ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

There is a Continuing Need to Develop and Revise Economic Analyses and Legal Guidelines for Effectively Incorporating the Provisions and Impact of Forestry and Environmental Law into Forest Management, Investment, and Operating Decisions¹

The rewards of private forest land ownership and the practice of private forestry are being increasingly shaped by public laws, regulations, and court decisions. Federal, state and local laws pertaining to land use and environmental protection are reconfiguring the institutional basis for private forestry by redefining forest management and timber harvesting options and influencing the costs and returns from forestry investments. Although governmental regulation of private forestry practices predates the formation of the country, most of the environmental and land-use laws affecting forestry have been implemented during the last quarter century. Most of these laws have been borne from various interest groups involvement in shaping laws and regulations. Two major forces are responsible for this public interest in private forestry: (1) rapid human population dispersal and urbanization, coupled with (2) strong concerns about environmental protection.

Residential and commercial development of urban/wildland interfaces often bring people in close contact with forestry operations for the first time. These new entrants often value non-timber uses of the forest over commodity production and do not approve of clearcutting, prescribed burning, and other activities. Residents often have the intellectual, financial, and political resources to covert their desires into rules of behavior, i.e. forest practices regulations. Overall societal concern for environmental protection is another force shaping the institutional context for forestry. Concerns about decreasing biological diversity, protection for threatened and endangered species, water and air quality, and other environmental battles are being played out in the reauthorization debates and the regulatory and judicial interpretations of the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA), the Clean Water Act (CWA), Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA), the Clean Air Act (CAR), and many state and local statues. These concerns are often manifest in calls for stronger regulations. Reaction from landowners has taken the form of a growing private property rights movement to asserting itself in the legislatures and the courts.

Several public agencies have adopted policies aimed at landscape level ecosystem management in an attempt to protect the integrity of whole systems, rather than single species or sites. Because these ecosystems are comprised of private as well as publicly-owned lands, ecosystem policy options could have profound implications for private forest land.

Forestry and environmental legislation in the United States is very dynamic and subject to frequent and often differing judicial and administrative interpretation. The dynamic nature of forestry and environmental law, together with its largely unanalyzed economic impacts, constitute the primary basis of this problem area. The goal is to develop knowledge and methods to help policy makers assess alternative policies on private forest lands and to help landowners make better decisions under an increasingly uncertain and changing institutional structure.

The problem will be broken down into five areas of investigation:

(1) Integrating risk and uncertainty into a framework for analyzing policy options for environmental protection in forest bio-social systems.

(2) Comparing the provisions and structure of environmental regulation statues, administrative values, and court decisions and incentive-based environmental policies and their effects on the costs and returns of forestry investments and operations.

(3) Analyzing the effects of interactions of regulatory and incentive-based protection policies on the harvesting and forest management behavior of private forest landowners.

(4) Interpreting the legal implications and liabilities faced by private owners under present and future institutional structures.

(5) Evaluating the incentive-based alternatives to a command-and-control@ regulations for their economic impacts, feasibility, landowner acceptance, social acceptability, and other characteristics.

The scope of the problem and the applicability of anticipated research results are nationwide. Approaches will be supported by continuing legal research to identify, describe, and summarize major components of land-use and environmental law affecting private timberland ownerships.

¹All four problem areas of our research work unit are in the process of undergoing revision. Updated problem statements will be posted when the process is complete.

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