Decisions Should Be As Local As Problems

If we Americans were to invest in actual conservation of natural resources with as much energy and funds as we devote to rhetoric on that subject, we might live in an environmental paradise.

Instead, natural resources decline. Industry stagnates. Federal land managers spend their days in thickets of lawsuits and studies. Big environmental groups point to the inaction as reason to send them dues so they can instigate more paper shuffling.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Indeed, there have been glimmers, in recent years, of a better approach: local control.

One example: The Chelan and Douglas county public utility districts have announced a habitat conservation plan covering Rock Island, Rocky Reach and Wells dams. Using their own ingenuity, the districts devised strategies to improve the survival odds of young salmon when they emerge, alive but temporarily disoriented, from the dams. Wires will keep away fish-eating birds. Local fishing derbies and the hiring of young people with fishing poles can remove squawfish that congregate by the thousands to devour the dizzy young salmon.

The federal government merely prescribed a higher rate of salmon survival. Local people figured out how to achieve it.

This stands in contrast to the government’s floundering Columbia Basin ecosystem project. Launched in 1993, it aimed to settle forest, salmon and grazing controversies by producing a massive, top-down plan for the management of federal lands in Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon, Nevada and Utah.

So far, this has cost $40 million. It hasn’t settled much. Industries and environmentalists are as suspicious now as they were before the paper shuffling began.

The exercise did, however, produce two draft environmental impact statements, each 1,300 pages long. It produced thousands of pages of technical research papers - 151 pages on “macrofungi,” 381 pages on “mollusks of special concern,” 27 pages on “surface wind patterns,” 369 pages on weeds, 95 pages on microscopic soil organisms … and on, and on, and on. All of it available to eager readers for 6 cents a page. There’s even a helpful list of 113 bureaucratic acronyms, from ACEC to WUG.

The ecosystem’s human inhabitants got skimpier attention; Sen. Slade Gorton mocked the economic analysis by noting that it missed the existence of agricultural jobs in Othello.

Now, Congress is wondering whether to cut off the project’s funding, and it appears that few will mourn if it does. In theory, overall plans and research can be helpful. But what Congress really needs to do is empower informed local decision making, so the use and conservation of natural resources can proceed. Left at the national level, this battle is political and never ending. It’s at the local level where informed decision makers can devise real solutions.