SOS Forests

Private Woodlands and the Statist JOF

by Travis Cork III

Note: Travis Cork is a South Carolina consulting forester and the author of The Fictional Ecosystem and the Pseudo-science of Ecosystem Management, W.I.S.E. White Paper No. 2010-3 [here] and The Market Illiteracy Embodied in the Politically Correct Version of Sustainability, W.I.S.E. White Paper No. 2010-4 [here].

The September issue of the Journal of Forestry has three op-eds regarding what’s happening “In and Outside of America’s Private Woodlands.” One might think that at least one of the op-eds would have an opinion from a private perspective, but all three are written from the statist perspective. The response by Fischer and Ruseva builds on the statist perspective of Messrs. Coufal, Wiedemann, and Greason.

The question is should the NIPF [non-industrial private forest landowner] be left to manage (or mismanage) his forest as he chooses, or should the state force its management choices on him.

Fischer, et al. write:

[The] ramification of “unregulated” timber harvesting as an ecologically harmful practice become even more salient once viewed through the prism of ecosystem services. As Coufal and colleagues acknowledge, “high-grading impacts all values of the forest.”

A legally-defined and enforceable framework of property and use rights that recognizes the public goods and CPR [common-pool resources] characteristics of forests can have important implications for the existing incentives to harvest. If WE [emphasis added] believe that private forests provide important ecosystem services enjoyed by society, then the need for [public] forester involvement in timber harvesting becomes a pertinent question.

It is discouraging and embarrassing to see the level of detachment from reality in the natural resource community. This community has taken a page out of Keynesian economics and sees the natural world in terms of simplistic aggregates, i.e., watersheds, ecosystems, biomes, etc. That the individual, whether it be man, animal, insect, plant, microbe, or any other form of living thing, is the basic unit of life is a fact that many in the natural resource community,especially in academia and bureaucracy, ferociously refuse to acknowledge.

The ecosystem concept is worse than a detachment from the reality of the natural world. It is a destructive device to justify the control-predictably by supposedly enlightened, superior humans-of inferior humans in their interactions with other individual organisms.

Ecosystems are said to provide services. I wonder, if I call the Little Pee Dee River watershed ecosystem in coastal South Carolina and order 100 gallons of water, how will the ecosystem deliver my water? If I call the upland pine-hardwood ecosystem that I live in and ask to have my garden pollinated, will the ecosystem send bees or butterflies? (Of course, I am illustrating absurdity by being absurd.)

“Services,” as with integrity, is another corrupting of our language. Historically, the word “services” requires action. With man, the action is purposeful. With other living organisms, the action is an instinctive response. The ecosystem, however defined, is not capable of action, purposeful or otherwise. There are no ecosystem services except as a figment in the ecocentric mind.

The detachment continues. Fischer, et al. tells us that

[f]orests are complex socioecological systems providing a range of ecosystem goods and services, and subject to different property rights regimes. Some features of forests are common-pool resources (CPR) (e.g., hunting, habitats for wild plants and animals), and others have public goods characteristics (e.g., water purification, pollination, carbon sequestration, aesthetics).

Fischer, et al. do not explain why ecosystem services are public goods. But as their intent is to justify more state control over NIPF activities, it is not unreasonable to conclude that they are throwing spitballs to see what sticks.

Randall Holcombe writes:

[A] public good, as defined by economic theory, is a good that, once produced, can be consumed by an additional consumer at no additional cost. A second characteristic is sometimes added, specifying that consumers cannot be excluded from consuming the public good once it has been produced. Goods with these characteristics will be underproduced in the private sector, or may not be produced at all, following the conventional wisdom, so economic efficiency requires that the government force people to contribute to the production of public goods, and then allow all citizens to consume them.

Simple observation of the real world suggest two problems with the application of public goods theory as a justification for government production. First, many public goods are successfully produced in the private sector, so government production is not necessary. Second, many of the goods government actually does produce do not correspond to the economist’s definition of public goods, so the theory does a poor job of explaining the government’s actual role in the economy. [1] …

The name public goods suggests public-sector production, and Samuelson [Paul A.] argued the merits of public-sector production when he first formalized the theory of public goods. Samuelson argued that there is no good revealed-preference mechanism for public goods, so they will not be produced efficiently, if at all, in the private sector. Public-sector production is thus required for efficiency. [2]

This should immediately raise the question; what have individuals in government ever done efficiently? Secondly, if individuals in a market setting using market-based prices cannot determine revealed preferences, how can individuals in government with no prices or profit-loss feedback do better? The obvious answer is that they cannot.

Yet another obvious problem with producing public goods through tax-financed public-sector production is that the tax system imposes an excess burden on the economy. The excess burden of taxation includes those costs of the tax system over an above the revenues collected, such as the disincentives caused by taxes, and the administrative and compliance costs that the tax system produces. Thus, at the very least, the inefficiencies of private-sector production would have to be weighed against the inefficiencies produced from using the tax system to raise revenue…” [3]

There can be no doubt that Fischer, et al. want individuals backed by the state’s monopoly of legalized violence to coerce the NIPF to manage forests as Fischer, et al. want. Why?

Because they cannot get the NIPF to do what they want with voluntary mechanisms:

Thus, one of the most attractive features of the public goods argument is the minimal nature of the normative assumptions it must make in order to ground a justification of the state. The public goods argument seems to presume only the legitimacy of helping people do what they want to do but cannot do without the state’s help.” [4]

I’m from the government. I’m here to help you.

F. A. Hayek in his great Nobel Prize lecture, “The Pretense of Knowledge,” reproaches
the destructive ignorance of Fischer, et al. and his ilk.

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of any organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants…

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society-a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him a destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

The pretense of knowledge. Sadly that is about all that we see in the pages of the Journal of Forestry.

1. Holcombe, Randall G., “A Theory of the Theory of Public Goods,” Review of Austrian Economics,
10, no. 1 (1997), p. 1.
2. Ibid., p. 4.
3. Ibid., p. 6.
4. Garrett, Dan, “Public Goods and the Justification for the State,” Humane Studies Review, Vol. 7, Number 2, Spring 1992, p. 2.