arvest nearly worthless timber, and that does so based on a system that rewards managers for felling trees in spite of the damage to the environment and losses to the federal Treasury.
The forests have been maintained with a doctrine of multiple use, and these different uses include the harvesting of commercial timber, cheap grazing land for cattle, multimillion dollar mining operations, recreational uses, and maintenance of a 360,000 mile network of roads that is eight times longer than all the U.S. interstate highways combined. Until World War II, the national forests could accommodate all users comfortably. Of course, at that time these forests were providing less than five percent of the nation's wood. A building boom developed after the war so that the annual cut from the national forests increased from 3.5 billion board feet in 1950 to 9.4 billion board feet in 1960, an increase that concerned Congress so much that it passed laws requiring the Forest Service to balance the goals of conservation and resource development. The national forests today still supply some 14 percent of the nation's timber output, and this timber is cheap for logging companies because the Forest Service builds all the roads and also sells off the trees at prices th
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