WTA Blog offers the following.

As I’ve stated earlier, the Forest Service’s budget is being hammered because it is no longer generating any revenue. This decline began in the early 1990’s under the Clinton adminstration and has only been exacerbated under the Bush administration. I really believe that we need to revisit timber harvesting on our forests again. This will provide jobs for our depressed rural areas, bring in much needed revenue to rural counties and fill the coffers of the Federal government so that they can once again justify spending money on roads and trails and campgrounds. I am not suggesting a return to the high-cutting days of the Reagan years. Smart sustainable ecologically sensitive logging is what I am calling for. Besides providing for American jobs and bringing in money for recreation-we’ll be taking the pressure off of old-growth forests in Russia, Chile and Canada. Where do you think our lumber is coming from now that we aren’t harvesting in our forests anymore? For every action there is a reaction-and bringing timber harvesting to a halt on our national forests has been devastating for recreation at home and forests in other parts of the world. The Forest Service is not the Park Service, so it needs to be addressed differently.

Emphasis mine. I don’t follow the environmental movement closely enough to know whether folks fighting to protect the environment of the Industrialized West really give a flip about what’s happening in the so-called developing world. What I do know is that in the 30 years since the United States began aggressively exporting many of its its polluting industries, things have gotten progressively better, environmentwise, within our borders, while things have gotten progressively worse in the lands where those industries landed.

Everybody has to do what they can, where they can, so by default we’re obliged to protect our own neighborhoods first and hope others have a chance to follow our example. But if all we’re doing is gumming up the engines of commerce here and encouraging environmental degradation somewhere else, we need to be thinking more about the bigger picture.

All the stuff the tree-huggers hate — commerce, greed, profit, wealth, development, industry — is as natural as a mountain stream; the problem being that human nature has gotten out of balance with the rest of nature.

The way I see it, humans are not a requirement on this world of ours; we aren’t necessarily even the most highly evolved species (I prefer Douglas Adams’ theory about dolphins). It could well be that we’re just an evolutionary accident, in which case our prognosis is not good: nature’s pretty much undefeated in regards to rectifying such errors.

I’m sure Al Gore has already said this, but it’s worth repeating; the planet doesn’t need us, but we need the planet. The whole thing, not just the parts where we happen to be shacking up.

We need our forests to thrive and our streams to be clean and our oceans to be unpolluted, but the same is true for everybody else, everywhere else.

I respect nature but I have no delusions that I can protect it. Invasive species either come into balance with their ecosystem, or they eat up all the nutrients and die. Either way, nature wins.

So if cutting a few trees in our precious forests helps sustain the forests somewhere else, I’m all for it. Nature’s revenge is inevitable, but we ought to be trying to put it off as long as possible.