A Forest Service that spent the past century suppressing wildfires is now grappling with the buildup of undergrowth - fuel for wildfires, in other words - that has accumulated over decades. Complicating the situation further: a six-year drought that robbed soils of moisture and led to insect infestation that is killing large stands of fir throughout the Intermountain region.

The Forest Service, which used to pay its own way by opening vast tracts for logging, must now scrounge for funds with other federal agencies as domestic timber sales have declined. The agency today harvests 2 million board feet of lumber annually, down from 10 million board feet a decade ago.

All of this is occurring at a time when more and more people are moving into the West's urban interface, where forest lands meet the sprawling suburbs of metropolitan areas. And accompanying this push toward the forest has been an outdoor recreation boom that has invaded it - bringing people into the woods by foot, horseback, bicycles, skis, off-highway vehicles and snowmobiles in unprecedented numbers.

"We've got an invasive species problem all right - they're called humans," says Walter Hecox, an economics professor who specializes in sustainable development at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. "We have this incredible number or people flooding the region, all on an illusion based upon the Marlboro Cowboy. But a lot of them don't really understand the land."

The urban interface dilemma today impacts most, if not all, of the Forest Service's management decisions. From deploying fire-prevention and fire-use plans - such as prescribed burns - to thinning projects under the auspices of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act passed by Congress or the more recent Healthy Forest Initiative put forth by the Bush administration; from assessing timber-cutting proposals to overseeing thousands of recreationists and the havoc that can result from abuses; and how to pay for all of it in a period of diminished funding.

At the bottom line, forest management "has become a social, political and economic issue, and that's the field we need to be playing on," says Penelope Morgan, a professor of forest resources at the University of Idaho.

Morgan, Hecox and fellow foresters, Forest Service officials, logging executives and environmentalists gathered at Boise State University last week to grapple with these and other forest-management challenges. The consensus was that the time has come to try new approaches - to collaborate when the Forest Service begins its decision-making process instead of litigate at the end.

"We have to get out of the mode of fighting the old battles - the roadless battles, the old-growth battles - and try to look at things in a new way," says Jonathan Oppenheimer, a fire policy and public lands analyst with the Idaho Conservation League.

But there is that small issue of trust. Environmentalists claim that the Bush administration, through the Healthy Forest Initiative, has tried to snuff out the full range of input by short-cutting the National Environmental Policy Act through "categorical exclusions" for smaller-scale (250 acres and under) Forest Service projects.

Kevin Mueller, executive director of the Utah Environmental Congress, says his organization is monitoring 10 to 20 Healthy Forest Initiative projects statewide, only about half of which include timber cutting. The group has filed suit against one of them, the Seven-Mile Spruce Beetle Management Project in Fishlake National Forest, because of negative impacts on the three-toed woodpecker - one of the so-called "indicator species" - used to monitor the overall health of the habitat.

"Even small projects require the involvement of the public," says Mueller. "That's important, and that's the problem with the Healthy Forest Initiative. It allows the Forest Service to complete projects - including timber sales - without involving the public."

One National Forest Restoration Act project also is being undertaken in Utah: a bark beetle restoration effort in the Manti-LaSal National Forest.

The Bush proposal to repeal the Clinton administration's roadless rule for untraversed forest lands inspires similar fears among the environmental and conservation crowd. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth predicts that, despite the reversal, most roadless areas will remain roadless.

"I believe that to my core," he told the Conference on Fire and Forest Health.

But right now, he has few takers, at least among those who think both Bush and the Forest Service have misread the changing demographics of the West.

"If the Forest Service follows its current direction over the next 20 years, logging will have expanded deep into the backcountry forests," says Pat Williams, a former congressman now a senior fellow at the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana. "Roads will be punched back in there, adding to the 385,000 existing miles of Forest Service road. There will be a small salvage here, a small sale there, and four-wheel tracks throughout and the sounds of snowmobiles piercing the air.

"The public's perception of the forests have changed, and so has the Rocky Mountain economy. Artists in Montana now earn 3 1/2 times the salary of logging and mining interests together. We should not continue down this track. Americans will end up with the kind of forests we do not want."

Yet, there are those who say it has now reached the point that the Forest Service - and the public - can no longer afford to wait while these issues play out. Give the agency the management tools, and let it do its job, argues R. Neil Sampson, president of the Sampson Group, a consulting firm that specializes in sustainable forest planning and forest land management.

"We've got to get away from something taking three years to do, then having Mother Nature make the decision for you. How much do we let the backcountry go before it becomes really damaged?"

Adds Thomas Bonnicksen, a forest science professor at Texas A&M University: "This is about restoration, and restoration is about creating things - creating forests the way they used to be. It's a creative process, not an exploitative one."

jbaird@sltrib.com

National forests in Utah

Utah has 4 percent of the 192 million acres managed by the U.S. Forest Service, including six national forests:

* Ashley National Forest

* Dixie National Forest

* Fishlake National Forest

* Manti-LaSal National Forest

* Uinta National Forest

* Wasatch-Cache National Forest