The United States Forest Service and a "Funny" Bird!
The listing of the Spotted Owl as an endangered species in the nineties highligted some of the peculiar economic mechanics of federal forest ownership. by Gene DeNardo
(libertarian)
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
The Spotted Owl likes trees, big trees. When nesting, it doesn't settle for young saplings or even partially mature second growth. It places its nest high up in the largest original trees in western forests. And it likes to roam. Each pair of nesting owls can claim an area up to two miles in diameter around its nest.
The forest industry also likes these monster trees for different reasons. The quality and amount of straight grain wood in one ancient tree is almost unfathomable. Old growth timber has all the characteristics that make it extremely desirable and valuable. It is the yardstick that farmed timber is measured by and really, farmed timber barely registers on the scale. Farmed wood does perform a task and you have to give humans a B or so for effort, but there is nothing like the real thing. You might say it is much like comparing fresh, wild salmon and a fish from a commercial pond; the farm fish will keep you from starving, but there the likeness ends. And really, the story how we got to where we are is similar in both cases.
The forest industry has been attracted to these ancients trees so much, there is barely ten percent of our original forest left in western forests. The ratio east of the Mississippi is even lower. With the exception of the Great Plains and the western low deserts, this country was once covered with trees that were hundreds to thousands of years old. It was the most extensive collection of temperate forests on the planet. Those remaining are for the most part small patches in steep and hard to access locations. And some of these stands have Spotted Owls in them. It is estimated there are about 2.000 pairs surviving today.
In 1990, life changed in the western forests. The Fish and Wildlife Department declared the Spotted Owl an endangered species. After numerous court cases and government studies, it was decided continued logging of the ancient forests would finish off the species. In 1991, the US District Court set the requirements: in a radius of 1.3 miles around a spotted owl nest, logging companies must leave 40% of the ancient trees on national forest property.
Controversy followed and the hype grew. While this was pitted as the typical government land grab, intrusion into our private property rights for the sake of a bird, this was seldom the case. Old growth forests had become even a rarer bird on private property.
Most private western timber property is owned by beneficiaries of the massive federal land giveaways to the railroad companies that began in earnest during the tenure of perhaps our greatest corporatist president, Abraham Lincoln. About ten percent of our continental land mass, mostly mature primitive forests and mineral properties, has been given away in the form of railroad grants. These gifts were not "payments" for laying tracks, those generous checks came later. They were given to provide "asset backing" for capital loans. When the tracks were laid, Congress simply said, "Keep the change"!
You won't find too many ancient trees on this corporate property. When the price is free and the quantity is virtually endless, one acts like a spoiled child. Those trees went first, after all, there was another place to get these giants for cheap, when the supply of the railroad trees ran low.
National forest service lands have been the backyard of the corporate timber firms. Literally. The land grants were given away as sections in checkerboard fashion, supposedly to increase the worth of the federal lands with the development of the railroad. This would somehow pay back the fed's "investment". Sound familiar? We were recently told this on the bank bailouts, how much the taxpayer was going to make by "donating" a trillion bucks to the poor banks, or buy purchasing these "undervalued" toxic assets. How's that going, anyway?
What this checkerboard layout did do was tie up the landlocked sections. It "appropriated" access to public lands to private corporations that had already been given alternate sections. When it came to board feet, these corporations had in essence been given twice as much property. If possession is nine tenths of the law, access to possession is probably at least half.
The forest service has used other methods to maintain harvest of the public's timber within the confines of their best buddies. They use a system very similar to the Federal Reserve: release large amounts to selected traders at much discounted prices. Auction the public lands in amounts so large that only the biggest and most capitalized resource corporations will be capable of bidding and let the timber go at a price that will ensure massive profits. In this way, the public worth is used to grow select private profit.
There are also other "tricks" that are used to keep the cost down. Often in road less areas, the contract for road building is awarded to the winning bidder of the timber auction on a non-competitive basis. Costs for roads into the logging areas of 70% to 80% of the auction total are not uncommon. This link is a very interesting account of the continuing sellout of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska.
They also use some very creative accounting tricks to make it "feel" like they earn more money off timber sales than they actually do. All counties that experience federal timber sales receive a portion of the sales to compensate for the removal of trees; a bit of a "land fee". The Forest Service accountants deduct this amount after figuring net gain, or I should say, net loss from a sale. They have appreciated roads within the forests, most of them dirt or at best gravel, over centuries rather than a couple of decades, to lessen their "costs".
The truth is, despite ownership of what was the most abundant temperate forest on the planet, the Forest Service, guardian of that same forest, continually loses the taxpayer's money. In plain and simple terms, we the taxpayers PAY selected corporations to log our forests and rob our nation in the interest of private profit.
Let's get back to the private timber lot owner and the Spotted Owl. How was the "real" private timber land proprietor affected by the Spotted Owl ruling. Most government regulations tend to subsidize economies of scale and injure the little guy, but this ruling was an exception.
