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Example research essay topic: Billion Per Year National Forests - 1,663 words

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Blanton Forest is the largest contiguous unprotected old-growth hardwood forest in the Eastern United States. The 6, 000 + acre design for the future Blanton Forest Nature Preserve includes 2, 350 acres of pristine old-growth wilderness including 200 + year-old trees and Watts Creek, a sanctuary for the endangered Blackside dace fish. It belongs to a type of diverse temperate forest class called "mixed mesophytic" that is considered called both "globally significant" and "critically endangered" by the World Wildlife Fund. Ninety-five percent of the nation's native forests have been logged. Most of the remaining five percent lie on public lands, but are subject to taxpayer subsidized logging. The result: deforestation, polluted drinking water and endangered species.

Logging companies claim the U. S. needs the lumber and jobs, but National Forests supply less than four percent of U. S. demand. Economic studies show that forests are worth far more standing and provide more jobs than when they are cut down and made into two by fours.

Is it really a choice between "owls and jobs" or is that just corporate spin to justify continuing subsidies for logging companies? What will be the future of our National Forests? From a social and economic perspective, our National Forests are far more valuable standing, growing, dying, and regenerating where they are than cut down and converted into two by fours and paper products. While lumber and wood products are readily available from the 80 % of forested land in the United States outside National Forests, clean water, recreation, wildlife and other public uses and values of immense economic benefit generally are not. The small share of the forested land base included in our National Forest system must shoulder nearly 100 % of the burden of providing these uses and values.

National Forests provide many social and economic contributions to the nation, simply by existing as natural ecosystems. Natural resource economists have coined the term "ecosystem services" to describe such contributions. They include important functions such as flood control, purification of water, recycling of nutrients and wastes, production of soils, carbon sequestering, pollination, and natural control of pests. They include valuable products such as plants used in manufacturing life-saving medicines, edible mushrooms, and floral greens. They include a diversity of uses such as recreation, hunting and fishing.

And they include scenic, aesthetic, and cultural values that are important quality of life factors for communities adjacent to our National Forests. Economists have recently estimated that ecosystem services provided by natural forests worldwide are worth at least $ 4. 7 trillion per year. On National Forest lands, ecosystem service values dwarf the value of our National Forests for timber production. For instance: National Forests supply over 530. 4 million acre-feet of clean water each year to municipalities, businesses, and rural residents. Economists estimate that the value of this water for consumptive purposes alone is over $ 3. 7 billion per year.

This figure does not include the value of maintaining wild fish species, recreation, or the cost savings to municipalities who have reduced filtration costs because water from National Forests is so clean. National Forests sequester over 53 million metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year. Economists have estimated that this function is worth nearly $ 3. 4 billion each year. Recreation, hunting and fishing on our National Forests contribute at least $ 111 billion to the gross domestic product and generate 2. 9 million jobs each year. These uses contribute 31. 4 times more value to GDP and generate 38. 1 times more jobs that the timber sale program.

National Forests provide habitat for tens of thousands of wild pollinators. Researchers have estimated the potential contribution of wild pollinators to the U. S. agricultural economy to be in the order of $ 4 - 7 billion per year. In contrast, the Forest Service recently estimated that its timber sale program generated net economic benefits of only $ 354 million and 55, 535 jobs in 1997. However, these figures are substantially overstated.

They do not include the vast majority of costs created by the logging program, which are largely externalized onto communities, businesses, and individuals who benefit from forest protection. 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? Blanton Forest will inspire future generations of environmental stewards. Under the proposed design of the Blanton Forest Preserve, the forest can serve as a living laboratory for teachers, schoolchildren and interested visitors to the Appalachian region. With proper care, the forest can also offer low-impact recreational opportunities to outdoor enthusiasts and families without threatening its rare ecology.

Ancient forests like Blanton are extremely rare. So are the research opportunities they present. Blanton Forest is an indicator of the health and well-being of our planet. Protected from destructive activities, it will serve as a living laboratory for us to better understand the way species interact and evolve in accordance with nature. Ecotourism is one of the fastest growing segments of the national economy.

The Blanton Forest preserve has the potential of anchoring an ecotourism industry in Kentucky that attracts visitors who leave ecologically tolerable footprints and bring significant economic benefits. Bibliography: In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology. By Alston Chase. St. Charles, IL, Houghton Mifflin, 1995. The Sylvan Path; A Journey Through America's Forests.

By Gary Ferguson. New York, St. Martin's, 1997. Petrified Forest National Park: A Wilderness Bound in Time. By George M. Luck.

Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1996. American Forests: Nature, Culture, and Politics. By Char Miller. Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press, 1997.

The Rain Forests of Home: Profile of a North American Bio region. By Peter K. Schoonmaker. Washington DC, Island Press, 1997. Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics.

By Daniel G. Payne. Hanover, NH, UP of New England, 1996.


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