Can anyone explain the mission of USFS? Why does the US maintain a bunch of wilderness when it’s buried in debt. Why not use federal assets to generate income instead of burdening taxpayers with taxes & debt payments?
Not maintaining a tremendously valuable asset (nearly priceless) is a waste.
They do have a bit of a point. The asset isn't really being maintained. It's being maintained for human use as recreation. Overall you don't need to really maintain wilderness to preserve it. Overall you just leave it untouched.
You would actually do a better job if you locked down the entire area and just spent the money on keeping everyone out as my own self fish usage of nature as recreation harms it more then it helps it.
That would work until a mining company wanted to extract oxygen from Yellowstone Quartz and met with zero public opposition to making use of "empty land."
And besides how selfish would it be to preserve nothing for the future generations.
Invasive species are the biggest problem. Fuel buildup is another. Ignoring the problem is the third.
Now your claim is forests don’t preserve themselves since humans arrived?
First off my solution is to reverse the arrival of humans. Second your claims are inconsistent as they’ve changed.
I don’t think you’re maintaining a clear and consistent thought process you’re just attacking me from every possible angle. We should be having a discussion here, don’t get defensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wilderness_areas_of_th...
It's not the spending people have a problem with, it's the what.
It’s funny how funding weapons and things like endless TSA security theater is not ever criticized for their contribution to insolvency. The gain has been negligent. No clearly the problem is the education and parks that actually contribute good and real safety and security to the country.
You can object to the overall non-profit egalitarian mission (and I do in many cases) but it's not unique to the forest service.
the FDA's job is to think about this stuff and provide recommendations and regulations. and a big part of their purview is Food, hence the F. Drugs are in the name too, but that's as much about the latest cancer medication as it as about street heroin.
However, forest recreation (which obviously requires the forests to still have trees) also generates a lot of money — both for the local economy around the forest and via things like permits for the government itself.
Basically the goal is to maintain the forests as long term assets, not sell them off in one go.
Assuming that is healthy, activate leasing on federal land (USFS & BLM) to generate income. e.g. logging, petroleum, recreational leases, mining , etc.
Reads like something straight out of George Orwell
He also was very much opposed to authoritarian rule and one of the points of 1984 was to distrust how a government used words to mislead -like in what I quoted
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown...
For basically all future years, an even greater proportion (more than two thirds) of federal government spending will be for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (old and sick and poorer people).
If that land was generating income, we could pay off the entire $35+T debt in no time.
The mission of the US Forest Service (USFS) is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the Nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.
"Public forest reservations are established to protect and improve the forests for the purpose of securing a permanent supply of timber for the people"
context: i live in PNW around Columbia gorge and the former logging towns around here hardly have any industry left.
For example, this quote is not a mission, “The U.S. Forest Service is a federal agency that manages 193 million acres of land, an area about the size of Texas.”
It might be part of what they do to accomplish their mission, but it’s not a mission.
Could you quote the part of the article that makes their mission clear?