Читать книгу The Best-Laid Plans - Randal O'Toole - Страница 25

As part one showed, the Forest Service encountered the law of change when planning the national forests in the 1980s. Planning began in 1979. But then, the Reagan administration revised planning rules in 1982; fires burned large areas of California forests in 1987; the spotted owl was listed as a threatened species in 1989; and President Clinton ordered the creation of a Northwest Forest Plan to address old-growth forest protection in 1993. Each of these events led many forests to scrap the plans they had written and start over. One result was that more forests took more than 10 years to write plans that were supposed to last for 10 years.

One way planners respond to change is to pretend it isn’t happening. Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest was nearly done with its plan when a new inventory revealed that the data planners had relied on were faulty. Planners decided it would be too much trouble to revise the plan so they simply used the faulty data. When planners do respond to change, it can significantly delay the plans.

Urban planners have had the same experiences. Portland’s plan called for higher-density housing on all available vacant land within the region’s urban-growth boundary. Then the northwest salmon was declared a threatened species and the National Marine Fisheries Service issued guidelines for protecting salmon habitat that specified that no more than 10 percent of any undeveloped area should be rendered impermeable by paving it or covering it with new buildings. Only low-density developments—one home per acre or less— could comply with these guidelines. Since they were only guidelines, planners ignored them because they did not fit preconceived preferences for high density.