Land of the Free? Government Mismanagement of America’s Open Spaces | Dr. Timothy Terrell
Summary
Land Privatization: The speaker argues extensively that private ownership leads to superior land management versus government control and advocates transferring public lands to private hands.
Timber: Detailed discussion on how locking up government land and tariffs on imported lumber create artificial scarcity, raising domestic timber prices and benefiting private timber owners.
Weyerhaeuser (WY): Cited as a forest products company that benefited by identifying protected owls on government land, restricting competitors and boosting profits.
Private Conservation: Examples like Audubon and the Nature Conservancy show private owners allowing controlled resource extraction to fund conservation and achieving better wildfire outcomes.
Materials Sector: The economics of lumber supply, pricing, and policy constraints place forest products squarely within the Materials sector opportunity set.
Policy Risks: Underpriced park access, deferred maintenance incentives, and lengthy environmental reviews exacerbate overuse and wildfire risks, impacting resource availability.
Market Implications: Policy-driven supply constraints can favor private timberland owners and forest products firms through improved pricing power.
Investment Perspective: Emphasis on market-based stewardship suggests potential opportunities in timber-linked assets and entities managing private conservation lands effectively.
Transcript
Thank you very much. It's a great thing to be here. Um, and I want to again thank Brian and Shauna Vinstrip for their sponsorship of my talk. I love talking about open spaces. I love being in America's open spaces. I'm not talking about the little open spaces that you might find in a city or uh city park or sidewalk or something like that, but uh the really big open spaces where you can um you can see for miles. And my wife and I took uh this past summer a 6,600 mile road trip through some of those. We went through the Dakotas and uh we we drove through a lot of what we sometimes call flyover country, but I would recommend not flying over it, but driving through it. It's really great. We uh spent a lot of time in the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming. Enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. Spent some time in America's national parks, some of them national monuments. um and uh and uh a battlefield or two. So um I want to talk about some of the problems that I've seen in the management of government-owned land, which is the bulk of the land in the American West. Uh the federal government controls about 28% of the land in the United States. Most of that is managed by four agencies. The Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and the Forest Service. If you add in state, tribal, and local government-owned land, then the total comes to about 40%. offshore the government controls out to 200 miles. And so if you consider that, which it's got valuable resources there, and and that's that's not not trivial, that means the clear majority of the surface area of the United States is government controlled. Federal, state, and local governments own 96% of the land area of Alaska, 88% of Nevada, 75% of Utah, 70% of Idaho, and since we're in Florida, 29% of Florida. Government land ownership is often associated with conservation. That is the general idea that many people have about government ownership of say forest land or national parks and the like. And yet this is actually more like cronyism than conservation. Theodore Roosevelt is highly regarded as a pioneer in government conservation of land. We saw his image at Mount Rushmore this summer. Um, and it it's even among people who are who are very market friendly, it just doesn't sit right with many of them to to consider that kind of effort wrongheaded. And yet, I would say that it is. Conservation in the early 20th century, including that that was uh spearheaded by Theodore Roosevelt, was part of a progressive era cronyism. Uh there were several interest groups that were interested for profit-seeking reasons and getting government to lock away land away from development. Uh Murray Rothbart mentions much of this in his book the progressive era which Patrick Newman edited. It's uh an eye openener if you want to take a look at at least this section on government land acquisitions. One of the interest groups was private land owners who owned timberland. They were interested in making money off of the cutting down of trees. And so it would seem a little odd that they would be linked up with an effort to set aside forest land as being uh untouchable uh or or to to take some of those trees out of production. And yet they they had a very clear interest in promoting a kind of artificial scarcity of the thing they produced in order to drive up their prices. Um they they wanted to see the timber barons wanted to see these uh forest lands locked away to their competitors so that the land they owned would then become more valuable. This kind of thing still happens. This is not just back in the in the uh the old progressive era, but you might say the new progressive era as well. Um much more recently, um I I tell my classes a story of a forest products company, Wirehouser, which some years ago um paid wildlife biologists to go into forests and look for endangered