A recent decision by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has upended years of forest planning that were based on a Supreme Court decision made back in 1998. The Supreme Court had ruled that forest plans didn’t really make decisions, so even though the Forest Service spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year writing these plans, no one had the standing to challenge them in court.
Forest Service photo showing a lake in the Huron-Manistee national forests.
The Forest Service continues to spend money revising plans that supposedly make no decisions, but an attorney named Kurt Meister, representing himself, challenged the plan for Michigan’s Huron-Manistee forests. Meister lost at the district court level, but he persuaded the Sixth Circuit Court that forest plans made decisions after all, and that decisions made in the Huron-Manistee plan were arbitrary, so the court ordered the Forest Service to redo the plan.
To understand the significance of this decision, we have to go back to the 1980s, when forest planning was in full swing. Environmentalists challenged every single plan, and many environmental groups hired the Antiplanner to help them find reasons why the plans should be overturned. The Antiplanner ended up working on a little more than half the plans, and about half of those were overturned either by the Forest Service itself, the Secretary of Agriculture, or in court. Of the plans the Antiplanner did not review, not a single environmental challenge was successful.
The real significance of the Antiplanner’s work was that it helped me understand that the Forest Service was heavily influenced by budgetary concerns, and that timber sales enhanced the agency’s budget even if–in fact, especially if–those timber sales lost money. Over the years, this slowly tilted the agency’s behavior–without employees even being consciously aware of it–from one that truly managed the forests for multiple uses to one that was dominated by timber above all else.
In the mid-1990s, the Antiplanner spoke to several conferences for federal judges about Forest Service incentives. Because of the agency’s perverse incentives, I told the judges, the agency’s plans could not be trusted. Two of the judges happened to be from the Sixth Circuit Court and one of them told me he hoped a Forest Service case would come to his court.
At the time, I was working with the Sierra Club, which had challenged the plan for the Wayne National Forest. Even though every timber sale on that forest lost money, the forest plan put 99 percent of the land in the forest in a clearcut regime.
To justify this decision, the Antiplanner’s review of the forest plan found that the agency had fabricated recreation data to make it appear that recreationists preferred to play in clearcuts, so more clearcuts meant more recreation. Since the plan assumed that recreation in clearcuts was valuable, the value of this recreation supposedly made up for the dollar losses from the timber sales. My reviews of other forest plans found that all of the plans in the Forest Service’s Eastern Region, which includes the Wayne and the Huron-Manistee forests, similarly fabricated recreation data.
Though this map shows the outer boundaries of Michigan national forests, the Forest Service actually owns only a small portion of the land within those boundaries. People who prefer to recreate in clearcuts have access to plenty of clearcuts on private lands within those boundaries. The recreation that is in short supply, and that the Forest Service should emphasize if it wants to maximize the economic value of the forests, is primitive and semi-primitive recreation.
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Though the plan was written in the 1980s, the courts didn’t make a decision about the Sierra Club’s challenge until the mid-1990s. When the Sierra Club lost the Wayne case at the district court level, the club’s attorney asked me if I thought they should appeal to the Sixth Circuit. I somewhat gleefully advised him to do so.
The three-person panel that heard the case included both of the circuit court judges who had attended the conferences I spoke at. The decision, written by the chief judge of the circuit, pointed out that the Supreme Court’s Chevron doctrine required courts to give “deference” to the agencies assigned by Congress to manage public resources. But the decision went on to quote Reforming the Forest Service at length and concluded that the Forest Service did not deserve such deference because it was biased by its budget. The court ordered the Forest Service to redo the Wayne Forest plan.
The Forest Service would have lived with that decision, but an Ohio timber industry association that had intervened in the case took the decision to the Supreme Court. Ignoring the question of deference, the Supremes concluded that, since the Forest Service would make later decisions about each individual timber sale, forest plans themselves made no decisions about selling timber. Thus, the court threw out the case.
The Antiplanner took this personally. Not only had the Forest Service spent hundreds of person-years writing the plans, the Antiplanner had spent thousands of hours trying to shoot down the plans. The Wayne Forest decision said that any future efforts in that direction were wasted, so environmentalists gave up trying to challenge forest plans in court.
Forest Service photo showing recreation trail in the Huron-Manistee forests. Curiously, none of the recreation photos on the Forest Service’s web site shows recreationists enjoying clearcuts.
