Rethinking the federal lands: a comment

Landscape and Urban Planning, 13 (1986) 65 -69 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., Amsterdam - Printed

65 in The Netherland<

News and Views RETHINKING

THE FEDERAL

SALLY K. FAIRFAX’ ‘Departmentof

Rethinking

the

and RICHARD

B. NORGAARD’

Conservation and Resource Studies and ‘Department of Agricultural and Resource University of California, Berkeley, CA (U.S.A.)

Federal

Lands.

Sterling

Rethinking the Federal Lands stems from a conference by that name sponsored by Resources for the Future. This workshop or conference (its sponsor refers to it by both names), was held in September 1982 in Portland, Oregon. “The workshop did not seek to arrive at conclusions or recommendations. Rather its objective was to enlighten and stimulate new ideas by providing a forum where people of widely divergent views and backgrounds could present and discuss their positions in a professional manner” (from the acknowledgments prepared by Kenneth D. Frederick). The book contains the best material from the conference and additional material commissioned afterwards. The first section consists of an extensive overview of the issues and the positions of the various speakers, and is written by the Editor, Sterling Brubaker. The second section presents chapters by Paul Gates, Barney Dowdle, Perry Hagenstein and D. Michael Harvey around the general title “The Federal Lands: Why We Kept Them - How We Use Them”. Section three addresses the retention versus disposal debate under the title “Retention, Disposal and Public Interest”, with chapters by Joseph Sax, Richard Stroup, B. Delworth Gardner and Gordon Bjork. The book closes 0 1986 Elsevier Science

Publishers

Economics,

“Intermediate Positions and Special with Problems”, with chapters by Marion Clawson, John Leshy and Robert Nelson. The conference was organized and the book was published in order to clarify the debate which has raged for almost three decades about the federal lands and the economist’s place in analyzing them. Federal land policy in the United States remains unsettled after a quarter of a century of public scrutiny and major legislation. The Multiple Use and Sustained Yield Act of 1960, for example, validated the priorities and procedures that had evolved within the U.S. Forest Service, giving the agency reign to use its technical expertise, considerable public support, and political acumen to determine the use of land, but the public soon demanded a spate of single-purpose statutes which defined specific management regimes for wilderness areas, national trails, and wild and scenic rivers. The broad discretion of the Multiple Use Act rapidly proved to be a poor foundation in a time of changing public expectations regarding federal land management. The 1970’s opened with the National Environmental Policy Act, which mandated detailed assessment and review of alternatives and impacts of proposed actions. The Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Act (1974) and the National Forest Management Act (1976) soon followed, as Congress tried to still the growing clamor with procedure

Brubaker (Editor). A Resources for the Future Book, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1984.

0169-2046/86/$03.50

LANDS: A COMMENT

B.V.

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rather than by defining substantive priorities. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act (1976) granted the Bureau of Land Management similarly ambiguous planning authority to manage the unreserved, unentered public domain lands which were at last officially declared to be retained. With the extension of federal land planning and control came the Sagebrush Rebellion. Rural westerners and others dependent upon federal lands balked at the changes, delays and uncertainties accompanying the new bureaucratic procedures. Many joined the cattle industry in its perennial quest to “return” the federal domain to the states. Environmental groups, long the most audible and telling critics of the federal land agencies, rallied to support them and embrace federal ownership as the sine qua non of wise stewardship. The rebellion received considerable media attention and political lip-service in the 1980 elections, and then fizzled out. Some rebels were mollified by the Reagan administration’s stance on things environmental. Others were thrown into dismay by the administration’s offer to sell selected lands to the highest bidder. A more complex story lies beneath these well-publicized events (Fairfax, 198 1). The nation’s faith in progressive-era, renewableresource management, as preached by Gifford Pinchot at the turn of the century, was last expressed in the 1960 Multiple Use Act. Almost immediately thereafter, the commitment to government decision-making by technically trained experts began to erode under the growing criticism of national environmental groups, but other voices and also played important, although processes subtler, roles. District rangers used to be able to make decisions based on their technical expertise and enter into formal and informal understandings with local firms, but since the late 1960’s, most local lumber mills have either failed or been purchased by national lumber companies. The technical decisions

