HARMONIZING CONFLICTING INTERESTS IN LAND MANAGEMENT

(By P. S. LOVEJOY, Land-Use Planning, State Conservation Department, Michigan)

There has been much such harmonizing with three well-tested ways to manage it: Club, compromise, or compensation-knock 'em out, talk 'em out, or buy 'em out-usually with a mixture of the three to get the best results.

These problems are very ancient. The cave dwellers seemingly ganged up on the Neanderthalers so as to get their own way of occupying lands. The Iroquois and Algonquins differed in their theories of how to manage the natural resources of the Great Lakes region. The French and English were presently tangled over the same question, and, having suppressed the reds, segregated them on lands considered worthless to the whites. But when those lands unexpectedly developed resources wanted by the whites the treaties were disregarded and pro-bono white.

Conflicting interests among the whites continued and intensified. The placer miners of California spread their tailings over the fertile bottom lands below, and the farmers fought the miners over that. Sheep and cattle men tangled over range allotments and fought wars which never settled anything save locally and pro tem. As the first national forests were being established, all the local contingents often ganged up to keep the forest rangers out. And so very ancient, very human, very real; one group, theory, and practice being replaced by some other-and seemingly without end to that sort of shifting.

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We may do well if we proceed upon that assumption: That Homo is incurably optimistic about his ability to retinker his habitats into more satisfactory combinations.

The prime difficulty, of course, arises from the fact that the different nations, tribes, groups, and individuals have different definitions of the correct objectives and ways and means for reaching them; and in that they so often change their minds concerning both.

My assignment is to canvass those objectives, and the ways and means for getting them decently stabilized and going parallel instead of crosswise. For that we have some precedents.

No such controversy could well be more acute-without developing into civil war-than the manner in which the western stockmen received the National Forest regulation of grazing. Having run out the "buffaler and fit the Injuns", and made it a white man's country, no white-collar dudes from back East were going to learn the stockmen and their neighbors how to run their own country. If they tried it, there would be ranger bones whitening in the gulches, directly * *. But within about 20 years, all that had been almost forgotten. The conflicting interests had been pretty much harmonized. The way of that may stand some consideration.

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Behind the rangers stood Washington and the Supreme Court. That was the club effect; but there was in it also, a large element of compromise. The rangers said to the sheep and the cattlemen: "Come on now there's only so much range here, and it will carry only so much stock, and it's gotta be divided up somegit together, you fellers its more your

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B, Male elk in the Olympic National Forest, Wash. (Forest Service photo.)

A, Wild ducks on a stream in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, Okla. (Forest Service photo.)

country than ours but iffen you don't git together an' do it fer yourselves, outsiders are a-goin' a-goin' to do it anyhow-an' probly wrong *** So git together, why don't yah?" There the element of compromise came in.

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When the stockmen replied, asking "Why should we? What's in it for us?" there was an answer. The rangers said: "Why you git the feed for your stock, of course, and you will know in advance that you are going to git it. You git feed and undisturbed possession Yore women folks, they won't hafta worry so much when the boys are out on the range." Therewith came the element of compensation; and in that compensation there was a tangible economic phase (dependable supplies of forage), and there was also a social phase, intangible but very real. That manner of range management in the mountains, made for a safer, more pleasant living for the people of the valley ranches.

Behind all this, tempering and conditioning all the actual contacts and adjustments, never conspicuous but always there, was the instruction from Tama Jim Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture. To the new Forest Service he had said: "In working out the local conflicts of interest, keep trying to make 'em break for the greatest good of the most people-in the long run."

There, perhaps, we have something approximating a formula of very general application-a sharp definition of distal objective, plus a mixture of club, compromise, and compensation. But this will be easier to write than to apply.

When the engineer has a job of designing a given structure or machine, using given materials which he does not fully understand, he puts typical samples into his testing machines and loads them until they fail. He notes the places and manner of those failures, and presently designs accordingly.

I am wondering whether we have not had enough conservation controversies, and enough failures, repeating over and over in the same ways and places, so as to permit us something of the engineer's procedure. If we find that similar frictions and failures are typically taking place and are increasingly predictable, then, seemingly, we should be able to design and operate our conservation affairs accordingly. Where then and how, have we been jammed or broken?

Waterfowl. With a variety of adverse factors long and obviously working to their detriment, supplies and availabilities steadily shrinking, nobody accepted the responsibility for getting and for translating the essential facts. Nobody was in good position to do this. Whatever the reasons it wasn't done. The first decently competent and comprehensive text on waterfowl management has just been published, and-make a note-it came from a State conservation department, and not from a Federal bureau.

If a Ding Darling had happened along 20 years ago, preaching and praying as Giff Pinchot preached and prayed his timber-famine doctrines, what might have happened?

Or shall we say that our waterfowl affairs are just now in about the status our forest affairs were 20 years ago, and that given a normal supply of prophets crying in the wilderness, and one or

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another Roosevelt in the White House, such things will somehow get taken care of?

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Or shall we say that, really, our waterfowl aren't so very important one way or the other and remind ourselves how pleased and excited we were 30 years ago when the reclamation prophets began to make the deserts blossom as the rose-to fruit out, presently, into bankrupt irrigation projects. Perhaps our waterfowl affairs are not yet ready for analysis, but many other conservation doings assuredly are.

Olympic elk.-Here we have an old national forest in some very noble mountains surrounded with privately owned timberlands, and with a central core of a national monument, in theory created to save the elk. In fact the elk would be in the high country only during the summers when they needed no such protection, and would be in the lower valleys far beyond the monument boundaries and even beyond the forest boundaries during the winters and while they might need special protection.

Even under the very sketchy protection actually supplied by the State and Forest Service, the elk increased until, by 1935, they had begun to press hard on the supplies of winter browse. Meanwhile the National Park Service had acquired jurisdiction over the monument. If very materially enlarged, the monument would have the makings of another national park, perhaps; and elk or no elk there was-is-no love lost between the Forest and Park Services.

Both Bureaus, of course, have their own tablets off the mount. Each worships as per its own organic act; the one before the altar of the sacred primitive, must save Nature for God and the fat lady from Kansas; the other places its wreaths before the altar of the sacred sawlog and chants Tama Jim's litany, praying for enlightenment.

Now the State game authorities open a short season on the elk and the power comes on. A stray mammalogist spends a few days on the Peninsula and makes a report to a New York Club. This report finds the elk to be very nice elk, indeed, and that they are in considerable trouble, and that only the Park Service is to be trusted to properly cherish elk like these.

Promptly thereafter, the emergency conservation association (of New Jersey) goes into action and circulates a Circular of somewhat frenetic tempo, mentioning the elk, picturing the ferns nestling among the primitive fir trees, and specifically suggesting large and early transfers of national-forest lands into national-park status Whereupon the local chambers of commerce begin to throw a barrage, asking, in effect, whether the local lumber industry is to be jeopardized or wrecked in order to assuage the aesthetic yens of a few people back East?

In 1935 a high official of the Interior Department is loudly complaining that the Department of Agriculture is using its field men to conduct a nefarious pro Forest Service lobby. Early in 1936 national park field men are soliciting State conservation departments to endorse to their Congressional delegations, a certain very wonderful bill. The Forest Service meanwhile, is soliciting testimonials for another very wonderful bill-the two bills being nicely calculated to cut each other's throats; and meanwhile there are hungry elk in various National Forests and National Parks.