Flying to Seoul Today

The Antiplanner is flying to Seoul, Korea, today to speak at a conference tomorrow (Thursday local time) on conflict management and collaborative governance. Apparently, someone heard about the Forest Options Group, a committee of environmentalists, timber industry leaders, and Forest Service officials that I helped organize in the late 1990s. The group urged the Forest Service to experiment on individual national forests with alternative governance models, including collaborative governance and market-driven systems.

My report to the conference may be discouraging. I argue that the timber war that took place over western national forests in the 1970s and 1980s resulted from the fact that the incentives to polarize the issues of national forest management were so great that there was no chance for any conflict resolution. I remember environmentalist friends of mine being hung in effigy, other friends bragging that they had ecotaged logging equipment, and people being fired by the associations they worked for because they dared talk with people on the other side of the conflict.

Conflict resolution groups such as the Quincy Library Group and Forest Options Group only became possible when one side had already lost. In 1991, national forest timber sales fell by 40 percent; by 1995, they were down by more than two thirds. This brought the timber industry to the table out of desperation. At least some environmentalists were willing to come to the table because they did not trust the Forest Service to keep sales low. The agreements reached by groups such as Quincy allowed timber companies to cut at least some timber while protecting many areas important to environmentalists.

Hormonal injections applied right into phallus are efficient as well, and in countries like Japan, cell cute-n-tiny.com side effects viagra phone technology has been incorporated, allowing buyers to access the correct options, you need to * Get the correct information from the manufacturer* Follow the detailed instructions* Have clarification in case you have doubt* Have the clearance from your medical practitionerIf you want to access the best ED medications, such. You do not want to end up with a online pharmacy viagra dependency for the drug. Treating the cause can help restore the on line levitra cute-n-tiny.com sexual function. Smoking is one of the habits, which most people find hard to viagra cheapest pharmacy quit. But the other important point I make in my paper is that many resource conflicts have more than two sides. Most people think of conflicts being between one group of users and another, but a third party–the government agencies managing the resources–should also be considered an interest group. In the case of the timber war, the Forest Service had an interest in keeping things polarized in order to maximize their discretion.

The Quincy agreement faltered for exactly this reason. National forest officials said that they did not agree with the plan put together by the environmental and industry leaders, but in fact they refused to participate in writing that plan. This led a frustrated Quincy Library Group to persuade Congress to legislatively impose their plan on several California national forests. This was followed by several more “place-based agreements being turned into laws. This remains a clumsy way of managing public lands, particularly if agency officials continue to resist the collaborative agreements even after the laws are put in place.

Ironically, the timber war ended because the Forest Service decided to side with the environmentalists. While this decision was not overt, and wasn’t even clear to most participants for many years, agency officials tacitly agreed to reduce timber sales and manage national forests for other uses. I told this story in 1995 when President Clinton fired the chief of the Forest Service who had overseen the greatest reduction in national forest timber sales in history because that chief wasn’t enough of an environmentalist.

The Korea Institute of Public Administration may be holding this conference because Koreans are interested in finding ways to reduce conflicts with North Korea. If so, my paper will be of little help. But people who are interested in resolving conflicts over resources such as forests, water, or minerals may find in the story of the western timber war to provide important lessons for how–and how not–to manage such resources.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

7 Responses to Flying to Seoul Today

  1. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    I take it you won’t be looking at any of the sights in North Korea, will you? Metropolitan Pyongyang sounds like the ultimate Smart Growth and rail transit success story, according to this page, with a heavy rail system and almost no private automobiles.

    Speaking of North Korea, there is an English-language article in Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat about the (apparent) pending change in the North Korean dictatorship (with photos) here.

  2. Dan says:

    Very low-end cheap shots in comments notwithstanding, Randal and I are in almost total agreement on the mess that was the FS during that time. The Larry Craigs of the world and their triumphal greed decimated the Service, polarizing just about everybody. The FS still hasn’t recovered and the good people I know that choose to work for the FS all have more karma credits than they will ever need.

    DS

  3. Borealis says:

    The Forest Service planning system is a good place to study the good and bad of planning. The Forest Service spends a huge amount of money in its planning process and it goes through immense public debate and court scrutiny.

    The bad is that the Forest Service plans for ecosystems a hundred years in the future, the plans are legally in force for ten to fifteen years, and the plans are usually obsolete in five years.

  4. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    Dan wrote:

    > The Larry Craigs of the world and their triumphal
    > greed decimated the Service, polarizing just
    > about everybody.

    Dan, anyone, including ex-Sen. Craig, who wants to engage in sex in a public restroom, deserves to be criminally punished.

  5. C. P. Zilliacus says:

    Dan wrote:

    > Very low-end cheap shots in comments notwithstanding,

    What was a cheap shot?

    The Smart Growth industry wants to force people to live in apartment buildings, and it also wants to force people out of their private automobiles and onto rail transit and non-motorized modes of transport.

    It seems that the North Korean regime has been wildly successful at meeting those goals. Now it helps that this success has been helped by the undemocratic/Communist/Stalinist nature of government in North Korea.

  6. Dan says:

    Larry Craig, his disdain for forest biologists, and his ‘get out the cut, everything else be d*mned’ is well documented. I have no problem with performing perfectly natural acts in public and I can’t imagine a more empty world than criminalizing my hookup in the stall with the drunk hottie.

    What was a cheap shot?

    Metropolitan Pyongyang sounds like the ultimate Smart Growth… success story

    It is verrrry low-rent to conflate th’ commanizm and SG. Come now, how embarrassing. And this silly statement:

    The Smart Growth industry wants to force people to live in apartment buildings

    is embarrassing as well. Lolz! Not only can you not produce evidence that the industry has such plans, but you cannot produce more than one or two examples on the ground where a SG development built mostly apartments (if that). You also cannot produce total numbers of dwelling units nationwide in SG developments that show more MF than SF units built. You cannot even show that a SG developer made people live in apartments by refusing to sell them a house. The assertion is silly on its face and becomes Lolz-worthy upon the tiniest inspection.

    DS

  7. the highwayman says:

    C. P. Zilliacus said: The Smart Growth industry wants to force people to live in apartment buildings and it also wants to force people out of their private automobiles and onto rail transit and non-motorized modes of transport.

    THWM: ROTFLMAO, OMG that was hilarious!

    Though really CPZ, you & JK need to stop worrying about the boogy man.

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