historically made at the district level were now more often carried to higher levels. The expertise of local managers was also no match for the multi-national oil and coal companies that began to bid for leases on federal lands. Simultaneously economists, most notably Marion Clawson, were criticizing foresters for ignoring economic efficiency (Clawson, 1976; see also Hyde, 1980). The combination tipped the balance of expertise and fundamentally altered the premises of resource management. The federal lands legislation of the 1970’s raised a frail umbrella of national resource assessments and economic analysis. These statutes established elaborate procedures to balance proliferating demands for access to public resources, setting agencies up to broker “interest-group liberalism” (Lowi, 1969). National interest balancing increased attention to both environmental amenities and economic efficiency, but a partial shift of authority to departmental and executive levels in Washington failed to deflect the increasing polarization in the public resource debate. The interests proved less concerned about the relative slices of the pie than with the nature of the knife. Ideological competition, long submerged in competition over the uses of the land, has emerged to structure and dominate the debates (Nelson, 1984a). Had economists been willing simply to participate in this intensifying dialogue on public resources management, it would not have been necessary for Resources for the Future to hold the conference or publish the book, but the outcry attending the Reagan administration’s resource policies confused both public and specialist discussion of the issues. Economists misinterpreted both the Sagebrush Rebellion and the Reagan election as a reversal in federal land retention policy. John Baden, Richard Stroup, B. Delworth Gardner, Steve Hanke, Gary Libecap and others built on the economic efficiency analyses of Clawson and others and argued for disposition and privatization of public

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lands. These economists produced a flurry of articles, largely from a position known within economics as the “new public choice theory”, which appeared in academic journals, the CAT0 Journal and major newspapers. Steve Hanke and Richard Stroup joined the Reagan Administration early, proposed privatization from within, infuriated the public - even Sagebrush Rebels - and quietly left Washington. The best of this work is available in Baden and Stroup (1981). James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock initiated the “new public choice theory” school several decades earlier (Buchanan and Tullock, 1962), but followers and fame were delayed until the 1970’s. Political scientists find the “new” school pretentious and dangerously narrow. It formally treats only a limited number of political and bureaucratic phenomena and ignores other factors long considered by students of public administration. Public lands economists, long dismissed as heretics by adherents of Pinchoist dogma, became simultaneously audible and disreputable as apparent or actual accomplices in the privatizers effort to sell the public domain. (Readers have been spared Gordon Tullock’s presentation at the conference on the possibilities of retiring the public debt through land sales.) The economists’ position was further sullied by their failure to distinguish it from that of the Sagebrush Rebels, whose frustrations with the federal bureaucracy had been, not wholly appropriately, dismissed as the machinations of commodity groups interested in public lands profiteering. Finally, the less than covert attack by the “new public choice theorists” on the legitimacy of political and administrative processes magnified the cacophony. By ideological mischief and miscalculation, economists effectively separated themselves from the progressive reformers of the post-war era. Enter Resources for the Future to hold a conference to rescue the economists credibility from these diverse excesses. The signifi-

cance of Rethinking the Federal Lands exceeds, indeed is only partially related to, its contents. Substantively, it is only one, and probably not *the best, of a recently flowered literary genre. When President Reagan and his first Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, proposed a partial but significant re-orientation of federal resource policy, symposia sprouted like mushrooms to analyze the proposals and/or capitalize on the intense public reaction thereto. Some published conference proceedings include Tucker (19831, Johnston and Emerson (1984) and Nelson (1984b). Utah State University apparently still intends to publish the proceedings of the conference they sponsored in 1982. Indeed, it was the proliferation of the landtenure discussions and the intensity of public reaction to them that make this volume important. Throughout the conference and the book, Resources for the Future lends its environmental economic prestige to the discussions of efficiency and public lands, imparting a legitimacy which had been washed away by the treatment of “privatization” by both the media and the new public choice theorists. There are several very interesting pieces in Rethinking the Federal Lands. Joe Sax waxes plur~istic over the extensive roots in Western philosophy and institutions of the competing concepts of society firstly as simply the sum of its autonomous individuals, and secondly as a collective entity. Robert Nelson effectively traces the rise and fall of conflicting ideologies affecting land policy over the last century. These two articles, along with Paul Gates broad historical overview and John Leshy’s pragmatic political assessment of current land management constituencies, contribute to our understanding of the debate and its possible resolution. However, beyond its symbolic value, the volume fails to affirm the role of economists in public land policy debates. The would-be rescuers got caught in the storm. They ap-

