The difference is that miners are engaged in a one time extraction of a resource whereas a sensible timber company can count on returning to a tract of land. A local outfit would be most likely to manage for the long term.

We argue about this stuff a lot when we mountain bike because the gov land we sometimes ride on is mixed use and each group is always trying to get the others thrown out. Enviros vs timbermen vs horsey people vs mtn bikers vs atv riders vs enviros. Many of the lands out West were managed for timber for many years, then enviros normally from away with no economic stake come in and for good or ill change the purpose the lands are managed for. Privately held land is easy to manage for a specific purpose.

I don't like the idea that some politician in Boston, Mass. can decide that a working community in Idaho isn't economically viable. What I'd like to see is a competitive bid process. Let groups of people purchase the lands for their stated purpose and manage it accordingly. Land where timbering can be viable would be the focus of timber companies and outfits like the Nature Conservancy could buy up the environmentally important pieces. We know with the Bush administration that open government isn't priority one reducing the likelyhood that sales will be truly open. It would be cool and useful to put together a map of all the lands and have a real time observation of bid prices for sections. Groups could get together and buy ajoining pieces if they have compatible goals say mountain bikers, cc skiers, and campers...

The National Forest Service is chartered to care for federally owned forests in a way that will provide a steady supply of trees for wood products. The words pristene, wild, natural, scenic and biodiversity are not in their mission statement.
Being a federal job, they are suject to the pressures of politics which is always make someone happy right NOW. Often at the expense of the land their supposed to keep productive for the future.

There are many people, especially in the west where large portions of land are federally held, that would like to see much of this federal land move into the tax base.
Part of the global economy is not having to conserve what can be bought elsewhere.

Federal money budgeted for schools is huge. Every school district in the nation gets some. Of course it's usually not enough to cover the federally mandated programs the districts are required to satisfy, but that's another topic. ;)

That's a nice dream. You do know that even with the scandal running around Congress, if the GOP and it's advisers think that the public isn't paying attention, the chances of a transaprent process in all of this are remarkably slim. The official notice for these auctions will be on the back page of smallest newspapers that can be found and they'll be held at midnight on the farthest green of the most exclusive country club in the country, or maybe on top of some desert plateau only accessible by private helicopter.http://www.cellar.org/images/smilies/wink.gif

Maybe they'll just post it in the Skull and Bones Alumni newsletter.

40 acres were made avaiable to every ex-slave. All they had to do was READ the instructions. WRITE the myriad of applications. TRAVEL to several locations to complete the process. BUY livestock and building materials to build a dwelling, fence the entire property and raise a viable crop for 5 years, to get the title/deed.
Remarkably, some actually managed to do it, but of course most didn't because they couldn't read or write and had no money. :(

UT didn't read the OP:

Why are there logging cutbacks on federal land? Because it is the environmentally sound thing to do. If a private timber outfit were to buy those lands, there would still be logging cut backs because the land needs time to recover from past tree harvests. A tree has the same rate of growth on the day after it is sold to a private outfit as it did the day before.

The feds have something called the US Forest Service which is staffed by professionals who have studied forestry for a minimum of 4 years. They know all about conducting reasonable timber sales and replanting afterwards. Unfortunately, politicians jump in the middle and scream free enterprise and at the same time cut funding for care of the land. The reswult is the destruction of forests that you find in many areas out West.

Come out to Colorado and I can show you some forests that ARE being quite well managed by the Forest Service since they were never clear cut in the first place. These forests are carefully harvested for their timber, have good regeneration, and are used by the general public for recreation like hunting and camping, as well.

Private timber concens do maintain vast tree farms. Weyerhauser comes to mind. However, Weyerhauser doesn't allow people to go traipsing around on its tree farms and that's what they are - farms and not ecosystems.

The "tragedy of the commons" is about too many people attempting to use too little land. The problem here is an irresponsible federal land management system where politicians are destroying your and my public lands and then using that destruction as an excuse to sell those federal lands out from under us. I read no where in the OP that the feds will sell these lands to anyone in particular - they most likely will go to the highest bidder. The article mentioned land in California. Depending on WHERE in California, most timber outfits would not be especially interested because California has the same problem as Colorado - a dry climate not conducive to the brisk regeneration of forests.

You would absolve the federal government of all responsibility and have OUR public lands sold off to what most likely will be private developers. Again, its a short sighted solution to the problem. Once all that land is sold where is the money coming from for the next government boondoggle?

Lands out west here were MIS-managed for timber by your politician from Boston for years until the havoc this caused was apparent to everyone who lives out here. The Forest Service then managed to start a few environmentally sound policies which have been disrupted by the likes of James Watt and now Bushco. Privately held land will be managed to extract the maximum commercial profit. In the Rocky Mountain West, this will not be timber sales, but the parceling out of land into ranchette subdivisions. This practice will NOT generate jobs for the locals. The hypothetical community of Bumfuck was not based on a viable local industry of timber harvesting, but a short sighted desire by logging outfits to extract everything they possibly could for a one time only commercial gain. It can take 50 years or longer to regenerate a forest in the Rockies. The logging town of Bumfuck has no business ever being created as a logging town in the first place.

The cattlemen's association wants to pounce on federal lands here and run sheep and cows on them. They are PO'ed because the Forest Service won't issue the grazing permits that would allow them to re-enact UT's tragedy of the commons.

