it goes back to the old Gifford Pinchot/John Muir days. Should the land be kept in reserve, for esthetic reasons, or be used to maximize human benefit?

How should wilderness be "managed"? For maximum extractive economic benefit? For multiple uses? Conservation? Some combination of the three? Not to mention, There is no "real" wilderness any more, all parts of the earth, all habitats and landscapes are interconnected, dependent on each other, and undergoing constant change, both natural and anthropocentric. And no matter what we do to the land, how much we try to leave it be, we make it different than it would be if there was no one there at all.

This is why people study to be foresters and ecologists. We have to decide whether the world exists to be "harvested" to maximize short term benefit and profit for whoever gets there first, or kept in some imaginary and impossible pristine condition forever while humans suffer for esthetic reasons. Or maybe it should be managed somewhere in between, so we can benefit from it economically, but in a responsible and sustainable manner.

And there is no one single answer that is always true. If we need to dam and flood the Grand Canyon to feed the world's starving millions, then so be it. But if you want to do it to provide hydro power for the neon signs of the Las Vegas Strip, then I say screw Las Vegas and everyone who lives there.

Timber is like fisheries, or agricultural land, or ground water, or rangeland, any renewable resource. We shouldn't mine it. We can make a big bundle on it right away, or we can settle for a smaller, but long term return on investment for a long time. Or something in between. It's our decision, and now we have the technical expertise to make it wisely. The national forests are a natural resource, but that resource is not the timber than's on it, but the timber that it can produce in a sustainable manner for the indefinite future. It also has other uses, wildlife, recreation, climate modification, water catchment and storage, erosion control, flood protection, genetic diversity. The list goes on. I don't expect a mining or timber company to care much for any use but their own. Fine, let them buy their own land. The national forests belong to the rest of us. The world does not belong to whoever gets there first, it belongs to all of us. And we can all benefit from it forever, we can have our cake and eat it too if we're willing to be responsible and to share.

I have no problem with leasing the National forests to timber interests, providing the timber removed can be replaced through natural or directed means. They should pay a fair lease price which can be applied to managing that range. They should also employ practices that do not damage the land, like roads blasted through for the sole purpose of making timber removable cheap. And the authority managing the land should not be spending public funds to provide infrastructure or services that the loggers should be paying for themselves. Will this make the timber more expensive? Of course it will. But they're already getting cutting privleges on public land, what else do they want.

I remember the (Interior Secretary) James Watt days, when the Fed was loaning money to local sawmills to buy big-tree processing equipment in order to generate local votes and support for their land giveaways to the big timber companies. "Jobs for little local loggers" my ass.
It was organized mass rape of the land for private profit.

Teach a man how to fish, and he can feed himself forever.
Teach a man how to fish with dynamite and we'll all starve, and probably sooner than you think..