February 22, 1997 marks the centennial of the creation of the national forest system. We can learn a lot from America's century-long romance with sylvan socialism. This Progressive Era experiment featured centralized planning by green Platonic despots; it has inspired America's environmental legislation ever since.

The Progressive Era reformers, in contrast to America's Founding Fathers, believed that elite government planners could achieve efficiency, justice, and conservation. Failing to first separate hopes and expectations, they launched America's counter-revolution by reversing the Founding Fathers' presumption about the role of government.

The Progressives focused on capitalism's flaws, often characterizing private-sector entrepreneurs as inherently venal and short-sighted. But, in prescribing a dominant planning and coordinating role for government, Progressives demonstrated great naiveté. They believed benevolent bureaucrats would exercise intelligence and foster the public good, not their own or that of constituents.

America's Founders, on the other hand, believed institutions must be arranged to check political ambition. They designed a system of checks and balances with one ambition countering another. They knew that otherwise government would become an engine of plunder. And political plunder is the natural consequence of unchecked power. The Founders built this understanding into our Constitution.

The Progressives' took a different approach to forestry, one that exemplifies their ignorance and arrogance. They believed the private sector was fundamentally incapable of managing forest resources. Federal officials even proposed that all timberlands in the United States be under the control of federal bureaucrats. It was not until the early 1950s that this monstrously ill-conceived and naive idea was abandoned by Forest Service officials.

America's Founders viewed each public policy as an experiment. And with the national forests we've had a century's experimentation with Soviet-style management. We find politics trumping ecology, economics, equity, and ethics. Today independent economists and policy analysts widely agree that political management generates duplicity and inefficiency. In contrast, there is near-consensus that when private sector forestry is held responsible for its spill-overs, it is more innovative, responsible, and efficient than federal agencies.

Chief Judge Boyce Martin of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals realized this in his January 21, 1997 decision against the Forest Service for "biased" and "arbitrary" management (in the Sierra Club v. Jack Ward Thomas). As Chief Judge Martin writes, the Forest Service makes decisions "not because they are in the best interest of the American people but because they benefit the Forest Service's fiscal interest."

In sum, the Progressives did us a service by calling attention to real problems, but their favored solution was fundamentally flawed.

Unfortunately, most people don't understand this situation. Many environmentalists still characterize private foresters as rape and ruin, cut and run vandals. And most still presume that the Forest Service, with the next reform, will act in the public's best interests. The Forest Service's abuse and mismanagement indicates the Progressives outmoded ideas are well beyond their justifiable life.

Progressives believed that professional, government foresters would monopolize innovation and efficiency. The reverse turned out to be true. Private timber companies proved remarkably adaptable and efficient at supplying timber products. The Forest Service, on the other hand, annually loses hundreds of millions of dollars on timber sales -- in many cases on public lands marginally suited for logging. Market forces, not political ones, are far better at optimizing commodity production. While the Forest Service clings to harvesting timber in high and dry forests which are often prime recreation or habitat areas, private forest owners seldom waste resources on poor sites. They harvest and replant tree farms and sell hunting rights and habitat conservation to individuals and groups like The Nature Conservancy or Northwest Ecosystem Alliance . Others like Port Blakeley Tree Farms are innovating management practices to preserve both wildlife habitat and profits.

But there is a future for the U.S. Forest Service. The federal agency is well suited to researching and monitoring, but not to managing commercial acres. When the political process manages commodities such as forest products, forest amenity values and rural communities often lose out. A Forest Service limited to research and monitoring could advance our knowledge of forest systems while protecting us against poor private forest practices.

We have conducted a century-long experiment on our public forest lands. The historical record is clear. It's time to end our experiment with sylvan socialism where politics decides timber production. We should carefully transfer the roaded and logged areas of the national forests to private owners and charge the Forest Service with research and monitoring. Certainly, that's a proposal worth considering on the centennial of America's counter-revolution.