Scenic photo © George Wuerthner; gavel © George Filgate.
Here’s the good news: the much-ballyhooed proposal to sell upwards of 300,000 acres of public land to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000 is unlikely to occur.
The Bush administration had proposed the land sales—which were to come from the national forests—to considerable fanfare in early February, a real kick-in-the-green-pants birthday card for the U.S. Forest Service, which had just concluded its year-long centennial celebrations. Mark Rey, Undersecretary of Agriculture, downplayed the significance of the proposal, assuring the Rocky Mountain News that none of the 3,000 parcels bundled for sale were “strictly speaking, the crown jewels” of the national forests; they were instead “isolated tracts no longer integral to Forest Service needs” and easily disposed of, a conclusion that provoked howls of protest and reams of heated editorials that have since framed the extensive public debate.
Former Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas, over a companionable breakfast in Milford, Pennsylvania, in early April, speculated that the Bush initiative was dead on arrival. How apt that we were in the ancestral hometown of Gifford Pinchot, founding chief of the agency, to talk with Forest Service personnel about leadership development in an organization that is set within an intensely politicized environment. Stark proof of its politicization is the land sale itself, for 300,000 acres of the Forest Service’s inventory were put on the auction block to generate an estimated $800 million to pay for public education and roads in the nation’s forested counties.
The government auction feels like a common business maneuver: dumping assets to generate cash to invest in potentially more profitable arenas. For some the administration’s action smacks not of financial integrity but of failed budgeting. “This is just a government living beyond their means,” charged Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer. “That’s a damn poor way to run a ranch and a worse way to run a government.” Republican Senator Michael Enzi from Wyoming echoed, “There are towns that are hurting, there are ways we ought to take care of them, but selling off the public lands isn’t one of them.”
Some have wondered if there was not a more Machiavellian reason for the sales, a clever administrative ploy to sell off non-essential lands, thereby establishing much-needed precedent for the subsequent sale of the forests themselves. “This proposal is merely the camel’s nose under the tent,” charged Representative Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat. “If this passes the administration will be back with more proposals for larger sales of national forest land.”
Before you scoff, remember that only five months earlier, California Republican Representative Richard Pombo, the staunch anti-environmentalist chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, had pushed legislation to sell off some national parks in lieu of drilling in the Arctic; not to be outdone, Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado wanted to hock Department of Interior lands to pay for Katrina cleanup and relief efforts. Offloading public land as an easy way to pay some very big bills is not as far-fetched as it may sound at first.
No wonder Thomas and I focused more on the latest controversy to swirl around the Forest Service than the food before us. No wonder, given his experience as an embattled chief, Thomas offered this caveat as we pushed back from the table: The sale “may be a non-starter,” but that does not mean “we shouldn’t take it seriously. There’s too much at stake.”
There has always been a lot riding on the national forests. Although not officially named until 1907, the idea of national forests had emerged in the late nineteenth century, in response to warnings that the rapid harvesting of timber from the nation’s forests would imperil future economic prosperity. This conservationist principle was given early voice in George Perkins Marsh’s seminal 1864 book, Man and Nature, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, and its arguments gave rise to a kaleidoscopic array of grassroots activists, hunters and fishermen, women’s groups and scientists who pressured local, state and national governments to better regulate the public domain.
Or what was left of it. Throughout the nineteenth century, the General Land Office had disposed of more than one billion acres to stimulate western migration and the development of regional economies. But the shocking news of some of its spectacularly fraudulent land sales dovetailed with heightened anxieties about over-cutting and over-grazing on forests and grasslands, adding weight to conservationists’ postÐCivil War demands for more rigorous land-management controls. In an 1878 editorial entitled “The Abuse of Nature and its Penalties,” the Sacramento Daily Union spoke for many when it asserted that the Sierra would be logged out in a decade, “and if the rate of consumption is increased the catastrophe will occur considerably sooner.”
Fears of timber famine set the stage for congressional initiatives, most famously the 1891 Forest Reserve Act, which granted presidents the right to “set aside” timbered lands as “public reservations.” The Organic Act of 1897 established these reservations’ formal purposes—they were needed for “securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens”—and the 1905 Transfer Act moved them from the Interior Department to the Department of Agriculture, where they would be managed by the newly founded Forest Service. Two years later, the forest reserves were renamed the national forests, a critical shift in nomenclature—these lands were owned by the American people, all of them, and for their manifold purposes. As noted in the 1905 Use Book, a text that Pinchot described as the “formal and detailed statement of our new policy,” the forests’ administration “is not for the benefit of the Government, but of the people.” That being the case, they are “patrolled and protected at Government expense, for the benefit of the community and the home.”
One of those vital benefits lies at the core of the current controversy: payments to counties. The principle behind these payments dates back to the origins of the national forests themselves. While there had been considerable western support for the creation of the national forest system, with many recognizing the essential protection they offered to high-country watersheds, there also was concern over the potential loss of tax revenue; once created, national forests would be off county tax rolls. Following the passage of the Organic Act, western legislators pressed for compensation to offset those losses, real and possible. A decade later they created a funding formula: the Department of the Treasury would remit payments to forest counties equal to 10 percent of each national forest’s gross receipts. The money would be used to support roads and schools. One year later, Congress passed the National Forest Revenue Act, boosting the payout to 25 percent, based on total logging receipts and national forest acreage. The winning formulation of the 25 Percent Fund bound the agency to the rural communities in which its lands were located, and those communities to the agency, a link that also sustained the political fortunes of local representatives.
