Or at least some of it has. Environmentalists are now paying timber companies to stay in business. What?
Apparently, environmental groups have decided that, though they hate clearcutting, they hate urban sprawl even more. So they are willing to subsidize timber companies to keep cutting timber so they don’t want to subdivide their property.
In the 1970s and 1980s, when the Antiplanner was working as a forestry consultant to the Sierra Club and other major environmental groups, environmentalists hated timber companies because they replaced natural, diverse forests with monocultures.
“Timber companies practice selective logging,” the always-quotable Andy Kerr liked to say: “they select a watershed, and then they log it.” Industry forests were not true monocultures like corn fields, but the were a lot less diverse — in both ages of trees and numbers of species — than natural forests.
