While I was in transition from working primarily on public lands issues to working primarily on urban issues, the Forest Service was in transition from focusing primarily on timber to focusing on something else, but it wasn’t quite sure what. Chief Thomas suggested that it should focus on ecosystem management, but ecosystem management doesn’t pay the bills, especially since no one was quite sure what it meant.
My reform proposals called for the federal land agencies to be allowed to charge market prices for all resources and be funded exclusively out of a fixed share of those revenues. I suspected that, on most national forests, this would lead to recreation becoming the most important use, though there would still be room for timber and other uses. The main obstacle to this was that Congress didn’t allow the agencies to charge for most recreation.
That began to change in 1996 when Congress created the Recreation Fee Demonstration program, allowing each of the four main public land agencies (Forest Service, Park Service, BLM, and Fish & Wildlife Service) to begin up to 100 experiments with recreation fees each and letting the agencies keep the revenues. The Park Service approached this with a complete lack of innovation, instead merely increasing entrance fees on 100 parks that were already charging fees and keeping the increased income (the fees that were previously being collected went into the Land & Water Conservation Fund).
The Forest Service, however, displayed a lot more innovation. One of my favorite projects was on the Umpqua National Forest where the forest archeologist invited people to pay $1,500 for a week-long program in which they participated in archeological preservation.
While some worried that recreation fees would discourage people from using the public lands, a GAO study found that the fees did not lead to any discernible reduction in use. In fact, in some cases they may have increased use because the monies were spent on creating new recreation opportunities.
The program seemed to be successful and in 2002 Congress lifted the 100-projects-per-agency limit. Unfortunately, a few years later Congress killed much of the program due to objections from some wilderness users, the turnaround due to the House being taken over by Democrats. The wilderness users argued that, since they didn’t cause as much environmental damage as, say, off-road vehicle users, they shouldn’t have to pay. I argued that, since fees create incentives for agency managers, setting fees proportional to the environmental impacts would give the managers incentives to emphasize the resources that do the most damage.
I also argued that, if people want free recreation, they can probably get it, but it will be in short supply and not very high in quality. This proved prophetic after Congress limited the program to developed recreation. National forests in Oregon and Washington had been charging a fee to park near wilderness trailheads. Under the new law, they could only collect such fees if the trailheads had such amenities as toilets and running water. Rather than adding similar amenities to other trailheads, the Forest Service closed many of the trails where it had previously collected fees. Then it said the remaining trails were being overused and it set up a quota system limiting the number of people who could use each trail each day.
Meanwhile, the Forest Service found its new mission in a completely unexpected place: wildfire. In 2000, the Cerro Grande fire burned more than a billion dollars worth of homes in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Forest Service pointed out that the fire was started by the National Park Service as a controlled burn in the nearby Bandelier National Monument. This served the Forest Service’s long-time fire-suppression-at-all-costs mentality.
What the Forest Service didn’t say was that the Forest Service responded to the controlled burn with a backfire, and it was the escape of the backfire that burned the homes. The Forest Service also played down the fact that homes that were fire wise — meaning non-flammable roofs and no flammables near the walls — survived the fire. This suggested to fire researcher Jack Cohen that treating homes near national forests is all that would be necessary to protect them from fires.
Instead of focusing on this, the Forest Service fire suppression people used the Cerro Grande fire to get more money from Congress for fuel treatments on the national forests and for fire suppression. During and after the fire, members of Congress did their best to get in front of cameras promising unlimited funding for Forest Service fire suppression program.
Fire is a great attention getter because it can be frightening and is newsworthy, since it makes such good video. Every summer after the Cerro Grande fire people were treated to articles with titles like “The West Is Burning,” and every year the Forest Service spent all of the money Congress gave it even when the number of acres burned weren’t particularly high.
Some people talked about banning the construction of homes near national forests, but this wouldn’t have served Forest Service interests. Instead, I realized that the Forest Service benefitted when homes burned because each home lost represented more members of Congress vowing to throw more money at the Forest Service. As I cynically put it, the Forest Service needed a sustained yield of homes burning down each year to sustain its fire budgets.
