Protect Our
Woods
Working to preserve our rural heritage and quality of life in
southern Indiana since 1985
Working to preserve our rural heritage and quality of life in
southern Indiana since 1985
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Protect Our
Woods
Working to preserve our rural heritage and quality of life in southern Indiana since 1985 |
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A Conservationist’s Alternative Plan for Management of the Hoosier National ForestSection 2: Forest Plan Management Goals: Ecology and HumansForest Plan Goals should be amended to include the following four provisions.2.1 Forests and the CommonsMultiple-use, equal-share approach: this principle should be applied so that no use interferes with other interests. It must also be viewed in the larger context of needs of the nearby population, which has so little public recreational and wildlife preserve lands.Federal public lands are common property of the people of the United States. Various sections of that land have been allocated for specific purposes. Executive branch units of government are assigned as stewards of that land to fulfill the government's purpose for that land. The U. S. Forest Service is steward for National Forest lands. The people charge them through Congress to manage these forests for the optimum good of all the people. Because all of the people have not agreed on a single purpose for the National Forests, a Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield doctrine has been codified. Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield doctrine for the forest specifies a number of unlike activities as priorities: water supply, wildlife habitat, mining, timbering, recreation and grazing. The choice of activities should depend on the best use for the most people for the long run. For public lands the population of people involved includes the entire population of the entity in charge. That is: everyone in Indiana has an equal share of state lands, and everyone in the nation has an equal share of national lands. The concept of "equal share" causes many conflicts. Many people interpret equal share as the right to do what he or she wants with what they perceive as their share. However, some activities preclude the present or future use for others. A better statement of equal share might be that no one may do anything that deprives others of their share. Timbering, mining, grazing, and road building are important to a subset of the people. These activities deprive other users for a long time. They are consumptive of the common resource leaving the future cupboard bare. For example: motorized recreation is noisy and destructive to soils and drainage. It requires a great deal of space per user, now and into the future of the commons. The carrying capacity of the commons places a limit on its sharing formula. Every use, however benevolent, causes an impact. The limit manifests itself through the deterioration of the satisfaction of that use. Sometimes, we can repair the deterioration, which requires resources and money. The greater the deterioration the greater the resources needed to repair it. Implicit in a commons is the notion that an optimum long-term solution for all people exists. The range of solutions is limited by the ability of the environment to recover from stress. Activities that more severely stress the environment require more time and resources to promote recovery. Some places cannot recover or be recovered. These activities take more than their equal share of the resource. "Multiple-use" must be applied in a way that reflects the function of the public forest lands in the over-all recreational and forest/wildlife preserve supply in that state. All public forests do not serve the same function in their communities. It is inappropriate to apply the same federal land management approach to justify timber harvesting in Indiana, a heavily populated state with just 3% of land in public ownership, that is applied to federally owned forests in states where a majority of the land is in public ownership. Forest preservation rather than harvest enables the forest to better perform its role as a public resource for education and recreation. |