Wednesday, March 2 – Economic Value of Nature
Do the things that forests provide to us—such as drinking water, food, wildlife, climate regulation, flood protection, recreation, and aesthetics—have an actual economic value to you and your community? If so, how and where should that value be recognized when decisions are made about land use that would affect forestland?
Jane Revesz 3:21 pm on March 2, 2011 Permalink
Certainly all of the items listed in the question introducing today’s conversation are provided by our forests. Some theoretical conversations have considered some kind of reimbursement in dollar value to landowners for the public use for those assets.So far the public has gone along with severely restricting the small forest landowners by laws while not paying for those items listed. When considering the overall topic for the week of “Loss of Forests”, the public and the state government must realize it cannot just keep taking form small forest landowners without eventually losing those small businesses. Any real economic value at present for the owners comes from producing and selling forest products, however, even this is highly restricted by state laws, particularly the law nicknamed “Forest and Fish”. Now, here in Clark County, many non forest landowners are willing to sacrifice the remaining forests we have for the 500 kv BPA line. The line is not wanted on the right-of-way that exists; forest lands are considered as irrelevant. It is time for the public not to just punish forest owners but to realistically support less regulations that would allow private forests to operate and survive as tax-paying small businesses. This year in very severe economic times for timber, we object to raising fees for Forest PRACTICE PERMITS. WHAT NEXT? Keeping productive working forests should be very possible in Washington State, probably the best timber producing land in the world. Let’s not so over restrict and add increasing costs to the detriment of the whole community and the unnecessary loss of our back country forests..