owls. And every time an owl nest was found, the law says you have to draw a big circle around that nest, and you can't harvest any trees within that circle. So why why on earth would a forest products company that makes money cutting down trees want to go the extra mile to find more of these? Well, um, they weren't looking for owls on their land. They were looking for owls on government land that might be accessible to some of their competitors. And in the process of getting the government to kind of lock up this other land, they were driving up the value of the timber they had access to. And their revenue showed that over the following year, their profits went up substantially because of this. Rothbart also mentions the forestry or land management bureaucracy in the federal government, the Department of the Interior. And he points out that if if you if these individuals were really interested in preventing American forests from being cut down out of some kind of idea of conservation. And why is it that some of these same people who promoted the government locking up forest land would also favor high tariffs on imported lumber. So you think about it, if you put tariffs on imported lumber, where are you going to get your lumber? Well, from domestic sources. And those domestic sources then would be American forest. That tariffs would encourage the cutting down of those trees in American forests. So if the the only way to reconcile this really uh to make sense out of it is to remember that the forest bureaucracy or the the land management bureaucracy the uh the far private forest owners um and and another group that I'll mention did have an interest in promoting the the profits of this industry. Um, another industry that benefited from this kind of early lock up of land away from development was the railroad industry. Railroads had been given massive amounts of land as part of the subsidy for the construction of transcontinental railroads. And so they were some of the biggest land owners in the country at that time. Well, they were going to make money off of that land by selling it off and having it developed and and so they were interested in promoting a high value of their land. And how better to do that than to have alternative land locked away from development. So, the railroads also wanted to see government putting land into various kinds of uh um parks or forests or something that would be preserved away from development. The railroads also got the government to subsidize irrigation on their land and to make sure that they didn't have too much competition in that regard. Any land that might one day be irrigated was prevented from being settled by homesteaders. So the Homestead Act was brought into this as well. So the end result of this was that government would basically shut down competition for timber firms and for railroads and favor those groups with subsidized development infrastructure. Now all of this needs a kind of a veneer of acceptable altruistic motivations. You can't just go to the voters and say, "Yes, we are we are trying to to make it more difficult for you to um to uh to find land in the West that you can afford. We're trying to drive up the price of land that you might otherwise settle on. We're trying to drive up the price of forest products that you consume." That doesn't fly very well. So, you have to come up with something else. And riding into the rescue on this front was the city dwelling conservation elites. people who were of the of the opinion that we were going to run out of trees or we were going to run out of, you know, some kind of natural resource. And therefore, they provided an ideological motivation that was very handy for those in the government bureaucracies and the private land owners who wanted to drive up the price of their of their of their uh assets. So, we have a kind of a classic um what Bruce Yandel called a bootleggers and Baptists alliance. Uh Bruce Yandel um popularized this this uh this phrase. He he said that there's you can get these strange alliances. Uh who doesn't want legal sales of alcohol? Uh well the Yandel used the term Baptists to reference people who might have an ideological objection or moral objection to consuming alcohol and they would not want legal sales of alcohol. And then in addition you got the people who sell alcohol illegally who do not want legal sales of alcohol. So you have a confluence of interests here that might sound a little strange but as they say politics makes for strange bedfellows. So here you've got the timber companies, the railroads, the Department of Interior bureaucrats as the kind of the bootleggers in this group. And then you've got the activist wealthy conservationists um who are providing that kind of u Baptist u u moral cover for this this action. And um I'm you can you can have these ideological persuasions. Um it it it just is very convenient for uh some groups interest groups to be able to use those for their own purposes. Now some government management has led to a tragedy of the commons and that's where a resource is not owned by anyone in particular or at least the resource is not you can't enforce the property rights for some reason. Um, a lot of national forest land is actually grass land. It's not what you would think of as a forest. Um, uh, cattleman early on, late 1800s, early 1900s, wanted to see some degree of