there's a serious flaw to the argument that says do nothing, it's the same flaw that leads to the argument that man is the reason for the destruction of the planet and that is the absence of the fact that man is an integral part of the environment. Name another species of mammal as widely spread throughout the globe as man, now how can you formulate an argument that extracts man from the very environment in which he lives?

"Thousand hour fuels are going because fire has been withheld from the system."--Hillbilly

that has been a regular thesis in that we fought fires and suppressed them too quickly and moving on from that one of the consequences, as well as the lack of lumber extraction from the forests, was that our forests now have six to ten times more trees per acre than they did historically, removing these fuels actually gets the forests back to where they were historically.

I haven't called for a house on every forty. Though public ownership of the forests has proven to be woefully inadequate, to assume that private ownership is somehow flawed assumes that the very people who formulated the policies that created public ownership of large tracts of lands would all be given to immediately bulldozing the lands for a profit and that is simply not true. Not to mention the economic feasibility roadblocks that the very terrain creates in most of these lands, let's face it, if these lands were developable, don't you think the vast resources available to the so called Robber Barons of the 19th century when there was lackluster government regulation, that those lands would have been developed?

You can't extract man from his environment and the entire globe is his environment. Therefore any solution must consider mankind. And man can thin the forests and create a healthier situation. Will there be unintended consequences, sure there will, but there always are with any decision that is made and leaving them alone in my estimation has greater unintended consequences, plus it disregards the fact that man will not leave it alone, there will be some attempt to manage them, why not manage them correctly?