While Bureaucracies Fiddle . . .

A former Forest Service chief coined the term "analysis paralysis" to describe how too much red tape, too much analysis, too many legal fights and too much prolonged public "process" was tying his agency in knots, making it impossible to deal with public lands challenges in a coherent and timely fashion. This Arizona inferno is one result of analysis paralysis. And it might have been prevented, as this report points out, if federal public lands policymaking wasn't such a slow, complicated, belabored process.

The complexity and contentiousness involved in getting almost anything done on federal lands has gotten to the point where managing them has become virtually impossible. Federal agencies therefore have defaulted to a policy of complacency, passivity and non-management. That's made it impossible to get on top of the forest health crisis ravaging the West. And the consequences are becoming even more visible, from runaway wildfires to the bark beetle blight that is browning-up vast swaths of Colorado.

Imagine the public outrage if a rogue band of loggers clearcut 336,000 acres of national forest in an act of mass vandalism. People would be going to jail. But when 336,000 acres is destroyed, due in large part to federal incompetence, mismanagement and paralysis, all we get is a collective sigh. The destruction of America's national forests is a scandal that can and should be laid at Uncle Sam's doorstep. Yet a clueless public thinks these are all acts of nature or God.

Nature is playing a part, but don't let anyone fool you: This is a man-made disaster.

Private Versus Public Conservation

I always wonder why a transfer of private property into public (meaning government) hands is described in so many media reports as an act of "preservation," or "protection," even though the West's public lands have been mismanaged by federal bureaucrats on a scandalously-massive scale. Private land owners tend to be far better conservationists not only because they have the pride of ownership but because, unlike red tape- and litigation-bound federal agencies, they are free to actively manage their properties for economic and ecological outcomes. The two goals aren't contradictory, contrary to media myth; they're complementary, as this piece in the High Country News reminds us.

It's time to stop stupidly assuming that every transfer of private land into government lands automatically guarantees a higher level of care and stewardship, since the forest health crisis now ravaging the American West is a stinging rebuke to that odd idea. It's time, too, to rediscover the benefits and virtues of private conservation and active forest management -- which just may be the keys to saving the last healthy swaths of forest and rangeland in the West.

Mind Your Own Business

The U.S. Forest Service can't even responsibly manage the hundreds of millions of acres in its vast inventory, as anyone knows who has driven through Colorado, or read about the similar devastation sweeping across much of the West. It seems a joke, therefore, to read that the agency is also taking an interest in helping private landowners manage their lands.

If this were merely an effort by the feds to encourage private conservation, I would applaud. Too much emphasis is placed on government-centered conservation (which is an abject failure, as the forest health crisis demonstrates), to the neglect of private-sector alternatives, which frequently have shown much better results.

But nothing is innocent where the federal government is concerned. The deeper agenda is to get taxpayers to "incentivize" -- meaning subsidize -- private conservation efforts (even more than already takes place, through conservation easement tax benefits and the Department of Agriculture's Conservation Reserve Program). With federal money comes federal strings, meaning federal control. This threatens to corrupt, and co-opt, the whole idea of private conservation.

Although the feds tout their credentials as preservationists and "protectors," facts "on the ground" tell a more damning story -- one of massive mismanagement of public resources, resulting in a perfect storm of wildfire, disease, insect infestation and benign neglect. Most private forests are much better cared-for than publicly-owned counterparts, because a private owner's personal stake and (yes) profit motive generally make him or her a better steward of the resource than red tape-bound bureaucrats going through the motions.

Public land managers have precious little to lecture private owners about. They would do better to focus on getting their act together.

Too Little Too Late

It was reported several weeks back that the beetle blight sweeping through Colorado is slowing somewhat. The bad news behind the "good news" is this: It's slowing because huge swaths of forest are dead and the hungry little buggers are running out of food.

How much of this calamity is "natural," and how much man-made, isn't much discussed (especially by those who might have the fingers pointed in their direction). Having first written about the forest health crisis back in the late 1990s (though the warnings were there as far back as the Yellowstone fires of 1988), I'm of the belief that conditions for the crisis were largely the result of policy choices, and that much of the devastation could have been contained with aggressive and focused federal action.

