Native Forest Council and our 2,000 national members know that public land logging provides short-term financial benefits for industry at the expense of economic and ecological benefits for the rest of the citizenry; it is therefore in the American taxpayers’ best interest to terminate the Federal Timber Sale program. Recreation’s economic benefits alone are worth dozens of times the value of logging, while the publicly-owned asset value of nature and nature’s services is worth hundreds of times more than that.
With the 21st century understanding we have of unlogged forests’ vital roles of attracting, storing and filtering clean drinking water; regulating rainfall and moderating regional climate; storing and sequestering carbon to combat climate change (northeast forests store the 2nd greatest levels of carbon of any forest region in the US); creating fertile topsoil and preventing erosion; ensuring the survival of fish and wildlife, etc., there is no honest justification for further asset stripping and logging in our public forests. If we had not liquidated all but 5% of our nation’s native forests, with over one-third permanently deforested for cities, agriculture, roads and other development, logging might still have had a small role in our public forests today.
But the liquidation of our country’s 1.082 billion acres of native forest over the centuries demonstrates a clear need to place our publicly owned national forests (and many other forest lands) under the strongest protections possible, banning all forms of
resource extraction, as a form of “ecosystem insurance.â€
More on the issue here.