Threats to Forests - Economics Continued

Economics continued —

People have always needed forests for survival and growing a civilization.  People have always believed, “There are more forests over there when these are gone.”  No more!  It’s not that the forests are gone, they’re not.  But, all the forests and crop land in the world are now being uses, some in good way, a lot not.  So far, we haven’t been willing to invest enough to sustain healthy, forests everywhere so we can have a steady flow of their products.  Our for-profit economic system doesn’t allow it.

America’s economic system demands products get to market as cheap as possible, that often means the long-term good is abandon for short-term profits.  For example, it is expensive to plant trees and culture and protect them through the many years until the next harvest, so, too often, we don’t.   Roads are another example, logging roads are cheaper to build without designed water drainage, grade and culverts, but without good design, roads erode, the dirty water pollutes streams, the eroded soil won’t grow another crop of trees because it has been washed downstream and lies at the bottom of some city’s water reservoir, building up year after year.  Eventually, maybe sooner rather than later, the reservoir becomes a mudflat.  That’s an example of “penny wise and pound foolish,” in spades, but that’s where the drive for profits takes us.  

There are alternatives within our economic and financial systems to take care of natural resources as we use them, but those alternatives take long-range planning, financial commitment and political courage to make changes.  In our economic system budgets for taking care of national forest and park areas are established by Congress, and there’s the problem.  If the people don’t know and care about the forests and parks, neither will congress and very little money will be budgeted for the management and research to sustain forests, range lands, crop lands and soils.  That is what is happening now.  These issues are as important on private lands and forests as they are on public forests.  

A big problem is, we haven’t come up with ways to value forest beauty, wildlife habitat, clean water and keep soil in the place where it developed.  Economists and politicians need to work on this.  Without ways to value clean water, wildlife habitat, soil and natural beauty these “invaluable” gifts, that are couched within products that have dollar values (board feet of wood, animal-unit-months of grass, recreation visitor days, subdivision lots), are valueless and are smashed in the rush to harvest the resources that are worth dollars.  That was what destroyed the famous cedar forests of Lebanon during the Old Testament days (read about it in The Bible, I Kings chapter 5) and the  sandarac pine in the Atlas Mountains of north Africa during Roman times.  Today we are much more efficient at taking down forests than those guys two to four thousand years ago and they destroyed those wonderful forests and made deserts where forests had been. Think about what we can do these days if we don’t put our mind to it.