Except for Kurt Meister. He pointed out that, even though forest plans might not make decisions about timber sales, they made other decisions. In particular, plans decided what acres would be managed for different kinds of recreation. Meister was upset that the Huron-Manistee plan was allowing off-road vehicles in parts of the forest where he thought they didn’t belong. The Sixth Circuit agreed that this was a decision.
When I read this, I slapped myself on the head and said, “Why didn’t we think of that back in 1998?” This decision leaves many forest plans vulnerable to challenges.
Though it didn’t quote the Antiplanner, the Sixth Circuit also found that the Forest Service did not deserve to have the court defer to the agency’s decisions. “Deference must be earned,” it said, and “it was not earned” by the Forest Service in several points in this case. In particular, the court concluded, Forest Service estimates of motorized recreation demand were “arbitrary.”
In other words, years after the Antiplanner reviewed the Wayne Forest plan, the Eastern Region is still fabricating recreation data to justify its decisions. The Antiplanner feels vindicated by this decision.
Ultimately, the solution should be to let the Forest Service charge for recreation and fund the agency solely out of its own receipts so it has an incentive to emphasize the most valuable uses rather than the ones that lose the most money. Until then, I hope other environmental activists will use the Meister decision to challenge fabricated data in other forest plans.
Interesting way to approach the problem. I fully agree that the Larry Craigs of the world – in addition to the Congresscritters who made the receipts the primary metric – ruined a perfectly good agency. Anyone interested in more detail around Randal’s nice essay may want to pick up Wilkinson’s Science Under Siege for chapters of gory details.
DS
I have long thought that the portions of the National Forests that are dedicated wilderness should be turned over to the National Park Service, along with those contiguous portions dedicated to recreational uses.
The land available for timber sales or just lying fallow or in destructive recreational uses (ATV raceways come to mind) should be put up to sale for the highest bidder. Private land trapped inside Forest Service artifical boundaries should be freed of the onerous restrictions placed on it during the Roosevelt Administration as their is no constitutional basis for the Federal Government to seize or buy land to make a National Forest. The Federal Government is only empowered to regulate lands it already holds, not to seize new lands except for constitutional purposes such as national defense or the erection of government buildings.
The same thing goes for land under the BLM. Existing ranchers and miners should have right of first refusal to purchase the acreage they use at reasonable cost, and after that, the land should go to the higest bidder.
Dan,
Actually, the problems long preceded Larry Craig and can be traced back to laws passed in 1916 and 1930. The 1976 National Forest Management Act, which is usually credited to Hubert Humphrey, exacerbated the problem. No law passed since that time had any significant influence on the agency, which actually resisted efforts by Craig, Hatfield, and Crowell to increase timber cutting.
For more details on the original problems, see my article on the K-V Act of 1930. For more details on Forest Service resistance to pressure to increase sales, see my article on Forest Service efforts to reform itself.
Randal, I agree. I merely used a recognizable name to make the point.
I would also argue that some of Pinchot’s boys were the drivers of some of the issues that persist to this day and their personalities created these laws. Some of the attitudes are evident in a very enjoyable read nonetheless by Elers Koch: Forty Years a Forester.
I also think that a good deal of the marginal land that BLM “manages” should be allowed to revert to steppe/scrub and recover from grazing. The small amount of meat grown there is a drop in the bucket and won’t affect meat prices much at all.
DS
It is interesting that the Antiplanner cut his teeth on forest planning, because forestry is perhaps the oldest of the planning professions and even today it is the planning profession with the longest time horizons.
The court decision is not anything ground breaking. The Supreme Court decision in Ohio Forestry found that the forest plan at issue did not make any legally binding decisions, but also said that if a forest plan did make a legally binding decision then it would be ripe to challenge it. The Sixth Circuit decision acknowledged that nobody was challenging ripeness or standing in the case, but it addressed it anyways because “standing and ripeness have proved uncertain in cases like this one”. Not exactly “man bites dog.”
The Sixth Circuit found that the allocation of areas to snowmobiles and gun hunting was a decision made in the forest plan. Whether that is true or not, the court can’t order anything because no matter how incompetent the Forest Service analysis was, the people wanting less hunting and less snowmobiles have no more right to it than the people wanting more hunting and more snowmobiles.
