I know, this is something we all "know," but it is nice to hear a federal official say it: threats to forests include land development. Indeed, during this last decade, private forests were routinely cut then cookie-cutter houses stuck on the land rather than re-foresting. In the meantime, we lost ecological services: shade, clean water, greenhouse gas sinks.
Shelterwood Consulting has long argued that we need to think through our policies and land use strategies for private forests. Somehow we need to make it more profitable for forests to be managed as working forests than sold for real estate developments. Instead of arguing over not having "any" tree cut, maybe, just maybe, we should think that well managed forests are far far better than myriad look alike homes that in the end never sold.
