Multiple-use forest management versus ecosystem forest management: A religious question?

Traditionally, forestry professionals in the United States have believed that forest management is a scientific discipline that should be undertaken by value-neutral experts. This understanding originated in the progressive era, typically dated from 1890 to 1920, as part of a wider progressive belief in the “scientific management” of American society. The U.S. Forest Service was created in 1905 to advance this mission, including on the national forests directly managed by the Forest Service itself. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, however, such core tenets of professional forestry came under increasing challenge from the environmental movement. Instead of seeing a forest as a “natural resource” to be used to advance the economic progress of American society, environmentalists now saw forests as having an “intrinsic value” independent of human welfare. By the early twenty-first century, reflecting such new thinking in American society, the old idea of “multiple-use management” of the national forests (and other natural systems) had lost out to “ecosystem management.” This article finds that this shift in forest management philosophy reflected new (secular) religious directions in American society, as the progressive “gospel of efficiency” increasingly lost out to a new environmental “gospel of naturalness.” •Explores U.S. Forest Service shift from multiple-use to ecosystem management•Changing American secular religion largely explains this shift.•Religion historically has shaped forest management in most societies.•Forest management is as much a normative as a scientific set of practices.•Forestry education should address the normative side more fully.