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Outside Magazine, March 2005

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As a Matter of Fact, Money Does Grow on Trees (cont.)

ZERO-SUM GAMES

If the numbers are so obvious to economists like Rasker and Loomis, why aren't they driving land-management policy in the West? That's simple: politics. The Bush administration simply doesn't acknowledge that these ideas have much value, and environmentalists have not done a good job of convincing policymakers otherwise.

For that matter, even the Clinton administration seemed reluctant to go too far with wilderness economics. A funny thing happened when Clinton's final roadless rule was published in the Federal Register, on January 12, 2001, eight days before Bush took office. The rule's cost-benefit analysis, in which the Forest Service laid out its economic justification, describes nearly all the economic advantages mentioned by Loomis and Richardson's study. But remember their grand tally of $1.88 billion to $2.38 billion? That was left out.

There were, however, numbers attached to what the rule would cost: the 730 timber jobs and the $184 million in lost income. Though the numbers Loomis and Richardson came up with were accepted by economists, they were still considered too theoretical in the legal and political worlds.

"We wanted to identify the positive benefits of the rule," says Chris Wood, a Trout Unlimited conservation expert who, in 2000, helped write the roadless rule as an adviser to Mike Dombeck, Clinton's Forest Service chief. "But there just wasn't broad unanimity about how to do that kind of economic analysis. Rather than risk having the rule struck down on a technicality, we qualitatively described the benefits without putting a hard number on them."

The Bush administration wasted no time using the missing numbers against the rule. A few months after Bush suspended it, the White House budget office declared it economically inefficient and targeted it for elimination. The office listed its costs at $184 million in timber-related income, the benefit at a mere $219,000—the savings realized by not having to maintain new roads. All other values, from recreation to water quality, were ignored.

To get a sense of how these numbers sat with the Bush administration, I spoke with Mark Rey, Bush's point man on the roadless rule. A former timber lobbyist, Rey oversees the Forest Service as the Department of Agriculture's undersecretary for natural resources and environment. In a phone interview, he made it clear that he's aware of the economic studies conducted by people like Loomis. But he said, in effect, that some numbers are stronger than others.

"Recreation benefits are pretty well established in terms of methodology," he said. "As you move out to passive values, those are more theoretical."

The question wilderness economists don't address, said Rey, is the extent to which the championing of one benefit reduces or eliminates others. "In the case of the roadless rule, if you're going to restrict particular uses from certain areas"—that is, eliminate logging in roadless areas— "you clearly are diminishing that particular economic benefit. But the converse is not always the case."

In other words, allowing a timber harvest on certain portions of a national forest doesn't entirely eliminate its recreation value or all of its ecosystem services.

"The dialogue we need to have is whether all those uses of our national forests are compatible with one another, not whether recreation is two or three times the value of timber receipts or whether oil and gas are two to three times recreation receipts," said Rey. "If we get into that debate, then we're probably going to end up making a compelling case for a lot more drilling in the national forests. And that's not the case we want to make."

Did Rey mean these new valuations are helpful tools but shouldn't be considered in a winner-take-all kind of way?

"If it becomes a winner-take-all proposition," Rey said, choosing his words carefully, "I think recreation users will regret the day it was framed that way."

Rey has a point: Both resource extraction and wilderness economics bring impressive numbers to the table (oil on BLM land and Indian reservations, for example, generated roughly $4.6 billion in 2003), and wilderness economics shouldn't be used as an argument to block extraction altogether. The problem is, Rey's actions—and the actions of other Bush officials—belie the professed interest in balanced use. The Bush administration is managing America's wild spaces as a moneymaker for a few politically favored industries—timber, mining, oil, and gas—opening protected lands helter-skelter without considering an increasingly important set of numbers.

The new paradigm, however, is making some progress on Capitol Hill. In Congress, the economic argument is being used by a group called the Green Scissors Caucus to bring together environmentalists and conservatives to eliminate wasteful, environmentally harmful government programs. "So many false arguments are made about how environmental protection is pitted against jobs," says Representative Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon who cofounded the caucus in 2003. "The fact is, we pay a lot of money for programs that diminish our environment and our quality of life."

Passing environmentally friendly legislation during the Bush era is "a tough slog," Blumenauer says, but attacking the issue from a government-waste angle is proving fruitful. The Green Scissors initiative has "cut more than $26 billion so far," says Ohio Republican and caucus cofounder Representative Steve Chabot, including a wetland-killing highway in Virginia and a seashore-eroding jetty in North Carolina. The caucus has inspired a conservative like Chabot, a low scorer on the League of Conservation Voters' environmental scorecard, to speak out against the Forest Service's waste of taxpayer money to build logging roads for the timber industry.

"Economics shouldn't be separated from environmental protection, yet that's what we've traditionally done," says Blumenauer. "There's a cost attached to air pollution, and it's paid by people who breathe and recreate. The biggest challenge now is finding a way to properly value those environmental elements."

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