Andy Stahl debates the DeFazio forest trust proposal with Douglas County (Roseburg) Commissioner Doug Robertson. Robertson also chairs the association of counties that collect revenues from the lands in question.
Instead of dividing the lands in two, Robertson proposes to give all the lands to a single board of trustees set up something like the collaborative stewardship groups that have sprung up around the country. “Tens of thousands of acres” would be available for wilderness (instead of the roughly 1.2 million acres of land preserved under the DeFazio plan) and timber could be rationed out more slowly, providing counties with a more even flow of revenues.
Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio is floating a proposal to turn the Bureau of Land Management’s “Oregon and California” lands into two trusts, one focusing on timber production and one focusing on environmental protection. This plan was partly developed by frequent Antiplanner commenter Andy Stahl.
The Oregon & California (O&C) Railroad land grant lands now managed by the BLM are shown in orange; green is national forests; click for a larger view.
The Antiplanner has long supported the idea of turning public lands into fiduciary trusts. My most-recent proposal would also create two trusts: one driven by markets and the other to protect non-market-resources. Some of the revenue from the first trust would go to fund the second.
The DeFazio-Stahl proposal is slightly different, more like the New Zealand solution, which is to divide the lands into two. One chunk of land would include mainly old-growth forests that have not been logged; the other would mainly be partly or fully logged forests. The latter forests would be the base for the timber trust; the former would be in the care of the environmental trust.
The Bureau of Land Management has always labored in the shadow of its sister agency, the National Park Service, and its cousin, the Forest Service. While the national parks are America’s “crown jewels” and the Forest Service represents the best (and worst) of the Progressive era, the BLM manages the federal lands left over after everyone else took what they wanted. Possibly because it simply isn’t as romantic as those other agencies (and so Congress has less reason to throw money at it), the BLM manages its 245 million acres of land far more efficiently, spending an average of about $5 an acre compared with $37 for the Park Service and $32 for the Forest Service.
To help overcome its “romance” deficit, the BLM recently published a four-page flyer titled, “BLM: A Sound Investment for America.” The BLM, the flyer claims, “raises more money each year for the American taxpayer from the use of these lands than it spends.” It goes on to say that the agency’s “management of public lands contributed more than $112 billion to the national economy in 2010.”
In the late 1990s, the Forest Service spent about $300 million a year on fire and the Department of the Interior spent another $100 million a year. Then came the 2000 Cerro Grande fire, which burned a billion dollars worth of homes in Los Alamos, NM. After that, Congress opened up the checkbook and told the agencies to spend whatever it takes to keep such a fire from happening again.
The agencies have taken full advantage of this. In 2010, the Forest Service budget for fire was $2.1 billion and USDI’s was more than $850 million. That’s just the budget; the agencies had another $500 million or so to draw upon if they ran over their budgets; if they didn’t go over their budgets, they got to keep the surplus for future years.
Here’s an indication of how expensive fire has become: In 2010, for the first time in at least 60 years, if not the entire 105-history of the Forest Service, the agency spent more money on fire than on all other national forest operations, construction, and maintenance combined.
“Many people hoped that introduction of wolves into Yellowstone would bring down elk populations and allow ecosystem restoration,” the Antiplanner noted last week. “While the wolves have changed park dynamics (to the detriment of coyotes but in favor of foxes), they haven’t made much of a dent in elk numbers.”
On the prowl in Yellowstone. Flickr photo by TBanneck.
While this isn’t entirely wrong, it turns out I am behind on the latest science. Oregon State University ecologist Robert Beschta has shown that, while wolves haven’t greatly reduced elk numbers, they have greatly changed elk behavior. Specifically, by forcing the elk out of meadows and into forests, the wolves have promoted the recovery of willows. That, in turn, is leading to the reestablishment of beaver colonies, which are creating wetlands and promoting habitat for other species. Don’t have alongside online cialis the accompanying * Grape fruit and all the grapes products should be avoided. Who needs cialis australia online when we can take acai… 7. cialis in On the other hand, Kamagra is a general ED drug and it is available at reduced price. If the sphincter of Oddi is not working correctly, so many diseases and disorders can manifest, which can make it difficult for blood to reach the male sex viagra professional price http://www.devensec.com/rules-regs/decregs111.html organ.
