How Private Ownership
Saved the Southern Forest
By Charles E. Tomlinson
Reprinted with permission.
Copyright © 2004 by Charles E. Tomlinson.
All rights reserved.
I have been
distracted for the last few years by other matters, and have just
recently returned to my world of natural resource management, to
discover that the major happening in at least the last two decades, has
slipped by without notice.
Remember the nineties? The radical environmental movement
screaming that the world as we knew it, was destined to doom because of
the nasty chip mills, the clear cut destruction of the forests, the
pollution of our waters caused by cutting trees, and all of the other
"chicken little" mantras?
Near the end of that decade, a study was begun in order to find out
just how badly the southern forests really were damaged. Not an
industry study, "tainted" by profit motive, but an honest-to-goodness
government study, pure in heart, uninfluenced by anything but a search
for truth.
The USDA Forest Service took the lead in this study, and enlisted
help from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. For over two
years, more than 25 scientists and analysts worked on this study.
More than 100 scientists from universities, state and federal
agencies, industry, and conservation organizations provided peer
reviews to enhance the accuracy and completeness of this report.
Finally, in late 2001, the report was made public, and was received
with huge waves of apathy.
Why? The report was of no use to the radical environmental
community because, with painstaking research and documented facts, it
destroyed every assertion they had made concerning the forests of the
south. It gave the lie to their "chicken little" scenarios,
and was impregnable to their attack, because of the unimpeachable
integrity of those who had created the study. So the radical
environmental community just acted as if it had never happened.
But what of the natural resource managers, landowners, and true
environmentalists? Are we so cowed by the beating that we have been
getting from the fringe, that we recognize good things only by some
lessening of the pain we endure? Don't we know vindication when
we see it?
The Southern Forest Resource Assessment documents one of the
greatest natural resource management triumphs in the history of man.
From the stump landscapes of the early 1900s, the southern
forests have recovered to become one of the wood baskets of the world.
Vibrant, never static, quickly responding to changing conditions, the
southern forests meet the needs of today and are poised to embrace
tomorrow.
The Resource Assessment does not cover the why of this marvelous
transformation, but I will tell you why. It is because the southern
forests are privately owned. The essential difference between the
southern forests and the burning, stagnant forests of the west and
looted forests of foreign lands, is that of private ownership. Each
landowner managing his own lands (and doing it very well, as the
Assessment shows) for his own perceived self-interest.
Maybe we do not respond to this study because we are used to having
things presented to us in sound bites by talking heads. Perhaps we
have forgotten that there is work attached to a study, and work
attached to understanding a study.
Let's do the work.
First, The Southern Forest Resource Assessment is a government
study. This means that those who researched and wrote it have no
incentive to paint rosy pictures. The future of government foresters,
in fact of all government employees, lies in finding areas of concern
and alarm that will justify their continued employment. If you work
for the government, failure is necessary in order to get the money to
continue your life's work.
Successful government programs are killed, because there is no need
to spend money if the problem is solved. Witness the "man on the
moon" program for the U.S. Government. In government, success means
cuts in funding, failure means increased funding. What this suggests
is that we should not expect The Southern Forest Resource Assessment
to loudly proclaim the success of forest resource management in the
South over the last 100 years, but should look for it to outline areas
of concern and alarm for the future. This it does, very thoroughly.
Next, we should examine the documentation in the Assessment, and
draw conclusions about what are now the southern forests, in light of
information about what they used to be. Here is where the good news
lies.
We discover that the area of the southern forests has remained
surprisingly stable since the early 1900s. We are not paving
over our forests.
We see that our forests are growing more wood than we are removing
from them. In the past fifty years, we have increased the balance in
our forest savings account by over 73 percent. The interest on this
account (growth) should mean that, even with increased harvest, we
will still be adding to our balance in the future. Rather than
running out of trees, we are growing more than we can use.
In addition, we are learning ways to make our forests more
productive. We can grow twice as much timber on our land - if the
markets tell us to do so.
We see that the South now produces more timber than any other
single nation in the world.
The present forests of the south are now the major wood producing
area of the world. Contrasted to the forests of my youth and earlier,
the change is phenomenal, a real, concrete example of successful
natural resource management.
Now we should look at the Assessment to determine just what the
areas of concern and alarm in this report actually are, and make
judgments about just how alarmed and concerned we should be. The most
interesting thing I found, was that none of the radical environmental
"chicken little" scenarios even made it to the concern and
alarm stage of the report. Chip mills, clear cutting, harvesting
trees, did not even make the first cut of activities to be alarmed and
concerned about. No surprise to those of us in the natural resource
management business, but, I am sure, a major disappointment to those
who make up ELF (Earth Liberation Front) and their ilk.
The Southern Forest Resource Assessment goes on to find many areas
of concern and alarm in the southern forests, critters facing
extinction, changes in land use, disease and insect infestations,
fragmentation of forest areas, increasing recreational and other uses
of forest lands, the list goes on and on. Remember, they had almost
three years to discover these areas of concern and alarm, and no one
accuses them of being lazy. But the big area of alarm and concern was
determined to be the increasing use of forest for urban expansion. In
fact, the Assessment says that urbanization poses the single largest
and most permanent threat to the sustainability of the southern
forests. Let's work on this a little.
The Assessment predicts (based on a forecasting model) that a total
of 31,000,000 forested acres will be gobbled up by cities over
forty-eight years; ignoring the fact that all forecasts of natural
resources more than five years into the future have one common
failing - they are wrong. Let's look at these numbers a little
closer. The Assessment shows that the southern forests contain a
total of 214,000,000 acres, so our 31,000,000 acres lost to
urbanization represents 14.48 percent of the total. But this loss is
spread over forty-eight years, so the annual loss of forest area to
urbanization is only 0.3 percent.
But, there is more. At the same time that the nasty cities are
eating our forests, open farmland is being planted to trees, or allowed
to revert to forest at a forecasted rate that will increase the forest
land 25,000,000 acres in this same forty-eight year period. Ignoring
again the fallacy of paying attention to forty-eight year forecasts,
this means that the forest recaptures 25,000,000 of the 31,000,000
acres that it lost to urbanization during the same time period. This
represents a net loss of 2.8 percent of our forest lands or, over the
forty-eight year period, an annual loss of 0.06 percent of our forest
lands. Not a number that strikes terror in this old heart, especially
since it is, by the nature of its computation, wrong.
I do not wish to intimate that there are no areas of concern or
alarm in our southern forests. I think that the Southern Forest
Resource Assessment does an admirable job of identifying these areas.
But, I would assert that the solutions to these concerns and alarms lie
in the realm of encouraging the folks who created our marvelous
southern forests, the private landowners, to be aware of, and perhaps
to address these concerns. This means letting the markets make it
worth their while to do so.
The traditional approach to concerns and alarms has been to pass
laws and restrictions to private action. This always results in
bureaucracy, waste, stagnation, and eventual destruction of the
resource in question. Case in point - the National Forests of the
western United States
The correct response to areas of concern and alarm in our southern
forests is to keep government out of the way, and allow the landowners
to deal with the opportunities, and respond to the markets that areas
of concern and alarm usually obscure.
I recognize that privately owned forests represent chaos in the
minds of those who wish to find certainty in this uncertain world.
There is no telling what is going to happen next! You can look back
at the past and make projections and estimates. You can build models
to forecast the future, and point to the results with concern and
alarm, but you cannot predict what private owners operating in free
markets are going to do.
We all like things to be neat and tidy, so our response to chaos is
usually to try to fix it - to bring order to the chaos. But it
has been discovered, for example, that the beating of our heart is a
chaotic system, and does not respond well to efforts to make it neat
and tidy. It seems that systems that need to be agile and efficient
(in case one encounters a saber tooth tiger) must be unstable and
chaotic. I suggest that the heart beat of our economic system is
similar, and fixing it, making it neat and tidy, is not the best way to
make it work.
We should learn to accept and embrace this lack of order and
tidiness, as the price we pay for a system that is responsive and
efficient. History, and The Southern Forest Resource Assessment, has
shown that just because our southern forests are not predictable, does
not mean that they do not work. From the chaos of private ownership
has come the brilliant success of the southern forests during the last
one hundred years. Keeping government regulation and control out of
our private forests is the key to providing the future forests that we,
and our descendants want, the nation needs, and the world can use as
the shining example of how natural resources should be managed.
Charles E. Tomlinson has spent the last
forty-seven years as a forest manager and consultant. His clients
have been mostly private landowners, but he has also provided services
to corporations, trusts, and governments. Mr. Tomlinson is author of
a warm, compelling personal statement of his views on man's
relationship to nature, "A View From My Stump." He can be contacted at cet@hiwaay.net
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