Читать книгу The Best-Laid Plans - Randal O'Toole - Страница 6

Once we have seen how simplification, legibility, and manipulation operate in forest management, we can then explore how the modern state applies a similar lens to urban planning, rural settlement, land administration, and agriculture.

—James C. Scott¹

Between 1952 and 1976, the Forest Service went from being one of the most popular agencies in government to one of the most controversial, with debates raging over clearcutting, road construction, herbicide spraying, grazing, mining, and other activities on the nation’s 193 million acres of national forests. Senator Hubert Humphrey thought that the controversies could be resolved by having each national forest write a comprehensive, long-range plan. Each plan would rationally consider all the various competing resources and alternative ways of managing the forests and would find the alternative that maximized net public benefits. Humphrey also expected that the national forests would revise their plans every 10 to 15 years.

When Humphrey’s legislation passed in 1976, the Forest Service estimated that it could write the plans in four years at a cost of about $120 million. Fifteen years later, the agency had spent at least 10 times that much on planning and some of the plans were still unfinished.

• Far from resolving controversies, the plans created opportunities for interest group leaders to further polarize the public.

• Far from rational planning, the plans often relied on fabricated data and computer models that used highly questionable assumptions designed to confirm the preconceived notions of top forest officials.

• Far from maximizing net public benefits, the plans proposed to spend billions of dollars on highly controversial and environmentally destructive activities that would produce negligible returns to the Treasury.

• To add insult to injury, the plans that cost taxpayers at least a billion dollars and required a decade or more to write ended up being virtually ignored by on-the-ground forest managers, who quickly realized that they were worthless.

What went wrong? After spending years reviewing scores of forest plans, including all the background documents and computer runs associated with those plans, I realized that the Forest Service was heavily influenced by its budgetary incentives. Those incentives rewarded national forest managers for losing money on environmentally destructive activities and penalized those managers for making money or supporting environmentally beneficial activities. If misincentives caused the original controversies, planning was simply the wrong solution, since the planners themselves, and the officials who supervised them, were subject to the same incentives that led to the controversies in the first place.

I also realized that long-range, comprehensive planning would not have been feasible even if the incentives had been correct initially. A one- to two-million-acre national forest capable of producing dozens of different resources that sometimes complement but often conflict with one another is simply too complex to plan, especially when planners were also expected to predict such things as timber prices and demand for various forms of recreation. Planners who tried to gather all the necessary data and understand the various relationships among resources soon discovered that their plans were obsolete before they were completed because new information, political trends, or physical events such as forest fires had a way of intruding into their virtual realities.

Finally, the notions that planning can be “rational” in a highly politicized environment or that competing interest groups would gladly sit down to negotiate the goals of their members proved to be as unrealistic as many of the numbers the Forest Service put into its computer models. For all these reasons, planning proved to be such a failure that a recent chief of the Forest Service referred to it as “analysis paralysis.”² Sadly, the Humphrey law is still on the books, and many national forests are busily but uselessly revising their plans for the next 10 to 15 years.