The National Parks Service administers the 367 parks, historical sites, and recreation areas under its purview, while the U.S. Forest Service oversees U.S. forest policy for a much broader wilderness area. When these lands were first designated a national forests, it was clear that they had been set aside for consumptive uses, but new priorities and new forces have brought into question many of the traditional guidelines for the use of this land. The political and social environment of the management of the national parks has changed many times over the years as a re-examination and a re-ordering of priorities have occurred, and as part of this process considerable conflict has been generated among different groups and factions with different ideas about what the priorities should be. Both the National Parks Service (NPS) and the Forest Service face considerable pressure to maintain the lands under their charge in good condition for the use of the public, and yet the public itself is a source of environmental damage that only increases as more and more people are making use of the national parks and national forests for recreation and other uses.
There are 120 national forests in forty-one states--nine states have no national forests at all. The forest system, however, is considered to be owned by and of benefit to all of the people. The primary responsibility of the Forest Service is to assure that this is true, but there are many today who charge that the agency is failing in its duty. Critics see the Forest Service as an agency out of control, an agency that is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to harvest nearly worthless timber, and that does so based on a system that rewards managers for felling trees in spite of the damage to the environment and losses to the federal Treasury (Budiansky 55).
The forests have been maintained with a doctrine of multiple use, and these different uses include the harvestin...