23. The End of Forest Planning

By the late 1980s, forest planning was far from complete. As of 1987, eight years after the Forest Service published its final planning rules, more than half the plans were still unfinished. Still, the process was winding down, as reflected by the number of forest plan reviews I did each year. As near as I can tell, I had reviewed some 20 plans in 1985, but only eight each in 1986 and 1987, seven in 1988, and one a year for the next couple of years after that.

After considering appeals and do-overs resulting from those appeals, the planning process was taking a lot longer than originally projected. The plans were also a lot more expensive. Though Chief McGuire had guessed in 1976 that each plan would cost about a million dollars, Northern Arizona University forestry professor Richard Behan estimated that the actual cost was well over $10 million per plan.

One of the plans I reviewed in 1987 was for Ohio’s Wayne National Forest. Since the Wayne and the Hoosier were both only about a hundred thousand acres each, compared to western forests that were typically close to a million acres, both the Indiana and Ohio forests were managed out of the same supervisor’s office in Bedford, Indiana.

Like the Hoosier, the Wayne lost money on every stick of timber it sold. Like the Hoosier, planners built assumptions into the Wayne’s FORPLAN model that recreation was valuable and in short supply and that the computer could only produce that recreation value by building roads and clearcutting timber. As a result, the forest plan called for putting something close to 99 percent of forested lands in a timber management prescription involving clearcutting.

Unlike the Hoosier, the Forest Service showed absolutely no remorse about these faulty assumptions when I revealed them in my review, instead staunchly defending them when the Sierra Club challenged the plan. This may have had something to do with the fact that members of the Ohio congressional delegation who showed any interest in the national forest were strongly pro-timber, while members of the Indiana delegation were strongly pro-wilderness.

Although the forest plans were written by the forest supervisors’ offices, the final decision on each plan was made by the regional forester. Anyone wanting to challenge that decision had to first appeal it to the chief’s office. If they lost that appeal, they could ask the secretary of agriculture to review the plan. If they lost there (or the secretary declined to review it), the next step was federal district court, followed by circuit court, and finally the Supreme Court. I don’t recall any environmentalists taking a plan to the Supreme Court, but — as we will see — the timber industry did.

As I may have mentioned before, the Forest Service produced a few more than a hundred forest plans and environmentalists appealed every one of them to the chief’s office. They asked me to review a few more than half the plans, and they won their challenges, at some level or another, of about half the plans I reviewed while they lost every challenge made of a plan I didn’t review. That doesn’t necessarily mean that my reviews made the difference in every case; it may just be that groups that were organized enough to hire me to write a review also tended to be organized enough to prepare a solid challenge.

For example, the Natural Resources Defense Council asked me to review two plans in Colorado with the intention of challenging those plans. They succeeded in persuading Doug MacCleery, who was John Crowell’s assistant in the Department of Agriculture, to send those plans back to the drawing board. But it wasn’t clear that MacCleery’s decision turned on anything I wrote in my review. On the other hand, my reviews were clearly the factors that led to environmental victories over the Santa Fe and Hoosier plans.

In 1988, I reviewed the Rio Grande Forest plan for some Colorado environmental groups. Among other things, I showed that planners had overestimated timber prices and failed to consider an alternative that only sold timber when it was profitable. The environmentalists lost their appeal at the chief’s level but convinced a federal judge that the plan was invalid on the grounds I raised.

Around this time, I was invited to speak at a conference of federal judges. At the time I spoke, none of the judges had any Forest Services cases pending before them or they would have stepped out of the room during my presentation. I focused on the incentives created by the Knutson-Vandenberg Act and how those incentives led the Forest Service to biased decision-making.

After my presentation, one of the judges came up to me and said, “If you bring a case like that to my court, I’ll guarantee you a win.” I had no idea that judges ever talked like that, but naturally I asked him where his court was. It turned out he was Boyce Martin, the chief judge in the Sixth Circuit, which covers Kentucky, Michigan, Tennessee . . . and Ohio! I told him that a case might reach his court soon.

In the meantime, in 1990, I reviewed the plan for the Mark Twain National Forest, which is in the same Forest Service region as the Hoosier and Wayne forests. The planners there printed out a big banner saying “Welcome Randal O’Toole,” but they were clearly annoyed to have me there, telling me they didn’t have time to talk to me. That was fine with me, as I preferred to base my review exclusively on the documents. They put me in a room with big stacks of FORPLAN runs and background documents and I went to work.

