Introduction to the RRR Program and Lasting Forests
Action and Enterprise for the Region

The RRR Program (Ranging 'Round the Region)is a concept, a proposal to create a comprehensive, diverse, profitable management system for lands and waters of a region (perhaps the greater Roanoke region).

An innovative, 40-enterprise system with all parts related for wildland conservation, enhancement, education, and sustainability.

Demonstrations to enhance support and contributions to recreation, tourism, and improved land use.

Lasting Forests can provide the RRR Program access to enormous resources within wildland management.

No major inventions or "break-throughs" are needed.

Driven by incentives, the "profits" gained will build the RRR Program.

The RRR Program is a powerful, year-around, for-profit, incentive-driven procedure and a working group of related enterprises that together work as a system that is new to wildland management.

Examples of actions, events, services:

Managed trails, fee-fishing system, nature group memberships, writers camps, parkland and river tours, new sports, nature expeditions, wildflower festivals, mountain bike events, nature conferences, bird-watching sport, software and publications, and nature-delayed special days. Also international group involvement.

Components of the Tripple-R Program Strategy:

1. Maximum exposure and marketing
2. Minimum capital outlay
3. Maximum use of un-developed resources of privately-owned tracts (strictly voluntary...but "money talks")
4. Maximum local involvement to create support and employment opportunities
5. Make profit every year for 50 years, then into perpetuity
6. Use general systems theory, a systems approach
7. Diversify (see Contents)
8. Use group incentives, e.g., shared ownership
9. Use a common service unit
10. Use planned synergism
11. Use success stories as a key advertising medium
12. Gain memberships for lasting involvement
13. Use the computer widely for its power; decision making and optimization
14. Use the internet
15. Develop physical experiences and involved events
16. Start events at least 6 months before actual visits and have them last for 12 months afterwards
17. Produce total ranging experience (anticipation, discussion, mystery, service, action, pleasant reflection, bragging rights, low cost benefits for return experiences)
18. Develop and use contests and games
19. Develop support and ancillary enterprise franchises
20. Use feedback, going beyond monitoring
21. Stay mindful of and prepare for pending low fossil energy availability
22. Become a center where others interested in superior tourism of the type within the region (ranging) to come for conferences, courses, publications, demonstrations, and consultation...for profit within the region
23. Do it all for the right reasons: a love of the country and its environment...sustained management for our children and grandchildren...with minimum government agency involvement.

Introduction

There may be an opportunity to create a special place, the best imaginable, where superior unified wildland management is practical, demonstrated, and promoted for the U.S. and the world. There exists 90 years and billions of dollars worth of research in the U.S. and the world devoted to forestry, fishery, range, landscape ecology, outdoor recreation, and watershed and wildlife management. Relatively little has been practiced for many reasons. New technology now is enabling, and reasonable concepts are available, not yet employed. Needs in natural resource management increase. Improved private land management seems to be resisted by landowners. Public land management is in crisis. New laws, changing policies, and work requirements that exceed available staff, equipment, and expertise perplex managers. Great regional needs are evident for economic development, employment, tax base building, and for ... how else can it be said? ... for improved quality of life.

The RRR Program or the Rangin' 'Round the Region Program is a tourism and wildland project grounded in the surprising premise that tourists are almost irrelevant. It uses the analogy of football. Of course, the leather football in the center of the field is important, but the total football enterprise is very large and diverse: uniforms, the stadium, food, drink, advertising, sales, grounds, publications, fan clubs, and more. The football, itself, is essential but in the context of the total system, irrelevant. By analogy, the tourist is essential but almost irrelevant in the context of the work proposed for the Lasting Forests that operates and achieves the objectives of the RRR Program.

Throughout the short history of ecotourism, thought and action has been on the tourist. The concept of the RRR Program, believed to be new, shifts the emphasis to a program to manage a total system of wildland resource enterprises as one enterprise for the good of the people living in an area. It includes the education, entertainment, recreation, and financial gains from visitors and sight-seers as well as financial and other gains from landowners and residents of the region, with profits into perpetuity.

