Give Bush an acre, and he'll take a forest

The public should tell the president to stop trying to nibble away at the nation's forests under the guise of small payments to schools.

The Roanoke Times
Feb. 14, 2006



President Bush plans to chip away at the nation's forests, selling a few acres here and there to fund a rural school program. It's not unlike a college student thinking about selling his printer to buy paper. A student, of course, immediately recognizes the folly of such a choice.

Bush might not be so easily swayed. Selling off small parcels of the national forests will raise nearly $1 billion to subsidize payments to rural schools over five years. Then what? More land for pocket change?

Of the 30 Virginia counties receiving stipends from the rural schools fund, only a handful receive checks large enough to offset even one teacher's salary. While any money is welcome in cash-strapped school systems, the $1,714 that Roanoke received in 2005 isn't worth keeping if it means selling off bits and pieces of the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests to do so.

The payments come through a federal program, set to expire this year, in which the U.S. Forest Service shares revenue it collects (mostly from timber sales) to counties where national forests are located. The administration claims that the fund is dwindling because logging in the forests is on the decline.

The administration dismisses the impact, referring merely to tiny, unwanted parcels within the vast 193-million-acre national forest system.

But the land is not the president's to sell. It didn't belong to him when he embarked on a quest to open roadless areas to logging and oil and gas drilling. And he certainly doesn't hold the title to the 300,000 acres, 5,717 of them in Virginia, that he plans to auction at his rummage sale.

The land belongs to all Americans, present and future, most of whom don't own private trails to hike, or streams to fish, or lands to simply bird-watch or soak up the outdoors.

Instead, they hold in common the public lands. Whether they visited a forest lately or just have good intentions to do so in the future, Americans ought to be appalled that the president would squander their holdings. Once the land is sold, whether it is as small as a quarter-acre in Rockbridge County or as large as a 920-acre parcel in Bland, it cannot easily be recaptured.

Americans will have lost something of far greater value than a few thousands dollars funneled into school systems.