An Environmentalist Deception

Last week the R Street Institute, which claims to advocate free market policies, issued a statement celebrating the anniversary of the establishment of Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument in 1982. This is, at best, misguided. The federal government’s ever-growing control over and continuous acquisition of land across America is the antithesis of the institution of private property and undermines conscientious private stewardship of land, waters, and other natural resources. 
Every day, we see the results of a century of mismanagement of government-owned forests. Failure to harvest timber allows the forests to become overgrown and filled with overstressed, diseased, beetle-ridden, dying, and dead trees—leading to millions of acres scorched by catastrophic wildfires every summer, year after year.

Far more instructive is what Weyerhaeuser did on its forest land adjacent to what is now the National Monument. The volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, instantly destroyed 150,000 acres of forest—trees were flattened by the shock wave or killed by the intense heat. Of the forest affected, Weyerhaeuser owned about 68,000 acres, the U.S. Forest Service 64,000, Washington State 12,000, and other private forest owners 6,000.

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/09/04/an-environmentalist-deception