The RRR Program is proposed to create and assist in developing a practical wildland management system for the region (originally conceived as around Roanoke, Virginia). The evident objective is to develop fully the land and resources there, but the equally important task is to create a sound, lasting concept with procedures and methods that can be transported directly to other lands and activities.

The RRR Program creates a land management system. Its premise is that everything in nature is related and that by working with them all as a system, human benefits can be achieved, problems reduced, and functional systems can be sustained over the long run for the children and grandchildren of the people of the region. The land management system and the enterprise that creates and operates it is the Lasting Forests . The System exists to produce maximum resource benefits for people at lowest costs. In doing so, money is "made." Many other benefits are obtained, by design, from the complex relations of many types of people with the land. Lasting Forests is like a large corporation with many enterprises. Each has its name, great independence, and all work together for maximum profits and quality of life, subject to many constraints. By "profits" we suggest only net income that is used in diverse ways to achieve the stated objectives of the RRR Program. Many of the resources needed to start the corporation, the "venture capital", are already in place in past investments of society in research, libraries, computer software, hardware, etc., and experience of staff of the Program. Some capital is still needed. As the Program develops, more profit will be made and this will be used to enhance the operational capabilities of the enterprise, Lasting Forests.

A situation exists in which a comprehensive system may be designed and created that can provide a world-class demonstration of superior unified wildland management. Such a system can be recognized by the criteria of:

1. Being profit and incentive driven
2. Producing abundant secondary financial benefits within the region for citizens, cooperators, as well as landowners
3. Gaining stability through success in diverse, related enterprises
4. Engaging in rational resource management and land enhancement
5. Integrating cutting-edge concepts of ecology, economics, energetics, and esthetics
6. Achieving variety (biodiversity) in animals, plants, and their communities
7. Providing human use for a variety of non-destructive activities
8. Using general systems theory and a modified systems approach
9. Using computer-aided optimization with feedback
10. Being dynamic, based on monitoring
11. Being sensitive to the likely future conditions and needs
12. Using a "land health" analogy (proposed by Aldo Leopold)
13. Expediting cost-effective work on the land for absentee or other landowners
14. Carrying the messages and procedures of management off the site
15. Gaining synergism and exploiting its potentials
16. Adressing cultural, employment, and community issues
17. Using the "rationally-robust paradigm" (recently published)
18. Displaying a single, coherent, managerial style
19. Using simulation and optimization to achieve new levels of cost effectiveness.

This is a management project, not a research project. Several years later (or as programs are developed) we shall develop outstanding, planned, functional, practical research projects in which all citizens can take pride. Until then, we propose to have the RRR Program demonstrate the usefulness to the people of the region and to investors of millions of dollars already invested in wildland resource management.

The major operational elements of the system are only mentioned here. The list is long but not overly-blown. The work is equivalent to that of building a skyscraper or aircraft carrier and is appropriate to the complexity of modern wildland management (including spreading mini-farms, rural homes, and dispersed commercial activities). A major premise is that for success of the Rangin''Round the Region Program, and the vitality of the region itself after 50 to 200 years, a profitable stable enterprise will only persist if a diverse, planned, managed system for people is created. The major categories of the system are those of modified general systems theory that includes overview (context), objectives, inputs, processes, feedforward, and feedback.

Overview or Context

The proposed system is a group of highly related enterprises, "divisions" of a corporation. With planned diversity comes stability in name recognition, staff, and profits. The design is for financial break-even with positive returns where possible with these reinvested or the corporation expanded and other lands added to the managerial system (but not purchased). The operational concept is that "conservation", wise land use, will be done when there is capital, low risks, assistance or "contacts" and a long-term mandate with incentives and self-sustaining influences. Exploitation of resources in the present destroys potentials for corporate profit or sustained profit in future years. A new accounting procedure as well as system "constraints" built into financial models can aid in the work ahead.

