Forest Service scales back forests’ recreational value

WASHINGTON – Forest Service officials have scaled back their assessment of how much recreation on national forest land contributes to the American economy, concluding that these activities generate just a tenth of what the Clinton administration estimated.

Under President Clinton, the Forest Service projected that by 2000, recreation in U.S. forests would contribute nearly $111 billion to the nation’s annual gross domestic product, or GDP. Bush administration officials, by contrast, have determined that in 2002 these activities generated about $11 billion.

Joel Holtrop, deputy chief of the National Forest System, said the revised numbers might spur the administration to shift some of its recreation dollars within the system but will not prompt it to downgrade activities such as hunting, fishing and wildlife-watching.

But critics of the administration said they fear the new numbers, which were obtained from the nonprofit Natural Resources News Service, will be used to justify more logging and mining on national forests. Under the old estimates, recreation accounted for 85 percent of the system’s contribution to the GDP, compared with extraction’s 11 percent; under the new formula, recreation represents 59 percent.

“Would I expect anything different from the Bush administration? No,” said Michael Francis, who directs the national forest program at the Wilderness Society, an advocacy group. “They will cook the books for whatever they want.”

According to Forest Service strategic planner Ross Arnold, who developed the most recent estimates, earlier studies inflated the number of people visiting national forests and how much money they spent while they toured the area. In 1995, Clinton administration officials assumed there would be 800 million visits each year to national forests by 2000; current officials have determined there were just over 200 million visits in 2002.

The Forest Service obtained the lower visitor numbers through its National Visitor Use Monitoring Program, which surveyed tourists in every national forest between 2000 and 2004, Arnold said. The agency also decided to peg spending associated with such visits at $46 a person, by basing it on how much visitors spent within 50 miles of a forest on a single day.

Greg Alward, another Forest Service planning staffer, said officials did not purposely inflate earlier recreation numbers but were simply relying on rougher estimates. “They were the best available data at the time,” he said.