65 



than increased, under the successful political pressure applied by the same people who 

 pushed the park expansion, many of whom are back for more In this case. Once again the 

 cry is that we must save the last redwoods. I^ow many more times after this one? 



It has been apparent to me for a long time now that difficult problems of coexistence 

 were going to emerge between pnvate-sector ownership of fbrestlands and the socialist 

 planned national forest system. But we have consistently moved in the wrong direction in 

 recent years, and nobody seerr® to get it! The spectacle of President Clinton going to the 

 Portland timber summit on one day to deal with problems arising essentially with a socialist 

 institution in the U. S. , and the next day to go to Vancouver to try and advise President 

 Yeltsin on how to extract the Russian economy from its socialist quagmire is simply too much 

 irony for me to take. Mr Yettsin is doing the best he can to privatize state assets including 

 land, over the objections of the hard-line apparatchiks while the U. S. continues apace to 

 add more and more land to federal ovmership. 



The proposed taking under this bill is, however, somewhat diffiBrwnt from either one of 

 the RNP takings. In those cases noone doubted that fair nriarket value would be paid for the 

 land and severance on mills closed as a result. The Redwood Employee Protection Program 

 (REPP) was the same sort of political bribery to call off labor opposition that the so-called 

 option 9 program offiers today. But now the claim is being made that the timber has already 

 been effectively taken through confiscatory regulations innposed at the state level and 

 therefore eminent domain payments need not provide full mart<et-value compensation. This 

 cynical strategy has become the norm in today's environmental movement. 



The 'science' behind the drive for more and nrxire stringent regulation of forestlands. 

 public and private, is also highly suspect. One need only to consider the self-interest of 

 those who get major grants of federal nnoney to study threatened or endangered species to 

 realize that there is a fundamental conflict of interest involved. Ronald Bailey in his new 