A managerial group provides direction and provides services needed by all of the subsystems or enterprises. These include marketing and advertising, computer support, communications, law enforcement and security, surveys and lands, transportation, and others. Each enterprise is very independent, yet each does not duplicate the central services. Funds are not invested in land itself; capital investment is minimal. Advantages are taken on memberships and new communication media. Cooperatives and affiliates are encouraged. Tax advantages seem evident. Markets are expanded. Economies of scale are gained; downtime is reduced; shared work crews avoid seasonal inefficiencies.

For each of the following items there is a written detailed plan. Herein, I only mention the components of the proposed system. Nowhere does such a system now exist. The components, however, do exist and have been tried. Some have failed because they were not stabilized by fluctuating government, were dependent on a single person, or could not gain the economies and synergism of work with related enterprises. The concept that is being proposed is one for superior work on site (within an expanding region or "the Valley" with an eye to demonstrating what superior wildland management really means and then taking that message, even practices (operational systems) to other land ownerships.) The elements of the system are listed and more information on any part will be supplied.

The RRR Program is likely to increase employment. A hundred jobs is a hundred jobs, whether in one factory or spread around a city or region. Communities around the world have sadly realized that if too many of their economic eggs are in a few big baskets, they are vulnerable to, actually suffer, from changes in the "baskets." The RRR Program concept includes intent to achieve maximum long-term effectiveness, however legally possible. This usually includes diversifying employment by age, gender, and race and by attention to part-time work, child-care, and off-site work. There are likely to be a number of "home-grown" units within the creative potentials released by the Program.

Throughout, ranging includes all of the hiking and varied outdoor activities of citizens of the region as well as those of tourists and others who see themselves merely as visitors. Some enter National Forests and National Parks within the region and do not see themselves as visiting Roanoke but only their national lands. Ranging is an inclusive word for the diverse visiting, site-seeing, ecotourism, trecking, outdoor recreation, and similar activities of the people of the region and those from outside of the region.

Rightful skepticism needs to be faced. Why hasn't this idea come along before? Why hasn't it worked? Giles wrote of "the associates" in his 1978 Wildlife Management textbook. At that time he was discussing a group of resource consultants. The concept has grown as political changes have occurred, hunting revenues decreased, land value increased, agency resources declined, and as needs increased. New laws requiring "biodiversity"; new agency policy supporting "ecosystem management"; new conferences pleading for "sustainability" - these have all created a new environment for the natural resource manager. New data, software, hardware, and discoveries are also present.

There really are few new ideas; most ideas are recycled or renamed. At least, most things new are arrangements of existing things in novel ways. The RRR Program uses new hardware, new software, new computer models, satellite data, the web pages of the internet, advanced concepts of forestry and range management, geographic information systems, GPS satellite location for surveys, rapid assessment land measurement - all relatively new, at least when used together - and places them in a new corporation, the Lasting Forests.

Objectives and a Winning Score

A new formulation allows a "score" to be produced showing how well the program and Region are doing. This includes a complex set of intricate ideas for type 5 objectives (from 7 types). The concepts for the objectives are demand, values, expectation, sustainability, and variety-all unified in an expression of benefits. Included in analyses is a new formulation of discounted costs that concentrates attention and rewards people who manage the system now for increasing surety of future gains. Estimated gains are maximized; costs minimized. The end result is a profitable system with a high R-score, one typically moving toward a maximum R* score.

Few enterprises have a very clear objective. The RRR Program seeks to assure profit making within the region within a group of landowners and other participants united to improve their lands and stabilize them and their productivity of profits into perpetuity. The objective is to maximize R* where

Where

B* = desired level of benefits
B = actually achieved benefits
|| = absolute value (i.e., negative values, if any, are assigned a positive value)
C* = discounted total cost estimate
k = a set of legal, labor, land capacity, time, and ecological constraints.

The objective is constrained profit maximization with a 150-year planning horizon.

The RRR Program is one grounded in modern general systems theory. The management could, like state and federal resource agencies, start planning by identifying "issues." Issues are usually "problems", those things that exist in the gap between objectives and the present condition. If objectives are being achieved, there probably are no issues, no problems. Issues can, with difficulty, be translated into objectives. When this is done, the creative energies of people can explore all possible routes to these objectives and select (or retain the present) best actions.

