Get Those Cows off My Lawn!

The Antiplanner is hardly a radical environmentalist, but I’ve lost patience with one environmentally destructive activity: livestock grazing on public lands. Taxpayers spend tens of millions of dollars a year to subsidize this grazing, while the ranchers who have permits to do it have successfully lobbied Congress to keep they fees they pay almost zero while their cattle and sheep trample fish habitat and compete with wildlife for forage.

Cattle on BLM land in eastern Oregon. BLM photo by Gary Shine.

Livestock grazing was once a profit center for the Forest Service; in 1920, the agency actually made a profit and most of its income came from ranchers, not timber buyers. But in 1978, ranchers persuaded Congress to impose a fee formula on the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management that supposedly calculated fair market value by starting with the value of livestock and subtracting all of the costs of production. What was left over was supposed to be the fee. Continue reading

Pouring Fuel on the Fire

The Forest Service today seems to believe that its main mission is to reduce hazardous fuels. The agency was spending close to half a billion dollars a year on this program, an amount that was doubled by the 2021 infrastructure bill. Yet there is a huge debate among fire ecologists over whether this program makes any sense.

Would any amount of prescribed burning prevented this 2020 fire from burning thousands of acres?

The latest volley in this debate was published earlier this week in a peer-reviewed journal called Fire. Representing those who disagree with the Forest Service’s fire policy, the paper charges that supporters of the policy have deliberately overlooked evidence that it won’t work. Continue reading

Point Reyes: Cattle Grazing Yes; Oyster Farming No

Environmental groups are suing the National Park Service’s Point Reyes National Seashore to stop a plan to kill elk (which are native to California) in order to provide more grass for cattle (which are not). Point Reyes is one of the few units of the National Park System that allow cattle grazing, and the ranchers whose cattle use the area claim that the elk are in their way.

Cattle grazing in Point Reyes National Seashore pollute streams and spread disease to native elk. Photo by John Loo.

This is the same Point Reyes that shut down an oyster farm, fabricating claims that the “oyster feces” were “smother[ing] native species” of plants, which was never proven. The reality is that oyster farmers do their best to preserve water quality as oysters themselves are highly sensitive to pollution. Despite the exposure of these fraudulent claims, then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar shut down the operation, saying that no commercial activities should be allowed in the parks. Continue reading

Sutton Mountain Wilderness Yes, Monument No

In November, Oregon senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden introduced legislation to turn Sutton Mountain into a national monument. If you’ve never heard of Sutton Mountain, don’t feel bad: I’ve lived in Oregon all my life and never heard of it until a few months ago. Briefly, Sutton Mountain is a undistinguished summit in eastern Oregon’s Wheeler County that is surrounded by land that is mostly managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which has studied it for potential wilderness status.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Sutton Mountain has some natural values that are deserving of wilderness status. But the Merkley-Wyden bill doesn’t protect natural resources: instead, it is an economic development bill. It proposes to create a national monument in the hope that it would attract tourism to the county that has the smallest population in Oregon. As a national monument, activities would be allowed that would be forbidden in a wilderness area, such as the destruction of juniper trees that some ranchers think reduce forage for their cattle. The bill would also transfer roughly more than 1,300 acres of federal land to a town of fewer than 130 people with the expectation that the town would use the land for economic development. Continue reading

Tongass National Forest Still a Loser

Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the largest forest in the nation, is losing $15 million to $21 million a year on timber sales, according to a new report from Taxpayers for Common Sense. The forest plans to sell 300 million board feet of timber in the next five years, says the report, and will lose money on all of it.

The Tongass National Forest covers more land than the state of West Virginia and is five times larger than the next largest national forest.

Forest Service timber sales dropped by more than 75 percent between 1990 and 2000, and since the agency lost money on much of the timber it sold, that saved taxpayers a lot of cash. However, it didn’t save as much as it should have, because the Forest Service didn’t reduce its timber staff by as much as the drop in sales. Instead, it relabeled them “vegetation managers” and kept most of them on the payroll. Continue reading

The Sordid History of Forest Service Fire Data

The latest wildfire situation report indicates that about 7.3 million acres have burned to date this year. That’s about 1.2 million acres less than this same date last year, but about 1.5 million acres more than the ten-year average and a lot more than the average in the 1950s and 1960s, which was about 3.9 million acres a year.

