Why would you need to sell federal holdings for timber production? BLM and NFS lands are heavily logged. They used to be much more heavily logged, but the decline is market-based, not policy. The national forests aren't some kind of tree museum. They exist for providing wood to the nation.
You don't need to, as you point out that is the current case, but I think that private ownership would do a better job of extracting economic value from land that we want to put to economic use. Motorized recreational forest and timber production could work well together, but I have not seen that. In some places selective cutting is done, but usually the biggest trees are felled. It would be much better, I think, if parts of the public forest were cut to leave the largest trees to become the beautiful and awe inspiring ones people like to be around. I don't have a deep knowledge of how the forest service does timber sales (and I'm sure it varies depending on local political and economic conditions). It would be interesting to read up on how it works in detail.
I’m curious, why wouldn’t a private owner just clear cut all of the land for maximum value? Private land owners choose short term windfall over long term sustainability all the time. I don’t see why private owners would preserve old growth forests if the lumber is more financially profitable when cut down and sold.
Yeah there's really no evidence that private interests would do anything other than clear-cut sections. Check out this picture. The USFS manages the green squares as part of Shasta-Trinity National Forest. The brown squares are private in-holdings.
Yes, private ownership would lead to tree farms which might find that clear cutting is the best way to maximize output. With regulations on soil runoff, I don't see that as a problem.
My proposal was one that might have a chance of being implemented, thus the reason for private sale of part of the public forest land. It would be impossible politically to get a 1/3 transfer of Forest Service land into wilderness designation and steep reduction of lumber sales on the rest. Allowing the sale of some areas to open up space for towns and cities and some for high output tree farms seems like a reasonable compromise to me that might be possible and I think a better situation that the current one.
You would not transfer any old growth to private hands. There is almost none left outside national parks and wilderness areas (Edit: excluding Alaska), in any case.
Yes, private ownership would lead to tree farms which might find that clear cutting is the best way to maximize output. With regulations on soil runoff, I don't see that as a problem.
Private ownership could lead to tree farms. It could also just as easily lead to private owners clear-cutting the forest without replacement planting, if the ultimate value of the lumber isn't worth the cost of running a tree farm.
I disagree with the premise that BLM held land is for “providing wood to the nation” especially if we’re clear cutting those forests for profits today and ignore sustainability.
You can disagree with it, but sustainable wood harvesting is a top-level policy of the BLM, throughout its history and most recently in the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act. Both BLM and USFS are charged with "maintenance in perpetuity of a high-level annual or regular periodic output of the various renewable resources of the public lands consistent with multiple use."
