Visiting Europe, where most private land has access ways (and I believe laws regarding shared use, in some cases) gives feelings of respect towards both neighbors and the earth, which should (in my and woodie guthrie’s opinion, at least) be a shared experience.
I’m not sure if it’s at all related to the first point, but in America, it would probably be more common for visitors (or ‘trespassers’) to leave someone else’s land worse than they found it (when compared to the shared respect generally found in Europe). Speaking in broad strokes, of course.
https://malegislature.gov/laws/generallaws/partiv/titlei/cha...
The Forest Service has one of the most checkered pasts you can imagine, they're in many ways the opposite of what people imagine when they hear the name.
To quote Bill Bryson:
> “In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way—it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world in the control of a single body. The Forest Service has the second highest number of road engineers of any government institution on the planet. To say that these guys like to build roads barely hints at their level of dedication. Show them a stand of trees anywhere and they will regard it thoughtfully for a long while, and say at last, “You know, we could put a road here.” It is the avowed aim of the U.S. Forest Service to construct 580,000 miles of additional forest road by the middle of the next century. The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. Of the Forest Service’s 150 million acres of loggable land, about two-thirds is held in store for the future. The remaining one-third—49 million acres, or an area roughly twice the size of Ohio—is available for logging. It allows huge swathes of land to be clear-cut, including (to take one recent but heartbreaking example) 209 acres of thousand-year-old redwoods in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest.”
That is the USFS. The guys who help loggers. The fools who so often mismanaged forest management based on Victorian ideas about "the woods". These are the geniuses who kill off fish in large waterways with rotenone.
A lot of what Trump is doing is highly questionable or outright terrible, but I don't shed a tear for this agency, and you shouldn't either. The wilds would be better without them.
Is the USFS not failing to protect old growth? Have their policies around controlled burns not been criticized for decades as antiquated? Do they not poison rivers to "control undesirable fish species"?
Or by contrast, what are they doing that you think excuses their shortcomings?
Shouldn't that elevate property values in rural areas? Being able to buy a get-away property with a large tract of land and its own forest/lake/mountain/whatever.
Thinking about comparable situations in Scotland, you can get a rural property cheaply, or even a spare castle, but .. that's not where the jobs are, that's not where people's friends or social scenes are, there's no shops, and often the weather isn't on your side. What people want is parks as an amenity they can visit. I suppose they'll be privatized and people will be charged to visit them.
They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them
-- Joni Mitchell Tears of sorrow running deep
Running silent in my sleep
-- Joan Baez