ABSTRACT
When mismanagement or malpractice accusations are made against a forest manager, the central liability issues will frequently revolve around the basic objectives being pursued. More precisely, the basic objectives that should have been pursued by the managers. What are the proper objectives of forest management? The author denies that any singular, universally applicable objective exists and insists that many different management styles may potentially be appropriate for a given tract of forestland depending on who owns it and for what purpose. Cleanly resolving that primary issue is necessary before addressing the second-level issues about techniques applied. These, for example, might be about the adequacy of silvicultural and habitat practices, intensity of inventory and environmental analyses, logging systems and execution, or other operational questions. Both these secondary issues and the primary question usually require experts with long practical experience. Quantifications of any damages resulting from malpractice, if they exist, naturally follow. These are commonly derived with counterfactual models that predict what a more “correct” management would have yielded. The author suggests that such models are frequently speculative and may tend to poorly estimate actual damages. Caution in their use is deemed appropriate. The chapter also includes a case study about various experts’ assessments of the adequacy of forest management on a Navajo Indian reservation.
