I'm going to dust off my right wing nuttiness... and point out that Government owned and preserved land is a complete waste of natural resources.
If you have a forest, and you preserve it, and leave it in its natural state... and it burns to the ground in a massive fire... what good did preserving it do?
You could argue the chances of that happening are small (which is wrong, but that's another topic), but comparitavely, people get very little use out of a preserved forest.
I lived in the middle of the redwood forest in northern california most of my life. They're loggign up there ALL THE TIME. You know what... I've never seen a bare spot of ground.
There are pictures of when the whole mountainside was clearcut in the early part of last century... but you know what... the forest grew back! There are plenty of animals around, they have plenty of space to roam free... there are wonderful preserves around, as well as plenty of trees that can be cut down.
The forest is healthier if maintained rather than let run wild.
To bring up analogies with Tolkien (boy would he have hated that
), the Old Forest had run wild forever, and it became a very bad place outside of where Bombadil ran things, and even there when he didn't pay attention things got ugly... The Ents were the Shepards of the trees, and when they maintained the forests, things were good, but when they stopped, and just sat around letting things grow wild... the trees got dumb, and mean, and wild... Not exactly pleasant.
There's waste by cutting down too much, and there's waste by not cutting down enough. There is a spot in between where forests flourish, and we get nice furniture
.