That action didn't come, in my opinion, because of bureaucratic and political inertia, red tape, "analysis paralysis," obstructionism from the environmental lobby (which won't even tolerate tree-cutting designed to save forests) and the pusillanimous politicians who kow-tow to the extremist element. Maddening stories such as this one show that federal responsiveness has not improved, despite recent rhetorical support for "responding to the crisis."

Reports The Pueblo Chieftain:

"Officials with the Rio Grande National Forest are still waiting to see whether their forest will benefit from $30 million the Forest Service has set aside to fight bark beetle outbreaks statewide.The agency's regional office in Denver recently earmarked $2 million from that pie for spruce beetle outbreaks and other forest health issues in Southern Colorado and the Western Slope.

Janelle Smith, a spokeswoman for the regional office, said there was no timeline for when a decision would be made on how to divide the $2 million, which could be spread across as many as three national forests. Aerial survey results released last month show that spruce beetles have chewed through at least 144,000 acres on the Rio Grande, which surrounds much of the San Luis Valley. But foresters suspect the outbreak may be even larger since the initial stages of infestation are not visible from the air, said Mike Blakeman, a public affairs officer with the Rio Grande."

The beetles have leisurely eaten their way across Colorado, devastating landscapes that are this state's most precious resource and biggest tourist draw. Yet the Forest Service is taking it's sweet time about doling out the meager funds belatedly made available. The Denver Post reports that another $30 million will soon be flowing to the state. But this will be used not to counter the epidemic, or save our remaining forests, but to clean up after the beetles. Senator Mark Udall called this a "huge win" for the state -- which is a little like saying Little Big Horn was a huge win for Custer.

This is more than a disaster: it's a national disgrace. It's Katrina in slow motion, but with a federal response even more unforgivable because it had years, not days or weeks, in which to react. And it's a direct result of the inability (or is it the unwillingness?) of Washington to responsibly manage lands it holds in trust for the rest of us.

So, the next time someone tells you that adding new acreage to the massive federal domain will lead to more "protection," laugh in their face. What's happening in Colorado and elsewhere across the West proves that the surest way to wreck a beautiful landscape is to put your incompetent old Uncle Sam in charge.

How Predictable

How could I have predicted, as I did in my previous blog post, that the U.S. Forest Service would waste no time in closing the Rampart Range Road shooting area, in response to an accident that occurred there Saturday? It didn't take a crystal ball.

I predicted correctly because it was completely predictable.

These days, every tragedy that makes the papers generates a disproportional regulatory response from the safety uber alles crowd. Politicians and regulators are constantly scanning the headlines, looking for tragedies or "crises" they can turn into legislative or regulatory "fixes." If a family in Aspen dies of carbon monoxide poisoning, we'll within a week have a law moving through the statehouse, mandating that every new home in Colorado be built with carbon monoxide detectors. If some nut tries to set-off a shoe bomb in an airplane, we'll all henceforth have to put our shoes through a scanner at the airport (thank goodness he didn't use an underwear bomb). If a mismanaged pit bull mauls a child, pit bulls must be banned, or registered as lethal weapons.

Any excuse will spur the safety uber alles crowd into an irrational overreaction. All it took in this case was a complaint from the shooting victim's grieving father, who would rather blame the Forest Service for the death than his son's companion. And the papers generate a steady stream of similar excuses to act. This is how the freedoms of responsible people get whittled away, one "crisis," one tragedy, at the time.

Also easily predicted was the Forest Service's haste in closing the range -- though I've never, in my decades of watching federal bureaucracies in inaction, seen one move so fast on anything before. That's because the agency increasingly seems to view the public as a threat to the public lands -- as a hassle to be tolerated, controlled and told "no" -- rather than the rightful owners of these areas.

More people out enjoying the public lands means more work, more hassles, more potential headaches for forest service bureaucrats, so they are increasingly using "protection" as an excuse to close trails, close ranges, close areas and limit public access to public lands. Almost any excuse will do. And the justification for closing the shooting range came Saturday.

