Seeking Steward for Our Treasures

The weakness in our drive to get the federal government to be our environmental protector has become obvious: possible hostile takeover every four years.

We should have seen it coming. Ronald Reagan and George Bush made logging America's most heavily subsidized industry, spending billions of tax dollars to clear-cut old-growth forests. By the mid-'80s, there were eight times more miles of logging roads -- built at your expense -- than miles of interstate highway. Severe erosion from these logging roads destroyed trout and salmon streams. More than a third of the hiking trails in our national forests disappeared over the preceding 40 years, despite increased demand.

The federal government isn't the environmental steward that International Paper is. On its own land, IP gets 25 percent of its income from recreational use, pays for its own logging roads and replants to sustain its investment.

This is only one of many stories in "The Tragedy of the Commons." Where public land is involved, neither government nor private industry plan past the next election. The story of federal land is one of strip-mining, clear-cutting, overgrazing, fires, fraud, greed and waste. Federal land is far more often plundered in sacrifice than blessed by sustainable development.

Bill Clinton is regarded as an environmental president, because in his last weeks, he tried to do great things -- create national monuments, limit hard rock mining on public lands and protect nearly one-third of national forests from roads.

But opponents have put these changes on the endangered-species list. Complaints, both legitimate (forest fires) and less legitimate (economic pain for subsidy-dependent companies), have instigated lawsuits, congressional legislation and re-regulation by executive branch appointees.

Incoming Interior Secretary Gale Norton is eager to sacrifice the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. That oil will be at least six times more expensive to produce than oil from Saudi Arabia. Even if corporate welfare makes production feasible, ANWR won't produce enough oil to lessen the international cartel's market power or our dependence on foreign reserves.

Instead of imploring to make the ANWR a national monument, we should have asked that it be sold cheaply to a good steward.

"The mission of The Nature Conservancy is to preserve the plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive," according to the conservancy's Web site. Because even the most eco-friendly politician isn't so direct, who could better steward such land than The Nature Conservancy?

In October, the conservancy bought Camp Creek Ranch in Oregon, which contains 20 percent of the fast-disappearing Zumwalt prairie. They convinced some Internet millionaires that this habitat, one of the nation's densest concentrations of nesting birds of prey, merited protection. Now they own it and have a conservation easement on it that will protect it even from government seizure through eminent domain.

Tim Toben, a local entrepreneur, protected Pickard's Mountain right here in Orange County. One of our prime wildlife habitats is now protected with a conservation easement overseen by the Conservation Trust for North Carolina. It neighbors another major easement, Maple View Farms, protected by Bob Nutter in 1995. These forms of real protection are popping up everywhere -- since 1995, the Triangle Land Conservancy alone brokered at least five such easements.

The benefits of easements are exactly why developers call them "property suicide." Such lands can't ever be "improved" with a mall or strip mine, though the occasional hiking trail is OK. Property values fall, easing the owners' tax burden.

But they have a downside: Many easements become owned by government, and based on The Boston Globe's astonishing recent series on federal land stewardship, our government is not a good steward.

Some of the most contaminated spots on earth are U.S. property. Federal agencies have fouled more than 60,000 sites across the country. The cost of cleaning up the worst, well over $300 billion, is more than five times all destruction caused by all private companies combined.

Most federal agencies are effectively exempt from environmental laws. Where they're not, the same person is in charge of both prosecuting and defending the polluting agencies. Nearly every government agency in every region of the country is guilty.

Even the Environmental Protection Agency has tried to fine itself.

The National Park Service makes the most of its exemption from enforcement of the Clean Water Act, pumping Yellowstone waterways full of pollutants.

The environmental movement's faith in the federal government is misplaced. The Libertarian Party would protect the environment by getting as much land as possible away from the feds so the politicians can't wreak their havoc. Less sensitive areas should be sold to those who will use and steward them. Sometimes these private interests will misuse their land, but at least then they -- and not the taxpayers -- will be stuck with the consequences. International Paper shows the incentives to steward private land are powerful. Sensitive land, like the ANWR, should be sold to organizations like The Nature Conservancy who have the mandate and the mission to protect them. They aren't subject to hostile takeover every four years.

Russ Helms, a tree-hugger with the

pictures to prove it, is a biostatistics doctoral candidate from Chapel Hill. E-mail him at rhelms@bios.unc.edu.