privatization of this land because they recognized the problem with having this land kind of open access is that it's going to be overgrazed. And so they worked on this um uh trying to get government to to privatize it in some way. The government would not go for that and the government pursued a kind of land communism. The Department of Agriculture noted that now I don't know if they drew the connection but the capacity of public grazing land fell by half in the last decade of the 1800s um largely because of this overg grazing. Eventually the government did kind of relent and allow for long-term grazing leases which allowed cattlemen to treat the land as more or less something that they're going to have access to the following year. Uh but the damage had largely already been done and some of the damage to the land cover meant that um when we had a drought in the 1930s, this land was susceptible to the kind of dust bowl conditions that you've you've heard about. Well, what about wilderness land that is in government hands? And again, I I I've got friends who are very marketoriented. Um um who who are not all of you are, but um I've got friends that I've talked to about some of these things that that say, "Yeah, I I agree. I like markets and I like private property, but it just doesn't seem to sit right with them when I start talking about privatizing national parks." It's just something that seems to them a little unholy about that. And there is a lot of resistance to transferring government land to private owners and then just leaving those private owners alone. And the fear seems to be that there would just be this stampede of people and development. And I would suggest that these these fears are not justified. Um who's best positioned to determine the tradeoffs between the preservation of wildlands and the benefits of development? These are two good things. I think being able to uh sort those those things out and weigh them requires us to have real information from a market process. Entrepreneurs will see value in preserving wild land. We can we see that there are private people who engage in this kind of wilderness preservation on their own without being told to do so by government. Um it's going to take that kind of entrepreneurship to make those things happen and that requires us to have information from again a market process. But what we have instead is a kind of a central planning process with government land and a lot of guesswork. About uh a hundred years ago, a little over a hundred years ago, the Ottabon Society acquired a 26,000 acre tract of land in Louisiana that became the Paul J. rainy bird sanctuary and the land is valuable wildlife habitat. But unlike other cases where the Ottabon Society would say, "No, we don't want development under any conditions. It's just completely off the table." In this case, the Ottabon Society became the owner and they had to think about things in terms of opportunity costs. what are we giving up if we if if we uh use this land in one way rather than another. Um the land had oil and gas reserves and so in this case the oil and gas reserves belong to the Ottabon society and they had to reckon with the uh the costs of not using that. So they decided drilling would be okay and they in fact they imposed rules on the oil and gas companies uh to make sure it was a clean process but uh they gained tens of millions of dollars of revenues which they then put back into some other conservation efforts. More recently the Nature Conservancy allowed drilling on some of its land in Texas and used the revenues to conserve prairie chicken habitat. Now, some land is likely over uh used and that is partly because the government has no idea can have no idea what the price ought to be for using some of this land. In 2025, a pass allowing a carload of people unlimited access to all national parks and other federal lands cost only $80. Um, popular destinations faced with these very low costs can see millions of visits a year. Crowds bring litter, traffic, noise, vandalism, disturbances to wildlife, pressures to build more infrastructure, and so forth. There's no guarantee government's getting this right. Maybe the use ought to be higher. Maybe the use ought to be lower. And they have no information from a market process. The incentives for managing these processes, these these these lands are perverse. They they create enormous uh problems. One rule, for example, says that revenues coming into national parks, 55% of those have to be used for deferred maintenance. So, of course, if you're the park manager, you're thinking, okay, well, I can use the money for deferred maintenance, but I can't use it for regular maintenance. So, what are we going to do? We're going to let the things fall apart. the facilities just kind of disintegrate and then that opens up the money that we can use for fixing these things that we allowed to to fall into disrepair. I wrote an article um for misuses.org report this past summer on wildfires. It was kind of driven by my distress over the Dragon Bravo fire on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, which on July 13th consumed the Grand Canyon Lodge, the visitors center, and dozens of other structures in that national park. Nobody was hurt, thankfully, but the damage to the buildings that dated back almost 100 years was catastrophic. The government has u the federal