The last monthly issue of Forest Watch magazine was August, 1993. The first issue of Different Drummer was winter, 1994. Although less frequent than Forest Watch, each issue was 64 pages long compared with 28 for a typical Forest Watch. Each issue focused on one topic: the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Endangered Species Act, state land and resource agencies, and so forth.
Different Drummer eventually published 13 issues. I was the sole writer of about six of them, and the main writer for several more. One person who helped write a couple of issues was Karl Hess IV, who had a Ph.D. in range ecology and whose father, Karl Hess III, was a well-known libertarian. While I was an environmentalist who had become libertarian, Karl was a libertarian who had become an environmentalist, so we fit well together.
In line with the Different Drummer idea, I changed the name of Cascade Holistic Economic Consultants, which had always been awkward, to the Thoreau Institute. Henry David Thoreau is sometimes considered the first environmentalist, but he was also deeply suspicious of big government. I felt this represented the focus of my work: finding ways to improve the environment without big government.
The inaugural issue was called “Pork Barrel and the Environment” and focused on the fact that federal spending was unsustainable. Those who care about federal lands, I argued, needed to insulate them from becoming victims of a giant sell off at some point in the future when Congress runs out of money to keep social security going, which is what had happened in New Zealand in the 1980s. The best way to do so would be to make them pay their own way by funding them out of user fees rather than tax dollars. This naturally alienated the progressive environmentalists as they didn’t want to hear that the federal government could ever run out of money (and still don’t).
I did more than just look at the then-current national debt. Going back to 1790, I showed that the budget deficits the nation had been (and still is) running are unprecedented in our history. For the nation’s first 150 years, we ran deficits during wartime and surpluses during peacetime, usually paying back most of the debt before the next war. This changed after World War II, I found, for three reasons.
First, after 1945, we stayed on a wartime footing due to the Cold War. But this was enabled by the other two changes that were a little surprising. One was the invention of air conditioning, which made Washington DC livable year round. Prior to air conditioning, DC was a malarial swamp and Congress was in session only a few months of the year, so it didn’t have time to spend a lot of money.
The other factor was that, early in World War II, the country made a simple change in how income taxes were collected. Prior to the war, people paid their taxes in a lump sum at the end fo the year. But many people who enlisted for the war took large pay cuts, and Congress realized they wouldn’t be able to afford to pay their taxes. Since it didn’t make sense to penalize people for serving their country, the change was made to a payroll deduction, effectively forgiving people for one year’s worth of taxation. At the time, no one realized that the result would also be that taxes were a lot less painful and so Congress could raise them far fewer political consequences.
After the war, Congress paid back half the debt incurred by the war. The debt then remained constant until the 1970s, when it took off again. The reason for this was also surprising: Watergate.
Prior to Watergate, House committee members and chairs were selected by the seniority system. Since Southerners tended to reelect their representatives more than Northerners, this meant that Southerners tended to dominate the most powerful committees, and the House Appropriations Committee was the most powerful of them all. Southern Democrats were fiscal conservatives, and members of the House Appropriations Committee viewed themselves as guardians of the public purse. Thus, they prevented spending from getting out of control.
As a result of Watergate, the House saw the biggest turnover in its history in November, 1974. The newcomers didn’t trust the Southerners due to their racism, so they changed the rules for selecting committee chairs. Instead of seniority, chairs were elected. One way to get elected was to hand out pork, so the Appropriations Committee became a vehicle for deficit spending instead of an obstacle to it. The result is that federal spending accelerated during the Ford years and from that point on it bore no relation to federal revenues.
The crisis point, I predicted in 1994, would be reached in around 2017, when the Social Security System would run out of money. Up to that point, Social Security was predicted to collect more revenues than it spent, and the surplus was used to fund the federal deficit. After that point, we would have to borrow more money than ever to keep Social Security and everything else going.
Media reports often claim that the Social Security System has a trust fund that is expected to last until 2030. But this trust fund consists of treasury bonds representing the borrowings from social security surpluses. Those bonds are only as good as the credit people give to the treasury.
Of course, we’ve passed 2017, and almost exactly as predicted, social security began running a deficit in 2018. But there hasn’t been a crisis because people still have faith in the U.S. dollar. If they ever lose that faith, the nation will be in severe trouble.
The second issue of Different Drummer focused on federal rangelands, which are managed by both the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service. Much of the issue was written by Karl Hess, and it also included contributions from nine other writers including ranchers, environmentalists, and Forest Service officials. It also included several case studies written by wildlife biologists Craig and Pamela Knowles.
The issue focused on the perverse incentives facing both public land managers and ranchers. Even the most environmentally conscious ranchers, the issue showed, were sometimes required by these incentives to overgraze their allotments because, if they didn’t, the government would give the allotments to someone else who would overgraze it.
Soon after publishing the second issue of Different Drummer, I was invited to participate in a conference on biodiversity held in Mexico City. The conference produced such a fascinating series of papers about the status of biodiversity in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, that I decided to publish them all in the second issue of Different Drummer.
