This awesome picture was taken in Montana's Bitterroot National Forest on August 6, 2000.
John McColgan, a fire behavior analyst from Fairbanks, Alaska, is the photographer.
The Case for Abolishing the U.S. Forest Service
by Professor Robert H. Nelson
When the U.S. Forest Service was created in 1905, its planners were Progressives who believed the national forests could be scientifically managed to ensure a steady supply of wood for American industry. But now, observes University of Maryland public policy professor Nelson, the Forest Service is an agency without a mission.
In 1995, Forest Service chief Jack Ward Thomas publicly disavowed scientific management, stating that "ecological processes are too complex to ever be fully understood! Timber harvests have been cut in half during the Clinton administration, and the uncut timber often dies and creates huge amounts of flammable detritus, serving as fuel for uncontrollable fires. Environmental organizations have drastically increased the amount of paperwork and red tape forest managers must produce. "The Forest Service is so confused today," Nelson writes, "that it no longer knows the reasons for its own existence."
The Forest Service has historically had a policy of suppressing fires, ever since a 1910 inferno turned 3 million acres of Montana forests into ashes. But fire is a natural process that ensures forests are thinned and sun-loving trees such as the lodgepole pine and the giant sequoia can thrive. Suppressing fires makes the forests denser and allows dead trees to accumulate, increasing the likelihood of an eventual cataclysm.
The Forest Service began to change its fire-suppression policies in the mid- 1980s, allowing a limited number of "prescribed burns.' Prescribed burns can easily get out of control and turn into major conflagrations. They might also be illegal, since the massive amount of air pollution released during a burn could violate Environmental Protection Agency regulations.
Moreover, the current system of a few major fires in the national forests each year is quite lucrative for the Forest Service, whose fire-fighting budget has risen steadily. These funds aren't just used to put out fires, but also act as an indirect subsidy to depressed western counties.
The Forest Service could get rid of the dead wood by increasing timber harvesting. In fact, it would make about $500 an acre selling wood now destroyed by forest fires. But environmentalists have halted logging in many national forests through the Endangered Species Act, and still other forests have had their logging reduced by the Forest Service's current goal of returning lands under its control to a "pre-European state! The result, says the General Accounting Office, is that it may take as much as $12 billion to get rid of dead wood on Forest Service lands by 2015.
Given the gridlock that results from Forest Service policy, Nelson wonders why we still have national forests in the first place. He suggests returning control of the national forests to the communities that surround them. Some forests could be public corporations (like Amtrak or the Postal Service). Others could be nonprofit land trusts.
Nelson applauds the work of the Quincy Library Group, a coalition of local environmentalists, loggers, and government. This group was created by concerned citizens who realized the need to "deal directly with each other or remain in perpetual struggle and gridlock." Though their forest plan, which called for stricter conservation measures and increased logging, was denounced by national environmental groups, it was adopted into law in 1998.
National environmental groups dislike local control because they claim an interest in overseeing every national forest in America. But who's better suited to govern a forest, Nelson asks, locals who know what the forest needs, or Washington? Unless power over the forests is devolved, "the current resource management gridlock is virtually inevitable."
A Burning Issue: The Case for Abolishing the U.S. Forest Service,
By Professor Robert H. Nelson, was published in February, 2000 by:
Rowman and Littlefield
4820 Boston Way
Lanham, MD 20706The above article is excerpted from a book review titled, "The End of the Forest Service?"
It was first published in the American Enterprise in the October 1, 2000 Issue.