Some people use the data behind this chart to argue against anthropogenic climate change. The problem is that the data before about 1955 are a lie. Click image to go to the source data.

While some blame the increase in acres burned on human-caused climate change, skeptics of anthropogenic warming have pointed out that, according to the official records, far more acres burned in the 1930s — close to 40 million acres a year — than in any recent decade. The 1930s were indeed a decade of unusually bad droughts that can’t be blamed on anthropogenic climate change. Continue reading

Time for Public Land Recreation Fees

NPR has an article about a serious problem that has an easy solution that no one wants to mention. The problem is that the number of hunters in the United States is declining, and since — under the Pittman-Robertson Act, a tax on guns and ammunition is one of the main source of conservation funding, money for conservation is also declining.

The article doesn’t mention some of the nuances of the problem. First, the real financial problem isn’t the declining number of hunters but the fact that America has a president who supports the Second Amendment. By comparison, when Obama was president and questioned widespread gun ownership, sales of guns and ammunition hit record levels, not because people were hunting but to safeguard and/or express their gun rights.

Second, the decline in hunters creates another problem at least as significant as the shortfall in revenues: a surplus of deer and other huntable wildlife. Deer in particular are overrunning much of the country. The animal most likely to kill you in rural areas is not a cougar or grizzly bear but a deer when you hit them with your car and they come flying through your windshield. Some areas also have too many elk and other huntable species. Continue reading

Who Stole What from Whom?

I visited the Patagonia web site looking for some Christmas presents yesterday and learned that “the president stole my land.” How horrible! So I looked into it and discovered that President Trump took federal land that was managed by a particular set of federal agencies under a particular set of restrictions and changed it into federal land managed by the very same federal agencies under a slightly different set of restrictions. Not to jump on Patagonia, whose clothing I’ve always enjoyed, but where’s the theft in that?

Of course, what Trump did was reverse changes by Presidents Clinton and Obama who first imposed the slightly different set of restrictions in 1996 (Clinton for the Grand Staircase-Escalante) and 2016 (Obama for the Bears Ears). I can say with absolute certainty that, when they made those changes in 1996 and 2016, many people in Utah said, “the president stole our land.”

Supposedly, one issue is vandalism and destruction to Native American antiquities and artifacts. But such vandalism and destruction was equally illegal (under laws that are equally difficult to enforce) under both sets of restrictions, so claims that Trump’s decision opens the areas to more looting or devastation are red herrings. Continue reading

A Non-Polarizing Secretary of the Interior

In 1993, Bill Clinton swept into office with a Democratic majority in both the House and Senate. His attempt to pass a controversial health-care bill failed but generated enough of a backlash that the Republicans took over both houses of Congress in 1995.

In 2001, George H.W. Bush entered the White House with Republicans in control of both houses. The events of 9/11 muted criticism of Bush for a time, but by 2007 Democrats had taken over Congress.

In 2009, Barack Obama became president and Democrats held both houses of Congress. He succeeded where Clinton failed in passing a health-care bill, but Republicans took over the House in 2011 and the senate in 2015.

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Not Guilty

It seems like we’ve been here before. A bunch of people mount a protest against the federal government. The only real violence is committed by the police. When seven of the people are put on trial for conspiracy charges, they turn the courtroom into a circus. The nation is shocked when all of them are found innocent of conspiring to break the law.

I’m writing, of course, about the Chicago Seven, one of whom, Tom Hayden, passed away earlier this week. Just four days later, the Malheur Seven were similarly found innocent of conspiracy charges in Portland.

The parallels go further. After the Chicago Seven cases were heard (but before the jury rendered a verdict), the judge cited the defendants for contempt of court and sentenced them to 2-1/2 to 4 years in prison (all of which were reversed on appeal). After the Malheur Seven jury presented its verdict, U.S. marshalls arrested and allegedly tased one of their lawyers for protesting the detention of his client without offering a warrant.

Continue reading