Most of the papers were from biologists looking at conservation issues, but in addition to my paper a few others looked at it from the market point of view. Robert Sopuck, of the Manitoba Sustainable Development Coordination Unit, called for property rights protections to protect biodiversity in Canada. Sopuck has since been elected to the Canadian parliament.
The most fascinating paper to me was by Raul Garcia Barrios, an economist who noted that most of the land in Mexico was supposedly owned by peasants and local communities but in fact was managed for them by the government — similar to Native American reservations in the United States. Actual control was in the hands of what Barrios called regional transactional oligarchies, small groups of powerful people who controlled both government budgets and the lands. They were responsible for most of the deforestation that threatened Mexico’s biodiversity, so Barrios argued that putting the land in the hands of the peasants with secure property rights would be good for the economy and for biodiversity. Since the conference, Barrios has continued to do incisive work on land institutions in Mexico.
The fourth issue was called “Creating the Environmental Supermarket” and argued that the environment would benefit from marketizing all environmental resources. After all, environmental problems can all pretty much be characterized as conflicts between market resources and resources that aren’t marketed. In these conflicts, the progressives portrayed the markets as the bad guys, but in fact what was bad was that the environmental resources weren’t in the market place. While it might be difficult to marketize all resources, many such as wildlife, water, and recreation can be marketized, making the remaining problems much smaller. I wrote this issue myself, but of course it persuaded no one.
I am particularly proud of the first issue of Different Drummer‘s second year, “Tarnished Jewels: The Case for Reforming the Park Service.” With the exception of brief essays by Michael Frome and John Baden, I wrote this entire issue myself, attempting to do in a few months for the Park Service the same kind of research I had done in more than a decade for the Forest Service. I visited national park offices all over the country, reviewed dozens of park plans, and scrutinized the Park Service’s budget.
One of the problems I noted was that the Park Service often complained about its backlog of infrastructure maintenance. On investigation, I learned that a lot of that infrastructure consisted of employee housing. Government housing for park employees made sense when the parks were remote, but by the 1990s all parks except for a few in Alaska were an easy drive from a city whose property owners would be glad to provide housing.
I also learned that the Park Service routinely spent twice as much, per square foot, on its employee housing as private homebuilders and twice as much on its visitor centers as private commercial builders. A major reason that it did so is that it took something like a third of all construction costs as administrative overhead. This gave the agency an incentive to overbuild its infrastructure, maintain employee housing when it was unnecessary, and build elaborate visitor centers for every little unit of the park system. I decided the maintenance backlog wasn’t a real problem but was merely a way for the agency to increase its overhead dollars.
The issue also included more than thirty case studies of individual national parks, a detailed history of the agency itself, discussions of problems with ecosystems, infrastructure, and finances, and a four-page appendix that listed the revenues, budgets, visitation, and other information for all of the nearly 400 units of the National Park System at the time.
Of course, the Park Service reforms I proposed were similar to those for the Forest Service: fund the parks out of their user fees, not tax dollars; dedicate a share of the user fees to trust funds for historic and ecological preservation; and eliminate the agency’s top-heavy bureaucracy. A few parks probably could not be funded out of user fees; I suggested they could be taken over by other parks, states, or private non-profit organizations.
The national parks issue was notable for two other reasons. First, it had the first (and, as it turned out, only) color photography in Different Drummer. We never had the budget for color photos in Forest Planning/Watch. Second, it was the first issue that was also posted, for the most part, on the World Wide Web. I left a few sections off-line in the hope that it would encourage people to order copies of the magazine, but the most important parts remain on line.
Later in 1995, I claimed the domain ti.org for the Thoreau Institute. Thoreau.org had already been taken by Drummond Pike, who had been the Shalan Foundation director who gave us our first grant to start Forest Planning magazine in 1980, and who later started the Tides Foundation. He had started a Thoreau Society as a part of the Tides Foundation, but it didn’t last long: today, thoreau.org goes to Tides.
As it turned out, the brevity of ti.org gave it a value of its own: for each suffix such as .org or .com, there are only 676 possible two-letter domains, and most have been grabbed up (ti.com is Texas Instruments and ti.edu is Tysons University). In addition, for whatever it’s worth, ti.org shows we had one of the earliest web presences in the nation. Today, ti.org is mainly a vehicle for the Antiplanner, but I still maintain all of the information we ever posted about natural resources.
The second 1995 issue focused on Reinventing the Forest Service, including a look at the various Clinton administration attempts to change the agency’s budget. Contributors included my friend Andy Stahl, who by then was director of the group Jeff DeBonis started, the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (Andy dropped the “association of” from the name), as well as one of his colleagues, Robert Dale.
Another contributor was Doug Crandall, who at the time was the timber industry’s leading lobbyist in Washington DC. I first met Doug when he was a student at the Oregon State University College of Forestry in the same graduating class as Stahl. Doug was president of the local student chapter of the Society of American Foresters, and he had invited me to debate the state board of forestry’s Forestry Program for Oregon (which called for increasing federal land timber cutting to make up for declining inventories on private land). The other party in the debate, a deputy state forester, forgot about the session and so showed up late.
