The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner’s Ride Around Crater Lake Three Times in One Day (RACLTTOD) went well. My brother Richard joined me for all three laps, his wife Carin for two, and the Antiplanner’s faithful ally (and sometimes commenter) Andy Stahl for two. With two 2-mile detours to Cloud Cap overlook, Richard and I did a total of 100 miles with 11,800 feet of elevation gain in 8 hours and 20 minutes of ride time–11 hours including lunch, rests, and sightseeing.

Crater Lake from Cloud Cap overlook.

An amateur racer, Andy is by far the better rider, but he handicapped himself by riding tandem the first lap with his 10-year-old son. A 10-year-old simply does not have the power to carry his own weight on such a long ride, so Andy had to work extra hard. After resting the second lap, Andy was easily able to drop the rest of us on a regular bike.

Andy and his son, Olallie circling the lake on the first lap.

While we were riding, comments on this blog focused on national park user fees. The original director of the Park Service, Steven Mather, believed that the parks should pay their way. Unfortunately, this goal was undercut, first by Congress which limited the amounts parks could charge and later by Mather’s successors, who were eager to get federal funds to subsidize park expansion and operations.

The Antiplanner, Carin, and Richard halfway through the third lap. Andy is way ahead of us, but our main concern is keeping warm as the day is cooling off.

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I have a friend who needs my help, and I hope some of my readers will help him too. Back in 1985, the Antiplanner worked exclusively for environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society, reviewing Forest Service plans and helping environmentalists understand how the Forest Service worked. My research showed that the Forest Service lost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year doing environmentally destructive activities.

Walkin’ Jim Stoltz

Why would it do this? The Forest Service’s own historian argued that the agency was “unlike other bureaucracies.” It was “more like a religion. . . fulfilling a sacred mission to bring wood to the world in order to avert the evils of a timber famine.” Other people suggested the agency had been captured by the timber industry.

Neither of these explanations made sense to me as they were not consistent with some of the things I saw the Forest Service do. Instead, as I reviewed plan after plan and collected data on thousands of timber sales and other activities, I realized that the only explanation that was consistent with all the agency’s policies was budget maximization. This did not mean that anyone in the agency necessarily thought, “How can I maximize my budget today?” Instead, through a process similar to natural selection, those policies that maximized the agency’s budget tended to be favored over ones that did not.

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The Forest Service has a problem. In 1974 and 1976, Congress passed laws requiring an elaborate forest planning process. That process turned out to be an utter failure. The plans collectively cost billions of dollars to produce, but they didn’t solve any problems and took so long to write that most were obsolete before they were signed.

Most people in the Forest Service know that planning is a waste, but the problem is that the planning laws are still on the books. Faithful Antiplanner ally Andy Stahl (who frequently comments on this blog) has a solution: rewrite the planning rules to create a highly simplified planning process that requires the absolute minimum under the law.

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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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