Soon, fire became even more important to the Forest Service than timber had ever been. At its peak, timber accounted for about 45 percent of national forest budgets. By the mid-2000s, fire was accounting for more than half of national forest budgets, and it has only increased since then.
The Forest Service’s main argument was that decades of fire suppression had led to a big build-up of fuels (that is, dead woody material on the ground and small shrubs and trees that could form a “fire ladder” into the canopy of the main trees in the forests), leaving national forests more vulnerable to fire than ever before. This persuaded Congress to increase the agency’s fuels reduction budget by more than ten times. Initially, I believed this claim, but when I decided to write a paper about fire, I felt I had to prove it to be credible.
Fortunately, my alma mater, Oregon State University, had a huge repository of Forest Service fire records, so I spent a few days in Corvallis looking at these records. The data allowed me to conclusively prove two things, neither of which I was expecting.
First, I discovered that the Forest Service had a long history of lying about fire, particularly in the 1920s through the early 1950s. I wasn’t surprised that the agency had lied, as I was used to that, but I had never suspected this particular lie.
To understand it means going back to 1908, when Congress effectively gave the Forest Service a blank check for fire suppression. When faced with wildfires, Congress said, the agency could spend whatever it took to put out the fires and Congress would reimburse it at the end of the year. As far as I know, this is the only time in history that a democratically elected government has ever given any bureaucracy a blank check.
This blank check reaffirmed the initial response of agency officials to fire, which was that it was evil and needed to be stomped out. Other agencies and private landowners who didn’t have blank checks took a different approach, realizing that spending a little on controlled burning now might save a lot of money on fire suppression later. The Forest Service, not having any money for controlled burning but unlimited funds for suppression, was not interested in such a policy.
In 1924, Congress passed the Clarke-McNary Act that, among other things, encouraged the states to work with private landowners to form cooperative fire protection districts. This law was to be administered by the Forest Service, which would provide federal grants to the states that formed such districts.
The Forest Service decided to offer such grants only to states that banned prescribed burning. Private landowners who had a history of such burning to enhance the values of their forests were to be forbidden from doing so. As a result, most states in the South, where such burning was most popular, refused to join the Forest Service’s cooperative program.
The Forest Service retaliated by counting all prescribed fires as wildfires. Thus, in the records, the number of acres burned each year showed a dramatic increase in the late 1920s and 1930s. Typically, wildfires burn about 1 percent of forested acres each year, but landowners in the South often burn as much as 20 percent of their acres each year, thus leading to a hugely inflated number of acres reported to be burned by wildfire.
The Forest Service finally recognized its mistake and in the late 1940s began to tolerate prescribed fire on private lands. During the 1950s, as various Southern states joined the Forest Service program one-by-one, the number of acres reported as wildfires steadily declined.
This discovery led me to ask: if the Forest Service lied in the 1930s as a result of budgetary incentives, who was to say that the Forest Service wasn’t still lying in the 2000s as a result of slightly different budgetary incentives? In fact, it was. When Forest Service fire people presented a series of photos to Congress purporting to show a huge growth of fuels over time due to fire suppression, environmentalists noted that the first photo in the series, which purported to show a natural forest before management, had stumps in it. They found an even earlier photo that was taken before timber cutting that showed the true “natural” forest was filled with about as much fuels as the later photos in the series. This called into question the whole fuels build-up story.
To see who was right, I compared fire data with annual drought data reported by the Weather Service. If the fuel-build-up problem was real, I expected to see an increase in the number of acres burned in any given drought condition over time. Instead, I found that the number of acres burned almost perfectly correlated with drought. The reality, I realized, was that Forest Service fire suppression efforts had never been good enough to lead to an unnatural build-up of fuels.
This was confirmed by a report published by the Rocky Mountain Research Station that classified the nation’s wildlands in two ways. First was into five natural wildfire regimes: frequent, low-severity fires; frequent stand replacement fires (this was mostly grasslands); moderately frequent, mixed-severity fires; moderately-frequent, stand replacement fires; and infrequent stand-replacement fires. Of these, the only forests likely to see build-up of fuels due to fire suppression were in the first category. This made up some 80 percent of forests in the South, which was why landowners in the South were so interested in prescribed fire, but less than half the forests in the West.