Before the debate, Doug and some of the other students met with me to find out how they could get careers in the environmental movement like mine. I basically told them they would have to work for nothing for several years. Naturally, none of them tried to do so; Andy Stahl joined the environmental movement only after establishing himself by working for the Forest Service and timber industry for a time.
Finally, the issue included an article by Gifford Pinchot III, the grandson of the Forest Service’s founder. Pinchot III had written a book and started a consulting firm helping businesses reduce their bureaucracy by making it competitive. Ordinarily bureaucratic functions such as accounting and human resources would compete with one another within the corporation or agency to handle the work. He called this “intrapreneuring” and, as a part of Dale Robertson’s reinvention programs, the Forest Service tried this in a few of its regions.
I wrote about three-fourths of the issue, most importantly an article called, “Memo to President Clinton: The Forest Service Has Already Been Reinvented–and You Fired the Man Who Oversaw It.” The article showed that, starting with forest scientists such as Jerry Franklin, followed by line officers such as Jeff Sirmon, and finally the timber staff such as Jeff DeBonis, the agency was reforming itself. That explained why timber sales had declined by nearly 50 percent before Clinton took office.
The third issue of Different Drummer‘s second year was nearly as monumental as the one on the Park Service: a review of more than 150 state land and resource agencies. For the review, I gathered budgets and other data from 50 state park agencies, 50 state forest or land agencies, and more than 50 (because some states have separate fish agencies from wildlife agencies) state fish & wildlife agencies.
The issue included an article on state trust lands by Jon Souder and Sally Fairfax. I had first met Sally at the Mission Symposium, which we held in San Francisco in 1984. She came away from that conference upset that the environmentalists did nothing but criticize the Forest Service, but reacted in horror when confronted with proposals to change its institutional design. She decided to do research on other institutional designs, and so wrote a book about state trust lands with her then-graduate student, Souder (who now teaches at Oregon State University).
One of the reasons I wrote this issue was that many people were claiming that states were better land managers than the federal government and so federal lands should be transferred to the states. I found instead that some state lands were better managed, but others were just as poorly if not worse managed than the federal lands. The difference was the institutional design: those designed as fiduciary trusts tended to be well managed, while those designed similar to federal agencies tended to have all of the conflicts and financial problems of the federal agencies. The solution, I concluded, was not to turn federal lands over to the states but to turn them into fiduciary trusts.
Although the Cato Institute would normally be thought of as supporting privatization of federal lands, my conclusion intrigued Cato enough that it published a shortened version of the Different Drummer issue as one of its policy papers. Cato also invited me to be an adjunct scholar, which only meant that it would publish my papers from time to time. At about the same time, it deleted Karl Hess from its list of adjunct scholars; although Karl and I saw eye-to-eye on these issues, he was perceived as moving away from a libertarian viewpoint while I was perceived as moving towards it.
The next issue was called “Congress and the Federal Lands” and it allowed me a break because it mostly consisted of articles from other contributors. These ranged from noted environmental law professor Charles Wilkinson to former Park Service director James Ridenour and also included Fairfax, Hess, Stahl, and several others.
The first issue in the third year of Different Drummer covered “The Endangered Endangered Species Act” and included original research by Karl Hess, Craig Knowles, and an intern who was working for the Thoreau Institute, Jeff Opperman. The research we all did for this issue greatly advanced my understanding of the endangered species issue and drastically changed the recommendation I made in Reforming the Forest Service, which was basically “leave it to the scientists.”
Instead, our research showed that the Fish & Wildlife Service’s administration of the law was failing to protect many species. In fact, one species studied by Karl, the black-footed ferret, was primarily endangered because the Fish & Wildlife Service had been deliberately destroying its food base. The ferret lived exclusively on prairie dogs, and the F&WS had a major program of killing prairie dogs, which were considered (probably wrongly) a pest.
We concluded that creating better property rights for wildlife would help save many if not all of the species that were listed as threatened and endangered. Under British common law, wildlife were owned by whoever owned the land the wildlife were on, but Americans changed this to say everyone owned the wildlife, which turned them into a commons.
I’ve gone into detail on each of these issues because most of them did some groundbreaking research that, unfortunately, had a tiny audience. Each of these issues was effectively a small book, and I should have submitted them to Island Press or another publisher. But I was more interested in doing the work than in getting it out; while going through a book publisher would have captured a much larger audience, it would also have delayed the publication of each one by years.
We published five more issues after the Endangered Species Act issue, but only three were important. First was a close look at the Bureau of Land Management, which was largely written by Karyn Moskowitz, who had worked with CHEC back when we published Forest Watch magazine in Eugene. Karyn has stayed in the non-profit world and currently runs New Roots, a group dedicated to making healthy food accessible to low-income families in Louisville, Kentucky. The issue also had articles by Karl Hess and Andy Kerr.
The other two issues were called the Second Century report and the Vanishing Automobile, and they each deserve chapters of their own. The first was my final effort to reform the Forest Service and the second represented the beginning of my new career in urban land-use and transportation issues.
