The USFS often sells National Forest timber at a loss. Although loggers may pay market price for it, the agency absorbs various costs—stand thinning, roads, sale preparation, reforestation, etc. Environmentalists view below-cost sales as evidence that “the Forest Service continues to treat timber as the number-one priority on every acre of land not otherwise designated by Congress.” Appealing to the multiple-use language of NFMA and other legislation, they point out that the forests are not to be managed solely for timber production and that “optimal policy requires a harmonious blend of land uses.” The USFS, however, defends below-cost sales partly in the same terms, claiming that “[t]imber harvest is often an efficient tool that can be used to achieve non-timber objectives and the desired ecological conditions outlined in forest plans.” Its friends in The American Forest and Paper Association suggest, for example, that cutting aspen in Minnesota’s Superior National Forest improves habitat for the small mammals that support the local wolf population and maintain that sales of this low-value timber “provide the most cost-effective means to provide prey for the wolf.” Some natural resource economists also endorse this general position, albeit more cautiously. John KKrutilla and Michael Bowes, for example, claim that “on public land, occasional timber sales below cost and timber management can be justified economically on the basis of the long-term improvement in multiple-use value that may result from harvesting.” Evidently, multiple use is an accommodating ideal. Appeals to “multiple-use values” remind us that the National Forests can produce a variety of things in various “harmonious” combinations; they do not settle what “blend” of outputs is “optimal.” We might be able to do this if we could agree on some standard of productivity that gives sense to claims of the general form “this use of those resources is better than that one.” Since the case for privatizing the National Forests and other public lands rests largely on the claim that their resources would thereby be put to better use, such a standard would also help in assessing the proposal by clarifying what is being claimed for it.
Crane and Rowan mountain timber sales : draft environmental impact statement : Tongass National Forest, Stikine Area /
