The 1964 Wilderness Act represented a crack in the ideological edifice of intensive management for maximum production. While the Act prohibited roads, timer harvesting and the use of motorized equipment in Congressionally designated areas, it allowed commercial livestock grazing, water development and mining on valued existing claims as well as camping, hunting and fishing. Very little commercial timberland was in the nine million acres originally set aside as wilderness. Wilderness designation had virtually no effect on the accelerating timber harvest program.
In 1976, in response to growing dissatisfaction with National Forest
management, Congress padded the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), which required preparation
of forest plans with public involvement. It reduced the size of clearcuts which
had to conform to landscape contours rather than be cut in large square blocks. NFMA also
required the Forest Service to preserve minimum viable populations of native wildlife and adopted
a more restrictive definition of sustained yield. Nevertheless, 50-year plans, prepared under
NFMA and completed in 1986, called for doubling of the timber harvest and construction of more
that 100,000 miles of roads on
National Forests. As a consequence, unsustainable harvest levels
and accelerated old growth liquidation continued through the late 1970s and into the 1980s.