If only city planners were held to such an exacting standard. Forest plans may make up numbers of anticipated skiers vs. snowmobiles, but the only consequence is that a few skiers hear a few snowmobiles for a few hours each year. When city planners make up numbers they trick voters to make bad decisions on bonds and waste hundreds of millions of dollars, businesses go bankrupt, eminent domain ruins lives, and important problems go unaddressed.
Basic, serious question:
When city planners make up numbers they trick voters to make bad decisions on bonds and waste hundreds of millions of dollars, businesses go bankrupt, eminent domain ruins lives, and important problems go unaddressed.
Is this a straight up lie, mendacity, or ignorance (willful or no)?
DS
Just to make a further point, the Sixth Circuit Judges found the Forest Service violated the planning law because it made errors in projecting snowmobile and skiing use FIFTY YEARS IN THE FUTURE. Most of those people who would be skiing and snowmobiling in fifty years AREN’T EVEN BORN YET, yet the planners think they can project what recreation activities they would like.
You might as well find the plan illegal because it doesn’t project hovercraft and landspeeder recreational activities.
Basic, serious question:
yet the planners think they can project what recreation activities they would like.
Is this a straight up lie, mendacity, or ignorance (willful or no)?
DS
If you get beat by the facts and the arguments, make up stuff and call people names.
Some poor hapless soul is making sh– up. I asked a question whether the clearly false italicized statements were purposeful, out of spite, or ignorance. The hand-waving sheds no light on the subject, as the reply could be to cover the lie, hide the mendacity, or from foolishness- because the Dunning-Kruger Effect masks the incompetent from seeing their incompetence.
Or – maybe – the commenter is a parody character created by, say, a screenwriter testing the believability of a character…I’d say the believability needs some work.
DS
1. If you think that city planners do not hurt anybody when they make things up, then please provide your evidence.
2. If you think planners can plan for the recreational preferences of people who are not even born, then please provide your evidence.
3. If you are unable to engage on substance, then try your name calling at the nearest junior high school.
1. Your premise that they make things up is false. Are you lying when you state such, being mendacious, or too ignorant to know that this is false?
2. Group visitation is a statistical exercise. If you are claiming statistics cannot inform future conditions, you are lying when you state such, being mendacious, or too ignorant to know that this is false.
3. No comment required.
DS
1. The Antiplanner has documented dozens of instances of urban planners making things up, especially cost estimates. The judges in the case at issue found that planners had made stuff up. Dan has documented nothing. (In fact, Dan would have to prove that no planner has ever made anything up to disprove what he is trying so hard to read the original my comment.)
2. Junior high “statistics” is extending a graph line further than the data and calling that a prediction. If that is what planners do, then that explains a lot of the “making stuff up” in #1. Some jobs, such as Wal-Mart greeters, require employees to use more judgment and common sense than that.
3. If you are unable to engage on substance, then try your name calling at the nearest junior high school.
Dan says:
“I also think that a good deal of the marginal land that BLM “manages†should be allowed to revert to steppe/scrub and recover from grazing. The small amount of meat grown there is a drop in the bucket and won’t affect meat prices much at all.”
Its a really big deal to the ranchers and ranch hands who would be affected by closing off this acreage to them even though by natural rights title to the the land should belong to those who have regular use of it.
Do these people not matter to you?
Why?
The NPS is a bureaucratic nightmare, and the system is a political pawn as evidenced by a maintenance backlog in the billions and photo ops by crooked politicians and their empty promises. Do we really need to spend hundreds of millions on Clinton Birthplace NHS, Steamtown, Eugene O’Neill and the bureaucracy that accompanies such additions?
If you give Forest Service land to the NPS, they’ll end up building unsustainable visitor center complexes (witness the old VC @ Rainier), roads, parking lots, and creating government-sanctioned monopolies to sell Chinese trinkets to clueless tourists. The NPS is every bit as crooked as the USFS, but they’re in the pocket of the industrial tourism lobby rather than the timber extractors. They’ve logged sequoia groves thousands of years old to protect $hitty fifty-year-old cabins; they’ve dug a sewage line with a backhoe through the roots of the second largest tree in the world; they’ve created toxic waste dumps in pristine areas; they’ve channelized rivers to protect roads; they’ve blasted trails in wilderness granite; they’ve inundated sacred Ancestral Puebloan sites.
If you want a real solution, look to conservation trusts.