government has has lately taken the view that having some controlled burns of land might be helpful in preventing catastrophic wildfires. And I I do think that is that is correct. But for so many decades that was not their view. and they allowed fuel uh dead branches, fallen trees, etc. to accumulate in these forests. Their their view was we just need to put out any fire the minute it starts. And so now we're dealing with all of that mismanagement from decades ago. Uh Steven Green Hut wrote this year in the Orange County Register, that's Orange County, California, not Orange County, Florida, uh that California clears maybe 125,000 acres of brush from its 19 million acres of forest, uh plus another 14 million that are federally owned, and they require lengthy approvals for any kind of forest clearing projects. um environmental review, ironically, gets in the way of actually taking care of these forests. If you want to engage in some kind of wildfire prevention by physically removing the brush from the forest floor, well, you it'll take you under the National Environmental Policy Act 3.6 years on average to get approval for that kind of treatment. uh for a prescribed burn, a low inensity burn to take care of the same problem, it'll take 4.7 years. But if an environmental impact statement is required, it'll turn into 5.3 years to get approval for the mechanical removal and 7.2 years for prescribed burns. Uh nearly half of all US Forest Service forest restoration projects require this kind of environmental impact statement. private ownership generates better results. This is this is quite clear. Uh one example of this that I've used in my classes, um I'm teaching environmental economics uh right now to some students and I'm I'm I'm talking about some of this and seeing some really uh interesting responses from students. Um, one of my examples is the 2021 Bootleg Fire in Oregon, which burned more than 400,000 acres. And it's a great case study because that fire moved from a national forest onto a preserve that was owned by a private organization, the Nature Conservancy. And you can literally see aerial photographs of the results and see where the Nature Conservancy land was and where the forest land national forest land was. The fire went from 200 ft flames on the National Forest side to a ground fire that didn't top out into the trees on the Nature Conservancy side because the Nature Conservancy had managed their land. They had removed the fuel to prevent that kind of catastrophic wildfire. And you can see in the aerial photographs the green trees still existing. I mean the ground was burned out but the trees are still alive on the nature conservancy side and utter destruction on the government control side. Governments need to be taken out of the land management business. Um, I think the best path forward is not to try to tweak some bureaucratic procedure like to maybe make it easier to do prescribed burns or um to, you know, change the prices on national parks. Um, although there's been some progress on that. It's the answer is not to increase federal budgets for government lands to be managed. It's not to replace officials who maybe made uh conditions for a wildfire to uh to become catastrophic or maybe um uh didn't maintain a facility very well. The answer I would say is to return land to private ownership fully and completely. Thank you. [applause]
Land of the Free? Government Mismanagement of America’s Open Spaces | Dr. Timothy Terrell
Summary
Transcript
Thank you very much. It's a great thing to be here. Um, and I want to again thank Brian and Shauna Vinstrip for their sponsorship of my talk. I love talking about open spaces. I love being in America's open spaces. I'm not talking about the little open spaces that you might find in a city or uh city park or sidewalk or something like that, but uh the really big open spaces where you can um you can see for miles. And my wife and I took uh this past summer a 6,600 mile road trip through some of those. We went through the Dakotas and uh we we drove through a lot of what we sometimes call flyover country, but I would recommend not flying over it, but driving through it. It's really great. We uh spent a lot of time in the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming. Enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. Spent some time in America's national parks, some of them national monuments. um and uh and uh a battlefield or two. So um I want to talk about some of the problems that I've seen in the management of government-owned land, which is the bulk of the land in the American West. Uh the federal government controls about 28% of the land in the United States. Most of that is managed by four agencies. The Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and the Forest Service. If you add in state, tribal, and local government-owned land, then the total comes to about 40%. offshore the government controls out to 200 miles. And so if you consider that, which it's got valuable resources there, and and that's that's not not trivial, that means the clear majority of the surface area of the United States is government controlled. Federal, state, and local governments own 96% of the land area of Alaska, 88% of Nevada, 75% of Utah, 70% of Idaho, and since we're in Florida, 29% of Florida. Government land ownership is often associated with conservation. That