pendulum doesn’t find its center: Environmental narratives, strategies, and forest policy change in the US Pacific Northwest

When the pendulum doesn’t find its center: Environmental narratives, strategies, and forest policy change in the US Pacific Northwest

Global Environmental Change 27 (2014) 84–95 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Global Environmental Change journal homepage: www.elsevier.com...

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Global Environmental Change 27 (2014) 84–95

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Global Environmental Change journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gloenvcha

When the pendulum doesn’t find its center: Environmental narratives, strategies, and forest policy change in the US Pacific Northwest Georg Winkel * Institute of Social Environmental Sciences and Geography, Forest and Environmental Policy Group, University of Freiburg, Tennenbacher Strasse 4, 79106 Feiburg im Breisgau, Germany

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history: Received 11 July 2013 Received in revised form 24 March 2014 Accepted 7 April 2014 Available online

Since the 1980s, the US Pacific Northwest has been shattered by a major environmental policy conflict related to the management of Federal forests. These ‘‘timber wars’’ were similar to forest environmental policy conflicts in several other countries, but were particularly polarized. They resulted in a significant change in Federal forest policy from timber production orientation to biodiversity conservation. The change occurred suddenly and had significant economic and social consequences within the region and beyond, but was embedded in long-term societal and institutional trends. In this paper, I adopt an interpretive approach in order to, first, understand contemporary interpretations of the 1993 policy change and, second, to reconstruct the contemporary discursive ‘landscape’ of the Pacific Northwest including the major resource management paradigms and narratives that guide policy making in this region today. Empirically, my interpretation is mostly built on 37 qualitative interviews with policy stakeholders that were conducted in the summer of 2011. Based on this evidence, the paper argues that there are four narratives circulating amongst policy stakeholders that represent different conceptualizations of the 1993 policy change. Yet, all narratives highlight the importance of environmental strategy making that mobilized the socio-institutional setting in order to prepare and finally achieve the change. Current forest policy in the region is characterized by a policy stalemate resulting from the confluence of diverse institutional, context-related factors and the inability of stakeholders to create enough contradictions or crisis by combining these factors in order to promote change-enabling narratives. Four resource management paradigms compete in the region and, within these, narratives and counter narratives on physical and social events are developed. Current forest policy is dominated by an ecosystem management paradigm, but forest management practices aim to reconcile demands arising from the different paradigms to a certain degree, for instance via the concept of ‘‘ecological restoration’’. Yet, given that the material base that feeds such compromises is finite, a new crisis in Pacific Northwest forest policy in the future is likely. In conclusion, this paper offers an interpretation of Pacific Northwest forest policy (change) as a process in which social and physical events are ‘discursively mobilized’ by means of narratives that are produced against the background of major natural resources paradigms. This includes the art of ‘discourse agents’ in constructing problematizations and intervention logics to either defend the current policy state or to increase the likelihood of change. ß 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Policy change Interpretive policy analysis Narratives Political strategies Resource management paradigm Discourse analysis

1. Introduction Driving up Interstate 5 through Oregon reveals a forest landscape of puzzling diversity: Patches of majestic ‘‘ancient

* Tel.: +49 0761 203 3723; fax: +49 0761 203 3705. E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.04.009 0959-3780/ß 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

forests’’ are interspersed with areas of dense plantation forests, burned forest land and recent clear-cuts on private lands. Timber mill architecture still shapes towns in rural Oregon, but the windows of many buildings are broken. In contrast, the drive through the prospering ‘‘I 5 corridor’’ into Portland is attended by the glass architecture of high tech companies. This scenery is the legacy of one of the most prominent environmental policy conflicts in the United States, the ‘timber

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wars’ in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California. This controversy involved foresters, the timber industry, environmentalists, media, courts, scientists, the U.S. president and congress, and several other groups. It was fought over the harvest of old growth forests, and resulted in a dramatic shift toward preservation-oriented management of the National Forests, thereby replacing a timber-oriented sustained yield approach. Change took place within a period of a few years, but was embedded in long-term socio-economic transformation processes (Haynes et al., 2006; Spies and Duncan, 2007; Charnley et al., 2008a). The US Pacific Northwest forest policy change was a ‘‘watershed event in American resource and environmental policy’’ (Yaffee, 1994, cover text). It also had strong impacts beyond the region. First, the conflict is perhaps the most prominent example of forest environmental conflicts that have developed since the 1980s in many industrialized countries – particularly in the Anglo-Saxon sphere (e.g., in Australia (Lane, 1999, 2003; Ajani, 2007; Hickey, 2009) and Canada (Lertzman et al., 1996; Wilson, 1998; Bernstein and Cashore, 2000; Pralle, 2003; Saarikoskia et al., 2013)) but also in Norway, Finland, France and Germany (Hellstro¨m, 2001, for Germany see also Mu¨ller, 2011; Winkel and Sotirov, 2011 and Winkel et al., 2011) and Sweden (Elliott and Schlaepfer, 2001; Hysing and Olsson, 2008). All of these conflicts continue to this day. In contrast to the primarily land conversion driven disputes on deforestation in tropical countries, these conflicts developed around contrasting management approaches for temperate and boreal forests – between intensified harvesting patterns to feed timber-based economies on one hand, and (changing) societal demands on these forests that emphasized their importance for recreation and biodiversity on the other hand. Second, the Pacific Northwest conflict produced policy and management innovations that were developed or tested in the region, but later applied elsewhere (Moseley and Winkel, in press). Ecosystem management, ecological restoration, adaptive management and designing policy via bioregional scientific assessments (Shannon, 2004) are well-known examples. Social and political science scholars studied extensively the changes in Pacific Northwest forest policy that occurred in the early 1990s (Yaffee, 1994; Hirt, 1994; Hellstro¨m and Vehmasto, 2001; Burnett and Davis, 2002; Cashore and Howlett, 2007; Swedlow, 2011). However, since then, research has focused more on detailed or ‘technical’ aspects, such as the effects of the

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Northwest Forest Plan (Haynes et al., 2006; Spies and Duncan, 2007; Charnley et al., 2008b), or national forest policy initiatives (Vaughn and Cortner, 2004; Davis, 2008; Johnson et al., 2009). In contrast, the regional forest policy arena and strategy making have received less attention. This is regrettable for two reasons: Firstly, the significant regional and global impacts of the 1993 landmark policy change render this case highly interesting in terms of retrospective analysis that can inform our understanding of the long-term effects of major environmental policy changes; and, secondly, it is obvious that different perspectives on, and conflicts about, forest management in the region have prevailed (Spies and Duncan, 2007). This paper aims to close the gap by addressing the following questions:  What is the legacy of the 1993 change in Pacific Northwest forest policy? What are contemporary narratives on this change?  What strategies are currently used in Pacific Northwest forest policy?  What are the lessons to be learned from the Pacific North West forest policy case for environmental policy making and analysis? In the following, I will first provide a short introduction on the history of forest policy in the Pacific Northwest (Section 2). This will be followed by an outline of my methodological approach (Section 3). I will then address research questions 1 and 2 (Sections 4 and 5) and will conclude with reflections on my case (Section 6). 2. State of knowledge – a short history of forest policy in the US Pacific Northwest The history of the US Pacific Northwest is one of logging and timber processing. Following European settlement in the mid-19th century, the vast old-growth forests of this region were first seen as an obstacle to agriculture and development, but soon turned into a source of wealth with growing timber demand, and a source of conflict once the limits of the resource became visible (Hirt, 1994; Langston, 1996; Bengston et al., 2004). Following Johnson (2007), different forest policy epochs can be distinguished (Table 1). Until roughly 1890, forest policy was characterized by the rapid privatization of public forest land (Huffman, 1978; Dana and Fairfax, 1980). Then, concerns about forest exploitation triggered the establishment of National Forest Reserves (later National Forests) to be managed by the US Forest Service, covering more than 50% of the forest area in the Pacific

