ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES in rocky mountain coniferous ...

THE SITUATION
Forest land managers must choose among a1 ternatives in an atmosphere of in-
creasing conflict and exposure. Once management objectives for a particular tract of
land are established, it ought to be relatively easy to choose the best strategy for
satisfying those objectives. Unfortunately, and especially with respect to public
forest lands, the objectives of forest management are seldom sufficiently clear or
specific to enable a manager to define his available alternatives.
In most situations a tract of forested land has merchantable timber growing on
it, or is otherwise deemed ready for or in need of some harvesting treatment. De-
ciding which trees should be cut, which trees and residues should be removed, the
method for extracting the fiber, and what subsequent treatment of the residues and
site should be undertaken, becomes a matter of weighing the environmental and economic
consequences of various a1 ternat i ves.
When one views a treatment as a specific combination of silvicul tural prescrip-
tion, removal specification, harvesting method and post-harvest site prescription,
the number of treatment a1 ternatives becomes very large, For example, even when a
manager considers only two silvicultural prescriptions, two removal specifications,
two harvesting methods and two inmediate post-harvest site treatments, that manager
is faced with choosing from among 2' = 16 treatment a1 ternatives. And if he or she
further considers the size, shape, and placement of harvesting units and the subse-
quent sil vicul tural treatment a1 ternatives his or her successors will face at various
times in the future, the array of choices becomes astronomical in size.
Assume that for each alternative specified, the manager could predict with a
high degree of accuracy the costs, the revenues, the envi ronmental consequences, and
some measure of associated public reactions at various points in time following
treatment, How could the manager synthesize this massive quantity of information,
and by what process would he or she seek a defensible decision? We will not attempt
to answer this question here, but note that good decisions can be made neither in a
vacuum nor in a morass of information. A manager must be provided with, or must
select, that and only that information relevant to a given decision. The ability to
cull information is far more important than the ability to gather information, The
recent Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon (1957) has suggested that most managerial
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decisions are made in the spirit of satisf in the constraints rather than optimizing
some predetermined value. It appears that umans are incapable of using all available
information. Information must be greatly simplified (organized) in order to be
effectively utilized.
We suggest that a considerable effort should be made to address the problem of
how managers utilize information. It fs not sufficient to provide information; it
must be provided in the right quality and kind. Note that we mean not to prescribe
how decisions should be made but merely to study how decisions are made.
HOW INFORMATION IS USED IN THE DECISIONMAKING PROCESS
We feel strongly that when trying to specify how Information is to be used, it
is imperative that the decisionmaking process be considered. Green, of the Wharton
School of Business, and Wind, of Bell Laboratories, have, we think, eloquently
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