I’m taking off for until Monday, but will still be approving comments. On Monday, we’ll have something exciting, the lovely and talented Martin Nie (co-founder of The Smokey Wire’s predecessor A New Century of Forest Planning) will return after 15 or so years for a special treat/post entitled “On Divesting, Transferring, Privatizing Public Lands: It’s Not Fearmongering.” So I’ll see you back here then, and for those celebrating this weekend (Passover ends, and this year that Orthodox and other Christians celebrate Easter on the same day):
Wishing you a joyful and meaningful Passover,
Wishing you peace, joy, and renewed faith this Pascha,
Happy Easter!
******************
If you weren’t here in 2023, you might enjoy my previous post on arguments “for the sake of heaven” and the schools of Hillel and Shammai.
And this still reminds me a bit of TSW discussions.
Mordcha: Why should I break my head about the outside world? Let them break their own heads.
Tevye: He’s right. As the Good Book says, “If you spit in the air, it lands in your face.”
Perchik: That’s nonsense. You can’t close your eyes to what’s happening in the world.
Tevye: He’s right.
Avram: He’s right and he’s right? How can they both be right?
Tevye: You know, you’re also right.
Blessed and Happy Easter
From 15 years or so ago, perhaps the following dichotomy by Robert Nelson on his take of federal lands might be of interest to some of the TSW participants.
https://www.hoover.org/research/our-languishing-public-lands
“After this 19th-century “era of disposal,” the federal government shifted to a policy of retention of the lands in federal ownership around the beginning of the 20th century. It was a reflection of basic new political and economic ideas emerging in the United States during the progressive era. The progressive “gospel of efficiency” preached that scientific management could better serve the nation’s needs than the chaotic, trial-and-error processes of the free market….The result was the establishment of the Bureau of Reclamation in 1902, the first federal wildlife refuge in 1903, the U.S. Forest Service in >1905, and the National Park Service in 1916. Democratic socialists advocated similar policies in Europe at the same time, if with less deference given to the need for ultimate democratic control.”…
“In the 1990s the Forest Service abandoned its historic goal to maximize the “multiple-use” value of the national forests — as sustainable over the long run. Instead of the historic practice of “multiple use and sustained yield management,” the new guiding principle of the Forest Service became “ecosystem management.” As the federal Interagency Ecosystem Management Task Force explained the new thinking in 1995, it meant that “as a matter of policy, the federal government should provide leadership in and cooperate with activities that foster the ecosystem approach to natural resources management, regulation and assistance.” The new goal of the federal government should be “to restore and sustain the health, productivity, and biological diversity of ecosystems,” including prominently those found on the public lands.
“Thus, rather than traditional economic and utilitarian purposes based on advancing a host of specific uses, the national forests should be managed by the Forests Service for wider ecological objectives. The national forests, according to the new official doctrine, should reach a “sustainable” or “healthy” natural ecological state. National forest and other ecologies, as environmentalists increasingly argued, had an “intrinsic worth” that transcended any traditional economic calculations. An ecology was valuable for its own sake, not because it advanced the economic interests of the nation.”
Anyway, present day – the “intrinsic” value as far as conservation easement(s) (not easement(s) across properties) and public/private use(s) is currently being played out in discussions of defining those values during Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board per FEB 1, 2022 Memorandum – Intangible Asset Working Definition and reiterated under revisions per a NOV 20, 2024, Intangible Assets Memorandum which appears to support GAO’s utilization of de-recognizing federal owned lands and subcategorizing those federal owned lands into 3 divisions, each titled with one predominate use for annual auditing purposes. This includes “multiple uses” lands.
The Trump administration, nor DOGE has addressed this as yet other than to revoke OMB’s Circular A-4 of NOV 4, 2023 and reinstitute the SEP 17, 2003 version “Regulatory Analysis” as a starting point for future changes (personal opinion).
Cheers
I’ve never seen a conflict at all. We’ve just more recently defined what “sustained yield” means using newer better science, more specifically what “impairment of the productivity of the land” means.