Fires of the Feds: How the Government Has Destroyed Forests
Fires are natural in that they have always occurred on earth, and will continue to occur. The real problem with the current fires, however, is government. Governments — in the name of "scientific" and "ecological" management — have grossly mismanaged the natural environment. Environmental policy has operated on the assumption — as so eloquently stated by Lew Rockwell — that "private ownership is the enemy." He writes that environmentalists believe that nature is an end in itself.
Indeed, we see the handiwork of such policies: utter destruction of human and animal habitat.
Those endangered species that the law was supposed to protect are swallowed up along with the million-dollar houses that environmentalists hate. So much for the state that "protects" nature. In fact, government has dealt with the natural environment in much the same way that the US Armed Forces dealt with Vietnam: they have destroyed it in order to "save" it. FULL ARTICLE
Comments (20)
Sounds stupid, doesn't it?
Published: October 30, 2007 8:51 AM
Yet still the environmentalists lay down their prayer mats and worship the Wizard of Warming. Too bad they don't see the man behind the curtain is the government. If they only had a brain...
Published: October 30, 2007 9:29 AM
Here, we show that large wildfire activity increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s, with higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons.
And this wasn't a rather obvious tipoff that it wasn't caused by "global warming"?
Published: October 30, 2007 12:35 PM
The Econ Library web site has as great podcast about common law vs. statutes as tools for protecting the environment. It's great! And common law wins! Very informative.
Published: October 30, 2007 3:03 PM
On the first Earth Day, I was one of a large group of kids who volunteered to clean out a local pond that had become a dumping ground. After the cleanup, I can recall our parents laughing, saying that we smelled so bad that they would prefer to tie us to the roofs of their cars rather than to have us sit in them.
The pond not only looked better, but water lilies and other forms of vegetation began to grow. We were proud of what we'd accomplished.
The thing that ran through my mind every time I passed by the pond was that we'd taken a place that everyone avoided and made it a nice place to visit. I never for a moment considered keeping people away from the pond in order to preserve it. And to this day, it is still a nice place.
I find it strange that people look upon man as an interloper, as if he were an evolutionary mistake. If only people would demonstrate the same concerns for each other that they bestow upon the piping plover...
Published: October 30, 2007 3:59 PM
They took are fires back to 1970? I wonder why they picked that date? It ignores the great Minnesota Hinckley fire of 1894. Not to mention several other large fires I know about that occurred over the years.
The logging companies were not doing a good job of preventing forest fires, but as we now see, the government isn't either.
Published: October 30, 2007 7:59 PM
Do you have a link to it Fundamentalist? :)
Published: October 30, 2007 8:10 PM
Michael, longer wildfire seasons - almost three months longer than three decades ago - is very clearly the result of climate change, as my other posts and links to research demonstrate. Whether this is AGW or not is a different question, but a link to climate change is pronounced, important and undeniable.
But of course the best way to deal with forest fires is not to take our foot off of the climate accelerator, but to change the institutional incentives that have turned the Forest Service (and other agencies) into fire-fighting budget hogs.
Tom
Published: October 30, 2007 11:51 PM
Complaining about climate change is like complaining about gravity. It's just something that naturally happens. To explain it, climatologists invented man-made climate change. Similiarly, cosmologists invented dark matter to explain gravity effects that they can't explain. At least the dark matter supporters claim that they are open to other theories, while the man-made-climate-changers describe their views as undeniable. How unscientific.
Published: October 31, 2007 12:38 AM
William, I would agree with your primary thrust that the real problem lies not with enviros but with government ownership, mismanagement and rent-seeking all around.
This is consistent with points I have noted elsewhere:
1. http://blog.mises.org/mt/comments?entry_id=7355
Turns out, of course, that bureaucrats have found out that the best way to have big budgets is to fight fires - which simply exacerbates the problem by leaving more vegetation to burn later. The FS simply doesn't have incentives to keep its budget small by helping to mitigate risks where they are most important - around people's homes and communities.
The chief answer lies in letting private parties assume their own risk. A secondary aspect is to stop the abuse of taxpayer dollars and end all of the misincentives and polical fighting over what the FS and other government agencies do. The latter can be achieved by privatizing the public lands - through sell-offs or by quasiprivatization through local land/forest trusts that essentially end federal funding.