Table 1 Epochs in Pacific Northwest policy on federal lands (own compilation based on Huffman, 1978; Johnson, 2007; Sabatier et al., 1995; Burnett and Davis, 2002; Hoberg, 2003; Salka, 2004; Weible et al., 2005; Boscarino, 2009; Moseley and Winkel, in press). Time era

Forest management paradigm

Governance arrangement

Relevant types of knowledge/science

Most influential actors

Most important level for decision making

Before 1890

Exploration and exploitation Custodial

Privatization

Diverse

Settlers, timber industry

Local

Science-based conservation and timber management for public welfare Science-based timber exploitation

Bureaucratic knowledge,

Forest Service, National park service

National government and bureaucracy

forest sciences Bureaucratic knowledge, forest sciences

Forest Service and timber industry

National bureaucracy influenced

Science- and planning-based, controlled timber exploitation

Bureaucratic-technological knowledge, computer-based rational decision making, cost benefit analysis

Timber industry, Forest Service, increasingly challenged by environmentalists

Science-based, ecosystem management

Science-based bureaucratic, conservation planning/ conservation biology Social science, local knowledge

Environmentalists, Scientists

Nationalization, importance of courts

Local and regional actors

(Re-)Localization

1890–1945

1945–1970

1970–1989

management Sustained yield, multiple use

1993-present

Sustained yield, economically efficient use, multiple use Forest Crisis/Timber wars Ecological forestry

Since 2005

Social forestry

1989–1993

Participatory network

by regional interests National bureaucracy influenced by regional interests

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Northwest. Hays (1959) describes the creation of the national forest system as being driven by a desire to protect these forests from uncontrolled short-term exploitation through the establishment of a long-term oriented sustainable use system. Gonzalez (1998) observes the intrinsic link between the growth of the Forest Service and its role as supplier for the timber industry from 1910 onwards. Hence, conservation of Western forest lands at the beginning of the 20th century laid the foundation for a systematic exploitation of these forests at a later stage. In the Pacific Northwest, however, the vastness of forest resources on private land coupled with the only moderate demand for timber prevented significant logging in national forests before World War II, with the private forest sector supporting non-production on federal lands as a means of limiting timber supply and increasing prices (Gonzalez, 1998). Yet, an overexploitation of private forest land during World War II combined with a post-war timber boom triggered timber cuttings in the national forests from the 1950s onwards. The sharp increase in felling and wide-spread clear cutting of old growth forests drew opposition from environmentalists and recreation groups as early as the 1950s, with rising tension in the following decades as the logging continued (Hirt, 1994; Burnett and Davis, 2002). The US Congress responded to these tensions with a series of new and amended laws. While the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act (1960) ostensibly recognized the equal status of outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish purposes, it was seen as de facto protecting the Forest Service’s decision-making autonomy and thus legitimizing further forest exploitation (Burnett and Davis, 2002). The 1976 National Forest Management Act, while actually aimed at (re-)legalizing clear cutting in national forests after it had been declared illegal through a court decision, introduced habitat conservation and societal participation rights into forest policy. Computer-based economic decision-making models were subsequently applied to forest management planning, in effect driven by the concept of sustained yield, and thus enabling a continuation of the timber-production centered management of the national forests. It was not until the second half of the 1980s that logging on federal forestland peaked in the Pacific Northwest (Moseley, 1999). The timber era was characterized by the interplay between institutional, ideological and financial forces (cf. University of Montana, 1970; Hirt, 1994). The forest products industry was the largest sector of the economy of the Pacific Northwest until the late 1980s. Local economies and county governments depended on revenues from federal timber harvest. Hence, there was political pressure to continue high harvest levels despite the new laws and growing environmental protest. Ideologically, the Forest Service shared a ‘‘timber religion’’ with the timber industry (Twight, 1983; Twight et al., 1990; Twight, 1989). Timber production was the ‘‘raison d‘etre’’ (Burnett and Davis, 2002) of the agency. Yet, rational budget maximization strategies were also important (cf. Sabatier et al., 1995), with the region’s timber industry lobbying for increasing budgets for the agency in Congress, and receiving harvested timber at low costs in return. This ‘boards for bucks’ deal was facilitated by the Forest Service’s exaggerated confidence that it could satisfy both timber interests and the demands of an increasingly ‘green’ population (Hirt, 1994). The timber era ended in the early 1990s. At the end of the 1980s, logging on federal lands in the region was de facto stopped by the federal court’s injunctions. Federal judges repeatedly emphasized that the timber harvesting practices of the Forest Service were violating national laws. The Forest Service responded to this logjam with a series of plans on how to achieve protection of endangered species, particularly the old-growth dependent Spotted Owl. Yet, the courts continued to reject these plans as being insufficient. The conflict escalated as both loggers and environmentalists engaged

in street protest, and the controversy received national and international attention (Yaffee, 1994). In 1993, the newly elected President Clinton chaired a Timber Summit in Portland, Oregon, and established bioregional scientific teams that were assigned the task of developing a future forest policy. The so-called Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team (FEMAT) finally developed nine options for future forest management and policy on the Pacific Northwest’s federal lands. The Clinton administration selected option nine that allowed for the highest rate of logging with respect to the strictly interpreted environmental laws (Cashore and Howlett, 2007). This option built the basis for the Northwest Forest Plan that since that time has guided forest policy on federal lands in the Pacific Northwest. The Northwest Forest Plan entailed a departure from an economically rational planning paradigm based on the concept of sustained yield to a (socio-)ecological forest management paradigm (Shannon, 2004; Johnson, 2007). It led to a decrease (by almost 90%) in timber production originating from federal lands in the Pacific Northwest (Cashore and Howlett, 2007), impacting the timber industry and rural communities (Charnley et al., 2008a). There are different explanations offered in the literature about which factors were most influential in triggering the change. These include changing institutional/legal requirements (Cashore and Howlett, 2007; Biber, 2009), cultural value changes (Bengston et al., 2004; Swedlow, 2011), changing science, and environmental strategy making (Yaffee, 1994; Hoberg, 2003; Shannon, 2004). As Hoberg (2003, 2004) and Burnett and Davis (2002) point out, three strategies were crucial. First, via a ‘‘brilliantly successful litigation strategy’’ (Hoberg, 2003, p. 7), environmentalists succeeded in ‘exporting’ the issues of clear cutting from the forest policy subsystem into federal courts, thereby achieving a series of favorable court decisions in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Second, they were able to redefine the appropriate level of decision making for the conflict by framing it as national policy issue, again circumventing the pro-timber use regional power balance. Third, they systematically pushed the Forest Service to rely on conservation biology knowledge, thereby ‘‘revolutioniz[ing] the ways the forests in the region are being managed’’ (Hoberg, 2003, p. 7). Following this seminal change, federal forest policy in the Pacific Northwest remained contested. Concerns were raised about the negative effects of banishing timber cuts in the Pacific Northwest forests and the complex planning and appeal process (cf. Anderson, 2004; Burley, 2004; Coulombe, 2004; Mortimer et al., 2004; Weible et al., 2005; Davis, 2006). In line with such considerations, the contested Healthy Forest Initiative of the George W. Bush administration in the mid-2000s aimed to increase the Forest Service’s scope for action, including for timber harvest, drawing on the rationale of forest health and fire prevention. At the same time, ‘place based’ collaboration and community involvement in the planning processes were increasingly highlighted, with social responsibility challenging ecology as the dominant management philosophy on public lands (Johnson, 2007; Moseley and Winkel, in press). 3. Methodological approach This paper follows the tradition of interpretive policy analysis/ case study research (cf. Fischer and Forester, 1993; Yanow, 2000; Hajer, 1997; Flyvbjerg, 2006; Fischer and Gottweis, 2012). I intend to (re-)construct a discursive ‘landscape’ of Pacific Northwest forest policy: that is, I will show how policy stakeholders in this region try to constitute what Pacific Northwest forest policy is about (for previous applications of interpretive/discourse analysis in forest policy cf. van Herzele, 2006; Wolf and Klein, 2007; Arts

