Public Land Fantasies, Courtesy Of The Hoover Institution

Not satisfied with wrecking the national and world economies, the folks at the Hoover Institution are now taking aim at federal land management policy in the American West:

Like other grand designs of the "progressive" era, public land policy has failed the test of time. Public lands have not been managed efficiently to maximize national benefits but instead in response to political pressures.

Past mismanagement has turned many national forests into flammable tinderboxes where intense crown fires reaching to the top of the trees — once a rarity — consume entire forests.

Rural Westerners receive significant financial benefits when the federal government pays for many of their local roads and conservation services and provides many high-paying local federal jobs. Increasingly, however, they are questioning the trade-offs involved.

...Professor Sally Fairfax of UC Berkeley observed that the creation of the national forests established "a relationship between the national government and the Western states that is usefully described as colonial." Little has changed, even as the federal system has become more and more dysfunctional.

...A rational public lands policy more suited to current and future needs would put the nationally important lands into a newly reorganized federal environmental protection system. Ordinary recreational lands would be managed at the state and local level, perhaps by transferring them to local counties. What better steward of a local recreation area than the people who live in the area?

Where to start with this blundering, misguided torpedo? I tried a letter to the editor:

Describing current federal land management practices, Nelson uses the term 'colonial' in a perjorative sense, but that IS the reality! Population density is thin. The land is managed from afar. It wouldn't matter whether the feds or localities managed the lands. The lands wouldn't be managed by people who actually live on those specific parcels. But there are good colonial services and bad colonial services, and Nelson would have us throw away the consistent management we have come to expect for no good reason.

Take fire management, for example. The biggest problem is managing undergrowth, particularly on the urban/forest interface, where firebugs and accident-prone people are common. There is no good way to slash profitless undergrowth economically, even though people try compromises by allowing timber harvesting too. Local management couldn't properly do the job without plundering the forest in the process, but federal management can deploy greater resources (taken from those distant coastal cities where the colonists live), and do a better job without having to turn a profit. What advantage local management?

Or take range land management. Nelson's accusation is that the feds currently favor narrow special interests at the expense of the greater good. Do you seriously think that would improve with local management? Really? Where would the accountability be?

There isn't enough time in the day to describe all the horrors in these plans. The more-in-depth article is here.

It's important to recognize that many of these western lands are of little economic use, or (in the case of the Taylor lands) sometimes no economic use at all. However they are managed, these lands will always be an administrative burden. That is fate. Trying to squeeze lots and lots of money out of them too risks environmental destruction. Stop that fantasy in its tracks!