President Bush wants to sell
my land to fund rural schools. I mean my land
— not the vast tracts of federal forests and grasslands I
co-own with the proverbial New York cabbie, the Seattle widow and
all other American citizens. My private land — the 12 acres I
own with my husband. We bought it through a Forest Service land
exchange in 2000 and have paid taxes on it ever since.
Yet there it is, a tiny green polygon on the maps described in the
Feb. 28 Federal Register. There it is, part of
the president’s plan to sell 304,370 acres of Forest Service
land to raise $800 million to fund the Secure Rural Schools and
Community Self-Determination Act, a popular county payments program
established in 2000.
If our speck of land in rural
northeastern California were the only mistake in the
president’s funding plan, we could all laugh it off as
another bureaucratic blunder. But the proposal is replete with
errors. Some are like the inclusion of our property, mere slip-ups
in a sloppy process done in haste. Others are far more troubling,
suggesting a strategy that veers from simply incompetent to
irresponsible.
Take California’s Plumas National
Forest, where agency officials have listed 700 acres that are
already under contract to the Maidu stewardship project. This
first-of-a-kind program was approved by Congress to demonstrate
traditional Native American management techniques on national
forest land. At best, the listing is a thoughtless error. At worst,
it is a cynical response to an innovative undertaking.
Forest Service officials say the lands proposed for sale nationwide
are difficult and expensive to manage. They insist the parcels are
not environmentally sensitive or protected scenic areas. But the
list includes 730 acres in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic
Area in Washington and Oregon, archaeological sites in Alaska, and
two parcels at the head of Swan Lake within a wildlife refuge in
Montana.
A mile-long roadless area near Eagles Nest
Wilderness is among the 21,000 acres for sale in Colorado. So are
two popular rock-climbing areas in Boulder Canyon and a
snowboarding site around St. Mary’s Glacier. For spelunkers, Pluto
Cave in California is part of a sale tract with spectacular views
of Mount Shasta.
The list includes 1,300 acres of a rare
low-elevation old growth forest in Washington’s Sultan River
Canyon. In Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, Bush wants to sell the
Willoughby 40, an outdoor classroom painstakingly restored to
native pines and sagebrush and maintained by the Ravalli County
Resource Advisory Committee, Forest Service employees and Lone Rock
school kids. So much for collaboration.
Agency spokesmen
admit they threw the parcel list together in a rush aimed at
producing enough property value to come up with the funding
commitment in the president’s budget. They acknowledge that
they used computer data that looked primarily at the size of the
tracts and whether they were separated from the main body of the
forest, not whether they played a role in recreation or other
forest uses.
Clearly, no officials at any level went out
on the ground to review the properties they have proposed to
abandon. If they had, they would have discovered the wildlife,
watershed and aesthetic legacy they are sacrificing for a pot of
cash. They would have confronted a funding scheme that values
maximizing short-term income over preserving public treasures. They
might even have realized that the tiny 12-acre parcel listed for
sale in the remote Sierra Nevada is in private ownership —
mine.
The president’s proposal to sell national
forest land to raise revenue for a one-time payment is the
land-management equivalent of his strategy for leaving Iraq. It
shows a profound lack of foresight. Resolving the mistaken listing
of my land will likely require little more than a telephone call.
It will take Congress to resolve the more significant errors of
this foolish proposal.
The Forest Service has extended
the comment period on the administration’s land-sale proposal
to May 1. Write USDA Forest Service, SRS comments, Lands 4S, 1400
Independence Ave., SW, Mailstop 1124, Washington, D.C., 20250-0030
or e-mail: SRS_Land_Sales@fs.fed.us.
Jane Braxton Little is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, a service of High Country News in
Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). She lives in Greenville, California,
and writes about forests and natural resource
issues.
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