The Best-Laid Plans - Randal O'Toole

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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.

      1. The Case of the Fake Forests

      “Fake Forests!” blared the headline on the front page of the April 13,1985, San Francisco Chronicle. The accompanying article by Chronicle writer Dale Champion revealed that Forest Service employees in California had pretended to reforest thousands of acres of land, and then spent the reforestation money on something else. The article noted that they sometimes also spent reforestation money to reforest land that didn’t need it.1

      The revelation was so stunning that in July 1985, the House Forest Management Subcommittee held hearings in San Francisco about the phantom forests. The star witness was a Forest Service employee named Cherry DuLaney, a reforestation specialist on the Tahoe National Forest. In late 1984, as part of a Forest Service-sponsored leadership-training program, DuLaney had surveyed Forest Service silviculturists (reforestation experts) in California. Nearly two-thirds of them returned the 32-page questionnaire within three weeks.2

      “Twenty-three percent of the respondents acknowledged reporting ghost acres,” she told the subcommittee.3 In other words, nearly a quarter of the reforestation experts admitted to having reported reforestation or other work that hadn’t actually been done.

      After DuLaney completed her testimony, Subcommittee Chair Jim Weaver (D-OR) turned to Zane Smith, the forester in charge of the Forest Service’s California operations, and asked what the agency had done to publicize DuLaney’s report. “Randy O’Toole noted it in his land-management planning newsletter,” answered Smith.4

      That newsletter, which we called Forest Planning, followed the Forest Service’s efforts to write comprehensive land-use and resource management plans for each of the 120 or so national forests in its care. When I wasn’t writing articles for the newsletter, I spent much of the 1980s sitting in Forest Service offices reading computer printouts and other planning documents. In doing so, I often ran across interesting memos such as DuLaney’s study and reported them to the newsletter’s readers.

      When I found DuLaney’s report, I knew it was interesting, but I never suspected it would lead to front-page headlines or congressional hearings. Representative Weaver’s office asked me to testify, saying, “The subcommittee will want to know why you think Forest Service employees would fabricate the numbers.” To answer that question, I had to put together everything I had learned in the previous 10 years about the Forest Service and its budgetary process.

      In 1952, Newsweek magazine reported that the Forest Service was one of the most popular agencies in government. In addition to the Forest Service being the only federal agency that actually earned a profit, Newsweek noted that the Forest Service’s management of the national forests produced huge nonmonetary benefits for recreation, wildlife, watersheds, and other uses. Members of Congress “would as soon abuse their own mothers as be unkind to the Forest Service,” added the magazine.5Newsweek traced the agency’s success and popularity to its decentralization, a view later endorsed by social scientists studying government bureaucracies.6

      During the four decades before this Newsweek article, the Forest Service budget was dominated not by timber, recreation, wildlife, or water, but by fire. In 1908, Congress had taken the unusual step of giving the Forest Service a blank check for extinguishing wildfires that started anywhere on the 193 million acres of national forests. This made the agency into, above all, a fire suppression agency.

      This was changing, however, even as Newsweek published its article. In 1952, the Forest Service sold about three billion board feet of timber, a board foot being the amount of wood needed to cut a board of lumber 1 inch by 12 inches by 12 inches. Most of the timber sold by national forests was cut using selection cutting, meaning that Forest Service experts selected individual trees, based on their maturity, and marked them for cutting, leaving behind most other trees in the vicinity. If carefully done, selection cutting could leave a forest looking like a well-manicured park or even (to the untrained eye) untrammeled wilderness.

      Over the next 15 years, postwar demand for housing led the Forest Service to ramp up annual timber sales to more than 10 billion board feet. Along with the increase in sales, the Forest Service switched from selection cutting to clearcutting, that is, the removal of all trees, regardless of size or maturity, within a perimeter marked by Forest Service employees. The change was not the result of a national directive but was made by individual forest managers over three decades in the 1950s through the 1970s.

      Clearcutting, the managers argued, was less expensive (partly true) and was needed by many species for reforestation (rarely true7). But clearcutting led to waves of protests from hunters, anglers, hikers, and other recreationists who considered clearcuts ugly and responsible for soil erosion, stream pollution, destruction of wildlife habitat, and numerous other problems. Controversies over clear-cutting led to numerous congressional hearings, blue-ribbon reports, and lawsuits. In 1974, one of those lawsuits convinced a federal judge that clearcutting violated an 1897 law that required the Forest Service to cut only mature trees and mark every tree to be cut. Under pressure from the timber industry, which claimed this law was archaic, Congress was forced to take action.

      Led by Senator Hubert Humphrey, Congress decided to turn the national forests over to the planners. Humphrey’s National Forest Management Act of 1976 directed the Forest Service to write comprehensive land-use and resource-management plans for each national forest. The plans would determine where clearcutting was “optimal,” which lands were suitable for other sorts of timber cutting, how much timber could be cut each year, and which lands should be set aside for recreation or other purposes. The law also required the Forest Service to revise the plans every 10 to 15 years. One of the last of the New Deal Democrats, Humphrey saw the planning process as a “vehicle that will get the facts needed to make wise decisions … to set national goals, [and] to get

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