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and Buizer, 2009; Medina et al., 2009; Winkel et al., 2011; Somorin et al., 2012; Pistorius et al., 2012; Winkel, 2012; Leipold, 2014). More particularly, I focus on policy narratives (Roe, 1994). Narratives (or ‘‘stories’’, cf. Roe, 1994; Bevir and Rhodes, 2002; McBeth et al., 2005) are the ‘‘lifeblood of politics’’ (McBeth et al., 2007, p. 88). They are the tool by which policy makers explore social and physical factors and events in order to organize complexity and render it governable by constructing intervention logics via problematizations, offering governance arrangements and assigning responsibilities (cf. Stone, 2002; Gottweis, 2003). In this way, narratives ‘‘are both the visible outcome of differences in policy beliefs (McBeth et al., 2005) and the equally visible outcome of political strategizing’’ (McBeth et al., 2007, p. 88). Hence, they mirror stakeholders’ perceptions, but are strategic at the same time. Narratives establish political ‘truths’. They create a fine web of stories that circulate in a policy arena, connect to superordinate discourses, and either stabilize or destabilize given policy arrangements by providing legitimacy, or orchestrating paradoxes, crisis, and need for change. Yet, taking an interpretive approach has implications for the analysis itself: My analysis is driven by what Marsh and Furlong (2002) have labeled a ‘‘double hermeneutic approach’’. Following Roe (1994), Bevir and Rhodes (2002) and McBeth et al. (2005, 2007), I consider the purpose of social science analysis itself in delivering narratives. In this sense, my analysis constitutes ‘narratives’ on Pacific Northwest forest policy by interpreting narratives offered by my interview partners during our talks. I do not intend to ‘test’ narratives against a ‘political reality’, but, rather, to describe events, strategies, and policy making with the language that was employed by my interviewees. In line with this approach, direct quotations from the interviews are an important means of presenting narratives in this paper. Empirically, this paper builds mainly on 37 qualitative interviews that I conducted during the summer of 2011 with foresters, scientists, environmentalists, and timber industry advocates in the Pacific Northwest. I used a handful of expert interviews and consultations prior to these interviews in order to identify relevant interview partners, and then validated my selection during the interviews. While I certainly did not cover all relevant stakeholders who are active in forest policy in the region, I believe that my selection was broad enough to cover most of the narratives that circulate in the region. I used an interview guideline to make sure that the same range of questions was addressed in all of interviews, however, this guideline was used flexibly, leaving room for interview partners to set their own priorities.

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All interviews commenced with an open question that invited the interview partner to tell their story of Pacific Northwest forest policy over the last thirty years. More detailed questions about drivers of policy change and stability, actors and their strategies, and the importance of forest management paradigms and political rhetoric followed. Interviews lasted between less than one and more than three hours. The interviews were recorded and fully transcribed. Altogether, nearly 700 pages of texts were produced. These texts were analyzed using inductive coding. As interviewees were assured that information would be treated anonymously, I will use categories where direct quotes from interviews are presented (E: environmentalist; F: Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (including retirees); I: timber industry; S: scientist). In addition to (and in preparation for) these interviews, I read several documents produced by NGOs, federal and state agencies, and timber interests in this region in order to be better informed about current debates in Pacific Northwest forest policy prior to the field research. Finally, I shared and discussed my interpretations of Pacific Northwest forest policy with colleagues who have conducted research in this field. This was done in order to evaluate my interpretations. 4. (Re)constructing Pacific Northwest forest policy change 4.1. Policy change narratives. . . ‘‘So, your question was ‘was there a change? Was it big?’ It was unbelievably big, it was un-believably abrupt. And there were so many dimensions of the change that played out, some quickly and some slowly. So we’re still in the shake-out.’’ (S) Most interviewees confirmed that a major change in federal forest policy in the region occurred, with emphasis shifting from sustainable yield (timber production) to biodiversity conservation. Yet, in addition, several interviewees highlighted the redistributive character of this change (Table 2). First, redistribution had a spatial dimension: The new, conservation-oriented policy on federal lands placed vast territories under a protection regime where timber production became subordinated to conservation and recreation. At the same time, private forest land was not regulated under the Northwest Forest Plan, and timber harvest on private land has increased since the early 1990s (Cashore and Howlett, 2007). Moreover, some interviewees mentioned that the clear-cutting of old-growth forests was only relocated into British Columbia.

Table 2 Narratives on the 1993 Pacific Northwest forest policy change, as recorded and analyzed in 2011. Dimensions

Label

Magnitude Substance

Redistributive effects

Protagonists of the narrative

Change Paradigmatic

Spatial redistribution

Socio-economic redistribution

Only symbolic

Paradigmatic change; timber to biodiversity era Huge Old growth conversion on federal land halted; management shifted toward biodiversity conservation Federal forest management(belatedly) adapted to changing societal demands, replacing timber with broader public interests Most interviewees

Conflict solved through reallocating production and preservation interests Huge Production shifted from federal to private forest land and outside the region; exploitation problem has been partially relocated, not solved Regional environmental and private forestry interests won; regional federal forestry interests lost, distinct effects outside the region

Displacing rural with urban culture

Change only symbolic, capitalist exploitative core remained intact Small Change was rhetoric, environmentalism was tamed while institutional timber orientation did not change

Several interviewees

Huge Rural lifestyles and economies were marginalized/displaced by urban and capital interests Rural population and small timber industry lost, urban amenity and capital interests won

Environmentalists and American people lost, timber industry and capitalism was able to maintain its exploitative core intact

