Sounds like a sound plan to me!

Matt
99 V-10 Super Duty, Super Cab 4x4

    Greetings and Salutations...
    Great parody, in the spirit of Swift's "A Modest Proposal"!

http://www.motherearthnews.com/library/1985_November_December/The_Deer_of_North_
America
http://www.wheretoshoot.org/specialty/hunting2.html

    I find it interesting that these two sites seem to agree
pretty well on the NUMBER of deer in America...  However, alas, it
also seems that at best there are 1/3 to 1/4 the number of deer
that roamed the land when American was unsullied wilderness.
    As for the lumber...I suspect that you don't have a lot
of contact with building ANYTHING from wood.   Over the past
30 years that *I* have been woodworking, I have seen some
significant changes.
    1) The quality of construction material has dropped
enormously and the cost has risen through the roof.  In the
70s, one could get good, stright 2x4 stock with almost no knots
from small branches and tight, strong grain for $0.50/$75 per
stud.  Now...the studs are full of knots and pin-branch roots,
they curl all over the place and have grain the size of soda
straws, and, cost $2.50 or more each.
    2) In the 60s and 70s it used to be very easy to get 1"x12"
stock for cabinetry.  Not any more.  If it is available, it is often
a "special order", it is bloody expensive, and, while the quality has
not dropped as much as with construction grade stuff, it is still
harder to get great looking wood these days.
    Why is this the case?   In the case of construction lumber,
the logging industry clear-cut the old growth timber, then walked
away from the denuded landscape.  After decades of neglect, they
were forced to start replanting...but have chosen to plant species
that will grow to "maturity" in the shortest possible time.  Volume
of wood does not come for free.  The quicker the wood grows, the more
of if that is left as air when it dries.  The more air...the less
structurally sound it is.   The only way to fix this problem is to
go back to planting slower growing, denser species, and, take the
time to let them come to maturnity.  If this takes 30 years instead
of 10...so be it.
    As for the case of cabinet woods...again...the old growth
has been cut, and, with these woods (walnut, Maple, etc), it takes
many decades to produce a tree several feet in diameter, so we may
not see wood of that quality again.
    To say there are more forests than when America was discovered
is at worst an outright falsehood, or, at best, an overstatement of
reality.  There may be almost as many trees...but how can one compare
a grove of twigs a foot or less in diameter, that has grown in a
couple of decades, to a grove of giants some twenty FEET in diameter,
that have been growing for a couple hundred years?   There is no
comparison between the quality and quantity of wood available from
the latter..

    History shows that if we allow the logging companies to
harvest the way they WANT, we end up with millions of acres of bare,
eroding land, covered with rotting stumps.  The fact of the matter is
that companies (especially now) are run by short-sighted beancounters
whose only goal is to keep their cozy jobs by ensuring that the stock
holders get big returns every quarter.  This means cutting expenses
to the bone..and in their eyes, investing in the future by replanting
logged lands is nothing more than a huge hassle and expense...to be
cut.
    It is true that wood is a renewable resource, but, it requires
that the public pressure the industry to not only replant the logged
lands but, to replant them with a diverse collection of species that
reflects the original mix of plants.  This will ensure that the next
time the land is logged, the quality of the wood gathered will be
as good as the last time.  However, this also gets back to the fact
that this will cut down on growth speed...and will require patience
to wait for the next harvest.
    So, on the positive side, thanks to public pressure, the
industry IS replanting trees.  The downside is that they are ONLY
planting the species that they believe will produce the most volume
of wood in the shortest time.   It is called "monoculture" and, is a
bad thing.  It leaves huge stands of trees vulnerable to infection,
pests, etc, allowing huge areas of them to be killed when they
get infected.  One of the benefits of a multi-species planting
is that it leaves islands of a given species, and makes it harder
for pests to travel from area to area...  If you want a human
example...look what happened to the Native American cultures when
the European diseases were introduced.   The natives had no
immunity to them, so, the bugs spread like wildfire, and, what
would have been a mild illness to a European was deadly to
the Native.  
    Oh yea...it can happen again, by the by...I just heard
a report that antibiotic resistant Staph infections have started
popping up outside of the hospitals where they have been most
common.  Modern medicines are great, but, something like this
could cut back on that 11 billion population in the world REALLy
quickly.

    Hum....

    Regards
    dave mundt
   

That should be been one of the Republican Party's planks way back in 1996.
They probably would have won. Geese are also on the rise, so are Bald
Eagles, so are Herons, Egrets, Hawks, Falcons, etc. My photos from my area
in the 1950's shows no trees, just new subdivisions and flat prairie
farmland. Now the entire area looks like wilderness forest. The only
emergency ecological problems are the damn imports brought over in the
ballast tanks of foreign ships.