"More than a century ago, through the Organic Act of 1897, Congress directed that: No national forest shall be established, except to improve and protect the forest within the boundaries, or for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States."

"In recent years, the focus has been on the Organic Act’s provision for timber production. Less well understood is the Act’s strong focus on watershed protection. In fact, the need to protect water supplies and to control floods was the driving force behind the Organic Act and other early forest legislation. The emphasis on watershed protection was both prophetic and well deserved. Today, the national forests contain a multitude of municipal watersheds, and 80 percent of the Nation’s freshwater sources originate on national forest land."

"Our natural resource agenda builds on this historical and legal foundation. Our first priority is to maintain and restore the health of our ecosystems and watersheds....Based on sound science, the Forest Service will implement a policy and strategy for restoring, protecting and maintaining healthy ecosystems at the watershed level."

"Forest Service policy is to restore and maintain healthy watersheds for use by current and future generations. We will give watershed protection and ecological restoration the highest priority in decision making processes, including budget and program planning, land management planning, project implementation, and watershed assessments for forest and inter-agency plans. This policy is built on the premise that we simply cannot meet the needs of people without first securing the health of our lands and water. Our policy goals are to:

· Understand the relationship between land uses, watersheds and ecosystem health.

· Complete ecosystem analysis at the watershed level to determine existing conditions and potential landscape capability.

· Use results from sound scientific analysis to make land use allocations and project-level decisions and to set priorities for watershed restoration.

· Ensure that land management decisions meet watershed and ecosystem management objectives.

· Collaborate with all interested parties and stakeholders to achieve healthy watersheds and ecosystems for current and future generations."

"Restoring and maintaining healthy watersheds and their terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems will sustain the long-term health of the land. Maintaining and improving water-shed health will sustain the output of goods and services from forests and grasslands. Local communities will benefit from their collaboration in project planning and implementation and from increased employment and economic opport- unities, and most importantly from the array of ecosystem services that flow from healthy watersheds."

"To realize our vision for healthy watersheds, the Forest Service will implement a nine-point strategy to restore, protect, and maintain healthy terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems at the watershed level. We will base these actions on the best available science and implement them in collaboration with States, local communities, other Federal agencies, and interest groups. Each planned action will have quantifiable, measurable goals that will serve to focus our activities and keep the Forest Service account-able to the American people. Restoration needs assessments will determine the type, amount, location and time of restoration work. In particular, we will engage local communities, giving them ownership in the outcomes." "Specifically the Forest Service will:

1. Make watershed restoration and maintenance the highest priority in land management plan revisions as appropriate.

2. Restore degraded ecosystems and attain desirable plant conditions.

3. Prevent exotic organisms from entering or spreading in the United States.

4. Reconstruct, relocate, and decommission roads to help restore degraded watersheds.

5. Restore degraded riparian areas.

6. Fully implement the Forest Health Monitoring Program established by Federal and State agencies in 1990 to collaboratively monitor and report on the Nation’s forest health by 2003.

7. Conserve and recover threatened, endangered, and sensitive species and their habitats.

8. Complete assessments of watershed conditions.

9. Help communities restore and maintain healthy watersheds through community programs."

"Sustainable forest management is a key strategy in fulfilling our mission of caring for the land and serving people. To gauge our progress toward our goal of sustainable forest systems, we need reliable performance measures. These measures – the criteria and indicators of sustainable forest management – tell how well we are doing as stewards of the land. To ensure our accountability to the American people, the Forest Service will link performance by Forest Service managers to the framework of sustainable forest management...."

"The Forest Service is committed to finding new ways to use a highly skilled work force to accomplish much needed wildland management and restoration."

"In accordance with Leopold’s land ethic, the Forest Service is committed to protecting and restoring the land. Protecting the land means not letting its use outstrip its capacity to restore itself. We need to protect rare and vulnerable plants and animals and ecosystems, as well as fish and wildlife unduly threatened by land use practices. In addition, we need to preserve wild places and restore damaged forests and rangelands."

"Through protecting and restoring the land, present and future generations will reap the benefits that healthy, diverse, and productive ecosystems provide. Our public lands offer an astonishingly rich and diverse package of benefits for all Americans."

"Americans are often quoted as saying that they want their children to have a better life than they themselves have had. For many generations, this meant obtaining a nicer house, a better education, or more material goods. Americans now understand that quality of life means more than material satisfaction."

"Today American envision a better life that includes a healthy environment -- an environment where:

· Children are assured of clean air and clean water.

· People can renew their spirit in the surroundings of nature.

· Wildlife, fish, flowers, shrubs, and trees are abundant in numbers and variety.

· People can work with confidence that future generations will not bear an unacceptable cost for the consequences of their work.

· The land sustains economic and social uses that do not compromise its health.

· Water flows clean, cold, and abundantly for use by many dependent life forms.

· People can feel connected to the land – part of the larger community of all living things that Aldo Leopold envisioned."

"To realize our vision for the future, we as a Nation must commit to conserve our precious natural resources. But conservation is not enough – we must also restore the health of the land, protecting the rich natural resource legacy we ourselves inherited. Our obligation to our children demands nothing less."

"The Forest Service cannot do it alone....we need to work together as stewards of these special places."