The agency also is succumbing to an attitude I describe as recreational correctness; it's the idea, somewhat analogous to political correctness, that only certain forms of "light on the land" recreation are to be allowed on public lands. Hiking is tolerated, because it's just about the only form of recreation that doesn't have environmental extremists (who today really give federal land agencies their marching orders) up in arms or bringing lawsuits. But all forms of motorized enjoyment of these lands, from snowmobiles to personal watercraft to off-road vehicles of various stripes, increasing are finding the welcome mat rolled up on them by federal land managers.

The continuing battle over snowmobile use at Yellowstone National Park -- see latest developments -- is one example of recreational correctness at work. Here's another recent example of recreational correctness in action.

Hunters are tolerated in national forests, at least for now, but they'll see restrictions and bans eventually, once the less powerful groups have been evicted. And how do shooters rate in this era of creeping recreational correctness? They occupy just about the bottom rung, from this perspective -- they're viewed as irresponsible redneck yahoos who are scaring away the birds and deer with their loud booms and are bound to get themselves or someone else killed, sooner or later.

And sure enough, a deadly mishap occurred at the Front Range Road shooting area Saturday, giving the agency an engraved invitation to do what it's been itching to do for some time. The irrational overreaction was completely predictable, given the factors I cite above, even if it's completely unfair, and bespeaks a double standard, since the Forest Service doesn't string barbed wire around a lake or river every time a boating accident occurs. And that's how I predicted it.

No crystal ball required.

Loving the Forests to Death

A report in today's Helena Independent Record highlights one of the great ironies, and great outrages, of our time: that the groups who claim to love our forests the most are doing everything in their power to destroy them, by obstructing any federal mitigation efforts that involve the harvesting of trees.

Our Western forests are in crisis, with beetles and wildfires destroying vastly more trees every year than the timber industry ever could, even in its heyday. Yet as the story below illustrates, litigious "tree-huggers" are the single biggest obstacle to saving the trees. Bigger than budget constraints. Bigger than bureaucratic inertia. Bigger than "analysis paralysis."

The story pretty much speaks for itself, but it's not an isolated case. Many a national forest has been stymied in its efforts to respond to the crisis, by extremists who would rather see the forests die en masse, and go up in flames, than see a single tree removed by human hands.

Managers of the Helena National Forest had a plan to counter invading mountain pine beetles and buffer nearby communities from the wildfire threat, which involved culling parts of the overly-dense forest in an effort to reduce "fuel loads" and cut out the cancer. That was in 2003. But because there was a commercial element to the plan -- because some of the logs could be milled and put to productive and profitable uses -- the zero-cut crowd, true to form, went running to the federal courts, demanding it be stopped.

Six years later, the plan has been upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But at this point the damage has been done, and there's not much forest left to save.

It's outrageous. It's criminal. It's madness. But it's typical of how knee-jerk obstructionism by gang green is helping to wipe out the very forests they claim to love -- and explains why federal agencies have been so ineffectual in countering the forest health crisis. The 3 groups that helped kill this forest, just for the record, are Alliance of the Wild Rockies, Native Ecosystems Council and the Wildwest Institute. An army of rampaging loggers couldn't have done this forest more harm.

Here's the story:

Court rules in favor of logging project

By Eve Byron

Three environmental groups couldn’t quash a project on national forest lands meant to lessen the threat of wildfires near Clancy and Unionville southwest of Helena, but it appears that the tiny mountain pine beetle has made the Helena National Forest rethink its plan.

In a decision issued Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the Helena forest’s 2003 plan to undertake commercial thinning and other efforts to remove small trees and vegetation on about 1,500 acres. However, Helena District Ranger Duane Harp said the prescription is only good now for about 100 acres containing Douglas fir trees, since about 90 percent of the trees on the remaining 1,400 acres — mainly lodgepole pines — are now dead.