Setting objectives is difficult and requires very precise language if progress to them is going to be evaluated carefully. Efforts to clear measures of cost effectiveness are part of the RRR Program so precise objectives are needed. Later work will sharpen objectives such as the following list, expected for large wildland areas.

1. To assess demand for wildlife and to attempt to meet it without damaging the resource.
2. To protect habitats and retain proper use levels.
3. To manipulate habitats to achieve desired population levels.
4. To protect individual species.
5. To protect communities and special areas of the Region.
6. To maintain habitats and conditions for animals having large home ranges.
7. To maximize the benefits from the fishery at reasonable expenditures.
8. To maximize the wilderness, archaeological, historical, cultural, and scenic benefits to people from the area.
9. To protect the area and special places from destruction and waning benefits.
10. To minimize the effects of gas, oil, and mineral resource extraction and development.
11. To maximize the consistency of the variety of uses and benefits provided by the resources of the Region (to assure compatibility of innovations).
12. To provide quality wilderness experiences within parts of the Region.
13. To maximize access to parts of the Region (as with other objectives, all are to be achieved simultaneously, so tradeoffs and limits are expected. The complexity of doing so requires computer assistance with decisions.)
14. To maximize knowledge used (and gained) to improve decisions about the Region.
15. To maximize knowledge of the Region needed to be safe and secure and to receive many benefits.
16. To conduct an effective program of behavioral change related to citizen involvement in wildland management.
17. To maximize law and regulation obeyance throughout the Region.
18. To minimize misuse, vandalism, littering, and disturbance of the land and wildlife.
19. To minimize conflicts between and among guests.
20. To maximize cost-effective development (trails, camps, toilets, etc.)
21. To minimize perceived recreational quality (an index) of hours spent by quests in the total Regional experience.
22. To maximize the quality of recreational access (including costs, impacts, etc.)
23. To develop utility and transportation corridors for their multiple benefits.
24. To minimize conflicts of regional policies and personnel with local, state, or federal staff or agencies.
25. To maximize an index to agency and government cooperation.

The above list is part of a set that will be carefully crafted, relative weights of importance assigned to each, and substitutions for how expected demand can be reached considered. Projects and programs, even personal actions are taken to achieve each one. Actions are judged based on how well and when they will achieve some of the objectives. Many different actions...very small to massive...will be taken, all presumably to achieve the stated objectives. To the extent that objectives are not achieved, we have a problem. We propose to try to close the gap as as closely as possible, quickly, for the least amount of money. It seems reasonable. A systems approach to wildland management has been call "organized common sense."

Inputs

Our past experience with GIS system development allows us to utilize and further develop a dynamic, active, information system for the region and surrounding areas. Site specific data allow previously impossible analyses and optimization. These include an extensive relational database, a GIS, laboratory access, reports from the WKB, unique debriefing procedures.

Processes

The following are the enterprises of separate working units of the Lasting Forests. These are potential units and are planned to be created. About 10 will be developed first, simultaneously. The system cannot be successful if it "starts small" as evident from previous failures.The list is long but not overly-blown. Few people recognize the dimensions, complications, or difficulties of creating such a system.