This tidy, back-scratching arrangement proved of even greater worth in the postÐWorld War II boom as the Forest Service got out the cut. In the late 1940s, harvests on national forests rose from 2 to 4 billion board feet; in the 1960s, they soared from 11 to 13 billion board feet, and remained at that level until the late 1980s. The chainsaw’s roar, like the smoky pall that hung over mill towns from Sitka to Flagstaff, meant only one thing: Timber was king, a cash crop whose revenues created a positive effect for the agency, western congressional leaders and rural counties.
Then the bust came. Lawsuits in the Pacific Northwest to protect spotted owl habitat, along with suits filed to aid some of the region’s aquatic species, essentially halted timber production on the national forests. The loss of jobs and of community cohesion may have occurred in any event, as logging companies as early as the 1960s had already started to shift south in search of competitive advantages in land, labor and transportation. But the industry’s geographical reorientation accelerated in response to successful lawsuits, with investment and production ratcheting up in Canada and developing countries around the world. So complete has this process been that it is tough to imagine a full-scale revival of the once-flourishing Pacific Coast lumber industry.
None of this is news to those counties dependent on the 25 Percent Fund, whose payouts had declined in the year 2000 by an estimated 80 percent, but it is worth recalling their mercurial economic history given what happened next. During the election year of 2000 a generous Congress passed the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act to continue to subsidize rural economies. This step-down subsidy was slated to end in 2006; it was intended to slow some formerly timber-dependent counties’ continued free-fall and enable them to expand their economic bases before the next round of federal funding.
Therein lies the rub. The need for support continues, the sun has set on the Rural Schools Act, another election is months away, and the cupboard is bare. To accept the Bush administration’s declaration that there is no other way to pay for the Act’s reauthorization except by marketing public land is to forget that this economic mess is of the administration’s own, and very deliberate, making. The president’s slashing tax-cut legislation, in combination with his flushing of staggering sums of money into a no-win situation in Iraq, has sent the national deficit spiraling out of control; rural schools and roads are not the only landscapes feeling the aftershocks. Rather than a sign of fiscal conservatism and prudent bookkeeping, the land-sales proposal is a signal of an executive branch in deep distress.
Such has been the buzz on Talk Radio, usually a predictable partisan support network for the president. When I appeared on a San Antonio drive-time show, I was startled by the conservative host’s vehement insistence that the proposed sales were proof that the president was not a real conservative; I was happy to give him a chance to speak his mind. Less surprising was the rush of editorials and op-ed commentary in environmentally friendly big-city dailies, a gathering storm that gained greater momentum in mid-March when the four living former Forest Service Chiefs faxed a letter to every member of the U.S. House and Senate challenging the administration’s actions. “We believe that auctioning off National Forest lands, for any purpose beyond enhancement of the National Forests, is an unwise precedent...and should occur only after the consideration of the change and the potential long-term consequences are fully debated and exposed to the owners of the National Forests—the American people.”
This chorus of opposition was so pronounced, and so unanticipated, that Mark Rey began to do a classic bob-and-weave: had he said 300,000 acres of Forest Service land was for sale? By golly, he meant 175,000 would do the trick. Yet this downsizing did not pacify southern politicos, perturbed by the proposal’s decidedly western tilt. According to the Southern Environmental Law Center, Oregon and North Carolina each had roughly 10,000 acres of National Forest up for sale, yet “under the funding formula currently used, North Carolina would get just $1 million in 2006, while Oregon would get almost $163 million.” That disparity ticked off Missouri Governor Matt Blunt. “The proposed sale takes two blows at our state,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “One, targeting us for significant land sales, and two, putting the money generated by any sale in other states’ hands.”
The administration had no ready retort for this regional resentment, or for the political complications it posed for legislative action. And its reaction to an infuriated Montana delegation, whose bipartisan opposition has particular relevance, given how many federal forests and financially strapped school districts exist in Big Sky Country, was to unfurl a white flag. Questioned about how he intended to respond to the caucus, Mark Rey temporized, “What we are getting from a broader range of members [of Congress] than just the Montana delegation,” he told the Helena Independent Record, “is a deep concern over this approach and a general feeling that if there were another alternative available that would be far preferable.”
Riding to his rescue were Democratic Senators Max Baucus of Montana and Ron Wyden of Oregon. On March 30, they proposed a strategy to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools Act without selling off a single acre of national forest. Their bill, vetted by the Congressional Budget Office, the Senate’s Joint Committee on Taxation, and minority staff on the Finance Committee, would close a tax loophole for government contractors. At present, the federal government does not withhold taxes that its contractors owe for providing it with goods and services; by withholding 3 percent of the payments, Baucus and Wyden say the Treasury will secure an estimated $2.6 billion over ten years, enough to fully fund the Rural Schools Act. “The administration challenged Congress to find a way to fund this program—and Ron and I just did,” Baucus said.
Whether this is the final legislative solution remains to be seen. But given the intense, across-the-aisle anger that the administration’s initial gambit unleashed, the Baucus-Wyden counterproposal has a good chance of attracting the votes necessary for passage. Moreover, if ultimately it succeeds in both houses, and obtains a presidential signature, this round of reauthorization of the Rural Schools Act may at long last decouple the budgeting process for rural development from national-forest receipts or public-land fire sales. That will be a very good thing. Communities in need rightly require a sustained line of support that is free of White House whim or whip; they should not be held hostage to any other administration’s bankrupt fiscal policies. Nor should the Forest Service (or BLM) discover that its forests are but pawns in an inside-the-beltway logrolling contest—such a practice will not help it better care for the land and serve the people.