Replace ‘Sweet Deal’ With Innovation

Three environmental groups, one based in Bellingham, have a great idea for the nation’s public forests: They would let conservation groups buy government tree-cutting privileges so as to leave the trees standing.

The government should try their plan.

Currently, the U.S. Forest Service - custodian of 191 million acres of American forests - lets only logging companies bid in auctions of federal timber.

This policy guarantees a sweet deal for huge timber companies. However, the exclusion also locks in the most destructive uses of public forests, and generates less revenue for the taxpayer than if others could bid.

Consequently, an unfair preference for Big Timber ensures a perverse outcome: Big Timber rips off the taxpayer by buying trees cheap, then saddles John Q. Citizen with the costs of building roads to harvest areas and mitigating ecosystem damage.

This, for example, was just what happened last year when the Service turned down the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance’s winning $28,875 bid on 275 acres of fire-scarred trees in the Okanogan National Forest in Washington solely because the group refused to log the trees. First the Forest Service awarded the timber to the second-highest bidder; then it built a costly, otherwise unnecessary, road into the property so logging could proceed.

The wider bottom line: Taxpayers lost $195 million in 1995 alone on ecologically damaging, below-cost timber sakes, according to the Wilderness Society.

But now three environmental groups - Bellingham’s Northwest Alliance, along with Arizona’s Southwest Center for Biological Diversity and the Oregon Natural Resources Council - want to change all this. This winter the groups filed a formal petition with the Secretary of Agriculture, who oversees the Forest Service, asking that the Service take the highest bid for most of its timber “regardless of whether that bidder has any intention of harvesting” the trees.

This plan to allow “unlogging” would vastly improve the nation’s forest stewardship - and not just fiscally.

It would embody the principle that parties other than logging companies have a right to the national forests under the system’s own mission of “multiple use,” which dedicates the forests to recreation and biodiversity as well as logging and cattle-grazing. It would reserve new areas for wildlife management and watershed protection. And it would bring to the federal realm a free-market approach that groups like The Nature Conservancy have made common in the private sector but that have succeeded only at the state level on public land.

For example, the state of New Mexico showed the way last October when it awarded a 550-acre grazing allotment along the cattle-trashed Rio Puerco to the Forest Guardians of Santa Fe and the Southwest Environmental Center of Las Cruces, which had outbid several local ranchers. The victory marked the first time such a contract had ever been awarded to non-ranchers - and now the conservation groups are busily kicking the cattle out and restoring the riverbanks. Surely this makes more sense than the Forest Service’s continuing refusal to release to the Southwest Center’s care some 800 fire-damaged trees the center bought for $4000 last fall on 60 acres of the Chiricahua Mountains southeast of Tucson, Arizona. These trees the center had hoped to reserve as nesting habitat for goshawks and Mexican spotted owls.

And one final thought: Letting the market adjudicate the use of more of the nation’s forests would likely apportion resources in a healthier, more appropriate way than the present government-run, industry-dominated system.

Now, a rigid one-size-fits-all system gives industry the same preferential treatment nearly everywhere. But under open bidding particular tracts might flow to different uses depending on their nature and value. Rich, accessible stands on flatter land would likely remain commercial, since their higher profitability would compel industry to bid high. Meanwhile, conservationists would quickly realize their interest in bidding hardest on scenic, steep-sloped and remote parcels of wilderness - parcels frequently of lesser worth also to Big Timber. While no panacea, these respective tendencies would at least inject some discretion into the too-rigid current arrangements.

With that in mind, then, Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman should look carefully at this imaginative Northwestern contribution to America’s resource debates. After all, if environmentalists - or for that matter fishing clubs or mushroom harvesters - are willing to offer higher bids than logging companies, why should they be denied? No way should the government turn away serious bidders just because they want to preserve, not damage, our public lands.

xxxx