Limitations of Sustainable Forest Management: An Economics Perspective

Abstract

This chapter reviews the pattern of economic development in forestry t and uses that pattern as a basis for commenting on sustainability. It concludes that sustainability in its narrowest sense, a “permanent forest estate” with unchanging boundaries, is a futile objective. It is more reasonable that we determine what to sustain—critical habitat, characteristics of global climate, perpetual options on the use of forest resources, or whatever—and then consider the feasible means for achieving each objective. Each objective requires its own measure of forest resources, and few of those measures are consistent with the standard measures of national forest inventories that are readily available at present. The chapter concludes by returning to the pattern of economic development in forestry as a means for instructing policy to achieve some of these objectives.