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parently intended to pit. the “nuts of the right”, the new public choice economists who favored privatization, against the “nuts of the left”, a hodgepodge of historians, lawyers and environmentalists who favored retention’. The latter included Sax: an environmental law professor long active in preservation issues, and Leshy, also a law professor with prior experience in the Natural Resources Defense Council and President Carter’s Interior Department under Secretary Cecil Andrus, but neither Sax nor Leshy make the “standard” arguments in favor of federal land ownership. Lacking easy targets, the gladiators on the right simply sound shrill. Editor Brubaker and the venerable Clawson make balanced, frequently sagacious, observations on the fray, but even their balance and reason is limited by their economic framing of the issues. One of the unforeseen contributions of rethinking the Federal Lands is, therefore, its documentation of the agony and amusement inherent in the sociology of economics. While scholars in the other social sciences recognize the affinities between various values and modes of analysis, economists consciously deny them. Del Gardner explicitly writes “Some think even ‘economic efficiency’ is ideology, but I prefer to think of it as a scientific paradigm”, and amongst other disciplines of economics, he can. In the same company, an economist is also free to argue that the paradigm, being scientific, yields correct answers to all questions concerning choice. Overlap between what economists feel qualified to discuss and the subject areas of other social scientists are inevitable, but when forced to acknowledge other values and paradigms, they note their duty to present to the public the message from the paradigm in which they have been trained and done their research. rethinking *We are grateful to Joe Sax for this apt characterization the conference.

of

the Federal Lands documents how this economic epistemology d,ouses dialogue. The non-economists are simply ignored by the economists. Discretion being the better part of valor, Barney Dowdle is uncharacteristically restrained in his critique of eminent historian Paul Gates’ presentation “Why We Retained the Federal Lands”. Instead of arguing, Dowdle simply ignores their disagreements and respectfully attributes to Gates his own economic interpretations regarding why we retained the federal lands. Thus Gates’ richly textured discussion of scenic preservation, opposition to robber barons, protection of watersheds and natural wonders is reduced failure” to “market in Dowdle’s article. Brubaker’s overview similarly re-casts the non-economists’ presentations in market terms. Richard Stroup’s comments on Sax’s presentation provide further evidence of dialogue failure. Sax dwells eloquently and at length on the parallel intellectual and institutional history regarding property rights. Stroup, accustomed to quick economic shootouts, simply picks out. familiar words and phrases from Sax’s well-wrought presentation and fires away. Sax discusses the difficulties of understanding the highest uses of land. Stroup agrees that appraisal is difficult and simply states that auctioning the land to the highest bidder solves the issue. Sax documents the elaborate roots of concern feeding the conservation movement, and Stroup simply retorts that private greed will guarantee that this generation of private resource owners will hold resources for the next. It is important to note that to a large extent the economists, even the middleground economists, have mis-used their theory. For any given assignment of property rights, markets allocate resources efficiently. (This statement, of course, assumes away all of the messy issues of indivisible property, information, and contractual and enforcement costs.) If future generations had rights to

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resources assigned to them, present generations would find it economically advantageous to hold the right mix of resources to trade with them, but if future generations hold no rights, present generations have no economic incentive to save resources beyond their own time. The argument is pure economics; straight from principles. Economists are mistakenly using efficiency arguments, or allowing others of their kind to do so, that assume the assignment of property rights where the nature of the rights and their assignment are the issue. We think Resources for the Future erred by high-lighting the extreme market economist’s arguments. They had already worked a minor miracle by ending the progressive-era dogma of “forestry at any price”. This success, however, seemed to have enfranchised a new group of public lands economists unacquaintted with the humility that comes with partial truths or the sloppy joys of incremental policy making. The assertion that political decisions are illegitimate, hence the only solution is to turn the whole kit and caboodle over to the private market, has lost even its entertainment value. We need practitioners who recognize that economics is a marginal science, both relative to physics and, more

importantly, because it can say more about the relative merits of small changes than big ones. We need, perhaps, a second miracle from Resources for the Future.

REFERENCES Baden, J. and Stroup, R. (Editors), 1981. Bureaucracy vs. the Environment: The Environmental Cost of Bureaucratic Governance. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Buchanan, J. and Tullock, G., 1962. The Calculus of Consent. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Clawson, M., 1976. The national forests. Science, 119 (4227): 762-767. Fairfax, S.K., 1981. Riding into a different sunset. J. For., 79: 516-523. Hyde, W., 1980. Timber Supply, Land Allocation, and Economic Efficiency. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Johnston, G.M. and Emerson, P.M. (Editors), 1984. Public Lands and the U.S. Economy: Balancing Conservation and Development. Proceedings of a Conference held by the Wilderness Society. Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Lowi, T.J., 1969. The End of Liberalism. Norton, New York. Nelson, R.H., 1984a. The Making of Federal Coal Policy. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Nelson, R.H., 1984b. Seeking Alternatives to Public Land Ownership: Assessing the Sagebrush Rebellion and the Privatization Movement. Paper presented at the National Conference of the American Society for Public Administration, Denver, April 1984, p. 103. Tucker, P.W. (Editor), 1983. Private Rights and the Public Lands. The Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC.