Selling federal forest land to
subsidize rural schools and road projects is a bad idea for many
reasons. But a proposal to do just that, incorporated into the Bush
administration’s 2007 budget, has one powerful virtue: It has
focused welcome public attention on a century-old welfare program
that has yet to achieve its goals.
Bush and his
Department of Agriculture, which runs the U.S. Forest Service, have
proposed extending a law that gives money to logging-dependent
counties to compensate them for revenue losses caused by declining
timber harvests. That law was signed by President Clinton in 2000
after protections for the northern spotted owl and other endangered
species reduced logging in the Pacific Northwest, causing rural
revenues to tumble.
But thanks to such fiscal irritants
as the war in Iraq, tax cuts and a reluctance to veto even the most
outlandish congressional spending proposals, the administration
can’t afford to keep the rural subsidy afloat. Rather than find
offsetting savings elsewhere, or let the program expire as
lawmakers apparently intended six years ago, the president and
Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey want to prolong it another five
years and sell more than 300,000 acres of national forest land to
pay the $800 million bill.
Criticism of the proposal has
been amusingly ecumenical. Environmental groups denounced the
sell-off as a betrayal of the nation’s conservation principles;
they were joined in righteous indignation by conservative Western
lawmakers, who typically show concern for the public lands in their
states by aiding efforts to strip-mine, clear-cut and subdivide
them.
Selling assets to pay ongoing expenses is fiscally
imprudent, like emptying your 401(k) to cover your phone bill. But
there’s a bigger issue involved in the forest-sale proposal, and it
goes to the heart of the evolving relationship between Americans
and the remarkable landscape they inhabit. In a sense, the program
in question awkwardly straddles a divide between the nation’s
rough-and-tumble past, when natural resources existed solely to be
turned into cash as quickly as possible, and the modern era, when
that attitude has become a wasteful luxury the nation cannot
afford.
The proposal also serves as a reminder that when
communities yoke their economic destiny to the unsustainable
exploitation of natural resources, their future is likely to be
grim. There’s a lesson there for the new energy boomtowns of the
West, in case they missed the hundreds of similar lessons scattered
across history.
The Clinton-era program that Bush and Rey
propose extending, dubbed the Secure Rural Schools and Community
Self-Determination Act, was enacted in response to the spotted owl
controversy of the 1990s. But its real roots extend to the 1890s,
when Congress authorized the president to create forest reserves
that would be closed to settlement to protect them from abuse.
Several presidents put that power to enthusiastic use,
notably Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt, who placed
millions of forested acres off limits. Keeping that land in federal
hands also kept it off the local tax rolls, prompting political
concerns about the potential economic impact on rural communities
that had hoped to prosper as settlers claimed that land, logged it
and turned it into revenue-producing farms and ranches.
In 1906, Congress directed that 10 percent of all money generated
by timber sales and other activities in a national forest be
returned to the neighboring counties, enabling them to invest in
community development and achieve prosperity despite the loss of
potential tax revenue. In 1908, the share was boosted to 25
percent, where it remains.
When the mills were buzzing,
it was a good deal. But the saws began to fall silent in the 1980s
and 1990s, as the unsustainable level of logging finally began to
unravel forest ecology across the West, and the money dried up.
Congress propped up the system with several supplemental allocation
laws, most recently in 2000, but lawmakers never adopted any of the
recommended strategies to permanently stabilize the program by
disconnecting rural subsidies from fluctuating timber revenues.
Most of those reform proposals were undermined by lobbyists for the
timber industry and those same rural communities, which opposed any
legislation that might weaken the case for increased logging.
Timber-dependent counties have had 100 years to diversify
economically and kick their addiction to federal subsidy. They’ve
failed to do so, and now the administration wants to sell family
heirlooms to buy them one more fix. Nobody wants rural areas to
suffer, but sometimes the kindest thing to do is say “no.”
John Krist is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia,
Colorado (hcn.org). He is a columnist for the Ventura
County Star in California.
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