It's easier to deny bad things than it is to face problems with only bad solutions. And anyone who tries to point out the reality will be called a defeatist.
I have had many discussions over the decades, presenting hypotheticals with no good answer--and I have found very few people who would even try to address the scenario as presented. They're always "misunderstanding" it in some fashion which allows a good outcome--and such "misunderstanding" can never be corrected because they are unwilling to contemplate the hard choice even when the choice is the best for all parties. (The assault team has taken the terrorist base--but there's a little kid reaching for his bottle that's holding down the deadman on the nuke. Nobody can reach him in time, do you shoot?)
It is incredibly sad that the US has come to this though. Yet another example of the country self-harming in ways that will leave permanent scarring.
A quote I've repeated before: "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment".
Personally, I'm a big believer in upscale cities massively and leave lots of nature. Like Hong Kong.
This is also about rich guys wanting to play rancher.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/about-agency/reorganization
Moving headquarters out of DC seems like a good idea on the surface.
I see many other countries in LatAM, Asia etc having just as many beautiful places of nature. And then in Europe there’s the beauty of e.g Gothic architecture in cities that are kept (mostly) clean.
I do agree there's plenty of places in other countries that have natural beauty, but the US has a combination of very large natural spaces, kept in a mostly natural state (not over developed), and does a decent job maintaining it. This is relatively rare (although the US is not the only one).
The US Forest Service has nothing to do with the amount of ads and billboards in US cities.
Once it's gone, it's not coming back.
Which doesn't mean I want dramatic management changes, but they are hardly pristine.
Probably be healthy for encouraging development in the right places for people to realize that much of what we consider "natural" was dramatically altered fairly recently. They built the park where I live out of sand in like the last 100 years and no doubt more than a few people would object to improving it because it's natural.
I can't speak to the Eastern US, but this is not the case in the West.
I can think of zero arguments which might persuade my house representatives in NY to care to stick their necks out on public lands and resources when the economy, transportation, mass deportation and war spending are priorities.
Thanks guys. Thanks for fucking nothing.
They're fucking everything.
Wonder who will help for fires now? Conservatives do hate trees I guess.
10B$ is equal to 100k people with 100k$ a year salaries
that's 2k such salaries per state, I guess half or more can be counted for buildings/traveling/equipment expenses
no idea what to do with "1k people per state" estimate tho
Spending on social security is about $680B, medicare is $480B, defense is at $410B [1].
Microsoft's valuation is approx. $2.8T [2], Google $3.8T [3], Amazon $2.3T [4], Facebook $1.6T [5] (Linux supply side is valued at approx. $8.8T).
The FBI employs roughly 38k people with about $10B in funding [7]. The CIA employs roughly 22k people with about $15B (?) in funding [8].
So, from that perspective, $10B is roughly .5% of yearly tax revenue (and about how much the FBI/CIA are funded) and estimated 50k people is about the size of the FBI and CIA combined.
[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...
[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/key-statistics/
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/key-statistics/
[4] https://companiesmarketcap.com/amazon/marketcap/
[5] https://companiesmarketcap.com/meta-platforms/marketcap/
[6] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigatio...
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency
aka literally what I said in the next line :-)
35k is same Order-of-magnitude as the 50k I set. Still no idea what to do/compare with those numbers tho
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numbers in sister comment say FBI has same budget/headcount, so... 300m pop vs 35k agents is ~10k:1, and since area-wise ~1% is urban and ~10% is forests... each Forest Service employee gets to keep and eye on ~100k house lots worth of trees?
medium-sized city worth of forests per every man