There are some good reports here by an economist who has occasionally published at Cato:
http://www.ti.org/fireshort.html
http://www.ti.org/fire.html
http://www.ti.org/firesvc.pdf
The pdf above has an excellent, in-depth description of the many woes created by budgetary misincentives in the Forest Service and other agencies, that I highly recommend to Lew or to anyone else seriously interest in this issue, which is likely to be on the burner for the foreseeable future. Here is a sample:
"The Forest Service told Congress that the recent high costs of fire suppression were due to the heavy fuels built up over decades of past fire suppression. Rather than being embarrassed by its mistaken fire suppression policies of the past, the Forest Service turned the fuel build-up into a revenue generator as it insisted that Congress provide it with hundreds of millions of dollars of supplemental appropriations to treat or reduce the fuels.
"Yet the truth is that the fuel build-up is not the only reason, or even the main reason, for the high cost of fire suppression in the 1990s. A more important reason is the weather, specifically hot droughty summers over much of the U.S., at least some of which have resulted from El Nino or La Nina events. An even more important reason is the budgetary process, which allows and even encourages Forest Service fire commanders to spend huge amounts of money fighting fires."
"As long as the West has forests, it will have fires. As long as the Forest Service has a blank check for fire suppression, taxpayers will spend a lot putting those fires out. If the new wisdom is wrong, how did get to be so widely accepted? The short answer is that most interest groups, and especially the federal agencies—which themselves must be considered interest groups—have a strong incentive to increase federal spending on the public lands.
"This paper shows that poorly designed incentives—starting with the blank check Congress has historically given the Forest Service for fire suppression—are responsible for most of the problems created by past fire management. Though federal land managers have the best of intentions, a bureaucracy cannot be trusted not to abuse a blank check, and a bureaucracy with a blank check cannot be trusted to tell the truth about the need to spend that check. Yet the current policy, which combines a blank check for fire suppression with a near-blank check for other fire management, is hardly an improvement.
"What should be done instead? This paper reviews a number of alternatives that have been proposed by various interest groups and policy analysts. The two most effective alternatives are for Congress to simply stop funding federal land fire suppression or for Congress to decentralize federal land management and let each management unit fund itself out of its own receipts."
2. The paper cited above was written by Randal O'Toole of Cato, whom I elswhere cited as follows:
[C]ontrolled burns might of course be useful in soime places, especially along the WUI (wildland-urban interface), but Randal O`toole at Cato has done a good job showing that generally fuel accumulation is not a major factor in the increasing number and severity of fires, but climate change, and the fuels build-up argument has been one that suits the forest service`s budget desires:
"Instead of fuels, they found a strong correlation between drought and fire. “Thus, although land-use history is an important factor for wildfire risks in specific forest types (such as some ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests), the broad-scale increase in wildfire frequency across the western United States has been driven primarily by sensitivity of fire regimes to recent changes in climate over a relatively large area.”43
Similar correlations between drought and fire
have been found going back to 1931.44 Another explanation for the large fires in recent years can be found in the changes in firefighting
strategies aimed at improving firefighter safety. To fight large fires, incident commanders often backburn tens of thousands of acres in an effort to create large firebreaks that wildfires cannot cross. ...
"All of this research—some of it done by Forest Service scientists—indicates that Forest Service leaders have greatly exaggerated the excess-fuels problem. By concentrating on this issue, they have deftly persuaded Congress to increase funding for hazardous fuel reduction in national forests from less than $8 million in 1992 to nearly $300 million in 2007.
"Meanwhile, because of the perceived threat of hazardous fuels, Congress has increased funding for presuppression (which the Forest Service now calls preparation) from less than $180 million per year in the early 1990s to more than $650 million per year since 2004. Despite—or perhaps because of—all this preparation, the Forest Service managed to spend a record amount of money on suppression in 2006, and it has spent three times as much on suppression in the last five years as it did in the first five years of the 1990s.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8210The fire http://ti.org/fire.html
http://ti.org/fire.html
http://www.ti.org/antiplanner/?p=226
3. You are right that the Forest Service doesn't want to face its own responsibility, and so is happy to point fingers elsewhere, including at climate change. On climate change, they clearly have a point, but one manages forests not by changing the climate, but through appropriate decision-making.
We clearly need to get Congress to stop writing blank checks - now running at over $1 billion per year - on fire suppression and firefighting, and to force decision-making down to self-financed local levels.
4. You and Lew Rockwell are both wrong to target for criticism some strawman of environmental philosophy. Environmentalists show themselves to be perfectly good landowners, as a recent story in the NYT about The Nature Conservancy's large holdings in the Adirondacks makes clear, http://mises.com/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2007/10/30/can-enviros-manage-land-give-anwr-to-the-nature-conservancy.aspx, but in the case of public lands are simply the latest rent-seekers who are seeking to manipulate - none too successfully, the public bureacracies. One would expect you and Lew to be more perceptive.
