EDITORIAL: A Crazy Idea: It’s Nuts to Sell National Forest Lands to Finance Schools

By The Charlotte Observer, N.C.

Feb. 16–The Bush administration has announced plans to sell off 307,000 acres of national forest across the country to pay for rural schools. There’s a good word for that idea: Crazy.

The White House obviously hasn’t listened to anything the state of North Carolina has said in years. Otherwise, administration officials might have heard that just before Gov. Jim Hunt went out of office in 2000, this state adopted an ambitious goal of conserving a million acres of land in 10 years. To date, the state has set aside a little more than 352,000 acres — about one-third of its goal after nearly two-thirds of the time.

President Bush’s plan would reverse some of this state’s hard-fought gains. While a significant acreage of North Carolina (2.7 million acres) is held by local, state and federal governments, the president proposes to put up for sale nearly 10,000 acres in the Croatan, Nantahala, Pisgah and Uwharrie National Forests in this state. Those forests lie near the coast, in the Piedmont and in Western North Carolina. The administration also would sell 4,700 acres of the Francis Marion and Sumter National Forests in South Carolina. Justification? Some parcels are outside the boundaries of enclosed national forests.

Viewing such outparcels as expendable assets requires a constipated view of the value of conservation. Many people do not realize that the Uwharrie National Forest, for example, comprises a larger number of such parcels because it has been difficult and at times expensive to acquire privately held land for the forest. But many family farms and other rural enterprises have continued to thrive next door to those discrete, jigsaw-puzzle parcels of federal land.

President Bush has argued that selling the federal lands would help pay for rural schools, often near the forests that might be sold. But selling off assets is the wrong way to pay for government operations. If the president and his party were not such avid borrow-and-spenders bent on running up more record deficits, the administration would not be so strapped for education funds — or so eager to sacrifice these national treasures. File this idea in the loony bin.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.

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