Yep. What's more that same era of management contributed to rules which have hampered clearing such on private land as well.
That's right... Even without the regulations, JUST the absence of roads, road equipment, logging equipment, and the lack of a huge manpower reserve that the logging industry used to provide...
I doubt folks understand the power of that. There was a partnership between industry and government when it came to fires. When I worked logging and road crew, if there was a bad fire, you stopped what you were doing, and loaded the whole dang show up on lowboys and went firefighting.
Do you have ANY idea what 20 or so D6 and D8 cats can do when you need a miles long firebreak? It's a thing of beauty, man. And literally hundreds of guys used to mountains, used to ditch digging, used to chain saws, used to sawyering and bumping knots... The hot shots and fire planes were like the special ops guys in that fire game, but it was the logging industry that supplied the heavy equipment and the army needed to take and defend ground...
UNDERSTAND FOLKS: All of that is GONE. No more heavy equipment, no more army. Hell, no roads to get in there to it either. ALL GONE.
And the same goes for mills. Without that big industry, all the mills left. There used to be, I don't know, maybe 10 big mills here in the valley, and countless little jippo mills... Now there are none. In the midst of the biggest forest on the earth now, there are none. So IF private land is to be logged, those logs need to either be suitable for plywood (the only surviving plant),those logs have to be trucked a very long way, and need to be transferred too, from logging trucks to flatbed highway haulers. The cost of shipping pretty well means it is not viable. The cost of importing road crews and logging crews and higher cost to buy them (fewer makes high demand and raises prices) also makes it less viable.
And now you get to buy your lumber from Canada... While all that timber in the states goes up in smoke.