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When National Forests are logged, valuable recreation, fishing, and hunting sites are destroyed. When National Forests are logged, municipalities, businesses, and domestic water users downstream must pay for filtering logging sediments out of water supplies. Economists found that logging imposes costs in the order of $ 1. 94 per ton on downstream water users in the Little Tennessee River basin. When National Forests are logged, increased flooding destroys prime farmland, washes out bridges and roads, and causes loss of life and property. After the Pacific Northwest floods of 1996, the Forest Service spent over $ 100 million repairing bridges and roads that were damaged from landslides largely attributable to clearcut's on unstable soils.
Heavily logged National Forests are scenic eyesores, diminishing property values and thwarting the ability of communities to attract businesses and residents to enjoy high quality environments. National Forest logging generates millions of dollars in tort claims against the government each year because it creates enormous costs in terms of death, injury and property damage. Logging is consistently the most dangerous profession in the United States, with an accident rate recently estimated at 142 per 100, 000 workers. Taxi drivers and chauffeurs are a distant second. A property owner in Washington is seeking $ 1, 000, 000 in damages from the Forest Service for a logging-induced landslide that washed away her home.
She is among many owners of properties adjacent to National Forests who have witnessed destruction of their homes and land from increased floods and landslides. The alleged benefits of Forest Service timber sales are seriously overstated in another, more fundamental manner. Forest Service timber sales are heavily subsidized, and, as such, they are anti-competitive. Subsidized timber sales on National Forest lands place small scale producers who operate on their own lands at a competitive disadvantage, creating costs in terms of lost revenues and jobs. Subsidized National Forest timber sales also create market barriers for alternative fiber producers and recyclers. Economists call these "displacement costs. " While the Forest Service takes credit for creating wood products jobs, in many cases, the agency is simply displacing jobs that would otherwise be available harvesting timber from private lands or supplying recycled and alternative fiber products.
When National Forest timber sales have been reduced, in many regions, jobs and income in the wood products sector have actually increased. In Utah, for example, between 1988 and 1994, National Forest timber harvests dropped by 56 %. During that same period jobs in the wood products sector increased by precisely the same amount. When added to the $ 1. 2 billion financial losses incurred by the logging program each year, externalities and displacement costs render the National Forest timber sale program an abysmal failure from an economic perspective. By law, the Forest Service must maximize the net social and economic benefits of its management programs for all Americans and fully account for the benefits of unlogged forests and the costs of logging in its timber sale program decisions.
Unfortunately, the Forest Service ignores this type of analysis when justifying the timber sale program to Congress and the American people. At every level of planning, the Forest Service invokes its discretion to ignore the vast ecosystem service values of unlogged forests and externalities of the logging program. Instead, the only economic benefits and costs quantified at any level of timber sale program planning are those benefits and costs attributable to the sale and processing of wood products. If the Forest Service took ecosystem service values and externalities into account, it is likely that few, if any timber sales could be justified on National Forest lands. The governmental campaign to preserve Blanton Forest can offer an unparalleled opportunity to preserve Kentucky's last significant old-growth firestone of our nation's last great places.
The majority of the forest is very vulnerable to outside disturbances and both willful and inadvertent destruction. Mixed-mesophytic forests are the most diverse temperate forests in the world, and they are critically endangered. The 2, 350 acres that comprise Blanton's old-growth tracts support species diversity and interdependent habitats that are found nowhere else in Kentucky. Blanton Forest is one of the few remaining healthy places that naturally sustains its forest communities. Shouldn't it stay that way?
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