Enviros are not responsible for creating the public lands (the PERC writing missed the Mexican war land grab), for the many decades of fire suppression that created the current mess, for the many decades where the FS operated at a loss while selling of timber at a pittance, nor for the changing climate. Even as enviros gained influence, the Bush administration's "Healthy Forests" initiative was more about providing free trees easily cut than about thinning the dangerous build-up of crowded understory in areas that wealthier populations were moving into for amenity reasons.
As I noted on Lew's initial post, for more perspective on forests, in addition to Randal O'Toole I would recommend that you take a look at what John Baden, a former forester, pillar of the free markets environmentalists/property rights enviros, founder of PERC and a member of the Mt. Pellerin Society, has to say about the USFS, bureaucrats, enviros and the Bush administration:
In the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, August 28, 2002
Bush Forest Plan Doomed to Failure
by John A. Baden, Ph.D. and Pete Geddes
http://www.free-eco.org/articleDisplay.php?id=18
In the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, July 03, 2002
Reform, Don't Privatize National Forest Management
by John A. Baden, Ph.D. and Pete Geddes
http://www.free-eco.org/articleDisplay_print.php?id=20
In the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, February 13, 2002
Forest trusts a sensible reform
by John A. Baden, Ph.D.
http://www.free-eco.org/articleDisplay.php?id=130
In the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, September 13, 2000
Suggested Cures for Forest Fires Way Off Mark
by John A. Baden, Ph.D. and Pete Geddes
http://www.free-eco.org/articleDisplay.php?id=32
A Century of Forest Service Ineptitude
By John A. Baden and Andrew C. St. Lawrence, October 1997
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=4816
In the Investor's Business Daily, August 08, 1997
The GOP Can't See The Forest For The Trees
by John A. Baden, Ph.D.
http://www.free-eco.org/articleDisplay.php?id=203
In the Seattle Times, January 31, 1996
Forest amenities in Thunder Mountains
by John A. Baden, Ph.D. and Douglas S. Noonan
http://www.free-eco.org/articleDisplay.php?id=264
I certainly support greater localization and privatization of the public lands and weaning them from tax dollars. Maybe now is a good time to push that. Though not all enviros understand why public lands are a recipe for disaster, poor management and frustration, many do.
Sincerely,
TT
Published: October 31, 2007 12:50 AM
As a note on the side, my understanding is that the greatest problems in SoCal have to do with chaparral and not forests.
In any case, I have no syumpathy for those who have moved towards the risk, even as I would agree that government fire suppression and firefighting have promoted this moral hazard.
Nor do I believe that these landowners have any right to demand that the government spend funds to lower fire risks, or to take matters into their own hands by cutting or burning adjoining public land, as William seems to suggest they should be able to do.
Published: October 31, 2007 12:55 AM
Robert, if you are talking about climate SCIENTISTS, this is clearly a strawman, but even among pundits and policy makers this is largely not true.
But if it helps you to paint your world in black and white, do right ahead. Just don't take my Kodachrome away.
TT
Published: October 31, 2007 1:04 AM
Anthony, maybe Fundamentalist was referring to this new podcast by Bruce Yandle ("Yandle on the Tragedy of the Commons and the Implications for Environmental Regulation") at the Library of Economics and Liberty?
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/10/yandle_on_the_t.html
Published: October 31, 2007 1:17 AM
Sorry I didn't provide a link. I thought everyone was familiar with the web site. TT has the right link.
Published: October 31, 2007 8:15 AM
Dear William Anderson,
Thank you for your well referenced article. I studied forestry and received a Bachelor's Degree in Forest Science in 1979.
What you report as the historical roots of forest management as it is presented in academia is accurate. But when it is put in the context of education there is an obvious problem. It is not education, it is not science but rather it is a vehicle for promoting a viewpoint, which classifies it as propaganda.
The intention of these 'leaders' is not important any more. Education and science trump the viewpoints of the politically connected 'founders.' Education will show that their contributions are questionable. Science will expose the short-sightedness of their ideas.
And if education and science are held in check by the interventionists then powerful forces outside the realm of the human sciences will destroy their falacies - namely - fire. Truth will reign, it cannot be concealed by layers of pseudoscience or hidden by institutions of supposedly higher education.
Published: October 31, 2007 5:16 PM
Tom Says: "Nor do I believe that these landowners have any right to ... take matters into their own hands by cutting or burning adjoining public land..."