Video of wolves in Oregon taken December 30, 2010.
WIth wolves now entering Oregon and Washington, we can expect to see more ecological changes. Thanks to Andy Stahl for this information.
National parks are one of the most popular programs of the federal government. Yet the National Park Service is also an increasing burden on taxpayers. Appropriations to the agency have doubled since 1991, and even after adjusting for inflation they have grown by a third.
What have taxpayers received for this money? One of the most important outputs of the parks is recreation, but national park recreation use peaked in 1987 and has stagnated or declined since then. Visitors spent 11 percent fewer days in national parks in 2010 than in 1987.
By coincidence, 1987 was also the year Alston Chase released his book, Playing God in Yellowstone, which for many people (including the Antiplanner) was the first signal that all was not well within the National Park System. Ironically, Chase started working on the book at the request of the Yellowstone Park Foundation, which wanted him to write a puff-piece that it could sell in its stores in park visitor centers.
Back in 1993, the Antiplanner wrote a report titled Pork Barrel and the Environment warning environmentalists that the federal government could not sustain its current expenditures through 2020. Those who cared about public lands such as national forests and national parks, the Antiplanner advised, should work to fund those land entirely out of user fees, else someone else would soon propose to simply sell them.
Now, economist Niall Ferguson, writing in Newsweek, makes the case for selling most public lands as well as other federal assets. Ferguson observes that most of the debate over federal finances focuses on either raising taxes or reducing spending. He suggests that selling federal assets represents a third option.
In 2007, an American scholar teaching in Christchurch uncovered a public-land scandal: New Zealand was giving grazing lands to local farmers at prices that were well below market. In fact, the government often paid farmers to take land that they sometimes turned around and sold at a huge profit.
The scholar was Ann Brower, who as it happens had audited the Antiplanner’s courses in incentive-based conservation at both Yale (where she was a masters student) and Berkeley (where she was a Ph.D. candidate). We even shared an office for at least one semester at Berkeley.
After getting her Ph.D., Ann received a Fulbright scholarship to study in New Zealand, where Lincoln University in Christchurch offered her a teaching position. Her current title is “senior lecturer,” which I believe is roughly equivalent to associate professor in the U.S.
A curious article in the New York Times says the Forest Service has a “new plan to manage the national forest system.” This new plan, says the Times, is 97 pages long (actually only 94) and has environmentalists upset because it no longer requires the agency to protect minimum viable populations of wildlife.
In reality, there is no new plan, but merely new rules for writing forest plans. As the Antiplanner has noted before, forest planning is a huge drag on the Forest Service that consumes enormous resources and produces nothing of value.
Since the law requires some form of planning, last year faithful Antiplanner ally Andy Stahl proposed “Keep It Simple Stupid” planning that met the absolute minimum requirements of the law but imposed no other obligations on the agency. Stahl pointed out that the only real requirement in the law was that forests should list the timber sales they plan, so he suggested that that’s all that the rules should require.
A recent decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has upended years of forest planning that were based on a Supreme Court decision made back in 1998. The Supreme Court had ruled that forest plans didn’t really make decisions, so even though the Forest Service spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year writing these plans, no one had the standing to challenge them in court.
Forest Service photo showing a lake in the Huron-Manistee national forests.
The Forest Service continues to spend money revising plans that supposedly make no decisions, but an attorney named Kurt Meister, representing himself, challenged the plan for Michigan’s Huron-Manistee forests. Meister lost at the district court level, but he persuaded the Sixth Circuit Court that forest plans made decisions after all, and that decisions made in the Huron-Manistee plan were arbitrary, so the court ordered the Forest Service to redo the plan.
