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Liz Michael for United States Senate

A Burning Issue : A Case for Abolishing the U.S. Forest Service (The Political Economy Forum)
by Robert H. Nelson
University of Maryland professor, Robert H. Nelson, teaches a timely lesson about bureaucratic intransigence. Meanwhile, the "managed" forests keep burning out west.

Virtually Safe Cigarettes
by Giovanni Gorini, G.B. Gori

Cigarette smoking is risky. Yet, official epidemiologic evidence indicates that less risky cigarettes are both desirable and feasible. Indeed, during the '70s, the National Cancer Institute, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the US Department of Agriculture, and the cigarette industry cooperated in an intensive and promising program to develop less hazardous cigarettes.

That program was shut down in the late '70s by intervening abolitionist policies aiming at a smoke free America by the year 2000. Predictably, those policies have failed and by the end of the '90s the number of smokers in the US alone has stabilized around 50 million. Thus, countless preventable illnesses and deaths could be attributed to an abolitionist intransigence blind to the opportunities of less hazardous cigarettes.

The world could do well without tobacco, but over a billion people on the planet will continue to smoke for a long foreseeable future. Declaring cigarettes illegal would only succeed in creating an illegal black market with ugly consequences. In the US such realities have led virtually all States and the tobacco industry to negotiate settlements, with the open acknowledgement that smokers are here to stay.

The settlements guarantee a steady stream of hundreds of billions of dollars into federal, state, and local revenues, predicated on a continuing, thriving, and legal cigarette market. On ethical grounds, these new official arrangements could not avoid raising again the moral obligation to reconsider less hazardous cigarettes, and their once tragically rejected opportunities. A program in this direction could be funded with a negligible fraction of tobacco tax revenues, and could prevent millions of premature deaths even if only partially successful.

The Environment

What is the greatest contributing factor to pollution in the United States? Well, it's not nuclear power. It's not chemical companies. It's not big oil, or timber companies, or auto manufacturers, or even coal companies.

It's the government. At the federal, state, and local levels, government is the single greatest polluter in the United States. Governments are the greatest polluters in the world. By turning to government for environmental protection, we've placed the fox in charge of the hen house. Government polluters get away with murder because of sovereign immunity.

The government doesn't even clean up its own messes. In 1988, for example, the EPA demanded that the Departments of Energy and Defense clean up 17 of their weapons plants which were leaking radioactive and toxic chemicals -- enough contamination to cost $100 billion in clean-up costs over 50 years! The EPA was simply ignored. No bureaucrats went to jail or were sued for damages.

If I were President, I would make government as responsible for its actions as everyone else is expected to be, by stripping governments of their right to hide behind sovereign immunity, by executive order.

Restore Land Management to Private Ownership

Governments control over 40% of our country's land mass. The Clinton administration was the biggest government land grabber in American history. But the government's stewardship over our land is gradually destroying it. The Bureau of Land Management controls an area almost twice the size of Texas, including nearly all of Alaska and Nevada. Much of this land is rented to ranchers for grazing cattle. Because ranchers are only renting the land, they have no incentive to take care of it. Cattle were twice as likely to die on public ranges and had half as many calves as animals grazing on private lands.

Owners make better environmental guardians than renters. If the government sold its acreage to private ranchers, the new owners would make sure that they grazed the land sustainably to maximize profit and yield.

Preservation of Wildlife

Ownership of wildlife can literally save endangered species from extinction. Commercialization of the buffalo saved it from extinction. No privately managed animal becomes extinct, because their status as valuable "property" encourages their propagation.

If I were President, I would look at the list of endangered species, and see what manner of private concern best fits the preservation of that species, and see that land engaging that species is sold to the proper type of concern which would preserve it.

Here is an example from Africa. Between 1979 and 1989, Kenya banned elephant hunting, yet their number dropped from 65,000 to 19,000. Poachers had a field day, because of the primary economic interest in elephant hunting. In Zimbabwe, however, during the same time period, elephants could be legally owned and sold. The number of elephants increased from 30,000 to 43,000 as their owners became fiercely protective of their "property." Poachers were shot, and the elephant was protected. Here, ownership of the animal was clearly the best way of protecting it.

Environmentalists were once wary of private ownership, but now recognize that establishing the property rights of native people, for example, has become an effective strategy to save the rain forests. Similarly, our national forests are turned over to logging companies, just as the rain forests are. By 1985, the U.S. Forest Service had built 350,000 miles of logging roads with our tax dollars -- outstripping our interstate highway system by a factor of eight! In the meantime, hiking trails declined by 30%. Clearly, our government serves special interest groups instead of protecting our environmental heritage.

Even the national parks are not immune from abuse. Yellowstone's Park Service once encouraged employees to trap predators such as wolves, so that the hoofed mammals favored by visitors would flourish. Not surprisingly, the ecological balance was upset. The larger elk drove out the deer and sheep, trampled the riverbanks, and destroyed beaver habitat. Without the beavers, the water fowl, mink, otter, and trout were threatened. Without the trout or the shrubs and berries that once lined the riverbanks, grizzlies began to endanger park visitors in their search for food. As a result, park officials had to remove the bears and have started bringing back the wolves.

Wouldn't we be better served if naturalist organizations, such as the Audubon Society or Nature Conservancy, took over the management of our precious parks? The Audubon Society's Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary partially supports itself with natural gas wells operated in an ecologically sound manner. In addition to preserving the sensitive habitat, the Society shows how technology and ecology can co-exist peacefully and profitably.

The environment would benefit immensely from the elimination of sovereign immunity coupled with the privatization of "land and beast." The third step to save the environment is the use of restitution both as a deterrent and a restorative. Entities which pollute and ecologically devastate areas would be compelled to compensate the people in such a manner as their damage is corrected. And it would not matter whether the enitty was a corporation or a government. Their liability would be equal.

In 1984, a Utah court ruled that the U.S. military was negligent in its nuclear testing, causing serious health problems for the people exposed to radioactive fallout. The Court of Appeals dismissed the claims of the victims, because government employees have sovereign immunity. Hooker Chemical begged the Niagara Falls School Board not to excavate the land where Hooker had safely stored toxic chemical waste. The school board ignored these warnings and taxpayers had to foot a $30 million relocation bill when health problems arose. The EPA filed suit, not against the reckless school board, but against Hooker Chemical! Government officials have sovereign immunity.They should not, and this is a major loophole in current environmental law which must be closed.

Private Homesteaders Must Be Protected

The private homesteading of land in ecologically sensitive areas must be preserved. More than anyone else, the people most familiar with a land and its species is the people who have lived there. When an endangered species has been discovered, the homesteaders are not only the people best capble of preserving such species, but it must be made to be part of their financial interest to do so. Current law actually encourages the destruction of precious species to avert having to deal with a government thug and eminent domain encroachment upon the land.

Instead of having a confrontational posture with land owners, the environment is best served by a cooperative relationship, where guidance is offered through public and private sources, but where the final decision is the homesteaders. People usually care deeply about land they own. They have usually worked hard to gain that land, and do not want to see either the natural beauty of it, or the net worth of it, destroyed. They are its best, most competent, and most sympathetic stewards