Читать книгу The Best-Laid Plans - Randal O'Toole - Страница 15

Far from helping the Forest Service resolve controversies over clearcutting, herbicides, wilderness, and other issues, forest planning ended up devastating the agency. In the 1970s, the Forest Service was still known as a can-do agency, famous for its esprit de corps and popular among members of Congress despite growing criticism that came mainly from environmental groups.

When Congress passed the National Forest Management Act, the chief of the Forest Service confidently predicted that the plans would be written in four years at a cost of about a million dollars a forest. The reality turned out to be far different: in the end, it took some 15 years and more than a billion dollars to write all the plans.

The first delay was in the preparation of rules to govern forest planning. The law specified that the rules should be written within two years of the law’s passage, but the Forest Service took three. Just two years later, the White House changed hands, and the new administration appointed former timber industry executive John Crowell as assistant secretary of agriculture in charge of the Forest Service. Crowell decided to rewrite the rules, and the changes he made forced some forests to start over.

Just months after the new rules were approved, Crowell fired another salvo at the Forest Service. The draft plans that had been passing through his office were unsatisfactory, he warned. “Appropriate changes would be made unless review drafts begin to improve significantly soon.”¹ Many within the Forest Service took this as a threat that the administration would replace the chief and regional foresters, who historically had all been promoted from within the agency, with political appointees. In response, the regional forester for Oregon and Washington ordered all his forests—including one that was about to send its final plan to the printer—to start over from scratch.²

Planners were frustrated by a variety of other delays. If the Fish and Wildlife Service listed a species as threatened or endangered, planners would have to revise their FORPLAN model so they could track the effects of the plan on that species. New timber inventories revealed that the data used in some FORPLAN models were hopelessly optimistic. Major forest fires in 1987 burned enough timber in California to force several forests to start over. It became clear that planners couldn’t plan fast enough to keep up with the pace of everyday change. As one planner explained, “There is never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it twice.”

Even when the plans were done, they weren’t done. Environmental groups appealed almost every plan to the chief of the Forest Service, and some of those appeals were successful. The Santa Fe National Forest was ordered to redo its plan with corrected yield tables. Embarrassed by the “did-as-I-was-told” memo of its recreation specialist, the Hoosier National Forest withdrew its plan and didn’t sell any timber sales for years after. The chief or the secretary of agriculture sent plans for the Black Hills, San Juan, George Washington, Ouachita, Texas, and many other national forests back to the planners. Plans for the Rio Grande and other national forests survived their appeals only to be overturned in court.

Eventually, the Forest Service came up with the curious legal argument that plans made no decisions and so there was nothing anyone could challenge in court. The Supreme Court bought this argument in 1998, but by that time the damage was long done. No one could explain why the agency had devoted more than a billion dollars to a planning process that the agency itself said reached no decisions.

Far from taking just four years, some forest plans remained unfinished a dozen years after planning began. Far from costing a mere million dollars a plan, many plans cost tens of millions of dollars. Far from resolving controversies, the plans just increased polarization as environmental and industry leaders used the plans as rallying points for their troops. Delayed by, among other things, the Reagan administration’s new planning rules, forest fires, and the spotted owl, the Klamath National Forest started over from scratch five different times and did not publish its final plan until 1994—18 years after Congress passed the law requiring forest plans.

Things didn’t get any better when the completed plans were turned over to managers to implement. Many managers soon found that the data in the plans didn’t jibe with the conditions they found on the ground.

• After doing “site-specific analyses” on 20 percent of the forest, the supervisor of Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest (home of the 650-foot computer-projected trees) informed the regional forester in 1990 that the forest could sell only about two-thirds as much timber as FORPLAN had calculated.³

• Timber managers on Utah’s Wasatch-Cache National Forest reported in 1991 that many acres that planners had considered suitable for timber management weren’t really suitable. They also found that planners had overestimated timber growth rates and that planned timber sales weren’t as compatible with wildlife as planners presumed. Managers estimated they could sell less than half as much timber as FORPLAN had calculated.⁴

• The General Accounting Office, working closely with officials of the Flathead National Forest, concluded that the Montana forest could only sustain about three quarters of the timber cuttings scheduled by FORPLAN.⁵

The years of indecision and the transfer of scarce funds and resources from management to planning frustrated on-the-ground Forest Service workers. By 1990, Forest Service employee surveys found that morale had sunk to its lowest levels ever. Internal memos revealed that employees felt that the agency suffered from a lack of leadership and had lost its identity as one of the nation’s leading conservation agencies. “The Washington office leadership is in a situation where the oars are out of the water and the Diesel engines are shut off,” one regional memo bitterly reported in early 1989.⁶

Regional officials told the chief that they couldn’t achieve the timber targets Congress was expecting, and became upset when the chief turned around and promised Congress that they could meet those targets. Dissension over timber targets reached a peak in November 1989, when the forest supervisors from the 19 national forests in Oregon and Washington prepared a videotape for the chief.