Frank; If you give Forest Service land to the NPS, they’ll end up building unsustainable visitor center complexes (witness the old VC @ Rainier), roads, parking lots, and creating government-sanctioned monopolies to sell Chinese trinkets to clueless tourists. The NPS is every bit as crooked as the USFS, but they’re in the pocket of the industrial tourism lobby rather than the timber extractors. They’ve logged sequoia groves thousands of years old to protect $hitty fifty-year-old cabins; they’ve dug a sewage line with a backhoe through the roots of the second largest tree in the world; they’ve created toxic waste dumps in pristine areas; they’ve channelized rivers to protect roads; they’ve blasted trails in wilderness granite; they’ve inundated sacred Ancestral Puebloan sites.
THWM: Though you guys praise the likes of Robert Moses, as well as urbanised land use arrangements hostile to pedestrians, cyclists & public transit.
1. (In fact, Dan would have to prove that no planner has ever made anything up to disprove what he is trying so hard to read the original my comment.)
I’ll go with Titanic ignorance. That’s got to be it.
No one lying would use such…erm…”logic”, or to pretend that there was stuff made up documented here.
2. Junior high “statistics†is extending a graph line further than the data and calling that a prediction. If that is what planners do, then that explains a lot of the “making stuff up†in #1. Some jobs, such as Wal-Mart greeters, require employees to use more judgment and common sense than that.
Thank you for backing down from your made-up objection to projections. It was, of course, ridiculous.
. 3. If you are unable to engage on substance, then try your name calling at the nearest junior high school.
Why do you have to make up stuff? Isn’t reality good enough? Asking whether someone blatantly lied, purposefully was mendacious, ro too ignorant to speak to an issue is not “name-calling”, unless you have nothing else to go on and must make up stuff to have something to say.
DS
I realize Dan is just a troll, and that it is an internet principle that you shouldn’t feed the trolls, but I like slaying a troll once in a while.
1. Dan totally fails to address the substance (of course). Planners do make stuff up all the time and they should be greatly embarrassed by the repeated errors in projecting the cost of projects that they sign their name to in Environmental Impact Statements. I know planners who are embarrassed, so take my remarks as just trashing Dan and not all planners.
2. Dan totally fails to address the substance (of course). Fifty years ago the planners would project that 227% of Americans would be sock-hopping to vinyl records. Even Wal-Mart greeters know that the world changes in fifty years.
3. Dan totally fails to address the substance (of course). If you are unable to engage on substance, then try your name calling at the nearest junior high school.
1. You are lying or clueless. Hasty generalization and vague assertions are not compelling arguments in sane civic discourse.
2. You are lying or incapable of speaking to the issue of statistical modeling.
3. You are lying or incapable of understanding that someone wondering if you are purposely lying is not name-calling.
Anyone with three firing brain cells and a scroll wheel can see what is going on.
Buh-bye now.
DS
Here’s another point Frank. Never expect Dan to admit that you have a point. A good leftist troll never budges an inch from his delusional positions.
Not sure why my name is getting dragged into this in 20. Would like to discuss points made in 15, though.
troll
?/tro?l/ [trohl] –verb (used with object)
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response[1] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[2]
Sorry about that, must have had a highwayman moment!
Frank, they logged piss fir out of the sequoia groves, along with some smaller caliper sequoia, something that was necessary due to fire suppression. Had they allowed regular ground fires, the piss fir wouldn’t be there in the first place and no logging or fire suppression activities would be necessary.
As for “sewage line”, I haven’t heard about that. Source?
DS
Dan, logging plans included logging sequoias not considered to be “museum quality” specimens, defined as anything under 16′ dbh. Some significant sequoias were cut as were sugar pines, the real targets. The USFS used fuel loads as an excuse to get at other old growth targets in the 1980s. Have you visited Kennedy Grove? How about Boulder Creek? Not only have they essentially been clear cut, but erosion damage due to logging roads is tremendous, or at least was a decade ago. I have a choice photo that shows one lone mature sequoia in a clear cut; the potential of erosion and wind damage to that tree is enormous.
The source for the sewage line is a blueprint at Grant Grove which shows the line along with other development done in the 1960s. I first heard about it from a former supervisor who worked in the Mariposa Grove in the 1960s. My SEKI coworkers didn’t believe me…until they found the blueprints. We later found an exposed, broken section of the pipe on the northeast side of the tree. I put a rock over it to hide it. So many of these behind-the-scenes exist to warrant comparisons of national parks to Disneyland.