I was fortunate to live in the heart of the private timber land of western Oregon during this time. We lived on a 13 acre piece and across our road were 200 acre tracts of privately owned timbered property. From the western line our neighbor's 200 acre properties to the Oregon Coast, a straight line distance of about forty miles, were the "private" properties of Weyerhaeuser Corporation, a direct beneficiary of the railroad grants.
This is a common pattern of ownership on the west coast from north of San Francisco to the Canadian border, interspersed with chunks of state forests. The national forests are predominately in the Sierra Nevada and Oregon Cascade ranges, although coastal sections of Washington State are federally owned. Much of these publicly owned coastal Washington forests are due to "swaps" with the railroads, in which "free" lands were given back in exchange for other valuable public properties.
The spotted owl ruling hampered the public giveaway. No longer could these large corporations pick and choose what public lands they wished to log. This drove up wholesale timber [price paid for logs at the mills] prices from less than two hundred dollars a thousand to over six hundred. While the owl logging restrictions seldom affected the small timber lot owner, the higher prices enabled them to market trees that had been unmarketable for years, due to prices depressed by discounted public auctions.
Mills offered to purchase small lots of trees, sometimes as few as five or six, and even helped the owner find a logger. Some went to so far as to set up "pickup" of these trees. Previously, the land owner was responsible for trucking the trees to the mill where the mill could reject the trees outright or offer a low ball figure for logs that already had quite a bit of capital invested in them. It had become a seller's market. Small timberland owners moved out of their modular homes into new houses and improved their properties. Things were looking up, all because of a peculiar bird and its nesting habits.
What is wrong here is the collective dominance and control of the timber market by the Forest Service, in collusion with the corporate resource firms that were the direct beneficiaries of the railroad land grants. Again, our government confuses the public ownership of "common" lands with collective or "group" ownership and direction. The collective can distribute the goods and resources as they wish, they do not need the approval of "common" owners.
If you have some idea that the citizens really "own" the public lands, for the most part, you are mistaken. The public lands are owned by the State and those whom the State wishes to benefit. Collective lands are managed by a group in the same way private property is managed, as the owner wishes. When a group can benefit from ownership, seldom will they choose to act in the "common" interest, and almost never if there is money to be made.
Much of our public forests could be owned and managed privately. If they were auctioned in small plots, around 200 acres, they would be large enough for an entrepreneur to own and earn a decent living investing their labor and know how, rather than requiring formidable amounts of capital that would be necessary for large plots. This would be consistent with "homesteading" principles as opposed to the principles of "public giveaway" that are now in place.
Smaller plots invite more intensive management and higher efficiency. Since these are public lands, the smaller auctions will also bring much higher prices, since what is profitable and also affordable to the individual does not produce enough profit margin for the highly capitalized and bureaucratic resource corporation. If these lands are to be transferred to private ownership, the whole idea is to gain the true owners, the citizens, the highest return, not further the cause of State Corporatism.
There are also many "special" places out there that should remain in the public trust. There is no price that would compensate the citizens for the "wholesale" of a site like Yosemite Valley or Grand Canyon. If only ten percent of our virgin forests remain, would not ninety percent be enough for commercial purposes? It seems it would be nice to "gift" our children with something besides a huge debt.
There are plenty of national and local wonders that everyone can continue to own and enjoy. Proper rent should be charged for any improvements inside these gems. After all, we are the landlord and we should get what is our due. Any uncollected rent simply becomes "super profit" and benefits special interests. Again, special interests dictate that we a currently collecting a miniscule percentage of the gross revenue of concessionaires. Supply and demand should rule, not campaign donations.
There is no real need for a Forest Service. Private ownership and the Park Service can handle most of our forested land situations, once we have re appropriated our forests. A hybrid setup on special lands could be a public private-partnership in which the landowner allows public access and gives up some management in exchange for compensation. There are as many possibilities as there are folks that dream of managing a small woodlot.
In this part of the country, areas that were dominated by the State-corporate timber industry are filled with poverty. Young people work low paying jobs if they are lucky or leave to find work in other more urban areas. The welfare and unemployment rate is extremely high. Although this controlled timber production system has been in place for decades, towns and communities have little to show for it, other than scarred hillsides and muddy streams.
In fact, without State intervention on the welfare end of things, with programs such as unemployment, disability and food stamps, it is unlikely these communities would have ever survived under the current corporate system. This is a little realized aspect of the State welfare system; welfare enables corporatism. Without this welfare aide, many workers would need higher wages to subsist. Welfare allows the taxpayer to subsidize the monopoly industry by supplementing the workers paycheck and enabling him to continue working at below market wages. What the government supplies, the industry doesn't.
A true free market demands opportunity of access to land for all who wish and are capable of competing in the productive sector. With our incredibly bountiful land base, exclusion and appropriation to the privileged few was no simple task and necessitated many blatant socialistic land appropriations and acquisitions over more than a century and a half. It continues to this day. Reclaiming the right to sustain oneself in the woodlands and compete with others of like mind is no easy task, but neither is it impossible. It is important that this time we do it right.
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