Environmentalists to bid on timber sales

[allthumbs]

http://www.redding.com/top_stories/national/20020224topnat011.shtml

[Fairweather]

This is an interesting story Trask. Curious that the Bush admin. says "yes" where the previous administration said "no". I'll be looking for more details, but it would seem that in a fair bidding system, these trees should indeed go to the "highest bidder."

...Just keep in mind...Bush could mandate 70mpg autos, 10 billion for alternative energy research, and an end to timber harvests in the US tomorrow......and it still wouldn't be enough to placate today's environmental left. That's because what most of them really desire is an end to capitalism. The environmental debate is merely a convenient vehicle they (some of them) can use to help them acheive this goal.

[mountainguy01]

This is not really a new issue. There have been many environmental organizations/groups that have purchased forest land/private land so that it can be protected. The Northwest Ecosystem Alliace bought the Loomis Forest in Washington with all state public raised money. Paul Allen even gave $3.5 million. The Nature Conservancy just spent $31.25 million to create Great Sand Dunes National Park.

If environmental groups are going to buy forest land then they need to buy the timber stands AND the land that the trees are on. That is what a timber company does, except most of the time the timber companies get subsidizes for the road building, etc., thus having the taxpayers front the bill. The U.S. lost over $1.05 billion on below cost timber sales between 1995-97 and spent $245 million in 1992-94 to build roads for forest companies to access public land according to the GAO. And by letting the groups buy the land we don't have to deal with them chaining themselves to trees or "spiking" the timber creating even more problems. And we sure DON'T NEED another Julia Butterfly. Also, in a capitalistic society we act in a free market economy. So let the highest bidder take the land.

[ 02-25-2002: Message edited by: mountainguy01 ]

[Winter]

FW - Your rhetoric is a bunch of crap. All you're doing is spewing a bunch of ideological nonesense without addressing anything substantive. End commercial harvest on public lands, and I think you would see many progressives "placated." Ooohh .. an "end to capitalism" ... you make them out to sound like the axis of evil.

Mountainguy - The timber companies DO NOT bid on timber AND land. That would amount to a sale of public land. The timber companies bid on the timber not the land, and then the freddies give them a discount for road building, or essentially subsidize road building by building incentives into the timber sale contracts. You are right that the env. groups do need both the timber sale AND the land, but that's because the Forest Service can just plan another timber sale in the same place a couple of years later. I'm in favor of market-based solutions, but in the long run I can't see this being a real successful approach to conservation, because the money will only buy a delay and not any permanent protections. And I agree with you ... we DO need another Julia Butterfly.

[Alpine_Tom]

quote:

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Originally posted by mountainguy01:

Also, in a capitalistic society we act in a free market economy. So let the highest bidder take the land.

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The problem with this is that the highest bidder will almost ALWAYS be the bidder who's going to extract and consume the resources, rather than the bidder who wants to protect them. (The occasional exceptions to this rule get plenty of press, but they remain statistically insignificant.) As we've seen in our happy little on-line community here, people are loathe to pay to use the outdoors. So, a timber company who's going to clearcut a forest and sell the logs is nearly always going to be in a more powerful financial position than a conservation group who wants to preserve the forest for deer and butterflies and tree-huggers.

I certainly appreciate that people like Paul Allen are willing to pony up some part of their fortunes to preserve bits of natural environment, but that relying on the kindness of billionairs seems like a skewed way to make public policy.

And (to pull on the flame-attracting eco-extremist cloak for just a moment) in a free market economy the taxpayers wouldn't be subsidizing the extraction of trees from the public forests, or subisizing grazing on the public rangelands for that matter.

It would bother me a bit less if that wood was used domestically, to provide jobs in local mills, but much of the timber that comes from public forests, in particular Tsongas in S. Alaska, which is the most heavily subisidized logging operation in the country, gets shipped overseas to provide jobs in Japan.

[Norman_Clyde]

My 2 cents on the market economy: it possesses no safeguards, none, against environmental destruction. A corporation can scorch the earth, get rich and get out, then deny accountability for the awful mess it has created. Just look at the mining industry. Poisons may leach into streams for a hundred years after they've gone. How does a market economy prevent this? You might respond that it's the customer's responsibility to have full awareness of how these products came to market, and to purchase only from responsible corporations. The problem is that this purchasing based on more than quality and price is in no way intrinsic to the market process; rather, it inhibits the smooth process of commerce, and I propose it's not really part of the "market economy" but more like a regulatory effect, whether it's imposed by the purchaser or by some agency. On this same topic, has anyone noticed that the Bush administration recently proposed shifting the cost of Superfund cleanups from corporations to taxpayers, because the cost of the tax was considered to be an unfair inhibition of the free activity of said corporations?

The evil that corporations do lives after them.

[Dru]

damn access issues forum needs images enabled!

[ 02-25-2002: Message edited by: Dru ]

[nolanr]

I thought corps. already were getting out of paying for Superfund sights all the time anyway. Definitely w/in the mining industry. Foreign company w/ an American subsidiary leases U.S. land for next to nothing, extracts resources, leaves an environmental disaster, goes belly up and declares bankruptcy, leaves costly clean-up bill to American taxpayers. The Seattle Times ran a week long article on the mining industry and made it sound like the above scenario is pretty typical.