July 26, 2004

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Kerry versus Bush on Forest Restoration

Public lands management and community protection from wildfires has become an issue in the presidential campaign with John Kerry offering a Democratic alternative to the Bush “Healthy Forests Initiative.”

Kerry has proposed to shift $100 million of the US Forest Service budget from the commercial timber program to a focused effort to reduce hazardous forest fuels and restore forests to safer conditions on lands adjacent to human settlements. As one would expect, the Bush campaign has responded vigorously, defending the forest management direction Bush got Congress to adopt. The gist of that response is that Kerry has been captured by “radical environmentalists” who are anti-logging. To go down that road, Bush insists, condemns our public lands to continued environmental decline that will end in catastrophic wildfires. We need, he says, the loggers in the woods to reduce that wildfire threat and restore our forests. As usual in politics, this response is based on half the truth. There is, no doubt, a tremendous amount of forest restoration work to be done on our National Forests. Clearly loggers, chainsaws, and other logging equipment will be a crucial input for many forest restoration programs.

But the Bush response ignores some other very important factual considerations including the following:

1. It was past management of our National Forests including fire suppression, commercial logging, and livestock grazing that caused the deterioration in the health of the most accessible of our public forests.

2. Logging guided by commercial concerns would remove the largest and most valuable trees, which are also the least flammable trees, and leave behind a highly flammable landscape of brush and small trees strewn with logging slash. Commercial logging does not reduce wildfire danger.

3. The National Forest commercial timber program loses hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

When what the Bush campaign said and what it left unsaid are combined, a completely different conclusion about forest restoration is suggested. First, it is not clear that using hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars to subsidize commercial timber harvest on National Forest lands is a high public priority. These subsidies encourage uneconomic timber harvests that effectively discourage the management of private timberlands that are more productive, less costly to access, and less environmentally fragile. As the Green Scissors coalition of fiscal conservatives and environmentalists has been pointing out for a long time, a money-losing “commercial” timber program is an oxymoron. There is no public interest in harvesting trees at a loss while doing extensive environmental damage. That is doubly irrational in economic terms.

Shifting dollars from that pure waste towards forest management objectives where there is a high priority public interest, namely hazardous forest fuels reduction and forest restoration, clearly is a step in the right direction. Given that these non-commercial forest management activities will also provide employment for forest workers and their equipment, including their chainsaws, and are likely to produce a flow of merchantable material to local mills, such a shift in the use of our tax dollars will also have a positive impact on our communities.

Second, it is vitally important that we not re-live the “conspiracy of optimism,” the destructive fantasy of the last half-century of National Forest management, in which we pretended that there were no tradeoffs to be considered, no real economic choices to be made. The contemporary version of this “conspiracy of optimism” is that the way to get around the high cost of forest restoration is to harvest commercially valuable trees and use the profits from those sales to fund our forest restoration objectives. Given that commercial and forest restoration objectives may not be compatible with each other, this will often not work. The more we pursue the commercial, moneymaking, objective, the more damage we will do to the forest, the opposite of forest restoration. Put the other way around, it may often be the case that the more seriously we take hazardous fuel reduction and forest restoration, the less likely it is that the commercially valuable materials removed will fund the restoration efforts. Public dollars will be needed and appropriate. In general, there will be no free lunch. We will have to make hard, costly choices. It is anti-economic to hide from this truth.

In this setting, proposals like Kerry’s to shift the public subsidy from supporting damaging commercial timber harvest on public lands to supporting forest restoration efforts make eminent sense. It will enhance the natural values that flow from our National Forests, help protect our communities from catastrophic wildfire, provide jobs to woods workers, and a flow of wood fiber to local mills. That is a set of priorities that not only we Westerners should be able to support but also a public program our fellow citizens around the nation will be willing to support with the necessary tax dollars.