I’m looking across at the olympic peninsula right now from victoria right now and it really just settled in for me that losing that might actually be possible.
I would literally be willing to die trying to save the hoh rainforest.
Am I overreacting here?
Well, it depends. On short leases, it does work exactly like the lorax. They just clear cut that shit as hard as they can to maximize how much money they can make on it. Montana and some other northern states eventually figured out that you should set these companies up with 100 year leases that pierce the corporate veil, so that even if the company strip cuts the plot and declares bankruptcy, you can go give the owner a big fat financial wedgie for the next 100 years. I think it’s a pretty smart solution, and from what I’ve heard, the companies in these arrangements do pretty good forest management.
I’ve honestly never heard of this. Could you link me to an article or something that I could read to learn more?
Jared Diamond wrote about it in Collapse, where he covers how we handle extractive industries and how we could better regulate them. That’s where I learned about it. I tried finding an article about it, and I could find stuff talking about the policy indirectly, but nothing directly about it.