I’ll never understand why people think like this. Alaska is the size of 4 western states. If you want to hike where there are no people just close your eyes and stick your finger on a map and go for it. But to say that people shouldn’t be able to use atv’s to access hundreds of sq miles of land because you don’t like atv’s blows my mind. Just don’t hike at trailheads that allow access to atv’s and you’ll never hear them. Hunting animals that are huge and saying that if you can’t backpack it out you aren’t a hunter is just [bleep] stupid. Especially when the animal will go bad or get eaten by predators before you can complete the job.
Death by a thousand cuts.......that's what is happening to our public lands.
Logging if done properly can benefit more than hurt--but it is NEVER all or nothing. Problem is, rarely does the federal agencies require it be done properly. And it may not be cost effective for the private firm buying the timber sale if required to do it properly.
When forests grow back from logging--even select cuts--they grow back differently. Is that better or worse? Often we don't know because these things play out over centuries or millenniums.
The single biggest impact of logging?--the roads that are left when the loggers leave. Logging is a temporary impact, constant use of roads is permanent.
Not to mention even today most timber sales on federal lands are break even at best for the taxpayer, more often than not the taxpayer loses money. Nothing like the huge losses of the timber program during the Reagan/Watt/Hodel era, whose policies engendered such a backlash it effectively ended logging for large and mid size timber sales in the lower 48.
