Look at timber prices in the late '90s, at around $50. If you count the true damage of cutting down forests, the resultant flooding, insurance claims, and so on, then the timber price should have been $100.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Ontario wood prices are among the highest in the world.
There's a basic kind of tension here. It's between those who say, I'd like to clear cut this forest and reduce it to saw timber because that's an economically productive thing for me to do.
I want the Forest Service to look at a vista with scenery, not only at lumber with a price tag.
We've set aside tens of millions of acres of those northwestern forests for perpetuity. The unemployment rate has gone not up, but down. The economy has gone up.
If you manage to stop the timber industry from cutting this forest, they'll cut that forest. If you stop oil drilling here, they'll go drill there.
Even if one tree falls down it wouldn't affect the entire forest.
Most people know that forests are the lungs of our planet, literally playing a critical role in every breath we take. And that they're also home to incredible animals like the orangutan and elephant, which will go extinct if we keep cutting down their forests.
Calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it.
If you think about it, for any kind of content on the web, the natural price per unit of these things should be under a dollar.
If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.