Let Forest Planning Wither Away

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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Unfortunately, no one ever told Congress that the process had failed, so the law requiring the Forest Service to revise the plans every ten to fifteen years is still on the books. Recently, the agency proposed that, since the plans were pretty worthless anyway, it would not go to the time and trouble of writing environmental impact statements for them. In the spirit of Dick Behan, I wrote an op ed suggesting that this was a good step toward letting planning wither away, and the Rocky Mountain News published it last week.

The Oregonian published a similar article, along with a counterpoint from a couple of Portland environmentalists. Their argument, as I understand it, is that the forests are so important that the Forest Service should have to do a bunch of paperwork even if it doesn’t have any effect on management.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

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