Forest Service caught submitting false visitor numbers

by James M. Taylor

At the same time the lynx and grizzly bear scandals were being uncovered, the U.S. Forest Service was forced to admit still another instance of providing false information.

The Forest Service is charged with keeping track of the number of annual visitors to national forests. When the number of visitors is large, the Forest Service and environmental activist groups cite this as evidence the federal government should take more land from the private domain to add to national forests. The argument goes that high visitor numbers indicate a public approval and public demand for far-reaching preservation programs.

High visitor numbers are also offered as a justification for large increases in the Forest Service's annual budget.

The Forest Service was recently forced to admit it has drastically misled Congress and the general public about the number of visitors to national forests. The Forest Service reported 920 million visitors in the year 2000, while the actual number was, at most, 209 million.

The Forest Service argues that, in a dyslexic-like mishap, the numbers must have been inadvertently shuffled. However, observers questioned how the Forest Service--which had access to the true numbers all along--would not have noticed such a huge discrepancy in its numbers before submitting them to Congress.

"More likely," noted Sean Paige of Insight magazine, "the USFS purposefully padded the figure to advance an agenda that under former chief Mike Dombeck meant a sharp shift away from its traditional multiple-use mandate and toward extreme preservationism. … That agenda could best be advanced if it appeared that Americans were flocking to national forests in unprecedented numbers."

"The previous administration used the large forest-visitor numbers as the justification for a dramatic shift in the management emphasis on the national forests," explained the American Forest Resource Council in a recent newsletter. "It was the same flawed data and projections that were used to justify dramatic reductions in timber-management programs and to claim that recreation jobs would replace forest-product jobs in our rural communities. Though timber cutting was sharply reduced under Dombeck, and other multiple uses were similarly curtailed, the promised recreation boom never materialized in forest-bordering communities."

In light of the recently uncovered lynx and grizzly bear scandals, in addition to evidence of false or skewed data being deliberately collected regarding other studies, the Forest Service's explanation that its false visitation numbers were submitted by mistake does not convince many Western observers.

"The feeling in the Clinton administration was that you could play fast and loose with the facts if you were doing good and important things, especially when you saw the president lying about minor and inconsequential things," summarized William Perry Pendley, president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation. "I'm sure they thought, 'Hey, we're saving the wolf and the lynx and endangered species, so the facts be damned.'"

http://www.heartland.org/environment/mar02/visitor.htm

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Crowdog
www.crowley-offroad.com

It's gonna take a long time for the essence of Bill Klinton to dissipate from various aspects of the government. Meanwhile, shit like this will happen time and time again.:mad:

BTW, any of you that aren't subscribed to the Heartland Institute's Environment and Climate News really oughta subscribe. I've been subscribed for the past several years, they send you a very nice print newspaper once a month, and best of all its FREE! A load of invaluable info, and lots of graphic stuff that the website doesn't have.

how do you subscribe?:usa:

Go to http://www.heartland.org and follow the links.

Forest Service Caught Fudging The Numbers
Daily Policy Digest

Environmental Issues / National Forests

Friday, March 01, 2002

At the same time as employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are coming under fire for manufacturing evidence that Canadian Lynxes and Grizzly Bears inhabited areas where they had not been previously thought to exist -- which would justify restrictions on land use in order to protect the two endangered species -- the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has been forced to admit that it falsified the number of annual visitors to the nation's national forests.

In recent years the USFS has argued that visitor numbers have risen dramatically, justifying the need for large increases in the forest service budget. Environmentalists, in turn, have argued that the increase in recreational forest users merits increasing the amount of forest service land. In addition, both environmentalists and forest service bureaucrats have cited the increased visitor numbers as evidence of the need to shift the management of national forests from multiple uses, including logging, to preservation for recreation. There is one minor problem with their arguments: the visitor numbers were false. For instance:


In 2001, the USFS reported that there were 920 million visitors to the nation's national forests.

Under close scrutiny by Congress and government watchdog groups, the USFS later had to admit that the number of actual visitors was, at most, 209 million.

The forest service claimed that this 700 million-visitor discrepancy was due to a simple mistaken transposition of numbers.

"More likely," noted Sean Paige of Insight magazine, "the USFS purposefully padded the figure to advance an agenda that under former Chief Mike Dombeck meant a sharp shift away from its traditional multiple-use mandate toward extreme preservation. That agenda could best be advanced if it appeared that Americans were flocking to national forests in unprecedented numbers."

Source: James M. Taylor, "Forest Service caught submitting false visitor numbers," Environment and Climate News, March 2002, Heartland Institute. L 60603