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Show ADMINISTRATION OF THE PUBLIC FOREST LANDS 605 Congress, the two Hoover Commissions on the Reorganization of the Executive Branch of the Government, and numerous political scientists have been concerned that two Departments have large, somewhat duplicating and overlapping agencies managing forest lands and competing with each other for public attention. Various proposals have been suggested to bring them together, but perhaps the most promising development is the manner in which the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service have cooperated with each other in fire protection work, and in sharing with each other the benefits of their experience and findings. The two forest management agencies have long recognized that public forests have other values than timber, watershed protection, and grazing. The multiple-purpose concept, that is the additional use of forests for recreation, for the support of wildlife for hunting and fishing, for the preservation of natural scenic values, and for the retention of wilderness areas in their natural state, receives increasing attention as the forests draw an ever-growing number of visitors. The Forest Service has long concerned itself with these objectives by setting aside areas where cutting will not be done, creating camping facilities and rendering many of the services of state and national parks to its visitors. In a number of instances lands it once managed have been added to Yellowstone, Sequoia, Olympic, the Great Smokies, and other national parks. In 1965 Congress took another giant step to develop greater recreational use of the public lands in the national parks and forests and to stimulate similar state activities by enacting the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act. It provided that admission and other recreation fees received from the use of the parks and forests should feed into a fund, to which large Land and Water Conservation Fund Squaw Valley, Tahoe National Forest, California U.S. Forest Service advances were also made, 60 percent of which was allocated to the states and 40 percent to Federal agencies for acquisition of land and water areas for recreation. Major beneficiaries of the Federal portion of the Land and Water Conservation Fund were to be the national parks and forests. An interesting qualification was included that not more than 15 percent of the acreage to be added to the national forests should be west of the 100th meridian. Additional funds for the two agencies to enable them to acquire some of the privately owned land within park and forest boundaries were highly welcome, for these holdings created many difficulties and made administration more costly. In the eastern forests no more than half the land was government owned. True, lands to be acquired were to be primarily for recrea- |