1. System Central - Managerial, administrative, marketing, accounting, software development, and training. The Base provides special chamber-of-commerce-like affiliations for land owners and local companies supporting the Program, and all that the developed areas and enterprise structure can mean in employment, services, and economic development. A web site will designed to be "the" environmental web site with linkages to all aspects of the Rangin' 'Round the Region Program (as the concrete example) but with hypertext and hypermedia links to supplies, equipment, services, and to government agencies, sources, images-of all types. Participants sponsor the web site and funds thus gained add extra support for the Program. GIS links may progressively expand worldwide. Several histories may be developed, published or placed in an electronic medium and cultural sites developed and artifacts displayed. The pre-settlement local people are one emphasis and topic of study and history development as they relate to the characteristics of the ecology and energy budgets of the area. Architectural coordination is needed to assure that main structures and related structures are safe, healthy, functional, maintained, energy efficient, in keeping with the objectives, and themselves communicate the desired image of conservation, concern for the land, natural beauty, consistency, and the occasional creative moment applied research is conducted based on needs identified within the total system model. A research foundation (probably with Virginia Tech but an alternative may be useful) will encourage invited research conducted by a leading investigator, on- or off-site, within one or more of the enterprises. Overhead and salaries contribute to the development of the Rangin' 'Round the Region Program. The results of research are seen as necessary information inputs to the system. Minimum time from report to implementation is a criterion of success. Publications is an interior group that produces newsletters, books etc.by local printers promoting responsible wildland information.
2. The Trevey - a dynamic planning system. A prototype is available.
3. The Forest Group - On cooperators' land, separate Lasting Forests are designated and developed. These are actively managed for profits for the long run as a total system, all with biodiversity and sustained wildlife populations as fundamental management constraints and stipulations. These are total forest systems - from seedlings to value-added sales and recreational use. Comprehensive analyses of the forest are made with concepts of diagnosis and prescription. Not just a tree system, the trees are managed to achieve the long-range objectives of the owners and the total system. Some trees are cut to allow wildlife foods to grow in special places (money is made form some trees, in other places the trees are used to reduce erosion and increase stream quality for fish). Forests are seen as resources-places for recreation; scenery (in special places or viewscapes); sources of profit; unique places for wilderness experiences. They, like tomatoes, are perishable resources, attacked by insects, disease, fire, vandals, and poachers so they must be managed carefully. We manage forests using a new alpha unit concept and The Trevey, a modern planning and decision support system. We hold that every 10-meter by 10-meter square is unique and we use the computer to attend to the uniqueness. We optimize the use of the forests of the entire area using planned harvest strategies and schedules that include objectives of profit, biodiversity, sustainability, and forest health. Annual financial gains are made.Access to SmartWood forest certification is typically sought. Viewscapes are analyzed for recreational developments as well as impact analyses of other developments. We promote the hyperhardwood concept -- maximum profits from a designed hardwood system that include certified woods grown under approved conditions for high profits. All of the elements of papers written about "ecosystem management" are included but we hasten to deny that this phrase is what we are doing. (The phrase is a political gimmick, erroneous, too limited in concept, and without a measurable end condition or desired state). A sub unit specializes in intensive management of the tree communities of local towns and cities including their pests, leaf disposal, surgery, replacements, wildlife and songbirds, and autumn colors. A sub unit also does specialized watershed analyses and management plans.
4. Walnut Vales - specialized intensive walnut system management for nutmeats, wood, and products. (Discussions are underway about empress tree groves.)
5. Nature Folks -An Audubon-Society-like group of people interested in many aspects of nature including specialty interests of seasonal changes (phenology), land snails, insects, "creepy places", bogs, logs - the unusual but not very spectacular. Other special interest groups form including those for deer, owls, coyotes and foxes, wild plants, and butterflies. Included is the Tours Group, a travel agency provides local and international wildlife- and nature-related tours. Conferences, e-mail, literature, photographs, local tours, related worldwide tours - these are for the people in this membership-fee plus costs group.
