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- Info
Regulation of private forest practices
| Author: |
Cubbage, Frederick W. |
| Date: |
1995 |
| Periodical: |
Journal of Forestry |
| Abstract: |
In the approximately three decades since the advent of the modern environmental movement, the United States has enacted a host of laws, regulations, and other policies designed to protect public and private lands. The environmental laws passed in the 1960s and the 1970s and strengthened since seem to have substantially improved water and air quality. As government policies become or threaten to become more restrictive, however, debates over their benefits and costs for private forest, agricultural, and range landowners have grown divisive. Environmental protection advocates perceive current forest practices as excessively destructive; believe that uncontrolled market processes lead to wasteful resource exploitation; distrust the willingness of forest landowners to act in the public interest; and advocate strict regulation of forest practices to correct these problems. Private rights groups perceive environmentalists to be self-serving in their calls for more regulation; believe constitutional protections provide almost unlimited property rights; fear loss of operating freedom and profits; and abhor the expansion of government command-and-control bureaucracies. These enduring tensions between public interests and private rights have led to a host of government interventions in free market outcomes, ranging from education and technical and financial assistance to public regulation of private forestry. This paper examines the role of both regulatory and nonregulatory approaches in encouraging environmentally "sound" forest practices on private lands. |
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