Public Lands Mismanagement

[Grumpy]

Public Land Mismanagement
Terry L. Anderson and Reed Watson, 04.07.09, 04:30 PM EDT
Environmental, fiscal and economic irresponsibility in the name of protection.



"This legislation guarantees that we will not take our forests, rivers, oceans, national parks, monuments and wilderness areas for granted, but rather we will set them aside and guard their sanctity for everyone to share. That's something all Americans can support." Those were the words of President Barack Obama on March 30 when he signed the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act that placed an additional 2 million acres of public land under the federal government's most stringent use restrictions. To anyone who knows the record of public land management, however, these words of preservation and unanimous support ring hollow.

If we used a measure like our stock indexes as a public land management barometer, it would be lower than the Dow Jones. Consider three measures of public land stewardship.

Environmental Irresponsibility--Decades of fire suppression by the Forest Service have disrupted natural fire cycles and turned many western forests into tinderboxes waiting to burn. Dense stands of spindly deadfall and underbrush now occupy land once characterized by open savannahs and large, widely spaced trees. One result is larger, more intense fires that burn the publicly owned forests to the ground. Indeed, by the Forest Service's own estimates, 90 to 200 million acres of federal forests are at high risk of burning in catastrophic fire events. Bans on thinning and salvage harvesting have not only exacerbated the fire danger in public forests but it has also left them more susceptible to disease, insects and high winds. Not only do the fires put enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, the fact that the forests are dead or dying means that they are not sequestering carbon, as healthy ones do.

Fiscal Irresponsibility--What makes the ecological mismanagement of federal lands even more difficult to swallow is the price tag that comes with it. Every year, U.S. taxpayers spend billions of dollars on public land management, but the way in which these funds are allocated--through the congressional budgeting process--ensures the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service respond to the will of politicians.

The result is what has been called "park barrel politics," which persists while the National Park Service maintains an estimated $9 billion backlog of construction and maintenance projects. Lest you think financial mismanagement is confined to the Park Service, consider that between 2006 and 2008 the Forest Service lost on average $3.58 billion each year. Similarly, the Government Accountability Office testified in Congress that in 2004 the BLM earned approximately $12 million in grazing revenues but spent $58 million implementing its grazing program.

Economic Irresponsibility--Environmental and fiscal mismanagement of federal lands may be obvious, but the economic effects of federal land mismanagement are subtler. Consider the debate over drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Economist Matthew Kotchen, University of California, Santa Barbara, offers an interesting thought experiment: What if environmentalists owned ANWR's oil? Kotchen theorized a surprising result might occur if the environmentalists could use the estimated $1.08 trillion in revenues ($921 billion after subtracting estimated costs of finding, developing, producing and transporting the oil) to address climate change. But since environmentalists do not own the oil under ANWR, the asset will likely remain underground.

In her new book, Who is Minding the Federal Estate?, Holly Fretwell describes additional economic consequences of shifting from active to passive public lands management: "Local communities suffer from lost jobs and business activity as sawmills close down" while "the nation's taxpayers lose revenues from their natural assets."

Is this new law likely to make a difference in terms of the environmental, fiscal or economic performance of federal land managers? No is the simple answer because the law does not change the underlying structure of federal land management or the incentives land managers face. Putting another 2 million acres into wilderness, the strictest non-use designation only adds those to the more than 100 million wilderness acres in the "unmanaged" category and turns a potential asset into a liability.

Establishing the 26-million-acre National Landscape Conservation System will only add more red ink to the BLM's hemorrhaging budget. Fretwell notes that less money is available to maintain federal lands as the percentage of wilderness land increases. This is partly due to the fact that wilderness designation results in more litigation than productivity. For example, as wilderness and endangered species issues forced the Forest Service to reduce timber harvests in Washington and Oregon from more than 6 billion board feet in the late 1980s to one-tenth that amount in 2006, its cost of offering 1,000 board feet of lumber for sale increased to $182 from $53. Jack Ward Thomas, President Bill Clinton's chief of the forest service, says litigation has tied land management agencies in a giant "Gordian knot," one which the legislation just signed by the president is likely to pull tighter.

If Obama wants to craft land use policy that "all Americans can support" and afford, he should make land and water management less subject to politics and more to economics. Given that the federal estate is worth trillions of dollars, Obama should make land management agencies turn a profit. States do this with their school trust lands, earning $5.62 for every dollar spent compared to an average of $0.76 for every dollar spent on national forests. Similarly, a forthcoming study from the Property and Environment Research Center shows that forest management on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana earns $2.04 for every dollar spent compared to $1.11 on the Lolo National Forest, one of the few "profitable" ones. We should be better stewards of our land and water, and we can be without it adding to a burgeoning federal debt.

Terry Anderson is the John and Jean DeNault Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center, Bozeman, MT, where Reed Watson is director of applied programs