A few social scientists

Two grassroots environmentalists

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Second, for some interviewees, the 1993 change meant a social redistribution process, with urban capital and environmental interests dividing the land into preserved and heavily managed forests, at the expense of timber-dependent communities and a related rural culture that was subsequently marginalized. Finally, two interviewees representing environmental pressure groups rejected the notion of a major change in Pacific Northwest forest policy. With the major institutional forces still in place, they consider the 1993 events as being mostly a strategic move by a capitalist state and industry elite to appease environmental protest in the region through a temporary retreat and rhetorical change, in order to protect the capitalist core and to reinstate an exploitative management regime once the time is right. 4.2. . . .and change enabling factors and strategies First stage was protests to get headlines. Second stage was the headlines caused environmental groups raising money and taking high profile litigation and legislative action. Third stage was those lawsuits led to political leverage, the injunctions caused by the lawsuits gained political leverage. And then fourth stage was the reforms, you know which is best exemplified by the Clinton forest plan. I think that’s an easy superficial overview. There were so many other drivers from the technological changes to broad societal, cultural changes (. . .). And I’m not sure anybody really knows, you know, what causation is anymore. (E) Interviewees mentioned several societal, economic and institutional factors that were important for the 1993 forest policy change (Table 3). These factors were the ‘‘seedbed’’ (E) that was used by environmental strategists to achieve the change. Factors include an increasingly urbanized population with changing attitudes toward the forests (emphasis on nature and recreation instead of timber production) and a decreasing importance of the timber industry for the regional economy (cf. Hirt, 1994; Yaffee, 1994). In addition, the favorable institutional setting was emphasized (cf. Yaffee, 1994; Cashore and Howlett, 2007; Biber, 2009). Finally, a strategic interest constellation was indicated by a few interviewees and is labeled here as a ‘baptist-bootlegger’ constellation (cf. Yandle, 1983). According to these interviewees, big private timber companies that could rely on their own land for their timber supply literally ‘disappeared’ in the heated debate about future forest policy because ‘‘(. . .) they got all that they wanted, and it was to their advantage, for the national forest to no

longer be a producer’’ (S). Yet no active coordination between environmentalists and the big timber companies was perceived to have occurred. Yet, these factors alone were not sufficient to achieve policy change. Interviewees largely agreed that a set of interconnected strategies employed by the environmental movement in the region was decisive in this regard. These strategies mirror those described by Hoberg (2003) (nationalization, litigation, new science, see Section 2 and Table 4). First, litigation established conservation biology as a hegemonic source of knowledge, thereby at least partially replacing economics and forest sciences: ‘‘There was a strong legal basis that you had to bring the science into it (. . .). At the same time, the issue was unlovable. And so politicians kept reaching out to science in the hopes that science would solve something they couldn’t’’ (E). In this way, new science ‘rationalized’ new societal perspectives: ‘‘I think the sort of appreciation for the natural beauty and wonder of these forests was a continuing theme, but (. . .) the new scientific studies reinforced, or re-energized why people thought these were special places. (. . .) They weren’t just beautiful; they were beautiful and ecologically valuable’’ (E). Science became powerful because it rendered the new policy normatively undisputable (cf. McBeth et al., 2007): ‘‘Every time they turned to science to answer the question, it got worse from a timber industry perspective, but it got better from our standpoint. So, we have embraced science’’ (E). Connected to litigation, science became the tool for ‘‘transforming the ecological crisis into a political crisis’’ (E), which then led to policy change. Yet, scientification and ‘juridification’ were only two pillars of an overall battle over truth: ‘‘A lot of what went on and continues to go on is how do you control public consciousness, public discourse with the manipulation of symbols, propaganda and what we call a free press (. . .)’’ (S). Hence, at the core of the environmentalists’ strategy was ‘‘casting forestry in an exploitive mode’’ (FS). Symbols like clearcuts, the Spotted Owl, and magnificent old trees prepared society and policy makers for change: ‘‘But, any issue you have to polarize it before you get results. You have to make people choose sides. You have to make it black and white, good and evil. So, are you on the side of saving old growth forests or are you on the side of cutting it down?’’ (E). The Forest Service’s inability to adequately respond to this discursive mobilization (cf. Yaffee, 1994) turned out to be decisive as ‘‘people became more and more convinced that the Forest Service could not be trusted to manage the forest properly’’ (FS). Hence, it became legitimate to ‘export’ decision making into courts and scientific committees.

Table 3 Factors enabling policy change in 1993, as recorded and analyzed in 2011. Factor

Substance

Importance

Indicators

Urbanization and socioeconomic changes

High-tech and service economy outweighs timber industry; support for environmental demands increases through urbanization

Impacts power balance of stakeholders by changing public support

Favorable institutional setting

Federal laws requiring protection of endangered species and participation of society in forest planning Forest Service sticks to ‘‘timber primacy’’

Access point for environmental groups to stop timber production via litigation

High tech industry and service sector more important than timber industry, growth of the environmental movement Success rate of environmental groups in courts (cf. Malmsheimer et al., 2004) Ongoing clear-cutting despite protest, failure of the Forest Service to provide a management plan acceptable to the courts (Yaffee, 1994) Visibility of clear-cuts

Non-responsive Forest Service

Exploited national forest land

Heavily cut federal forest land with only one fifth of the former old-growth left

Baptist and bootlegger constellations

Tacit interest coalition across ideological actor groups

Leverage point for disavowing the Forest Service as trusted management agency

Leverage point for shaming strategies, doubts about the possibility to maintain timber supply in future Acquiescence of forest policy change on federal lands by important timber companies with own land

Development of annual cuts after the policy change (increase on private lands)

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Table 4 Policy change strategies in/before 1993, as recorded and analyzed in 2011. Strategy

Substance

Venues

Most important actors

Long-term consequences (see Section 5)

Nationalization

‘Nationalize’ decision making in order to circumvent an exploitation-oriented regional forest policy system ‘Exporting’ conflict from the forest sector into courts via litigation

Federal government and courts, media

Environmentalists, politicians, journalists, scientists

Counter strategies (e.g., place-based collaboration)

Federal courts

Environmental lawyers, federal judges

Scientification

Ecological knowledge informs and determines decision making, pushing back professional forestry expertise

Federal courts, media and universities

Scientists, judges

Discursive polarization

Labeling of forestry as exploitative industry, inserting conservation language

Media, public discourse

Environmentalists, journalists, citizens

Litigation threat constrains management planning, only incremental changes possible ‘‘Scientification trap’’: Science is powerful through, and, at the same time, constrained by, politicization Disavowing of the Forest Service, shift of politically acceptable language toward biodiversity conservation

Juridification

5. Post-change policy 5.1. Hidden polarization ‘‘Yes, there was a dramatic change and but, we have not found a stable policy yet. It’s still changing. Most of the changes have headed in one way, but that may be reversed soon, so this is a good time to study policy dynamics.’’ (S) Twenty years after the crisis, Pacific Northwest forest policy is characterized by what one interviewee labeled as ‘‘hidden polarization’’. While public controversy has decreased, the frontline between environmentalists and timber interests is still very present, including significant distrust on both sides. Interviewees employed distinct metaphors to describe contemporary forest policy. Several interviewees used the image of a pendulum, e.g.,: ‘‘I think that politically the pendulum has swung toward being influenced probably excessively strongly by a preservationist minority (. . .)’’ (FS). Others challenge this metaphor: ‘‘We don’t know if it’s a pendulum or a racehorse on a very straight track, we don’t know if it’s coming back’’ (S). Alternatively, some describe a policy stalemate: ‘‘The laws are more on our side than theirs, the politics are, can be locally more on their side than ours. But nationally more on our side than theirs. And so it’s sort of a stalemate’’ (E). In any case, a set of socio-economic and institutional factors builds the ‘seedbed’ of current forest policy in the Pacific Northwest (Table 5). First, the overall mood of society is still seen as pro-environmental, with the region’s old growth forest being a