Somewhere in the pile of documents I found a memo from the regional forester’s office saying that the Hoosier had developed a useful FORPLAN model and encouraging other forests in the region to emulate the Hoosier’s example. The model the memo was praising, of course, assumed that recreation was in short supply and the only way FORPLAN could increase recreation was by road construction and clearcutting. Of course, the Mark Twain built the same flawed assumptions into its model.

After my review was published, Mark Twain planners issued a response saying my review was based on “personal philosophy” and had “no legal standing.” I suppose a decision about whether or not to lie in a computer model could be considered a “personal philosophy.” The sad thing was that the forest felt defensive enough about its lies to issue a public response.

Back in 1980, I had originally approached forest planning with the belief that such planning was possible but that the Forest Service would probably screw it up. By 1990, I was convinced that such planning wasn’t even possible, and so I wrote a report advocating the repeal of the Resources Planning Act of 1974 and the National Forest Management Act of 1976.

The report noted that the NFMA was written by Hubert Humphrey as a continuation of the New Deal philosophy that wise government planners could write rational plans that would provide the optimum benefits for society. In fact, I pointed out, such rational planning is impossible in a political environment; forests, even as small as the Hoosier’s 100,000 acres, were simply too complicated to plan; planning couldn’t be done in a reasonable amount of time as plans supposed to last for 10 to 15 years were taking 10 to 15 years to write; and the Forest Service’s own incentives prevent it from acting as an unbiased, rational planner.

Part of the reason why planning took so long is because reality changed faster than planners could keep up. They might assume timber prices were increasing when they were declining; new species might be listed as endangered, requiring major changes in the planning process; each new presidential administration wrote new planning rules requiring planners to revise their work. As one planner told me, “There’s never enough time to do it right; but there’s always enough time to do it twice.”

My experience reviewing FORPLAN models also revealed the weakness in computer modeling. No matter how complex the computer models seemed, they were nowhere near as complex as reality. Of course, a model is by definition a simplification of reality, but the FORPLAN models were so oversimplified that the bore no relation to reality. Yet the plan decision-makers, most of whom didn’t really understand FORPLAN, treated the results as fully accurate. As the same planner comments, FORPLAN modeling was “garbage in, gospel out.”

I didn’t do any forest plan reviews in 1991. Thanks to Richard Alston, an economist who I had gotten to know at the Western Forest Economist meetings, I received my first job in transportation. Alston was a professor of economics at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. Some Ogden rail history buffs had somehow raised some money to do a preliminary feasibility study for reconstructing a rail line to Promontory, where the last spike was struck for the first transcontinental railroad. Although there was a national park there, the rail line had been abandoned in 1942 due to a reroute across the Great Salt Lake. The history group proposed to rebuild the line and run tourist trains from Ogden to Promontory, a distance of about 53 miles.

The group offered the money to the Weber State economics department. The department was happy to take the money, but didn’t know how to do a preliminary feasibility study. Alston remembered that I liked trains, so suggested they subcontracted the work to me.

I didn’t know how to do a preliminary feasibility study either, but I decided this would be a great opportunity to visit some tourist railroads in the West. Besides taking rides on tourist trains, I could scope out what made some successful and what caused others to fail. For example, the Durango and Silverton, in southwest Colorado, is a thriving, for-profit business, while others, such as the Nevada Northern, in eastern Nevada, are non-profits that depend heavily on volunteers and even then barely survive.

After reviewing several of these operations, I concluded that two factors were vital to a tourist railroad’s success. First, the rail line had to go through spectacular scenery. Second, it had to be scenery that people wouldn’t be able to see from their car windows on a highway.

The Ogden proposal failed both of these tests. The scenery in the rural areas between Ogden and Promontory was some of the dullest in the West, and the route was paralleled by and within sight of a highway for its entire length. In addition, most of the successful lines relied on tracks that had existed long before the railroad became a tourist line, while the Promontory line would require at least 25 miles of new rail construction, which would cost tens of millions of dollars. I concluded that the project wasn’t feasible.

At the conclusion of my tour, but before writing my report, I ended up in Ogden and met with the leader of the rail group that funded the study. He asked me what I was doing for the study, and when I told him he exclaimed, “If you’re doing all that for $10,000, what would you do for $100,000?” This taught me several things.

First, I realized I was doing far more than would be done for a preliminary feasibility study. Second, I learned that the university, which was paying me $6,000 to do the study, was keeping 40 percent for administrative overhead. Finally, I realized he was saying, “If your preliminary study comes out with a positive recommendation, we’ll probably hire you to do the full study.” This promise of further work is why consulting firms always conclude that boondoggles are “feasible.”

I confess I didn’t use the words “not feasible” in my final report. But no one reading the report would conclude that the project made sense, and the group didn’t bother to try to raise $100,000 for a full feasibility study. However, in late 1992, after Bill Clinton won the presidential election, I received a phone call from someone in the Park Service.

“President-elect Clinton said he supports funding for infrastructure,” he said. “A rail line to Promontory is infrastructure! Do you think he would favor that?” I told him “no.”

In December, 1992, I completed my last forest plan review and my first review of a forest plan amendment. Under the law, the plans were to be revised every 10 to 15 years, and the plan for North Carolina’s Nantahala and Pisgah forests (which I reviewed) was getting close to 10 years old. There are four national forests in North Carolina, all managed by one supervisor’s office. Because the Nantahala and Pisgah in western North Carolina are so different from the Uwharrie and Croatan in eastern North Carolina, the forest elected to write separate plans for each pair.

As with so many forest plans before, this one assumed timber prices were much higher than they actually were, that those prices were rapidly growing when in fact they were declining, and that timber costs were lower than they actually were. I also found that planners neglected to incorporate a nondeclining even-flow constraint into their FORPLAN model, and as a result, sales in the second decade of the plan would be significantly lower than the first — a clear violation of not only Forest Service rules but of the National Forest Management Act.

Although North Carolina forests were beginning a second round of forest planning, there was still at least one forest that hadn’t completed its original forest plan. I had reviewed the draft plan for California’s Klamath National Forest in 1983. Every time the forest came close to publishing a final plan, however, something happened — a new forest planning rule, a new spotted owl management plan, a new wilderness bill — that sent the planners back to the drawing board.

Finally, in 1993, the forest effectively threw up its hands and gave up. Today, if you look at the forest’s web site, you’ll find a “2010 update” to the forest plan. But the plan’s introduction reveals that it isn’t an update of a 1980s-era forest plan but of the timber management plan and unit plans that had been written in the 1970s.

In 1994, I got a call from Fred Gittes, the Sierra Club attorney who was handling the Wayne Forest case. They had lost at the district court level, he said, and were undecided about whether to go to the circuit court. He was obviously pretty discouraged. Without giving him the details of my conversation with Judge Martin, I encouraged him to appeal to the circuit court.

Although I was under the impression that circuit court cases were randomly assigned to judges, two of the three judges who heard the Wayne case had attended my lectures on the Knutson-Vandenberg Act. Judge Martin wrote the main decision and the second judge who had heard me speak, Alice Batchelder, wrote a concurring decision.

In his 1997 decision, Judge Martin noted the Chevron doctrine, which is based on a 1984 Supreme Court decision directing federal courts to defer to agency interpretations of the laws they administer. But, he concluded, this shouldn’t apply to the Forest Service because the agency was biased in favor of timber.

“The Forest Service budgeting process, which allows the Forest Service to keep a percentage of the funds it realizes from timber sales, provides an incentive for the Forest Service to sell timber below cost or at a loss. See, Randal O’Toole, Reforming the Forest Service 122 (1988),” Martin wrote. “Also, to maximize its budget, the Forest Service uses expensive timber management and reforestation techniques, such as clearcutting. Id. Again, conflicting interests lead to perverse results: clearcutting provides the Forest Service with a higher congressional subsidy because the Forest Service can request preparation and administrative costs. Consequently, decisions may be made, not because they are in the best interest of the American people but because they benefit the Forest Service’s fiscal interest.”

Naturally, I was thrilled by this decision, and the Forest Service said it would live with it. But the timber industry, represented in this case by the Ohio Forestry Association, wasn’t happy and took the case to the Supreme Court. In a stunning ruling, the court decided to throw the case out, saying that forest plans didn’t make decisions and so no one had the standing to challenge those plans. The court ignored the fact that Congress had specifically required the Forest Service to make decisions about such things as the suitable timber base, the annual sale level, and whether land was suitable for clearcutting. Instead, the court said that anyone challenging a plan would have to challenge specific actions such as timber sales.

Many of the Forest Service employees who had dedicated years of their lives to writing plans must have been upset that the court essentially said their plans were meaningless. I was a little upset myself, but in retrospect the court effectively invalidated a planning process that I thought was worthless anyway.

Although Congress hasn’t repealed the planning laws, the Forest Service doesn’t spend a lot of time planning anymore. Some forests have updated their 10- to 15-year plans since the 1980s; some have not. Even when they do update them, the plans are no longer as contentious as they were in the 1980s, mainly because — as I’ll describe in upcoming chapters — the stakes are much lower. Forest planning was a grand experiment that proved what many people already knew: government planning doesn’t work.