“I understand why targets are emphasized and how those targets generate dollars,” said Umpqua Forest Supervisor Robert Devlin on the video. But he warned that he could not meet his targets without unduly harming other resources. “The people who I am familiar with on the ground are not comfortable with this, and neither am I.” Unless this problem is solved, he told the chief, “I can’t be the steward of the public lands that you depend on me to be.”⁷

Thirteen forest supervisors in Montana and northern Idaho wrote a memo supporting the video. Because of timber targets, they said, “We are not meeting the quality land management expectations of our public and our employees.” They added, “A ’can-do’ attitude cannot save us this time.”⁸ A second memo signed by 63 forest supervisors from throughout the interior West noted that “our timber program has been 35 percent of the National Forest System budget for the last 20 years while recreation, fish and wildlife, and soil and water have been 2 to 3 percent each.” Because of this imbalance, “the allowable sale quantity [ASQ] issue will continue to be a problem for us and some supervisors feel our ASQs are unrealistic even with full funding.”⁹ As a narrator on the videotape told the chief, “It’s time to reconsider program emphasis and round out multiple use.”

The chief apparently listened. The national forests offered 11 billion board feet of timber for sale in 1990, but sales fell to just 6 billion in 1991, 5 billion in 1992, and under 4 billion in 1994.¹⁰ By 2000, the agency was selling around 1.5 billion board feet a year, though sales recovered slightly to about 2.8 billion board feet in 2006.¹¹

Many people blame this reduction in sales on the northern spotted owl, which was listed as a threatened species in 1990. The spotted owl lives in only about a dozen national forests in the Pacific Northwest. Yet national forests throughout the West, and to a lesser degree in the East, significantly reduced timber sales. It is clear that national forest sales declined largely because forest managers did not believe the forest plans and concluded instead that historic sale levels were too high.

The only forest plans that foreshadowed this decline came out of Oregon and Washington, known in the Forest Service as Region 6. Region 6 had historically been the Forest Service’s leading timber region. Though Oregon and Washington forests comprised less than 13 percent of the land area of the national forests, they typically produced 40 percent of the volume and more than half the revenue. Insiders sometimes said, “The real chief of the Forest Service is the Region 6 director of timber management.”

Yet when Jeff Sirmon, the regional forester, responded to John Crowell’s pressure to boost timber sales by ordering planners to start over, he apparently let it be known that he would support reductions in sales proposed by the forests provided they could present an airtight case for such reductions. While previous Region 6 regional foresters were known as “timber beasts” who might have welcomed Crowell’s timber imperative, Sirmon did not have a long history of working in forests dominated by timber sales: his previous job had been in Utah, a state not known for having particularly productive forests.

Yet it wasn’t just Sirmon vs. Crowell. People throughout the region were disturbed by the recession’s effects on the industry. They felt they had an unwritten agreement with the timber companies: the Forest Service would sell lots of timber each year, and the industry would cut it, thus keeping the revenues flowing into the Knutson-Vandenberg and similar funds. But the recession of the early 1980s was so bad that timber companies almost completely stopped cutting public timber. Lacking the anticipated revenues, Region 6 had to lay off thousands of employees. Even many of the most hard-core timber supporters felt that the agency should diversify its sources of revenue and political support.

Around this time, the 1970 Environmental Teach-In (Earth Day) began to influence the Forest Service. Before 1974, most forestry school graduates came from rural areas and were sympathetic to a commodity-production view of forestry. But Earth Day inspired many urban high school students (including this writer) to go to forestry school. As a result, by 1974, most forestry school graduates came from urban areas and were more sympathetic to wildlife, wilderness, and other amenities. By the late 1980s, many of these people were rising to positions of power within the agency.

Partly because of this change, the new plans from nearly all the national forests in Region 6 significantly reduced timber sales. Overall, the plans would have reduced Region 6 timber sales by 45 percent, from 5.5 billion board feet to 3.0 billion. The timber industry did its best to delay implementation, including pressuring Congress to try to stop the plans. But what really killed the plans was the spotted owl.

Abandoning the goal of “comprehensive planning,” the Forest Service responded to the spotted owl controversy by dealing with the owl in a separate plan—ultimately, a series of plans—that would cover all spotted owl national forests as well as other federal lands managed by the Department of the Interior (the Forest Service is in the Department of Agriculture). The 3 billion board feet that came out of the forest plans did not take the owl plans into account. When the president’s Northwest Forest Plan was finally approved in 1994, it rendered obsolete the plans for all the owl forests and many of the other forests in the region.