6. Official Avi- A new bird-watching sport. This will be the first place that this franchised, golf-course-like activity will be implemented. Strongly related to wildlife watching, the birds of the typical habitats of the region are featured on some courses. International franchises are planned.
7. The Plant People - Medicinal and specialty plants are a topic of interest among The Plant People, a sub unit of the Nature Folks. They conduct cooperative program with select gardeners and gardens; computer-aided garden layout; supplies; gardener's network.
8. The Owl Group - a new membership group related to Nature Folks to study nature and engage in a special type of ecotourism.
9. Coyote - a sub-group of Nature Folks interested in the coyote that is moving into the region. Also includes people interested in foxes and similar dog-like creatures of the world. Local and international tours to observe the animals and their environments.
10. Butterfly Band - a group devoted to insect management of all types with positive emphasis on lepidoptera identification and conservative collections, museum work, insects as wildlife food, and invertebrates as part of the "biodiversity" quest for the future. Includes work with bees for honey production and includes insect-related disease and damage management.
11. Prospectors - the geology group provides comprehensive geological map layers, addresses groundwater resources, relates geology to soils, forests, fish, wildlife. Education along with rock and mineral collection are promoted. Prospecting events (for fees, as in most other activities described herein) are coordinated with outfitters, guides, R* Stables, and others. Mining and history of the region are presented and preserved.
12. Wilderness Group - part of Nature Folks, the sub-group analyses, cooperates in developing easements and set-asides, sponsors research, tours ancient forests, and promotes the use of wilderness research findings (now rarely done).
13. Teams - an international computer database on wildland experts allows small teams to be assembled and intensive work done in carefully planned "orchestrated" meetings to solve problems. These are usually backed by expert systems work and the Wildland Knowledge Base. These are intensive, planned, unique consultations; recordings made; dictations taken; internal reports made, but no "publications" are made without approvals. Results proceed to revise computer models, change policy or plans, modify risk estimates, or explore future needs (see Feedforward). These are usually on-site experiences in a specially equipped space for a maximum of 6 experts, a coordinator-investigator, translators, and support staff.
14. Wild Turkey Group Guild - a total species management system.
15. Pest Force - modern vertebrate pest damage management reducing the variety of bird and mammal damage.
16. The Raccoon Group - a fur-bearer management system including damage management. - Intensive, comprehensive management of the raccoon and other furbearers.
17. The Deer Group - a center for a comprehensive deer resource management system.
18. Good Dog - a new procedure to judge the goodness of a trailing or scenting dog and to offer a score to improve breeding or sale value of such dogs.
19. The Fishery- A comprehensive fishery including cooperatives and systems of diverse angling and other activities in lakes, streams, and ponds under contract. Evident relations are in water developments in select habitats, guided bird watching from boats, and improved water quality from intensified forestry.
    • Stream Fishery including Native Fish-Watching Sport
    • Ponds and lakes (cooperative sets of 20 to 50 ponds; management and guide services, etc.)
20. Stoneworms - a trails building system - construction, maintenance, operation.
21. Rollers - following detailed work with the local courts, people that are required by the courts to do community service are allowed to join the Rollers for healthful, positive outdoor work experiences advancing the objectives of Rangin' 'Round the Region.
22. The Safety and Security Group
    • Officer training
    • Safety and security marketing (equipment, services, patrols, etc.)
    • Modern, computer-aided patrols
    • A comprehensive law enforcement system-including education, prevention, apprehension, and court work.
23. The Products Group - Responsible for all sales, working with System Central's marketing role, this group sells bird houses, handicrafts, soil amendments, decomposition units, outdoor equipment, publications, software, art objects, photographs, etc. products and crafts, all processed locally including equipment rentals. Inadequate health, safety, and comfort often cause outdoor trips to "fail." Areas or experiences should not be judged to be bad because of inadequate or improper equipment. Rentals,sales, and service by existing cooperating retailers are promoted. A web site for one imaginary product has been created, the big bandanna.
