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Category Archives: Public lands

Merge Forest Service into Interior?

By | | Public lands
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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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Park Barrel

By | | Public lands
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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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The Spotted Owl and the Planner

By | | News commentary, Public lands
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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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150 Years of Mismanagement? Or Seven Years of Misplaced Priorities?

By | | Public lands, Wildfire
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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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Will Anyone Learn the Lessons from the Tahoe Fire?

By | | News commentary, Public lands, Wildfire
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At the risk of premature judgment, it appears the Angora fire that destroyed hundreds of Lake Tahoe homes will provide a classic example of what is wrong with federal wildland fire policy. As of Tuesday evening, the fire has burned more than 3,000 acres, and managed to destroy more than 200 homes and scores of other structures. (Get the latest official report here.)

The Angora Fire on Sunday.
Flickr photo by Steve Wilhelm.

As those who have read my most recent fire paper know, the standard story is that a century of fire suppression has led to a build-up of fuels in the forests. The standard solution is to allow the Forest Service and other agencies to spend close to half a billion dollars a year on fuel treatments.

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Strategic Planning: Another Waste of Your Tax Dollars

By | | News commentary, Public lands
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Our society lets markets handle the production of most things that are easily measured and asks government to produce things that are harder to quantify. This makes it easy for government agencies to suffer mission creep, meaning they start doing things other than the purposes for which they were created because the new things are easier to measure or have a more powerful political constituency.

Back in 1993, some bright bulb in Congress tried to solve this problem through strategic planning. Specifically, a law called the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) required every federal agency to write a plan that specified the outcomes the agency was trying to produce and showed how each part of the agency’s budget contributed to those outcomes.

Like so many other planning ideas, this one hasn’t worked. Instead, it has become just one more hoop for agency officials to jump through, adding to taxpayer costs without producing any results.

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The Pace-of-Change Problem

By | | Public lands, Why Planning Fails
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In 1976, when Congress required the Forest Service to write comprehensive, long-range plans for each of the 100 or so national forests, the Chief of the Forest Service estimated that it would take about three years to write all the plans. In fact, it took eighteen.

Part of the problem was that planning took so long that reality changed in unexpected ways before the plan could be completed. Planners then had a choice of ignoring reality or starting over. Those who ignored reality delivered plans to forest managers that made no sense. Those who started over never really got done.

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Planning Creates Power Without Responsibility

By | | Public lands, Why Planning Fails
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David Schoenbrod is an attorney who once worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council and now teaches at New York Law School. His 1993 book, Power Without Responsibility, argues that legislators often avoid responsibility for their actions by delegating power to bureaucracies. If the bureaucracies succeed, the legislators can take credit; if they fail, the legislators can blame the bureaucrats.

This explains why planning is so popular in a country that supposedly opposed central planning for most of the twentieth century. The planners gladly accept the power that legislators are so eager to delegate. Yet even the planners do not face any responsibility for their actions. If they screw up, their usual “punishment” will be more money and power to try to fix the problems they created.

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Let Forest Planning Wither Away

By | | Planning Disasters, Public lands
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In 1976, Congress passed a law requiring all national forests to write long-term, comprehensive management plans. I remember attending a 1980 meeting of newly hired planners who were all excited about the opportunity to shape the future of 193 million acres of the nation’s public lands.

Their spirits were somewhat dampened when Professor Richard Behan, who later became dean of the Northern Arizona University school of forestry, predicted that planning would fail. He urged the Forest Service to simply ignore the law. The Forest Service ignored him. A decade and at least a billion dollars later (Behan thinks it was a lot more), some of the plans were still unfinished and those that were finished were ignored by forest managers who quickly realized they were worthless.

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