Despite the plan’s effects on the timber program, many Forest Service employees welcomed the final spotted owl plan. Having convinced themselves that they were cutting too much timber, national forest managers were happy to let the owl take the blame for reductions. By 1996, timber purchasers cut only three-quarters of a billion board feet of wood from all 19 Region 6 forests—less than they had cut from just one Oregon forest, the Willamette, in 1989.

Practically overnight, the Forest Service was transformed from an agency dominated by timber to one that attempted to focus on ecosystem management. Yet a billion dollars and more than a decade invested in planning had almost nothing to do with this transformation, except to the extent that the plans had failed so badly that they exposed many of the other problems with the agency.

Comprehensive forest planning turned out to be a demoralizing nightmare for the Forest Service. There are many reasons for planning’s failure, but three stand out:

• The Forest Service’s incentives conflicted sharply with what most people regarded as the best way to manage the national forests.

• Comprehensive planning for 1- to 2-million-acre national forests is simply too complicated, especially when the plan depends on information about the future that no one can accurately predict.

• Finally, planning cannot be rational in a political environment, even if the politics are only the internal politics found in any bureaucracy.

Congress had carelessly designed a budgetary process that rewarded forest managers for losing money on environmentally destructive activities, and penalized the agency for earning a profit. As a result, managers came to believe that it was in the public interest for them to lose money, impose ugly clearcuts on the landscape, spray thousands of gallons of chemical herbicides on the clearcuts, and build tens of thousands of miles of expensive roads. Planners built these beliefs into their FORPLAN models: beliefs that timber was so scarce that people would pay a fortune for helicopter-logged lodgepole pine; that managers could make trees grow far faster than nature; and that cutting trees produced such positive effects on other resources that those effects alone justified below-cost timber sales.

The Forest Service is far from the only government agency whose incentives conflict with its mission. Congress lets the Park Service keep 25 percent of construction and reconstruction costs as overhead, so the agency lets national park ecosystems decline while it spends millions of dollars rebuilding housing for employees who could easily live in private housing outside the parks.¹² Some state land agencies that are required by law to earn revenues for local schools fail to do so because they are funded out of tax dollars and have no incentive to produce revenues.¹³ Everywhere, agencies learn that failing to solve a problem can be more lucrative than solving it because, when the problem becomes a crisis, Congress or state legislatures will deal with it by dumping money on the agencies.

Perverse incentives pervade government agencies and create real conflicts about how the agencies fulfill their missions. These conflicts will not be resolved by legislatures passing the buck to planners. They will only be remedied when Congress or state legislatures change the incentives within agency budgets.

Even if there had been no conflict between the Forest Service’s incentives and the public good, forest planning would still have failed. To paraphrase forest ecologist Jerry Franklin paraphrasing J. B. S. Haldane, a 1- to 2-million-acre national forest is not only more complicated than we understand, it is more complicated than we can understand.¹⁴ Forest planning might have been useful when each plan focused on a single resource, such as timber, wildlife, or recreation, but comprehensive planning of all resources required more variables than any human or any computer could deal with. Adding to this complexity is the fact that new issues arise and public tastes change faster than planners can plan.

How is it that private timber companies can plan a forest but the government cannot? Private forest plans rarely attempt to be comprehensive. Instead, they focus on the resources that are valuable to the company doing the planning. They also tend to be relatively short-term, committing the company to actions for only a few years instead of a decade or more. Since they are short-term in nature, they are also very flexible, and since they are narrowly focused, they do not lead to the formation of special interest groups dedicated to carrying out an absurd program.

The real reason national forest planning failed is that it was a solution for the wrong problem. Senator Humphrey proposed planning because he erroneously assumed that national forest controversies resulted from inadequate data collection, poor analyses, and insufficient public involvement. But the Forest Service had always been good at these things; indeed, its ability to collect data and work with the public declined when it began writing comprehensive forest plans. So it was no surprise when, in 2001, the chief of the Forest Service described the planning process as “analysis paralysis.”¹⁵

Ultimately, the real problem with national forest management was that Congress failed to align the Forest Service’s incentives with the public interest in the national forests. Newsweek magazine praised the Forest Service of 1952 for earning a profit, avoiding conflicts between resources, and being responsive to the public. Although the Forest Service at that time sold timber, its use of selection cutting minimized public objections to those sales. If the incentives inadvertently built into the Knutson-Vandenberg Act had not encouraged the Forest Service to switch to clearcutting, sell money-losing timber, and increase timber cutting to the point where it conflicted with almost every other resource, then most of the controversies over wilderness, herbicides, the spotted owl, and other issues might never have happened and no one would have proposed to solve those problems with an unwieldy and unworkable forest planning process.