General Discussion

Our National Forests are managed under a multiple use doctrine with one of those uses being timber production. In the 1980s Reagan ordered them to "up the cut" and produce more timber. A lot of trees were harvested, about 10 billion board feet annually as I remember. Many of those trees were old growth, trees that are over 200 years old which contain nice straight grain wood. Well guess what? Today the big ones are gone and what's left do not contain nearly as much volume. Combined with the expansion of Wilderness Areas, which prohibits timber harvesting, there just aren't many trees left to cut.

The other fact is that in many areas of the National Forest system, outside of the Northwest and coastal Alaska, timber quantity and quality is so poor and logging costs are so high that it ends up costing more to build the roads to access the trees than they can be sold for. The result is "below cost timber sales". Maybe those wankers at DOGE will catch wind of it and actually halt some real waste. Combine that with the resistance movement within the ranks of Forest Service employees who can slow walk a lot of this I imagine this will turn into another dumb Trump idea that he quickly loses interest in following through.