‘‘national icon’’ that cannot be touched (Spies and Duncan, 2007). At the same time, interviewees described decreasing societal interest in forest policy, and little acceptance of continuing polarization. Rather than new controversy, compromises are preferred by the citizens. This public perception feeds a rhetoric of pragmatism that is feared by some environmentalists. This is because it may support logging interests given a perception that the current state is (too) pro-environmental. The pendulum metaphor and the demand for a more ‘‘balanced’’ approach expressed by forestry and timber interest interviewees are representative of this perception. Yet, the stable institutional setting and related practices consolidate the status quo, despite political pressure: ‘‘I mean where things are on the ground, like what kind of logging projects are actually occurring, it’s pretty well swung to the environmental side. But the conversation that’s going on is pulling it hard toward the other side right now’’ (E). Moreover, the forest sector has lost importance for the economy compared to the situation 20 years ago. This weakens its political stance. Yet, as several interviewees confirm, in tough economic times, ‘labor arguments’ brought forward by the timber industry are important. At the same time, growing demand for timber from China and resulting raw log exports from private land are seen as putting pressure on the National Forests to provide more timber for the remaining local mills particularly in the rural hinterland where unemployment is high. The US Forest Service remains a central actor, which is, according to many interviewees, still heavily affected by the 1993

Table 5 Policy stalemate factors in 2011 (as perceived by interviewees). Factor

Substance

Importance

Indicators

Continuing urbanization, socioeconomic crisis

Less public interest in forest issues, stronger support for activities that stimulate the economy No major changes in federal laws

Disinterest in forest policy leaves issue to experts and stakeholders, increasingly ‘hidden’ polarization Stabilizing factor

Forest Service acts carefully and respects hegemony of ecology in planning and practices Forest management concentrates on ecologically restoring plantations

Stabilizing factor, only incremental changes in forest management occur

Public opinion analysis (cf. Lach, 2007), interviewees’ perceptions Mostly failing attempts by the pro-timber production-oriented Bush administration to change the institutional setting Ongoing litigation and annual cut below the rate foreseen by the Northwest Forest Plan Efforts by scientists and federal agencies to consider regeneration harvest again Fewer mills and reduced workforce

Stable institutional setting

Concussed, careful Forest Service

Restoration forestry

Loss of timber production capacities Dynamic, globalizing timber markets

Ongoing re-structuring of the timber production industry including loss of capacities and workforce Changeable, but overall increasing demand for timber, particularly from China

Timber flow originates from ‘ecological restoration’; end of restoration period is foreseeable Less political support for timber production interests, but attempts to keep ‘minimum capacities’ in place Increasing pressure on private timber lands

Increasing timber prices and cuts on private forest lands

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forest policy change: First, the Forest Service lost power because the policy change led to significant decreases in its budget and personnel. Second, there is a wide-spread perception that the agency has undergone a loss of identity. One scientist puts it frankly: ‘‘And now the Forest Service doesn’t have any clear ideology (. . .) I mean, what are they doing?’’ (S). Both the discrediting of the old ideology and the decrease in resources have placed the agency in a wicked situation: ‘‘The public is telling them, ‘we want more conservation, restoration.’ The laws are saying, ‘that’s the only thing you can do.’ But yet the conservation community has not yet delivered their budget. So they don’t yet have a new constituency to rely on to further their bureaucratic interests’’ (E). The resulting weakness of the Forest Service has become a concern for environmental strategists: ‘‘If the agencies shrink too much, then there’s a power vacuum that could be filled by the states or private or somebody who’s a lot less able to do it. (. . .) I was happy to have the agencies weakened back when they were the bad guys. Now they are kind of my allies, I want them to be strong enough to maintain control of the forests so they don’t end up in the hands of the wrong people’’ (E). In this situation, the Forest Service’s emphasis on ecological restoration forestry is seen as a no-regret strategy: ‘‘An agency cannot operate unless it has the trust of the people. That level of trust has now been eroded. And so the Forest Service is trying to build trust. And so you latch on to things like restoration, who can argue against that?’’ (S) Ecological restoration forestry appeases timber and conservation interests to a certain degree. Practiced on the vast plantations created by the clear-cuts of the timber era, it aims to transform them into forests with old growth characteristics. At the same time, it creates a timber flow: ‘‘(. . .)whether you call it a timber sale, or you call it a forest restoration project (. . .), if it produces some wood, it goes to a sawmill and you know, we‘re happy’’ (I). While most environmentalists support ecological restoration, for some, this timber side-effect entails a strategic risk: ‘‘If you provide a flow of wood, people have a vested interest in continuing it’’ (E). The decreased autonomy of the Forest Service is related to the ongoing power of science and scientists in the region. ‘‘The agency’s got knocked flat and they haven’t figured out how to get back on their feet. (. . .) And ever since then, the answer to every political dilemma has been more science and more science teams. (. . .) And the federal agencies have never figured out how to abstract themselves from that until this day’’ (S). Scientification has consolidated into what some interviewees described as a ‘technocratic’ ecological rule (‘‘They are trying to recommend social, economic, political policies with an

ecological rationale’’ (E)). This is problematized given the strategic notion of science and knowledge: ‘‘Lots of science is in fact simply a rationalization for deeper beliefs. A justification for deeper beliefs’’ (S). Hence, ‘‘science is political’’ and ‘‘goes back and forth’’ (E). Yet, science remains a central source of legitimacy that is used extensively: ‘‘Well you know, they have their science, we have our science’’ (I). Scientification and science advocacy, both legacies of the forest crisis (Shannon et al., 1996), pose the risks of ‘‘politicized’’ science, including constraints on knowledge production due to its embeddedness in policy making (Maasen, 2005; Memmler and Winkel, 2007). Together with the dependence of policy making on science, this situation may be labeled as a ‘scientification trap’ within Pacific Northwest forest policy. 5.2. The battle over future forest management ‘‘I believe that as a strategist. . .it’s very rare when you can affect substantially the trajectory of the pendulum. I think usually our opportunity is only to exploit the pendulum or maybe to exploit its natural swing a little bit further.’’ (E) Over the last decade, stakeholders have engaged in controversial debates over future management of the federal forests in the region. In these debates, different resource management paradigms become visible (Table 6). Resource management paradigms are the ‘‘shared wisdom that collectively provide the lens through which individuals in resource management professions form attitudes and upon which they base their actions’’ (Brown and Harris, 1992, p. 232; cf. also Brown and Harris, 2000). They encompass conceptualizations related to the biophysical forest system, the social system, and the system of management governing the resource system (Brown and Harris, 2000). Taking a pragmatic stance, they can be equated with resource management discourses (cf. Umans, 1993; Winkel et al., 2011). Notably, these paradigms materialize in distinct management practices on the ground, mostly split according to ownership categories (e.g., industrial forestry on private, ecosystem management on federal lands). In the policy debate, proponents of different resource management paradigms provide (counter) narratives on issues such as forest fires, climate change and forest health. In the following, I use direct quotations to illustrate the strategic importance that interviewees attributed to these issues. As differences between the industrial forestry and the sustained yield/multiple use paradigm were marginal, no distinction is made between them in Table 7.

