1997 marks the centennial of the National Forest System. This is America’s best example of centralized government planning and management, our glorious experiment in “sylvan socialism.” In the Federalist Papers, America’s founders urged us to consider each law and policy as an experiment to be evaluated and perhaps modified. The end of a century’s experiment […]
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The U.S. Forest Service continues to throw money and timber away, but don’t expect the Republican-led Congress to call a halt to this long-running story of government waste. The GOP is brain-dead when it comes to sparing live trees. Last week , Louisiana-Pacific Corp. placed the winning bid of $155,190 for 1.8 million board feet […]
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Like a zombie in a second-rate horror movie, the Hyalite timber sale is once again rising from the grave. Reaction is predictable: already on the defensive, the Forest Service promises a “kinder, gentler” project, while environmentalists scramble for silver bullets, trying desperately to send this beast to its grave. Resurrection of the Hyalite sale guarantees […]
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It’s clear the rural American West is in transition. Ways of life, deeply rooted in the culture of ranching, mining and logging, are challenged by new social and economic forces. Immigrants arrive with their wares stored in hard-drives rather than Conestoga wagons. People move to the region for its amenity values–wilderness, clean air, fish, wildlife […]
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BOZEMAN, MONT.- Snow is still ten feet deep on the Spanish Peaks just south of town, but summer is coming to the Gallatin Valley. Greening fields and the sudden emergence of kayaks and mountain bikes tells us the annual crush of tourists will soon arrive in the region’s national parks and forests. Recreation is serious […]
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New demographics and cultures are defining the next American West. Newcomers, urban and affluent, are escaping cities to build better lives. They work with information and manipulate symbols rather than stuff, and bring with them an utterly different value system for the land. A value system based on a romantic notion of the West’s ecosystems […]
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The epicenter of Ecotopia lies somewhere in the area encircled by Bellingham, Eugene, and Bozeman. Four colleges of forestry, dozens of environmental groups, and busloads of environmental writers are based there. Hence, the federal land management agencies are under intense scrutiny. But even here, the institutional arrangements are so perverse that often management is grossly […]
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MANY people share my deep concern with improving and protecting the wildlife, watersheds, and recreation values of forests. Good policy links these goods with sound economic practices. All require landowners’ confidence in the future. The proposed export ban on raw logs from private lands subverts this confidence and undermines the management required to reach these […]
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IT is easy to understand why some people find banning private log exports an attractive idea. Superficially, it appears to save jobs, reduce domestic timber prices and slow environmental degradation caused by logging. But there are good, ethical reasons why a ban makes little sense. In later columns, I will discuss the likely economic and […]
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ECONOMIES are like ecosystems in that everything is tied to everything else. We cannot do only one thing. Protecting owls by limiting timber harvest has multiple consequences, mostly unintended. People anticipate outcomes, estimate how regulations affect their security and livelihood, and often change their behavior accordingly. Regulations that ignore this interconnectedness can make matters worse, […]
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