24. The Wildland Knowledge Base (WKB) - library services for wildland managers around the world, but particularly the region. A report-producing service, using the extensive libraries of Virginia Tech and worldwide electronic library sources.
25. The Research Group and The Automated Ecosystem - Contract studies and demonstration of a high-tech, fully-automated ecosystem - an ecosystem "hooked up" as if in an intensive-care unit of a hospital (developed with research and memorial funds and funded by admission fees).
26. The Stables Group - riding horses, trail rides, outfitting, veterinary service and research, snow/hay sled rides with educational components. Land and space is rented for horse pasture and stables. Grazing is used in vegetation control (avoiding some smoke management and herbicide costs.)
27. The Pasture and Range Group - grazing range and pasture systems--COPLAN based; elements of Savory; GIS-based with micro-scale work; Bonham-basic rangeland economics.
28. Tours- National and international tours are conducted,to places of natural and ecological interest. Local tours and developed.
29. Outfits - university-based design and testing center for outdoor clothing and equipment.
30. Writers' Camps - unique 2 and 3-day program for adult writers interested in outdoor and environmental topics. These are held in rented camps (some off-season) within the region.
31. Competency - a company that tests and certifies education level and abilities in 500 measurable behaviors which range from ability to start a campfire, to write a business letter, to use a computer to solve a problem. This company's "product" may replace the diploma as the standard for future employment in the natural resource field. It does not give or teach any behavior; it tests for its evidence in scheduled "exams" that are in-person demonstration before 2 examiners of a person's ability to perform things needed by wildland managers.
32. The Fire Force - the "fire force", a "hot-shot" forest and range fire fighting crew trains and is prepared to do superior fire-fighting. It demonstrates; it trains others. It is available for work elsewhere. Affiliated is a fire-ecology office exploring all aspects of fire in the complex system, one that relates to economies, smoke management, wildfire, and watersheds. Models are used to evaluate influences of wild and prescribed fire on a set of 40 objectives. Optimization routines analyze best conditions and allow comparisons of deviations. A national wild fire-fighting center develops to replace the expertise recently lost in government staff "downsizing."
33. Energy Core - comprehensive energy budgeting is essential as the fossil-energy supplies become unstable. Promoting energy conservation, demonstrating solar and other processes, attending to future transportation problems, doing energy-based modeling along with ecological-and economic-based modeling are part of this team's support effort.
34. Memorials - publications and other honoraria or memorials are developed under contract for individuals. A series of memorial groves are developed.
35. NovoSports-a series of unusual sports is practiced, (perhaps started) demonstrated in the area. New sports, memberships, contests including tug-of-war and "world ball."
36. Gamma - a new practical computer game requiring the knowledge of wildlands and the strategy of a chess player. This game may become the core of education programs in FFA, 4-H, Scouting, and may lead (by design) to international competition (in Roanoke) for large prize money awards for experts (who may then be employed by the RRR System and others for real-world decision making).
37. Wildland Walkers - a hiking, dispersed camping, woodcraft, and general activity group for all ages with memberships, contests, and levels of accomplishment. A modern system of diverse outdoor recreation is developed. Diverse user groups need education, various levels of support and supervision, safety and health care and interpretation for appreciation and maximizing their experiences. Protecting the environment from users is essential. We have concepts for a world-class system of diverse outdoor recreation units that vary from day-visits to challenge contests. A recreational-use education unit may be developed later to prepare inexperienced urban people for the repeatedly enjoyable, safe, gentle-on-the-land, outdoors and wildland or rural experience.
38. The Wildland Crew - a group for volunteers who come to the area for work and experience who are given meaningful experiences, shown a responsible work ethic, and encouraged in wildland work in the future. A wildland experience for urban people allowing healthful, meaningful work (with fees paid by participants) in the outdoors (in lieu of jogging or indoor exercise. A loyal membership grows. Occasional "reunions" are held. Coordinators assure positive experience, encourage returns and associations, and a bonding with the area and other volunteers.