Table 6 Resource management paradigms in the Pacific Northwest, 2011. Forest management paradigm

Core pattern

Policy problem

Governance arrangement

Relevant types of knowledge

Most influential actors

Spatial and temporal importance

Industrial forestry

Commodity forest: highest possible profit from timber production

Profitability, competitiveness of the timber industry

Economics

Timber production is core, other forest functions are provided for ‘in its wake’

Ecosystem Management

Intactness of the forest ecosystem, forest biodiversity

Social forestry (collaboration)

Social forest; inclusive forest management and decision making

Provide reliable flow of timber, socioeconomic stability of timber-dependent communities, multiple uses Loss of old-growth forests, biodiversity and amenities through harvesting Local stakeholders are excluded under other paradigms

Timber industry, investment funds, private (corporate) forest owners Forest sector/ timber industry/ forest science

Private (corporate) lands

Sustainable yield/classic multiple use forestry

Global free markets, avoid regulation except for secured property rights Science-based timber exploitation, efficiency through professional planning

Science-based, ecosystem management Participatory networks, decentralized

Forest growth ecology (silviculture), economics

Scientific knowledge; conservation biology Diverse rationalities, local knowledge important

Former paradigm on federal lands, still present in the discourse

Scientists and environmental movement

Paradigm on federal lands since 1993

Local stakeholders, social (science) activists

Increasingly important on federal land since 2000s

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Table 7 Resource management paradigms’ narratives on forest challenges, 2011. Issue

Industrial forestry/sustained yield/multiple use

Ecosystem management

Social forestry

Forest fires

Calamity that requires active management (timber harvest) to prevent damages to forests and society

Disturbance that frightens local citizens and requires fire prevention management

Climate change

Challenge and opportunity for the forest sector to adapt forests via active management, and contribute to mitigation via the whole forest product chain

Forest health

Crucial problem, active management of forests (timber harvest) is needed to prevent a serious health crisis

Natural disturbance that must be tolerated, yet restoration needed on sites that have degenerated through past management Challenge; yet forest ecosystems with natural dynamics are able to adapt, old growth forests important as huge natural carbon storages Combat term of the timber industry to legitimize logging, but also serious issue due to past mismanagement

Climate change has been a challenge for the discursive matadors in forest policy as it has shattered previously stable predictions about the trajectory of forests (S). In this way, it has the potential to question pillars of the ruling ecological paradigm such as ecological restoration and old-growth preservation. In the political debate, ‘‘environmentalists use it as big tree stored carbon to mitigate. And timber industry says forest fires release carbon and fast growing plantations store carbon’’ (E). Scientists contribute to this debate by providing predictions on potential impacts of climate change on forests (e.g., Spies et al., 2010). In sum, as some of the interviewees pointed out, contrary discursive mobilizations have neutralized each other and thus decreased the importance of the issue: ‘‘Climate Change is completely irrelevant (. . .) it’s used as an argument, but it hasn’t changed anything (. . .) it’s one where it’s been neutralized, because every side has used it as a part of their argument’’ (E). Similar observations were made in regard to the issue of forest health, which was the subject of fierce debates under the Bush administration and the ‘‘Healthy Forest Initiative’’ (see Section 2). This was considered by many environmentalists as an approach to legitimize more logging (‘‘Now the timber industry is taking a different tact of ‘we must log these forests for their health’’’, E) and, according to some of the interviewees, has diminished forest health as a political concept (‘‘totally useless as a legitimate topic of conversation’’, S). Yet, industry interviewees in particular still emphasized forest health problems (‘‘So all of this land here is basically growing, dying, bugs are eating it, (. . .) the density of those forests is just going through the roof waiting for a catastrophic event. (. . .) We need to stay in business; otherwise the forest won’t be healthy’’ (I). Other stakeholders underlined the ambiguity of the concept: ‘‘To some people it means a healthy crop of trees and to other people it means a healthy diverse ecosystem with young, middle and old forests’’ (E). Yet, once again, different conceptualizations seem to neutralize each other in the debate. Connected to both forest health and climate change, forest fires are a third, important issue that at least occasionally dominates the forest policy debate, ‘‘depending on the fire season’’ (S). Forest fires present a more or less foreseeable window for discursive attacks. According to environmental interviewees, this card is played frequently by forest commodity interest groups: ‘‘It’s a huge issue.(. . .) the timber industries (. . .) still use it to create fear. And the fear of fire is a great excuse for logging’’ (E). And indeed, industry interviewees underlined the necessity to more actively manage the federal forests because of the fire danger: ‘‘I think a lot of our federal forests are in a downward death spiral, and they’re just waiting for the next lightning storm to come through and burn up’’ (I). Yet, once again, environmentalists consider these efforts to be rather ineffective (‘‘It’s a good effort by the other side, but they haven’t pulled it off yet’’, E). Summing up, the discursive battle on Pacific Northwest forest policy is characterized by on-going mobilization of narratives and

Challenge that can be managed if active forest management is possible

Important motivation to tackle the issue of management via place-based collaboration

counter narratives on ecological events by different groups adhering to distinct resource management paradigms. In particular, the discursive field is structured by the bipolarization between the environmental and the forest/timber community. Altogether, this discursive mobilization has not greatly influenced the trajectory of the pendulum since the 1993 forest policy change. 5.3. Redesigning governance: The rise of place-based collaboration Over the last two decades, place-based collaboration has slowly grown in importance as a new governance approach to forest policy (cf. Moseley and Winkel, in press). Johnson (2007) describes it as a new powerful paradigm of forest policy in the region, and several interviewees agreed with this interpretation (Tables 1 and 6). Place-based collaboration has political appeal as it satisfies the public expectation that locals can manage difficult challenges amongst themselves and are able to conciliate opposing interests. Yet, this ‘normative power’ does not result in unanimous political support. Rather, place-based collaboration is only strongly supported by the adherents of a social forestry paradigm, whereas it is viewed with some skepticism by the proponents of the other three paradigms. Skepticism from the environmental side is, firstly, related to the redefinition of the decision making level (from national to local): ‘‘Though the local communities often feel like they own the forests, they don’t. These forests belong to all of us. That’s the difficulty’’ (E). Second, a stronger link to commodity interests that is created by the concept is viewed with suspicion: Collaboration ‘‘created a much more direct link between ecological restoration and timber. So now there’s a more direct motivation to log more in order to restore rivers. Very sneaky’’ (E). Moreover, the shift from science-based decision making to include local knowledge – a major proargument for the supporters of this approach – is viewed with skepticism: ‘‘Collaboration is a way to reject (. . .) multi-faceted robust science, to basically establish public license’’ (E). In this way, place-based collaboration challenges strategic pillars of the environmental movement’s success in the region (nationalization, juridification, scientification), and may significantly compromise the power position environmentalists have achieved owing to the 1993 policy change. It is exactly this notion that leads proponents of the sustained yield/multipurpose and industrial forestry paradigm to support place-based collaboration to a certain degree. Local common sense is seen as advantageous because collaboration means to ‘‘create trust and then also when the extremist would be at the table, the average person would realize that they were extremists, ok?’’ (FS). Timber industry supporters frankly acknowledge the strategic function of the tool to mobilize more wood from national forests: ‘‘One of the things the collaboratives are understanding is, if we want

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92 Table 8 Strategic importance of place-based collaboration. Issue

Industrial forestry

Sustained yield/multiple use

Ecosystem management

Social forestry

Overall appraisal

Useful, if more timber can be mobilized, but not effective enough

Useful in parts but also giving too much power to locals

Can be useful, but tendency to replace scientific evidence and national demands with local interests