is the general idea that many people have about government ownership of say forest land or national parks and the like. And yet this is actually more like cronyism than conservation. Theodore Roosevelt is highly regarded as a pioneer in government conservation of land. We saw his image at Mount Rushmore this summer. Um, and it it's even among people who are who are very market friendly, it just doesn't sit right with many of them to to consider that kind of effort wrongheaded. And yet, I would say that it is. Conservation in the early 20th century, including that that was uh spearheaded by Theodore Roosevelt, was part of a progressive era cronyism. Uh there were several interest groups that were interested for profit-seeking reasons and getting government to lock away land away from development. Uh Murray Rothbart mentions much of this in his book the progressive era which Patrick Newman edited. It's uh an eye openener if you want to take a look at at least this section on government land acquisitions. One of the interest groups was private land owners who owned timberland. They were interested in making money off of the cutting down of trees. And so it would seem a little odd that they would be linked up with an effort to set aside forest land as being uh untouchable uh or or to to take some of those trees out of production. And yet they they had a very clear interest in promoting a kind of artificial scarcity of the thing they produced in order to drive up their prices. Um they they wanted to see the timber barons wanted to see these uh forest lands locked away to their competitors so that the land they owned would then become more valuable. This kind of thing still happens. This is not just back in the in the uh the old progressive era, but you might say the new progressive era as well. Um much more recently, um I I tell my classes a story of a forest products company, Wirehouser, which some years ago um paid wildlife biologists to go into forests and look for endangered owls. And every time an owl nest was found, the law says you have to draw a big circle around that nest, and you can't harvest any trees within that circle. So why why on earth would a forest products company that makes money cutting down trees want to go the extra mile to find more of these? Well, um, they weren't looking for owls on their land. They were looking for owls on government land that might be accessible to some of their competitors. And in the process of getting the government to kind of lock up this other land, they were driving up the value of the timber they had access to. And their revenue showed that over the following year, their profits went up substantially because of this. Rothbart also mentions the forestry or land management bureaucracy in the federal government, the Department of the Interior. And he points out that if if you if these individuals were really interested in preventing American forests from being cut down out of some kind of idea of conservation. And why is it that some of these same people who promoted the government locking up forest land would also favor high tariffs on imported lumber. So you think about it, if you put tariffs on imported lumber, where are you going to get your lumber? Well, from domestic sources. And those domestic sources then would be American forest. That tariffs would encourage the cutting down of those trees in American forests. So if the the only way to reconcile this really uh to make sense out of it is to remember that the forest bureaucracy or the the land management bureaucracy the uh the far private forest owners um and and another group that I'll mention did have an interest in promoting the the profits of this industry. Um, another industry that benefited from this kind of early lock up of land away from development was the railroad industry. Railroads had been given massive amounts of land as part of the subsidy for the construction of transcontinental railroads. And so they were some of the biggest land owners in the country at that time. Well, they were going to make money off of that land by selling it off and having it developed and and so they were interested in promoting a high value of their land. And how better to do that than to have alternative land locked away from development. So, the railroads also wanted to see government putting land into various kinds of uh um parks or forests or something that would be preserved away from development. The railroads also got the government to subsidize irrigation on their land and to make sure that they didn't have too much competition in that regard. Any land that might one day be irrigated was prevented from being settled by homesteaders. So the Homestead Act was brought into this as well. So the end result of this was that government would basically shut down competition for timber firms and for railroads and favor those groups with subsidized development infrastructure. Now all of this needs a kind of a veneer of acceptable altruistic motivations. You can't just go to the voters and say, "Yes, we are we are trying to to make it more difficult for you to um to uh to find land in the West that you can afford. We're trying to drive up the price of land that you might otherwise settle on. We're trying to drive up the price of forest products that you consume." That doesn't fly very well. So, you have to come up with something