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Professor Richard Knight is well known for seeing problems and then trying to find compromise solutions. His soft-centered approach generally makes matters worse, or so I would suggest. In predictable fashion, Knight's new Op-Ed about volunteerism correctly identifies pressing real problems and then offers solutions that will, unquestionably, make matters even worse.
Where Knight goes wrong this time, is in ignoring (or perhaps not knowing) that 25 years ago volunteerism was targeted by those who now rule America as the very FIRST STEP that had to be implemented in order to ultimately bring about the very outcomes Knight so desperately hopes to avoid.
Pasted here is a short passage from "Parks, Property Rights, and the Possibilities of the Private Law" by James P. Beckwith, Jr., published by the Cato Institute in 1981. It is one of many such papers in which the individual steps of the privatization agenda are laid out for all to read, follow, ignore or avoid as they wish. It is, for those who care about parks or other public lands, one of the most important papers ever written.
[The organizing principle of this paper is one of ascending radicalism: from reform through volunteerism and privatization of services to the outright abolition of public ownership and the transfer of the parks to private parties. The transition to a freer legal order is not costless, however, and a prescription for change must be tempered with a sensitivity to the capacity for change of the existing legal order.]
With this in mind, I hope you'll read Knight's latest Op-Ed (pasted below) and then reject his suggestions.
To learn more, GOOGLE for the word "privatization" combined with "volunteerism", then start reading the ONE MILLION articles you'll find available online.
Scott
"I agree with you that in politics the middle way is none at all." -John Adams
--- begin quoted ----
When a forest goes feral, it's time for volunteers
With on-the-ground forest work neglected, volunteers step into the breach
by RICHARD KNIGHT | posted 11.10.05
Wallace Stegner once wrote that the worst thing that can happen to a
piece of land, short of coming into the hands of an unscrupulous
developer, is to be left open to the unmanaged public.
His great fear seems to be coming true. With the downsizing of the
federal workforce and the increasing mountain of unfunded federal
regulations, our public lands are witnessing the kind of neglect that
befell the thousands of victims of hurricane Katrina.
During a recent Senate hearing, while I was waiting to speak about the
declining health of the West's public lands, I heard a Western senator
berate a Forest Service staffer for failing to work with ranchers who
had grazing leases on federal land. To the official's credit, he
reminded the senator that his employees did not choose to spend their
days in government offices grinding out federal documents.
These natural resource managers, the agency official pointed out,
wanted to be out on the land, exercising the stewardship skills they
had learned.
That made me think about the last time I saw a Forest Service employee
on a trail. I had to go back almost a decade, to the time when my wife
and I chatted with a team of sawyers thinning a forest stand. Sure, I
still see federal vehicles on paved roads, and even occasionally on
gravel roads. But today's public-land stewards more often park their
trucks at Forest Service offices than at trailheads.
Is this what happens when, in the words of an influential conservative
thinker, "you shrink government down to the size where you can drown it
in the bathtub"?
Today, the ideologues who have made careers of berating the government
are now in charge. Paradoxically, they find themselves having downsized
government so it barely works, yet denying responsibility when it
doesn't work. It was not always this way. Once, we had leaders such as
Teddy Roosevelt, who said proudly, "I am the steward of the public
good."
I was thinking of these quirky twists of national sentiment recently,
as a friend and I sawed through yet another downed lodgepole pine that
blocked our horses on a trail through public land. Behind us lay the
remains of the half-dozen trees we had already sawed. Scores more
loomed ahead. We'd packed into designated wilderness on the Roosevelt
National Forest in northern Colorado, and by the end of our trip it had
become obvious that this national forest was going feral.
The good news is that this forest won't continue to be a victim of
neglect. Thanks to a group calling itself Poudre Wilderness Volunteers,
180 Colorado residents have taken up the cause of their national
forest. By foot, horse, or mountain bike, volunteers patrol 43 trails
on the Roosevelt National Forest, with about three-quarters of the
routes through designated wilderness. They carry maps and answer
questions from people they meet on the trail. They do the dirty work of
picking up trash, and they take notes on trail damage. They've also
trained a crew to open trails that have closed because government
downsizing left no one to maintain them.
The idea was the brainchild of Chuck Bell, a retired diplomat, who
recently worked as a seasonal ranger for the Roosevelt National Forest.
In his three years with the agency, Bell says he saw the wilderness and
recreation staff drop from three full-time rangers and 33 seasonals, to
one full-time ranger and two seasonals. He also saw wilderness areas
overused and abused, which led him to join with friends in organizing
the Poudre Wilderness Volunteers.
Wallace Stegner anticipated local action such as this. He wrote that
"The protection by these agencies is of course imperfect. All
Americans, but especially Westerners whose backyard is at stake, need
to ask themselves whose bureaus these should be. Half of the West is in
their hands."
On the Roosevelt National Forest, for the time being, we've seen an
answer. It is almost a new form of outdoor recreation -- people
volunteering to work on the public lands, ensuring that their forests
don't go feral. We can be grateful that these people are more worried
about the health of our publicly owned lands than about what's in it
for them.
Richard Knight is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He is a professor of wildlife conservation
at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.
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- Privatization 