Best tool to create cooperation and locally adapted problem solutions

to have healthy forests in the future we can’t afford to lose any of those mills. So, in fact, (. . .) the (name of collaborative) is specifically designing timber sales to help support this mill’’ (I). Nevertheless, several interviewees representing an industrial forestry or sustained yield/multipurpose forestry paradigm were skeptical about place-based collaboration. First, they objected to handing power over to local interest groups: ‘‘There’s a fine line between collaborating and capitulating. (. . .) ‘‘what will you allow us to do and not sue us? And they call that collaboration. Well, I don’t call it collaboration, I call it extortion!’’ (I). In addition, they are skeptical because of the limited potential of place-based collaboration to support an industry that produces for global markets: ‘‘It’s like eating an elephant, one bite at a time’’ (FS). Summarizing, place-based collaboration has gained political traction in the region. Despite significant skepticism, the approach has supporters amongst all resource management paradigms. Even though the motivations for engaging in collaboration differ greatly amongst different interests groups, place-based collaboration is currently the only strategic policy tool that may challenge the hegemony of forest ecosystem management and conservation on federal lands (cf. Johnson, 2007) (Table 8). 5.4. Hopes and expectations ‘‘I don’t think we’ll see any change in forest policy until we face some new crises. . . or if somebody creates those crises as what’s happened with the North West forest issues’’ (S). Finally, interviewees were asked about their expectations of future forest policy. Overall, for the next ten years, interviewees expect Pacific Northwest forest policy to remain stable, with only gradual adjustments. Environmental strategists expect little progress, but are confident that the current level of conservation can be maintained: ‘‘This is a time (. . .) of holding on to what you have, instead of trying to move and improve things further’’ (E). Forestry and timber industry interest groups also expect less change. They expressed the view that for a major policy change to happen, a significant political crisis would be needed, which is not in sight: ‘‘Forests are not on the radar. It comes on the radar with fire, but politically it’s probably safer to burn up a few trees than to take action and to build policies that would make the forest less vulnerable because that involves cutting trees’’ (S). In the absence of crisis, strategists concentrate on small advances in the discursive battle, and mark out ‘lines of absolute defense’ for a future policy. For environmentalists, such a line is the preservation of the remaining old growth forests because, in old growth conservation, ‘‘every victory is temporary and every loss is permanent‘‘ (E). Yet, for timber interests, any substantial further loss of wood processing industry in the region would compromise the possibility to manage the federal forests: ‘‘I think we have enough infrastructure right now but we’re kind of at the point (. . .) if we want to have healthy forests in the future we can’t afford to lose any of those mills’’ (I). With both industrial infrastructure and preserved old growth being sacrosanct, the debate circulates amongst established compromise activities, that is, ecological restoration of plantations: ‘‘So we are trying to do as much as we can to put some timber out there and keep some of the mills operating at this time at some level. (. . .) to make sure we keep some timber flowing, is to do the least controversial treatments now’’ (FS).

Yet, according to many interviewees, ecological restoration cannot be used as a pacifier forever. The currently ‘restored’ plantations will grow older and the options for politically uncontested thinning will become fewer in the future. In this regard, the resource base that feeds the current compromise is finite, and a future crisis seems predictable: ‘‘But the next crisis, if there is one, will be in 20 years when the ecological restoration thinning is done and the timber industry that’s still here says, ‘well, now we need more logs.’ (. . .) And that’s still being fought out but we are winning more than they are’’ (E). In addition, continued stalemate might be favorable for environmental interests in the long run. First, the new management paradigm of conservation is becoming more and more established as ‘normality’ that is no longer questioned, and, second, industrial capacity and knowledge to process larger dimension timber from public lands is further diminishing (because private lands usually produce small dimension industrial plantation timber). Given this situation, it is not surprising that some forest and timber interest interviewees suspect that ‘‘at least a portion of the environmental groups are not looking for resolution, they are looking for continued stalemate’’ (FS). This, however, ignores the point that for those environmental groups, the status quo may be the solution. Finally, all interviewees point at major socio-economic forces that lie beyond their scope, but that will be decisive for future strategy making in forest policy in the Pacific Northwest. These forces encompass the development of the economy and political (ideological) meta-discourses. Interestingly, the connection between changing meta-discourses and the strength of commodity or environmental interests is not as clear as it might be: One environmentalist pointed out that Republican austerity ideology may more effectively hinder future timber operations on federal land than environmentalist protests. In a similar manner, a poor economy is expected to weaken environmental in relation to economic and labor arguments, but may also reduce pressure on forests via reduced demand for timber. Yet, in the long term, one interviewee expects the forces of capitalism entrenched in American society to be decisive: ‘‘And our economy is based a lot on growth (. . .) and I think that national appetite for wood is what will drive us to change. And the reason I say that is because this is where most of the wood in the US is produced. In the Pacific North West’’ (FS). 6. Conclusions What can be learned from the case of Pacific Northwest forest policy? First of all, this analysis has revealed the complexity of major natural resource and environmental conflicts, and the potential of an interpretive perspective for analyzing it. At first glance, the story of the Spotted Owl is a simple one – a landmark victory for conservation that halted the exploitation of primary forests before they were fully harvested. Protection was achieved via splitting the land, and also via partly translocating the exploitation problem to forests outside of the region. Yet, closer analysis reveals that the situation is more complicated. Issues such as an urban-rural divide, major socio-economic changes connected to or overruling forest policy change, and eclectic interest structures are interspersed with a deeply entrenched polarization between commodity and environmental demands. While most interviewees agreed that

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change in this region has been huge, they had contrasting perceptions of the extent of causalities as well as on the social, ecological and economic consequences. Hence, there are different stories told about the change – for many interviewees, it is about changing attitudes toward old growth forests, and finally achieving their protection. Yet, for others, it is a story of urban lifestyles overruling rural ones, and for a few, it is even about an environmental pyrrhic victory given that a deeply entrenched capitalist resource exploitation system remained intact. Such divergent interpretations demonstrate the value of an interpretive policy analysis approach that understands policy making at its core as a battle over truth. Forest policy making in the Pacific Northwest is essentially a process of aligning socioeconomic trends and ecological events with political governance logics – such as law, collaboration, or timber markets – via narratives; a process of legitimizing interventions. The complexity of the issues at stake as well as contested and ambiguous knowledge creates plenty of room for discursive policy making – even seemingly powerful institutions such as the federal environmental laws became effective only once they were ‘mobilized’ by a variety of environmental strategies, first and foremost targeting the redefinition of forest policy in the region. These strategies were (and are) fed by knowledge and discourses that circulate in the region. Distinct resource management paradigms are aggregated orders of such knowledge. Science is a major source of knowledge and resource in this battle over truth. The continuous demand for legitimizing scientific knowledge as well as the direct access of scientists to decision making may be indicators of remaining tension, a lack of ideological settlement, and persisting uncertainty after the collapse of old hegemonic paradigms and ideologies in 1993. This also has implications for the establishment of a major scholarly interpretation of the 1993 events: While this paper has largely confirmed Yaffee’s contemporary interpretation of the 1993 forest crisis as a ‘‘watershed event in American resource and environmental policy’’ (Yaffee, 1994, cover text, see introduction), it remains contestable as to exactly which watershed(s) have been crossed, and in which direction the river in the new basin will flow. Viewed within a global context, this analysis of the Pacific Northwest case reveals striking similarities with forest environmental conflicts in other regions. For instance, the environmental strategies that led to (and then stabilized) the paradigm change on federal lands are strikingly similar to those that were (and are) used by the environmental movement in Europe to establish and implement the Habitats Directive (the ‘‘cornerstone’’ of European biodiversity policy’’, European Commission, 2012) in 1992 and, with it, the EU’s network of protected areas ‘‘Natura 2000’’: Scientification (inter alia through the legal institutionalization of conservation science as a crucial type of knowledge via the Habitats Directive) together with juridification (manifested in the prominent role of courts, particularly the European Court of Justice, in enforcing the implementation of the policy, cf. Beunen et al., 2007) and the strategic ‘‘upscaling’’ of the policy making process in order to bypass commodity oriented national policy arenas (in Europe from the national to the European policy level, cf. Weber and Christophersen, 2002) are comparable to the strategies used by the American environmental movement. Moreover, the current debate on Natura 2000 is characterized by similar argumentative patterns – including narratives and counter narratives on climate change (De Koning et al., 2013) and on the value of local stakeholder participation (Rauschmayer et al., 2009). A more in-depth, systematic comparison of these policy arenas (including an investigation of the role of transatlantic networks and policy diffusion) would thus be highly interesting, yet is beyond the scope of this paper. Returning to the Pacific Northwest, the change that resulted from these strategies was – according to most interviewees – significant.