else. And riding into the rescue on this front was the city dwelling conservation elites. people who were of the of the opinion that we were going to run out of trees or we were going to run out of, you know, some kind of natural resource. And therefore, they provided an ideological motivation that was very handy for those in the government bureaucracies and the private land owners who wanted to drive up the price of their of their of their uh assets. So, we have a kind of a classic um what Bruce Yandel called a bootleggers and Baptists alliance. Uh Bruce Yandel um popularized this this uh this phrase. He he said that there's you can get these strange alliances. Uh who doesn't want legal sales of alcohol? Uh well the Yandel used the term Baptists to reference people who might have an ideological objection or moral objection to consuming alcohol and they would not want legal sales of alcohol. And then in addition you got the people who sell alcohol illegally who do not want legal sales of alcohol. So you have a confluence of interests here that might sound a little strange but as they say politics makes for strange bedfellows. So here you've got the timber companies, the railroads, the Department of Interior bureaucrats as the kind of the bootleggers in this group. And then you've got the activist wealthy conservationists um who are providing that kind of u Baptist u u moral cover for this this action. And um I'm you can you can have these ideological persuasions. Um it it it just is very convenient for uh some groups interest groups to be able to use those for their own purposes. Now some government management has led to a tragedy of the commons and that's where a resource is not owned by anyone in particular or at least the resource is not you can't enforce the property rights for some reason. Um, a lot of national forest land is actually grass land. It's not what you would think of as a forest. Um, uh, cattleman early on, late 1800s, early 1900s, wanted to see some degree of privatization of this land because they recognized the problem with having this land kind of open access is that it's going to be overgrazed. And so they worked on this um uh trying to get government to to privatize it in some way. The government would not go for that and the government pursued a kind of land communism. The Department of Agriculture noted that now I don't know if they drew the connection but the capacity of public grazing land fell by half in the last decade of the 1800s um largely because of this overg grazing. Eventually the government did kind of relent and allow for long-term grazing leases which allowed cattlemen to treat the land as more or less something that they're going to have access to the following year. Uh but the damage had largely already been done and some of the damage to the land cover meant that um when we had a drought in the 1930s, this land was susceptible to the kind of dust bowl conditions that you've you've heard about. Well, what about wilderness land that is in government hands? And again, I I I've got friends who are very marketoriented. Um um who who are not all of you are, but um I've got friends that I've talked to about some of these things that that say, "Yeah, I I agree. I like markets and I like private property, but it just doesn't seem to sit right with them when I start talking about privatizing national parks." It's just something that seems to them a little unholy about that. And there is a lot of resistance to transferring government land to private owners and then just leaving those private owners alone. And the fear seems to be that there would just be this stampede of people and development. And I would suggest that these these fears are not justified. Um who's best positioned to determine the tradeoffs between the preservation of wildlands and the benefits of development? These are two good things. I think being able to uh sort those those things out and weigh them requires us to have real information from a market process. Entrepreneurs will see value in preserving wild land. We can we see that there are private people who engage in this kind of wilderness preservation on their own without being told to do so by government. Um it's going to take that kind of entrepreneurship to make those things happen and that requires us to have information from again a market process. But what we have instead is a kind of a central planning process with government land and a lot of guesswork. About uh a hundred years ago, a little over a hundred years ago, the Ottabon Society acquired a 26,000 acre tract of land in Louisiana that became the Paul J. rainy bird sanctuary and the land is valuable wildlife habitat. But unlike other cases where the Ottabon Society would say, "No, we don't want development under any conditions. It's just completely off the table." In this case, the Ottabon Society became the owner and they had to think about things in terms of opportunity costs. what are we giving up if we if if we uh use this land in one way rather than another. Um the land had oil and gas reserves and so in this case the oil and gas reserves belong to the Ottabon society and they had to reckon with the uh the costs of not using that. So they decided drilling would be okay and they in fact they imposed rules on the oil and gas companies uh to make sure it was a clean process but uh they gained tens of millions