“We are obviously extremely pleased that the Ninth Circuit has found in our favor. But it’s bittersweet news because with the current beetle epidemic, the vast majority of the project area, which was proposed for timber harvest, is now dead,” Harp said. “You can’t use the prescription for green trees on dead trees.

“So I guess we’ve implemented the no-action alternative.”

Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance of the Wild Rockies, said that if the Helena forest had worked with his organization and the two others that began appealing the lawsuit in 2004 — Native Ecosystems Council and the Wildwest Institute — that some compromise might have been reached to allow the project to move forward. He said the groups did agree with the forest that some thinning should be done on forest lands near homes while the lawsuit was under way, and that his group has worked with the Helena forest and others in the past to craft projects that wouldn’t be litigated.

“Our main focus was that the forest’s own five-year review of its forest plan showed that it was failing to ensure the viability of species,” Garrity said. “The forest service never disclosed that report to public, as originally planned, and has never addressed that concern even though it continues to implement the same flawed forest plan.”

He added that the appeals court’s decision wasn’t “published,” meaning it can’t be used as precedent, and that they disagree with the findings of the three-member judicial panel that issued the ruling. Garrity said they’re considering whether to ask for an opinion involving more of the appeals court’s judges.

Planning for what became known as the Clancy/Unionville Project began in 1997, because the forest service and some of the neighbors in the area thought this might reduce the threat of large-scale catastrophic wildfire. Harp said he also hoped thinning the forest here would also create a habitat less conducive to mountain pine beetles.

A final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision for the project was issued in 2000, but was successfully appealed and sent back to then-forest Supervisor Tom Clifford by the regional forester. Additional analysis was conducted and a new decision issued in February 2003. It’s that decision that’s been in litigation until this week’s Ninth Circuit Court ruling.

Garrity and others have long disputed that logging is good for reducing the threat of wildfire forestwide; they’d rather see it implemented only near homes for that purpose. They also argue that it’s impossible for the forest to “log its way out of the beetle epidemic.”

“British Columbia has a huge beetle infestation, and they log like crazy in Canada,” Garrity said. “There aren’t any scientific, peer-reviewed papers that say you can log your way out of a beetle infestation.

He adds that once the needles fall off of the dead trees after a year or two, the fire hazard actually is reduced. The danger increases, however, when those trees eventually fall to the forest floor, creating ladder fuels that fires use to creep up a tree from the ground into the crowns of trees.

But Harp said that at this point, the fire hazard has significantly increased in the Clancy and Unionville areas due to the standing dead trees.

Harp said they plan to remove “hazard trees” lining roads in the area that are at risk of falling on vehicles or people. They also may try to sell the dead trees as part of a commercial harvest plan, but will have to do additional studies to look at the impacts. He doesn’t expect any logging, other than possibly for hazard trees, in the area this year, but he wants to proceed as quickly as possible because the longer the dead trees stand in the forest, the less value they have to sawmills.

“We now have to decide if we will do any harvest at all under the Clancy Unionville decision,” Harp said. “We will however, move forward with the prescribed burning and other treatments that are outside the timber harvest units.”

Disorder in the Courts, Devastation in the Forest

I've been writing about Bill Clinton's roadless rule since it was approved nearly 8 years ago, as one of his last actions in office. But even I've lost track of how many related court cases are going, and how many often contradictory court rulings have been made, in this seemingly endless, seemingly unresolvable, controversy.

We just had court ruling 10 or 11, I think. And this one -- like the rulings before it -- resolves nothing and only deepens the confusion. I defy readers to make sense of the situation, as described by the AP:

"SAN FRANCISCO — A federal magistrate judge on Tuesday scaled back a 2006 decision that reinstated a Clinton-era ban against new road construction and development on millions of acres of national forest.

Two years ago, Judge Elizabeth Laporte in San Francisco invalidated a 2005 Bush administration rule that overturned the 2001 "Roadless Rule," which protected 58.5 million acres of federal land in about 40 states. But in August, a federal judge in Wyoming invalidated President Clinton's Roadless Rule, prompting the Bush administration to request that the two judges modify their conflicting rulings.

