No abstract

No abstract

A discriminant analysis of environmentalist and industrialist constituent publics of the U.S. Forest Service along with agency responses to 26 attitude, preference, and conservation value questions demonstrates that field-level line officers of this elite federal career system share attitudes and preferences with only one of these constituencies. Rather than holding the middle-ground position between these two groups, described by Culhane in a 1981 book on politics and the public lands. Service attitudes are more consistent with a 1979 land use decision made by their agency, which allocated 58.3% of the U.S. de facto wilderness land for the use of its industrial clientele and 24.3% in favor of the environmentalist position. Group means (centroids) show that Forest Service managers' attitudes overlap heavily with their industrialist constituency, but only slightly overlap with their environmentalist constituency.

A case study of public involvement in a controversial land-use plan indicated that participants who attended one or more Forest Service workshops failed to see themselves in any greater agreement with the agency than did participants who merely wrote letters or attended public meetings. Among each participant group (workshop attenders and non-attenders, perceived differences between the public and the agency were about twice as great as actual differences. This ratio of real to imagined differences is consistent with findings of two earlier studies where workshops were not part of the involvement technique. The failure to achieve more consensus suggests that the agency was seen as an adversary rather than as a mediator in the workshop process.

In three cases after Forest Service public involvement processes had been completed, many participants still had stereotyped misconceptions of the agency's position on use of land areas. Perceived disagreement was twice as great as actual disagreement. Membership in a conservation group was a primary variable associated with continued perception of polarization.