And if anyone wants to see what great stewards of the land private outfits are, I invite you all to go visit Uravan, Colorado, a mining community on the Colorado-Utah border that no longer exists. The big uranium mining concerns owned quite a bit of land and uranium mines out there in the 50's. Uranium was mined without a second thought as to the consequences of unsound mining procedures. The entire town of Uravan had to be closed down and dismantled thanks to contamination from uranium tailings. The heavy metals from the mines has leached into the rivers making the Dolores River (well-named) one of the spookiest rivers I have ever seen in my life. There are no fish in it, no aquatic insects, not even algae. The Dolores is dead for a good 100 miles. Go look at it and then contrast it with the neighboring San Miguel River Basin which was not subjected to the tender mercies of private land owners. The San Miguel is a vibrant living river and the communities that were built near its banks are still in existance.

Busterb, my quotes were taken after Beestie's habit of making up imaginary quotes in various other threads.

I defined the phrase twice in my post, and yet you re-defined it here... incorrectly.

The feds managed it incorrectly and yet you demand they continue to manage it.

The correct answer is to sell the land under deed restrictions to only permit certain uses by any future owner.

Garrett Hardin, a population biologist, coined the term "the tragedy of the commons" in a rather lengthy article which first appeared in Science Magazine in December, 1968. The term was then taken up by other ecologists and biologists:

The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.

The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. "Freedom is the recognition of necessity"--and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

One of the things I love most about Missouri (and it's hard to love sometimes) is that we have a large amount of forest here, primarily in the southern half of the state. Some of that land proposed for sale is here in the state...it's part of the Mark Twain National Forest. I'm not overly familiar with all the details, but I'd hate to see us lose any of this land, as it's beautiful and it's in areas that are not heavily populated.

Wikipedia:
That was the parable to which I was referring. The Wiki entry also notes that
BTW, the overpopulation scientists were kind of humbled when the growth curve started its downtrend in the 1980s. "Oops." Our doomsaying always sounds better when it's semi-scientific.

Please give your cite as to the declining growth curve of the global human population. Also please state what rate of growth is acceptable on a finite planet with finite resources.

Hardin is the one who brought the term "tragedy of the commons" into the popular language where the concept has been largely misunderstood every since. I was first introduced to the term in a class on population biology in 1974 where we were required to read the original sources.

Sorry you don't care for the findings of biologists and other scientists. :p

Wikipedia on overpopulation:

Sorry you only read the ones that agree with you.

Two interesting notes:

Hey, that's not too bad, I guess. I'd feel better if they "sealed up" more of the Ocala National Forest, here, by aquiring some of the more abused areas that are privately owned and permit the areas to return to a healed state.

...and...

Do I read this correctly in that it is not environmental restrictions that are hurting these areas, but rather slow sales?

Hmm.

I believe Canada has been accused of "dumping" timber on the US market.

The following is about the closing of a pulp mill in Port Angeles owned by Rayonier Inc. This is a perfect example of what I was saying earlier in this thread. Its from a story published in The High Country News which contains more information about the economy, people, and the environment out West than anybody east of the Mississippi ever wants to know:



Then the supply of wood abated. The price of pulp plummeted. Some locals said it had nothing to do with the spotted owl and the Endangered Species Act. There just weren’t enough big trees anymore.

The shortage was no surprise. In the 1970s, the government made the unprecedented move of opening federal land to clear-cutting. It was a way of flushing fresh cash through the economy, booming the Northwest. The result was simple to predict: Once the forest is clear-cut, second-growth timber will not make near the profits. Rayonier Inc. knew this. Official predictions of it were published 10 years earlier.

When a Northwest coastal forest starts from leveled ground, the biomass of greenery hits a peak after 50 years. Wood, however, continues expansion for another 600 years. If you cut it before 600 years, you’re only getting scraps. The thing to do was to move to Port Angeles, make as much money as possible off old-growth harvest, then brace for the inevitable crash. But a lot of children were born in that time, mortgages acquired, V-8 extra-cab trucks purchased, loans taken.

When forests thinned, when certain regions were closed to timber harvest due to declining spotted owl populations, the industry faltered. Rayonier went from using 242 million board-feet in 1985 to 13.6 million a decade later.

Sorry you don't read. The world population was around 2.5 billion in 1950. A world population of 9.1 billion is more than triple. I haven't noticed forests tripling or arable land tripling or the size of the earth tripling. Yes, population growth rates have slowed. The growth rate in 1950 was 1.47%. It is expected to be around .5% in 2050. No one is predicting that the population growth rate will then stay at .5% forever after. Scientists simply don't want to make more long term predictions than that. There are simply too many variables involved. A growth rate of .5 % of 9 billion means that about 45 million more people will be added to the world's population every year. Naturally this amount will increase exponentialy if the growth rate remains constant. Do the math UT, all is far from rosey with the world's population growth. From a report on world population growth done by The US Census


The U.S. Census Bureau’s long-term projections indicate that the globe’s population will grow to approximately 9.1 billion in 2050, an increase of over 45 percent compared to its size in 2002. The largest gains in population
between 2002 and 2050 are projected to be in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Near East. In these regions, many countries are expected to more than double in size by 2050, with some more than tripling. More moderate gains are expected in that time period for North Africa, the Americas, Asia, and
Pacific. Although some countries in these regions are expected to more than double in size, the typical country is likely to experience a smaller increase.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, a majority of the countries Europe and the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union are expected to experience a decline in population between 2002 and 2050.

Isn't that nice? The first world nations will lose population, while the third world becomes more over-crowded and desperate than ever. Interesting...

I have faith that drought, starvation and machete hacking will moderate those increases. :cool: