The Antiplanner

Ray Rasker, the Antiplanner’s friend from the days when the Antiplanner worked primarily for environmental groups, has published a paper offering ten ways to reduce firefighting costs in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). That’s the private land where people are building homes near fire-prone federal lands. Unfortunately, the Antiplanner must respectfully disagree with most of Rasker’s proposals.

Rasker’s view is that fire costs have escalated in recent years as people have built more first and second homes in rural areas near public lands. This leads firefighters to make extraordinary efforts to keep fires from burning those homes. The solution, then, is to keep people from building in those areas, and at least eight of Rasker’s ten proposals focus on that solution.

For example, one of Rasker’s solutions is to “Allow Insurance Companies to Charge Higher Premiums in Fire-Prone Areas.” That sounds innocuous enough, except for the fact that insurance companies are already allowed to do that (and they do). Rasker’s real goal is to set the premiums “sufficiently high to discourage development in the WUI” (p. 45).

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Six former chiefs of the Forest Service met in Missoula, Montana recently, and at least some of them agreed that forest planning is a waste of time. “Analysis paralysis,” Dale Bosworth called it, repeating a term the Bush appointee had coined first applied to planning when he was chief. “Just pouring more and more money into planning doesn’t seem to be getting us any further down the road,” said Jack Ward Thomas, who was chief in the early Clinton years.

Many in the Forest Service agree. Yet, as a top Forest Service official recently told the Antiplanner, the Obama administration plans to rewrite the rules for forest planning — something that every administration has done since Jimmy Carter. Such rewrites merely make more work for the national forests, which have to go back and redo work to make it comply with the new rules.

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Here’s a little-known fact: Around 80 percent of the revenues collected by federal land agencies in 2007 came from about 0.1 percent of the lands they manage. The other 99.9 percent is just a black hole sucking in tax dollars.

This fact is revealed in a new report on federal land management that offers a way to improve resource management and save taxpayers at least $7 billion per year. The report proposes to turn federal land agencies into fiduciary trusts and fund them exclusively out of a portion of the receipts they collect in user fees.

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Whenever we get something for free, especially if it is from the government, we quickly feel we are entitled to it. Case in point: Last Wednesday, the Antiplanner and some friends took some kayaks to a lake. Despite being the middle of August, we arrived in the middle of a rain storm with a fierce south wind.

The nice thing about kayaking is that you can put on a spray skirt and raincoat and be almost completely shielded from the elements. So we happily paddled around the lake for a couple of hours.

On Saturday, after dinner, the Antiplanner invited Ms. Antiplanner to go on a short cruise on the same lake. The weather was much nicer, but when we arrived we were greeted by a gruff gatekeeper who demanded $5 to launch our boats. My immediate thought was: I went for free three days ago, so why should I have to pay now?

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Almost every forester I’ve ever met, even ones who work for environmental groups, believes that forests “need” to be thinned. Not just some forests; virtually all forests. Take a forester and show him or her a natural forest, or even one that has been thinned but not in the last ten or so years, and they will invariably say, “This forest needs thinning.”

Is this forest “diseased and in poor health”?

At one time, these foresters argued that thinnings boosted the economic value of the trees. The trees that would be left behind would grow faster. Because you can cut more lumber out of a bigger tree, a few bigger trees are more valuable than many small trees.

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Oregon counties have been on the federal dole for decades. Some of them get as much as two-thirds of their budgets from federal funds, unlike most other counties that rely on local taxes for most of their money.

Now that federal money is being cut off, and the counties are crying poor. “Just give us one more year,” they say, “to ease this painful transition.” Of course, that is what they said last year, and the year before, and the year before that. But they never did anything to prepare for the reduced funds.

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The House Appropriations Committee has asked the Government Accountability Office to examine the possibility of merging the Forest Service into the Department of the Interior. This idea is raised about every decade or so and is beaten down by a combination of special interest groups who all fear they might lose from such a change.

About a decade ago, however, the Antiplanner made a prediction that the next administration that proposed such a merger would succeed, mainly because many of the special interest groups that once relied on the Forest Service — timber companies, ranchers, and miners — have been so shut out of the national forests that they would have no incentive to stop such a merger.

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An Oregon legislator, Fred Girod, wants to make Silver Creek Falls, a popular recreation area, into a national park. Such a park, he says, would be a “magnet for tourism,” which would be good for businesses in his district.

One of the waterfalls in Silver Creek Falls State Park. Trails take hikers behind many of the falls.
Flickr photo by John Hann. Click photo for a larger view

Of course, a state legislature cannot create a national park. But even if it could, would this be a good idea?

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Many people know that the northern spotted owl stopped the cutting of old-growth forests, but few people know why. In the late 1980s, the Fish & Wildlife Service listed the spotted owl as a threatened species because it relies on old-growth forests, which were rapidly being cut, as its habitat. This contributed to a huge decline in timber harvests from federal lands after 1990.

Fish & Wildlife Service photo.

The spotted owl is a predator whose main prey are northern flying squirrels, red-backed voles, and other species that mainly live in old-growth forests. But the spotted owl is not the stop of the food chain: it is preyed upon by the great grey owl, which especially goes after undefended juveniles and eggs. When given the opportunity, the great grey will swoop down on spotted owl nests, knocking the eggs or young out of the nests, and then feeds on them on the forest floor.

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When I drafted yesterday’s post about the Angora Fire in South Lake Tahoe, I almost included speculation that local rules might have prevented residents from making their homes firesafe by removing the vegetation from around their homes. But I took it out before posting — this, after all, was a high-fire-risk area. Nobody could be that stupid.

Fighting the Angora Fire.
Flickr photo by joyseph.

It turns out you rarely lose by underestimating the intelligence of government planners. Local residents say that rules issued by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, a federally chartered group, prevented them from making their homes firewise. One local resident says that he cut trees and shrubs in violation of those rules, and his house survived while his neighbors did not. Of course, the agency denies that the burned homes are its fault.

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