Public Land Mismanagement

"This legislation guarantees that we will not take our forests, rivers, oceans, national parks, monuments and wilderness areas for granted, but rather we will set them aside and guard their sanctity for everyone to share. That's something all Americans can support." Those were the words of President Barack Obama on March 30 when he signed the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act that placed an additional 2 million acres of public land under the federal government's most stringent use restrictions. To anyone who knows the record of public land management, however, these words of preservation and unanimous support ring hollow. If we used a measure like our stock indexes as a public land management barometer, it would be lower than the Dow Jones. Consider three measures of public land stewardship. Environmental Irresponsibility--Decades of fire suppression by the Forest Service have disrupted natural fire cycles and turned many western forests into tinderboxes waiting to burn. Dense stands of spindly deadfall and underbrush now occupy land once characterized by open savannahs and large, widely spaced trees. One result is larger, more intense fires that burn the publicly owned forests to the ground. Indeed, by the Forest Service's own estimates, 90 to 200 million acres of federal forests are at high risk of burning in catastrophic fire events. Bans on thinning and salvage harvesting have not only exacerbated the fire danger in public forests but it has also left them more susceptible to disease, insects and high winds. Not only do the fires put enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, the fact that the forests are dead or dying means that they are not sequestering carbon, as healthy ones do. Fiscal Irresponsibility--What makes the ecological mismanagement of federal lands even more difficult to swallow is the price tag that comes with it...Establishing the 26-million-acre National Landscape Conservation System will only add more red ink to the BLM's hemorrhaging budget. Fretwell notes that less money is available to maintain federal lands as the percentage of wilderness land increases. This is partly due to the fact that wilderness designation results in more litigation than productivity. For example, as wilderness and endangered species issues forced the Forest Service to reduce timber harvests in Washington and Oregon from more than 6 billion board feet in the late 1980s to one-tenth that amount in 2006, its cost of offering 1,000 board feet of lumber for sale increased to $182 from $53. Jack Ward Thomas, President Bill Clinton's chief of the forest service, says litigation has tied land management agencies in a giant "Gordian knot," one which the legislation just signed by the president is likely to pull tighter...Forbes