I used to be really hard on the USFS, but the NPS is essentially as as culpable for resource degradation.
Ah, I misspoke. Of course the USFS logged groves. The “logging” done by the NPS was not nearly of that scale, but in Giant Forest years ago, a leaning old-growth sequoia (centuries and centuries old) was cut to protect concession cabins. Mostly the Rx fire program avoids mechanical thinning in all but the densest groves, and I have to give them props for their fire program. It is after all where the NPS Rx fire program began. There’s also “logging” of older white firs and other trees deemed a hazard to campers. Small scale stuff, really, when compared to the USFS “grove enhancement of the 80s. But the NPS is no poster child for preservation.
Frank:
“The NPS is a bureaucratic nightmare, and the system is a political pawn as evidenced by a maintenance backlog in the billions and photo ops by crooked politicians and their empty promises.”
There are insufficient funds for the NPS because billions of dollars per year are wasted “adminstering” Forest Service, BLM, and NWS lands in all manner of conflicting priorities or to actually persecuting the small time ranchers, foresters, etc. Of course this belies that “Wilderness” land should only require very minimal “maintenance” by definition, and so should not be a burden on the NPS.
“Do we really need to spend hundreds of millions on Clinton Birthplace NHS, Steamtown, Eugene O’Neill and the bureaucracy that accompanies such additions?”
While obviously some of these types of parks are ridiculous and unworthy of argument in their favor, I don’t have a problem with preserving parts of America’s industrial history like the Erie Canal or Steamtown or the like as a matter of memory and popular education once we agree that there should be a National Park System, provided the acquisition of such sites is by donation and not seizure. Do you also have a problem with the NPS administering Independence Mall?
“If you give Forest Service land to the NPS, they’ll end up building unsustainable visitor center complexes (witness the old VC @ Rainier), roads, parking lots, and creating government-sanctioned monopolies to sell Chinese trinkets to clueless tourists.”
I think you are missing the point of moving “Wilderness” land to the NPS. The Forest Service offices already exist to sell books and trinkets to tourists for the recreational areas. “Wilderness” areas obviously wouldn’t be developed. The areas near Wilderness land that are developed with access roads and recreation areas are already developed.
I don’t care about your crying about NPS “sins”. The NPS exists to provide mass access to the most scenic and historic portions of the Federal Lands in perpetuity. You can’t provide mass access without building roads, railroads, hotels and cabins. Switzerland has done much more development of their lands like those held by the NPS without actually injuring the scenery.
OTOH, the Forest Service simply exists to monopoloize enormous amounts of the nation’s Timber resources under the thumb of the Federal Government. I take this as prima facie problematic and wrong.
If you look at the NPS Greenbook, you’ll see that operational funds have increased over the decades. Reasons for the large maintenance backlog include: 1) a massive and unsustainable infrastructure; 2) addition of many new units (many of which are pork barrel projects Congressional reps back to bring home the bacon to their constituents); 3) politics.
And as for “insufficient funds”, one must examine waste in the system. The government spends more to operate regional and national NPS offices (bureaucracy) than it does to operate the 58 national parks (by name) in the system. There is plenty of money; it’s just being allocated to bureaucrats.
Steamtown does not preserve America’s industrial history. Many of the trains are Canadian. In the book “Our National Park System”, the Dwight Rettie writes:
“The associate director for cultural resources [of the NPS] characterized Steamtown National Historical Site as ‘absolutely not a worth addition to the system.’…John White, former curator of transportation for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., refers to Steamtown as ‘a third-rate collection in a place to which it had no relevance.'”
Steamtown, and many other NPS sites, are pork, unworthy of inclusion in the system, and a drain on other parks. Additionally, there is no valid reason why Independence Mall (and other sites) couldn’t be preserved and operated by a private non-profit trust, as in the case of Monticello and other historic sites.
If you don’t care, why are you responding? And please don’t distort my message by using loaded terms. What I’ve done is decry environmental degradation committed by the agency founded to prevent environmental degradation. If you don’t care about the century-long record of NPS mismanagement, then you are part of the problem of complacency. Also, please read the Organic Act, the 1916 charter for the National Park Service. No where in the charter is there any mention of “mass access”; its “purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” In this regard, the National Park Service has utterly failed.