The second classification considered the current condition of the forests: class 1 was “fire regimes within a historical range”; class 2 was “fire regimes moderately altered” by management; and class 3 was “significantly altered” by management. Class 3 was the one that had a large fuel build-up.
Page 13 of the report estimated that about 77 million acres of the frequent, low-severity forests were in condition class 3. While that sounds like a lot, it was only 6 percent of the total acres evaluated in the report. On national forests alone, it was 28.8 million out of 196 million acres, or 15 percent of the total. Just 3 percent of Department of the Interior lands fell into this category. Moreover, a table on page 16 of the report concluded that only 424,280 federal acres were both in a high risk class and a danger to nearby structures on private land. That’s a tiny fraction of the number that the Forest Service wanted to treat with funds provided by Congress.
I concluded that the money the Forest Service was spending on fuels treatments and fire suppression was mostly wasted. Instead, the agency should probably let a lot more fires burn that it was allowing to burn. At the time, it only allowed fires to burn if they were in wilderness areas, which meant that it immediately suppressed most fires many of which, if allowed to burn, would have done the job controlled burning that was costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Jack Cohen’s research had also convinced me that fuels reductions on federal lands was neither necessary nor sufficient to protect structures on nearby private lands. It wasn’t necessary because treating the structures themselves and the land within about 150 feet of those structures would protect them from fire. It wasn’t sufficient because low-level fires could burn across recently treated areas and then ignite structures that hadn’t been treated.
I wrote up my findings in a lengthy (36,000-word) report that I put on the Thoreau Institute web site. My conclusions were supported by some environmentalists and some fire ecologists. But the fire issue didn’t produce the kind of political movement that was generated by wilderness or old growth, so the Forest Service view remained the dominant paradigm.
In 2007, I updated my data and conclusions in a report published by the Cato Institute. The report suggested that firefighting responsibilities be taken from the federal agencies and given to the states. Some BLM districts already let the states do their firefighting by joining the state cooperative fire programs, paying the same amounts per acre as private landowners would pay. Since the state lack a blank check, they would have an incentive to allow more fires to burn.
After a Colorado fire killed fourteen firefighters in 1994, the Forest Service changed some of its policies, putting firefighter safety ahead of fire suppression. This meant that it often allowed wildfires to burn more acres or that it burned more acres itself in backfires. Either way, these fires helped treat what fuel build-ups there were. But the Forest Service used the additional acres burned to argue that it needed more money to put out the larger fires.
Since then, the Forest Service has abandoned some its other stringent fire-suppression policies, including one that insisted that efforts be made to suppress all fires by 10 am of the day after they are detected. But changing the policy and changing the on-the-ground practice are two different things. So long as Congress is willing to treat fire by throwing money at it, the Forest Service will continue to spend more on fires each year.
In 2009, I wrote one more paper about the federal land agencies that pretty much has been my final word on the subject. Everyone likes to say that the 600 million acres of federal lands managed by the Forest Service and Department of the Interior are “priceless,” but they cost taxpayers roughly $10 billion per year. At some point, Congress is going to run out of money. Instead of selling the lands, I suggested they be managed at a profit, which should easily be possible. Despite the fact that I didn’t call for privatizing the lands, the Cato Institute published the report.
For more than a century, we’ve treated federal lands using a system that assumes that the bureaucracies managing them will always make decisions in the public interest and not out of their own self-interest. We know that isn’t true. Instead, I proposed a system of checks and balances that would produce better management and more public benefits at no cost to taxpayers.
Those checks and balances include treating the lands as fiduciary trusts, which puts the burden on the trustees to show they are doing a good job. Each chunk of land would be managed by a board of directors elected by anyone who cares enough about that land to join a “friends of” group. Each trust would be funded out of a share of the receipts it can produce plus any private money people are willing to donate, but no tax dollars. The remaining revenues of the trusts would go into secondary, non-market trusts set up to specifically maximize the production of non-market resources such as endangered species and historic sites. All of these points would insure that the trusts manage the lands for their highest and best uses.
While I continue to monitor and write occasional op-eds about Forest Service budgets and fire programs, these are the last major reports I’ve written on the subject. Instead, most of my energy has gone into urban issues, particularly transportation and housing, two key aspects of what I regard as the American dream.
