National forest land sale proposed in US

The Bush administration has asked the US Forest Service to evaluate more than 300,000 acres of national forest land around the country–including 9,828 acres in North Carolina–with an eye toward selling as much as 200,000 acres. Maps showing exactly which parcels are being considered were made public on Feb. 28, starting a 30-day public comment period on the sale. The sale of public lands is part of the Bush administration's Fiscal Year 2007 federal budget proposal, with proceeds from the sale to fund an extension and amendment of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000 (SRS). That law, which funds rural schools and roads, was a response to a decline in such funding resulting from a decline in national forest timber sales. (A percentage of the money from those sales has been earmarked for rural schools and roads.) Forest Service officials have estimated that the land-sale proposal would raise as much as $800 million over five years, a figure critics say is unrealistically high. Revenue from the sale is intended to offset, partially and temporarily, the administration's proposed phased reduction of SRS spending to zero over the next five years. The proposed land sale has been harshly criticized by both Democratic and Republican members of Congress and state and local officials as well as by environmental groups. Much of the criticism has focused on the apparent shortsightedness of selling publicly owned assets to provide temporary funding for an ongoing program that depends on those assets for future funding. Some critics, though, believe the proposal is actually intended to further a longer-range agenda. At first look, says Christopher Joyell, campaign coordinator for Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project, "the proposal appears to be shortsighted; however, it is anything but." After five years, Joyell notes, funding for rural schools and roads "would revert to the old revenue-sharing formula–rural counties would again receive 25 percent of federal timber receipts.... To meet the fiscal demands of the rural program [this way], the administration will have no choice but to return to logging on a scale not seen since the clearcutting era of the eighties." The parcels of land proposed for possible sale are not evenly distributed around the country. Nearly 80,000 of the proposed 300,000 acres are in California, for example, which has set off a storm of protest in that state. But the lands proposed for sale in California add up to only 0.38 percent of that state's total of nearly 25 million acres of national forest land. In North Carolina, 0.78 percent of national forest land in the state is being evaluated for sale–proportionately more than twice as much. In general, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center, greater proportions of the national forest lands in southeastern states have been proposed for sale than in western states. "For example," the center notes at its website, "both North Carolina, with a total of 1.25 million acres of national forest, and Oregon, with a total of 15.55 million acres, have about 10,000 acres proposed for sale." The relatively large amounts of land proposed for sale in southeastern states derive at least in part from the history of how national forest lands have been acquired. In the West, national forests were carved out of public domain lands a century ago, generally in large, contiguous blocks. In the East, where nearly all land was privately owned a century ago, the federal government has bought lands one tract at a time over many decades, making a sort of patchwork of publicly owned land within the "proclamation boundary" of each national forest. While the proclamation boundaries define large blocks of watershed, ridgeline and wildlife habitat, the amount and configuration of land that's actually publicly owned within those boundaries varies. "Ideally, all the private land within the proclamation boundary would be acquired over time to create a solid block of publicly owned and managed forest land," according to Rupert Cutler, assistant secretary of agriculture for conservation, research and education during the Carter administration. "Of course this target was never met.... While some tracts when combined provided large, easily managed tracts, other pieces remained isolated, awaiting the day when the federal land acquisition program would be fired up again." In selecting national forest lands to be considered for the proposed sale, the Forest Service has targeted parcels that "are isolated from other contiguous National Forest System lands, and... are not efficient to manage as a component of the National Forest System," the Federal Register notice of the proposed land sale states. Such isolated parcels of national forest are far more common in the East than in the West. Selling these parcels marks a shift in public policy away from the historical intention that "the land between the large chunks of public land and these small, isolated tracts would be acquired and the little pieces would become part of the big tracts," Cutler notes. "The Bush administration is taking the opposite tack, proposing to sell off the outliers of public forest and permanently shrink the future size of national forests." Comments on the proposed sale may be emailed to SRS_Land_Sales@fs.fed.us. The public comment period ends on Mar. 30, after which the Forest Service will consider which parcels to recommend for sale. Congress will then decide whether to authorize the sales in conjunction with amending and extending SRS.