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In this region, the former timber-oriented system has outmaneuvered itself through its narrow, exploitative approach to a multifaceted natural resource with high social value, camouflaged with professional optimism and economic rationality. Out of the ruins, the new paradigm of ecosystem management and conservation has become hegemonic. It dominates the rhetoric of interest groups in the region. Yet, tension between this paradigm and the old paradigms is still present – one interviewee representing the timber industry frankly admitted that the dominance of ecological language in the public debate ‘‘drives us crazy’’. In general, however, the matadors of the old paradigms have learned to adapt. Terms like ecological restoration (meaning thinning of forest plantations), place-based conservation (meaning local negotiations on forest management), and forest health are expressions of such adjustments. These concepts allow for time- and space-bound compromises between timber production and conservation, drawing on the language of ecology. Environmentalists and scientists, on the other hand, feel the burden of being in a reigning position. Two decades after having achieved one of the greatest ever victories of environmentalism in the United States, they perceive themselves in an ongoing defensive war to maintain these achievements, and to address the damages and doubts that have been brought about by the change. The evolution of ecological research in the region since the change is fascinating in this regard. For instance, interest in early stages of forest succession (as opposed to the long-term focus on old-growth stands) has recently increased (Swanson et al., 2010), and leading ecological scientists are currently engaged in pilot projects working toward an ‘‘ecological’’ regeneration harvest (post the current ecological regeneration thinning). In this sense, one may argue that science is subject to its own paradigmatic swings of a pendulum that correspond with those of societal and political pendula. The environmental movement in the region, however, has split into groups that continue to draw on the ‘egalitarian grassroots’ spirit of the 1980s by employing a polarized rhetoric, and those that engage in more pragmatic, collaboration-oriented approaches. Yet, both strategies are driven by the desire to prevent the pendulum from swinging back. Altogether, these recent moves of both scientists and environmentalists target what one may call a diversification and ‘pragmatization’ of the hegemonic paradigm. That is, they try to develop solutions for ecological phenomena and political challenges that are not fully ‘covered’ by the hegemonic resource management paradigm, yet without questioning the paradigm itself. Such a diversification strategy may be interpreted as ‘lessons learned’ from the failure of the previous timber primacy paradigm to organize change via diversification within the old paradigm itself. Overall, the legacy of the timber wars is still very present. Ideological polarization determines any new approach to forest policy making right from the beginning. Place-based collaboration is a telling example here. Surrounded by a powerful nimbus of democratization, this approach to conflict solution is mostly assessed strategically by different interest groups, and only supported to the degree that it may help to achieve distinct ideological goals and interests. Beyond place-based collaboration, strategists constantly engage in the production of (counter) narratives on social and physical events that tend to neutralize each other. Together with the strategies that were catalyzing the major policy change of 1993 – litigation, scientification, and nationalization – this discursive battle reduces the federal agencies’ room for maneuver, with the Forest Service still heavily shattered by a loss of reputation and resources since the 1980s. In such a state of mutual blockage, and in the absence of a major crisis, significant policy change seems unlikely (cf. Sotirov and Memmler, 2012). Rather, change may be incremental and will be

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characterized by gradual shifts in forest-related discourses, probably facilitated by social, political, or economic events and the overall potency of the interpretations of such events that can be provided by the adherents of different management paradigms. The foreseeable end of the Forest Service’s ‘ecological restoration’ strategy due to limits of the resource is interesting in this regard. It will sooner or later trigger new political rationales and legitimizations once a certain degree of timber management in the national forests is set to be continued. In addition, the venues and strategies of the groups involved may slowly change. The powerful combination of scientification and juridification that drove the 1993 policy change, and has since stabilized the reign of the conservation paradigm, may lose its grip if the societal support for conservation and its basis (science, national laws) should erode through powerful counter narratives (for instance related to social forestry). In this sense, future intervention strategies of stakeholder groups may also be judged in terms of discursively negotiated appropriateness. In summary, the future trajectory of the pendulum in forest policy in the Pacific Northwest will depend on the ability of strategists to successfully link future societal, ecological, and economic events in the region with shifting societal and political meta-discourses. The accepted ‘truth’ about forest policy in this region will lie in the interpretations that are most convincing politically and in the intervention logics that these provide. Further mirroring the moves of the pendulum using the tools of interpretive policy analysis will be a fascinating endeavor for political science scholars – in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Acknowledgements First of all I am grateful to the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, for having been a great host during my research stay in the US, and particularly Louise Fortmann for her generous support of my work. Another big thankyou goes to Margaret Shannon, Cass Moseley, Sally K. Fairfax and Ben Cashore, for supporting me with their perspectives on and deep insights into Pacific Northwest forest policy, to Emily Kilham for proofreading, and to my colleagues in Freiburg who did all the teaching while I was abroad. Moreover, I am grateful to the German Science Foundation (DFG) for financing my research in the Pacific Northwest and at Berkeley. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my interviewees all over Oregon, Washington State, and California, for sharing with this ‘‘outsider’’ from Europe their knowledge of and sometimes emotional experiences during the timber wars and beyond. References Ajani, J.A., 2007. The Forest Wars. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Anderson, M., 2004. Response: Appeals Process Provides Multiple Benefits. J. For. 102 (2), 48–49. Arts, B., Buizer, M., 2009. Forests, discourses, institutions: a discursive-institutional analysis of global forest governance. For. Policy Econ. 11 (5–6), 340–347. Bengston, D.N., Webb, T.J., Fan, D.P., 2004. Shifting forest value orientations in the United States, 1980–2001. A computer content analysis. Environ. Values 13 (3) . Bernstein, S., Cashore, B., 2000. Globalization, four paths of internationalization and domestic policy change: the case of EcoForestry in British Columbia, Canada. Can. J. Policy Sci. 33 (1), 67–99. Beunen, R., van Ark, R., 2007. De politieke dimensie van Natura 2000. Landschap 24 (1), 13–20. Bevir, M., Rhodes, R.A.W., 2002. Interpretive theory. In: Marsh, D. (Ed.), Theory and Methods in Political Science.Palgrave, Basingstoke et al. Biber, E., 2009. Too many things to do How to deal with the dysfunctions of multiple-goal agencies. Harv. Environ. Law Rev. 33, 1–63. Boscarino, J.E., 2009. Surfing for problems: Advocacy Group Strategy in U. S. Forestry Policy. Policy Stud. J. 37 (3), 415–434. Brown, G., Harris, C.C., 1992. The US Forest Service: toward the new resource management paradigm? Soc. Nat. Resour. 5, 231–245. Brown, G., Harris, C.C., 2000. The US Forest Service: Whither the new resource management paradigm? J. Environ. Manage. 18, 1–19.

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