National Forest Management Act of 1976

National Forest Management Act Of 1976

The National Forest Management Act (NFMA) of 1976 (P.L. 94-588) is a United States federal law that is the primary statute governing the administration of national forests and was an amendment to the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974, which called for the management of renewable resources on national forest lands. The law was seen as necessary, because a lawsuit (commonly known as the Monongahela decision) had invalidated many timber practices in the national forests.

NFMA changed forest planning by obliging the Forest Service to use a systematic and interdisciplinary approach to resource management. It also provided for public involvement in preparing and revising forest plans. Also, NFMA established and expanded several Forest Service trust funds and special accounts (?). It expanded upon the land and resource management plans (L/RMPs) outlined in the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act of 1974 (RPA), and started by requiring the Forest Service to do an inventory of all its lands, followed by a zoning process to see what uses land was best suited for - dubbed the "suitability determination." These plans required alternative land management options to be presented, each of which have potential resource outputs (timber, range, mining, recreation) as well as socio-economic effects on local communities. The Forest Service, in cooperation with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), contributed considerable resources to the creation of FORPLAN (a linear programming model used to estimate the land management resource outputs) and IMPLAN to estimate the economic effects of these outputs on local communities.

At the time NFMA was written there were conflicting interests in regards to proper forest management. The major player of national forest management at the time was the timber industry. In a post World War II economy, the demand for timber skyrocketed with the housing boom and people were recreating on public lands more than ever before. Visitors to national parks rose from 50 million in 1950 to 72 million in 1960. The Sierra Club and other conservation groups were also fighting for preservation of natural landscapes. The Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960 made it clear that the Forest Service had to manage for non-timber values, like recreation, range, watershed, wildlife and fishery purposes, but it wasn't until NFMA that these uses were embodied by the forest planning process.