Owners should be permitted to transform their own land to reduce fire hazards; prevention would then be a matter of purchasing enough land in the right places to exert your own control over your level of risk. Modifying adjoining land owned by some other party should of course not be defended.
Of course the state has no legitimate claim of ownership over anything; discrete government land holdings should be voucher-privatized to allow a market in those lands, so that the demand for, e.g., 'fire prevention landscaping', can be met.
Published: November 2, 2007 2:40 AM
Jean Paul, I agree that the primary focus ought to be what homeowners can do themselves (and on a coordinated basis with others in their development). Building a home that is a satisfactory "shelter-in-place" is the primary defese against fire, as this info from one development association advises: http://www.rsf-fire.org/education/programs/adult_shelterinplace.asp
As a public policy matter, I agree 100% that we ought to get the government out of the land ownership and wildfire management businesses/scams.
Published: November 2, 2007 3:51 AM
Many thanks to Dr. Anderson for this excellent analysis of the high costs attached to "public ownership" of approximately 2/3 of the American West.
This last August, a 50,000 acre forest fire threatened our family log cabin which sits on forest service acreage, and which was purchased by my grandfather in the Twenties for $200.00. Because the cabin is situated in a large grove of pine trees, and since the forest fire had advanced to within about three miles of our site, we were told by forest service experts and "fire-abatement engineers" that the fire would probably destroy our summer place in the next day or so.
I decided to cut down trees on the lot to remove combustibles from the immediate proximity of the building. Fully understanding that merely contemplating such an action is today considered blasphemous, while actually performing the action might be adjudged criminal, I phoned the Forest Service autocrat in a nearby town to inquire of the legality of my proposal.
She dodged and squirmed, ducked and weaved, as I persisted in seeking a clear answer to a simple question: was cutting down trees around the imperiled cabin legal? I could hear condescension in her tone at the outset; soon she was explaining that "we're only concerned for your safety", because she felt that cutting trees with a chainsaw was dangerous. "I can take care of myself"...I politely offered. When she repeated this line, I said in a conversational tone, "Her name, I don't want you to be my safety officer."
Now her tone hardened--a welcome respite from her earlier condescension. Clearly, she was dealing with an uncooperative roughneck; one untutored in Green Manners and the ethos of environmentalism. So she began to attempt to "reason" with me, offering arguments as to why my cutting down and removing trees around the cabin would actually have the perverse effect of INCREASING, rather than diminishing the fire danger.
"The trash pile from the trees would create a very hot fire", she insisted, "much hotter than the fire racing through virgin timber". "So what?" I asked in polite exasperation; "I'll drag the felled trees 100 yards away with a saddle horse." She agreed that would reduce the threat from a burning trash pile. "Flying embers from a fire as far as a mile away might land on the trash pile and ignite a conflageration that burns down your cabin--a fire that might not happen if you hadn't created the trash pile.", she explained. "I imagine flying embers could land in lots of places that might start a fire", I countered. She conceded this. "How many trees do you intend to cut down?" she asked. "All the trees on the lot, if I could." I responded.
"Unfortunately, I probably only have time and resources to cut down several in the immediately adjacent to the cabin". She was silent.
She then volunteered that it would be a shame to cut down trees if the fire--predicted by all the forest service experts to be on my doorstep in the next day or two--didn't burn the cabin! At this point, my veneer of politeness cracked a little, and I responded, "That's easy for you to tell me. You don't have property to protect from an advancing 50,000 acre forest fire." "Now let's not get rude", she corrected me. When I protested that rudeness had nothing to do with my response, and asked again if tree cutting was legal, she hung up on me.
When I called her back, she "was down the hall." So I drove to my brother's house, tolf him what had happened, and asked him to phone her. When she did, I answered. Not realizing she was talking to me, she said "We think Mark's plan is a good one, but there are a couple of restrictions you should be aware of. First, the use of chainsaws is prohibited after 2 pm, due to fire danger. Second, the fire crew will probably evict you after 2 pm in a forced evacuation." It was now 10 oclock in the morning, and the drive to the cabin was 2 hours. I politely thanked her and ended the call.
Did the cabin burn to the ground in the midst of still standing sacred virgin timber, as I stood by, pulling my hair and muttering to myself?
Sadly, I'm out of time and have to clear out of here. But many thanks for this great article describing the injustice imposed by the Federal Lands Empire!
Published: November 4, 2007 4:03 PM
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Published: August 11, 2008 3:12 PM