The Forest And The Trees
Rethinking prosperity and preservation in the American West
In the summer of 1886, writer and preservationist John Muir spent a few weeks traveling the western United States with a federal forestry commission. Among the commission’s members was a young forester named Gifford Pinchot. As related by Roderick Frazier Nash in Wilderness and the American Mind, Muir and Pinchot would go walking through the evergreen forests, bonding over a shared love of nature. Muir had devoted his life to trekking through, writing about, and advocating for America’s wildlands, while a passion for “the woods and everything about them” had led Pinchot to a career in forestry.
But the two differed fundamentally in their view of land management. Muir, whose writings emphasized the spirituality of raw nature, believed in keeping wild country pristine. Pinchot, meanwhile, had studied forestry in Europe and would go on to head the newly created U.S. Forest Service under Theodore Roosevelt. He adhered to the “wise use” school of conservation — managing forest reserves for sustainable but economically useful ends, including timber production and mining.
At first, they were united in their opposition to the wholesale clear-cutting of the remaining American forests. But, as Nash writes, “[T]heir common interests had different limits. For all his love of the woods, Pinchot’s ultimate loyalty was to civilization and forestry; Muir’s to wilderness and preservation.”
Rep. Ryan Zinke, Trump’s pick for Interior Secretary, invoked this history while testifying at his Senate confirmation hearing this January. Some lands, he said, are “better managed under the John Muir model” of restricted-use wilderness; others — the “preponderance” — should fall under the “Pinchot model” of sustainable multiple use, encompassing both recreation and extraction.
I’m a bit uncomfortable telling people who graze cattle or maintain pipelines how they should or shouldn’t feel. But as a matter of policy discussion, the either/or framework is oversimplified and anachronistic, and ignores the compelling economic rationale for preserving public lands.
The Interior Secretary oversees a large portion of the more than 350 million acres the federal government owns and manages, for various uses, across the contiguous West. Some would like to see that number greatly reduced. Zinke’s nomination comes against the backdrop of an effort — led by conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council and Republican lawmakers like Utah Rep. Rob Bishop — to transfer many of those public lands from federal to state ownership.
Proponents emphasize local control and the economic prosperity they say it will bring, while opponents see “land transfer” as a step toward expanded energy exploration and a sell-off of public lands. Similar sentiments have attached themselves to the creation of permanently protected national monuments — most recently, Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah — by Presidential proclamation.
Even assuming a good-faith effort by states to properly manage, conserve, and preserve public access to formerly federal lands, the economic math would make it hard to do so. Zinke, a hunter and angler, stated his unequivocal opposition to selling off federal lands during his confirmation hearing, but supports greater local and state involvement in those lands’ management and fewer restrictions on energy development — which could amount to nearly the same thing.
In the well-worn “economy v. environment,” “people v. nature,” “jobs v. endangered spotted owls” framework, that has a certain kind of logic. If millions of acres are just sitting there, unexploited — and hundreds of folks in the area are sitting around, unemployed — who are environmentalists/the Feds/yuppie hikers in Portland to tell them what they can and can’t do on that land?
Deeply felt frustrations fuel that narrative, and as a yuppie hiker myself, I’m a bit uncomfortable telling people who graze cattle or maintain pipelines how they should or shouldn’t feel. But as a matter of policy discussion, the either/or framework is oversimplified and anachronistic, and ignores the compelling economic rationale for preserving public lands.
Muir and Pinchot had their disagreements about forestry in the context of a very different U.S. economy. In 1900, agriculture accounted for around 40 percent of American employment and mining another two to three percent, according to estimates based on Census data. Add in construction and manufacturing, and the extract-stuff-from-the-ground-and-make-it-into-something sector provided around 70 percent of the country’s jobs.
Today, the link between employment and intensive use of the earth is weaker than it was 115 years ago. In 2014, those same industries employed less than 15 percent of the workforce, with just 0.6 percent in mining and oil and gas. The basic trajectory holds across the resource-rich Western states, including in rural areas, where the non-service sector provides around 19 percent of jobs, on average.
At the same time, landscapes as landscapes have more economic value than ever before. Part of this has to do with the outdoor-recreation industry. Contemporaries of Muir and Pinchot were still decades away from the advances in gear and transportation that later allowed outdoor recreation to grow into a mass-market phenomenon; in 2012, a study from the outdoor industry’s trade association estimated that American consumers spend $120.7 billion on outdoor gear and services, and another $524.8 billion on tourism and travel expenses during outdoor-related trips.
But the effect extends beyond raft guides and ski instructors and clerks in tchotchke shops. Building on previous research, a 2012 Headwaters Economics study of non-metro counties in the contiguous West found that a higher acreage of protected federal land — wilderness areas, national monuments, national parks, national conservation areas, and the like — was correlated with better economic performance. Calling Western public lands a “competitive advantage,” the researchers cited the importance of quality-of-life factors like scenic and recreational amenities in attracting businesses, skilled employees, and well-off retirees.
Of course, every place is unique. Some communities depend more heavily on mining or oil-and-gas jobs, and many small, geographically remote, economically struggling towns may lack the transportation infrastructure, internet connectivity, or educated workforce necessary to attract knowledge-based businesses, scenic amenities notwithstanding.
Nonetheless, logging, mining, and drilling are not the only paths to prosperity in the rural West. Nor are they even the most promising in the long-term. In a society in which scenic value has economic value, following Pinchot’s paradigm may in fact lead right to Muir’s ideal.
Paul Cuno-Booth writes about land, recreation, and other sundry topics. He’s based in Colorado.