FEEDBACK

Clarity of objectives will allow feedback (missing in most public wildland work) to operate. Monitoring with adjustments is needed. Also called "adaptive management", the system proposed is grounded in:

1. all participants knowing the objectives
2. profits being shared by all participants
3. units being independent in profit-making
4. units sharing with all a planned percentage of their profits
5. some profits are invested in system building, some in maintenance
6. profits are evaluated for a 100-year planning horizon, continually "sliding forward."
7. present-discounting is done using the Overton and Hunt formulation option that values time.

Each enterprise has a manager. A system manager assists in all operations. Venture capital "payback" is analyzed annually for the sliding 5-year success period. Each objective is addressed in an annual report.

Feedback addresses objectives (as well as the more conventional parts of the system) - should they be changed? A board of directors works annually with suggestions. Feedback also addresses the inputs - advice, knowledge, data management systems, staff resources gained and their full equitable use.

Energy consumed is a major input of primary concern. Fossil energy conservation is paramount. Processes may not be most effective, so change is needed. Emphasis on effectiveness, the efficient achievement of carefully stated objectives, is made over work on efficiency alone.

Feedback is usually needed to address the system context, whether it is too narrow or local or where it has "gone too far." A landowner usually limits analyses to the ownership but failures and problems abound if neighbors are not included. An enterprise with national or international outreach interests may need select guidelines to assure limited but sure successes in a timely way. Improving the feedforward systems is difficult and needs to be a persistent effort.

FEEDFORWARD

Looking head, then adjusting the present system to get ready for that imagined and carefully predicted system, the one ahead, is feedforward. Work of the "Teams" can be helpful, but discussions, using regression models, using simulations, and regular application of many other available techniques needs to be built into the total operation. Periodic conferences on the future of wildlands may be useful. An annual publication form the small feedforward office is expected to become a heralded event throughout the region, perhaps nationally.

SUMMARY

Herein is the concept of a project or program provided by a diverse corporation needed to manage natural resources for people in a large dynamic region that is rich in wildland resources. A diverse corporation is needed to respond to the daily changes on hundreds of managed sites, but also to the changes in the public as it is changed by travel, television, and new communications. New problems never encountered in resource management arise as the U.S. population becomes more urbanized and removed from the daily risks and realities of living and working in the outdoors. A varied system is needed to accommodate the ponderous pace of the wildlands (200 years to grow a tree to function in an "ancient forest") in the center of a society experiencing daily, even hourly, advances in technology and changes in life style. A place is badly needed to show that some people can "get it all together." People need to be shown that public "forestry" will not suffice; that system building can and needs to be done before one more dollar of research is done; that computer systems (simulations, expert systems, non-linear optimization, GIS-GPS combinations) can allow advances and change today that were previously impossible. An executive summary with financial concepts can hardly do the RRR Program concept justice. A personal perspective of R.H. Giles may be of interest.

It may be possible to implement the best imaginable wildland management system in the world. The risks are low; the cost is "high", but high is always relative. The estimated break-even for investments in the total enterprise described herein is 5 years. The costs of not implementing such a system are for the people of the expansive region to continue on a piece-meal, agency-dominated, highly ineffective set of operations intent on agency mandates and not on quality of life for society. The RRR Program may not be a bad idea.

Lasting Forests is designed to assist in implementing the RRR Program.There are few wildlife or ecotourism consultants. Unlike abundant forestry consultants, their services have not been widely recognized. Few people have tried to be wildlife resource consultants since many services were provided freely by state and federal agencies. Stabilizing a "cash flow" for a single resource consultant has been almost impossible. The needs have been great; the competition (with an agency) impossible. The Lasting Forests manages land, all of its resources, well. It seeks to sustain a profit (re-invested in itself as appropriate; dispersed toparticipants as in a corporation). It assists in holding wildland (in all of its dimensions) as a predominant and important resource and is involved in total system management of its many resources. Its "themes" are economics, ecology, esthetics, energetics, and enforcement, the 5 E's. Not an "ecosystem" organization, its premise is that profits over 150 years cannot be sustained unless the land is very carefully managed using sophisticated programs to integrate ecology, economy, and other factors. The Lasting Forests uses a dynamic planning period (always sliding ahead one year as each year passes).

The reasons why the Lasting Forests will work are:

1. Diverse enterprises share a common management or administrative group and "incubator" as in small businesses (System Central).
2. Enterprises are diverse, capturing different interests, ages, and seasons of use for clients.
3. Memberships are promoted to assure lasting attachment.
4. Hunting and fishing are combined with other exciting sports and activities.
5. The market audience (within as well as outside of the region) is expanded.
6. Cooperatives and affiliates are encouraged.
7. An existing resource base (land, structures, computers, programs, library and associated knowledge) is used.
8. All staff (as well as citizens and landowners) are driven, in part, by personal financial incentives.
9. Lasting connections are made with Virginia Tech (and select other universities) students, their families, and potential participants.
10. System performance measures and accountability are very clear.
11. All groups support each other; there is no downtime (not seasonal); no lag in the total system; all are adapting to changing conditions.