of dollars of revenues which they then put back into some other conservation efforts. More recently the Nature Conservancy allowed drilling on some of its land in Texas and used the revenues to conserve prairie chicken habitat. Now, some land is likely over uh used and that is partly because the government has no idea can have no idea what the price ought to be for using some of this land. In 2025, a pass allowing a carload of people unlimited access to all national parks and other federal lands cost only $80. Um, popular destinations faced with these very low costs can see millions of visits a year. Crowds bring litter, traffic, noise, vandalism, disturbances to wildlife, pressures to build more infrastructure, and so forth. There's no guarantee government's getting this right. Maybe the use ought to be higher. Maybe the use ought to be lower. And they have no information from a market process. The incentives for managing these processes, these these these lands are perverse. They they create enormous uh problems. One rule, for example, says that revenues coming into national parks, 55% of those have to be used for deferred maintenance. So, of course, if you're the park manager, you're thinking, okay, well, I can use the money for deferred maintenance, but I can't use it for regular maintenance. So, what are we going to do? We're going to let the things fall apart. the facilities just kind of disintegrate and then that opens up the money that we can use for fixing these things that we allowed to to fall into disrepair. I wrote an article um for misuses.org report this past summer on wildfires. It was kind of driven by my distress over the Dragon Bravo fire on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, which on July 13th consumed the Grand Canyon Lodge, the visitors center, and dozens of other structures in that national park. Nobody was hurt, thankfully, but the damage to the buildings that dated back almost 100 years was catastrophic. The government has u the federal government has has lately taken the view that having some controlled burns of land might be helpful in preventing catastrophic wildfires. And I I do think that is that is correct. But for so many decades that was not their view. and they allowed fuel uh dead branches, fallen trees, etc. to accumulate in these forests. Their their view was we just need to put out any fire the minute it starts. And so now we're dealing with all of that mismanagement from decades ago. Uh Steven Green Hut wrote this year in the Orange County Register, that's Orange County, California, not Orange County, Florida, uh that California clears maybe 125,000 acres of brush from its 19 million acres of forest, uh plus another 14 million that are federally owned, and they require lengthy approvals for any kind of forest clearing projects. um environmental review, ironically, gets in the way of actually taking care of these forests. If you want to engage in some kind of wildfire prevention by physically removing the brush from the forest floor, well, you it'll take you under the National Environmental Policy Act 3.6 years on average to get approval for that kind of treatment. uh for a prescribed burn, a low inensity burn to take care of the same problem, it'll take 4.7 years. But if an environmental impact statement is required, it'll turn into 5.3 years to get approval for the mechanical removal and 7.2 years for prescribed burns. Uh nearly half of all US Forest Service forest restoration projects require this kind of environmental impact statement. private ownership generates better results. This is this is quite clear. Uh one example of this that I've used in my classes, um I'm teaching environmental economics uh right now to some students and I'm I'm I'm talking about some of this and seeing some really uh interesting responses from students. Um, one of my examples is the 2021 Bootleg Fire in Oregon, which burned more than 400,000 acres. And it's a great case study because that fire moved from a national forest onto a preserve that was owned by a private organization, the Nature Conservancy. And you can literally see aerial photographs of the results and see where the Nature Conservancy land was and where the forest land national forest land was. The fire went from 200 ft flames on the National Forest side to a ground fire that didn't top out into the trees on the Nature Conservancy side because the Nature Conservancy had managed their land. They had removed the fuel to prevent that kind of catastrophic wildfire. And you can see in the aerial photographs the green trees still existing. I mean the ground was burned out but the trees are still alive on the nature conservancy side and utter destruction on the government control side. Governments need to be taken out of the land management business. Um, I think the best path forward is not to try to tweak some bureaucratic procedure like to maybe make it easier to do prescribed burns or um to, you know, change the prices on national parks. Um, although there's been some progress on that. It's the answer is not to increase federal budgets for government lands to be managed. It's not to replace officials who maybe made uh conditions for a wildfire to uh to become catastrophic or maybe um uh didn't maintain a facility very well. The answer I would say is to return land to private ownership fully and completely. Thank you. [applause]