In response, Laporte on Tuesday reduced the geographic scope of her 2006 ruling, so that the road construction ban would apply only to national forests in 10 western states. The ban doesn't apply to national forests in states such as Colorado and Wyoming, because those states are in the district overseen by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, rather than the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Laporte's move is only a temporary fix. Federal appeals courts in San Francisco and Denver both are expected to rule on the case next year, and road construction rules also could change under President-elect Barack Obama's incoming administration."

The reporter does his best, but doesn't (and can't) do justice to the complexity of the situation, which would require a book, rather than a wire story, to fully explain (any literary agents out there interested in such a book, please drop me a line). Here one gets a Reader's Digest Condensation of a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners public lands battle that demonstrates, I would hope, the impossibility of having any coherent public lands policy when every decision is hashed-out (and turned into hash) in court. It shows, as well, that such conflicts ultimately get us nowhere, whether we support the roadless concept or not.

I do not support it.

Clinton's actions constituted a typically slick attempt to overturn multiple-use management on 60 million acres of national forest, and turn those acres into de-facto wilderness areas, without going through Congress. That dishonesty -- that unwillingness to say what the real agenda was, while using euphemisms like "roadless areas" as obfuscations -- still angers me, as it angers many in the West.

But the Clintonistas and gang green, rather than admit that they were trying to pull a fast one, and retreat when they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar, have been trying ever since to legitimize the illegitimate, and to secure their ill-gotten trophy. They know they would lose in the court of public opinion, and probably in Congress, if these roadless areas were proposed as wilderness areas. The public understands that this means severe access restrictions and the throwing out of multiple use. So the exclusionists try to win from judges what they can't get from Congress. Chaos and confusion have been the result.

And roadless advocates are kidding themselves if they imagine that the Obama administration is going to settle the matter, once and for all, in their favor. Now that the matter is tangled up in the courts, it will stay in the courts. Even the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent Obama can't override the federal judiciary. And the other side has access to the courts as well.

The roadless push was also terribly ill-timed, since the wildfire threat and forest health crisis (which already was apparent when Clinton left office), if we're going to combat them, will require more access to the forests, not less. But this all circles back to a fundamental disagreement (already touched on in my earlier post about Terry Barton and Smokey Bear) between those who want the forests left to themselves, with man and his management techniques subtracted from the equation, and those, like me, who believe that we can responsibly manage the forests for multiple uses, balancing economic and ecological values, and be a force for good, as well as for ill.

We've been chasing our tails in circles now for 8 years, while the forest health crisis -- a crisis that demands decisive action, not paralysis -- deepens around us.

The full impact of that crisis, and the economic devastation it will bring to Colorado and the American West, will be clear to anyone who takes the shortcut between Breckenridge and Keystone ski resorts, as I did last weekend. Once green forests are a sickly mustard brown. It's now obvious to the untrained eye that all these trees are dead or dying. It's only a matter of time before the brown needles are shed and the skeletons start blowing over, littering the landscape and blocking (and perhaps closing) the road -- if they don't go up like a torch first. A moonscape will follow, destroying the views from the million dollar homes nearby and driving many winter visitors to more bucolic settings.

Riding the chairs at Keystone, on a very windy day, I worried that the brown giants nearest the lift line could snap and fall, bringing disaster. It was frightening and depressing. And it's happening everywhere in Colorado, and in many Western states.

Yet the vocational activists who profess to love the forests most -- the tree hugging industry -- stand mute and passive in the face of the devastation, creating chaos and paralysis by playing their usual games in court and blaming a man-made crisis on natural causes or climate change. And worse, they want to severely restrict access to a third of these forests, impeding any possible response, through their roadless agenda.

But perhaps roadless areas serve a secondary purpose for gang green now. This way, fewer Americans will be able to venture far enough onto the "public" lands to see the destruction all this pointless conflict, all this costly litigation, all this paralysis, all this stupidity has wrought. They'll be able to hide this scandal, and their culpability in it, from the public eye.

Out of sight, out of mind. Right?