Hoosier National Park? Why not designate it to protect the Indiana forest from logging

There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

A great need exists today to protect the public lands known as national forests. Imagine these forests becoming more like our national parks. The US Forest Service, an agency in the Department of Agriculture, currently conducts commercial timber sales in national forests. The National Park System, however, an agency of the US government within the Department of the Interior, is mandated to 'preserve unimpaired' the natural landscape. Thus, no commercial logging takes place in national parks.

The overcrowded conditions of current national parks demonstrate the necessity for more such recreational space, rapidly diminishing biodiversity is desperate for more preserves and mature forests are the most efficient and economical way of sequestering carbon in the urgent fight against climate change.

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Furthermore, a recent study from economists at the University of Houston shows that protected recreational spaces draw more people into an area and increase overall employment and income in the local economy. The National Park Service announced that visitor spending in communities near national parks in 2020 resulted in a $28.6 billion benefit to the nation’s economy. In Indiana, the amount of timber contributed by the Hoosier National Forest is negligible compared to the great majority that comes from private land.

There is not a strong economic reason to log our public forests. Rather, it is time to end resource extraction. As currently managed, our national forests are seriously threatened by commercial logging and intentional burning. Two proposals for Indiana’s sole national forest serve to exemplify this. Called by the seemingly innocuous name 'restoration projects,' the Houston South Vegetation Management and Buffalo Springs Restoration Projects alone propose to log approximately 10,000 acres and burn close to 30,000 acres within the Hoosier National Forest, directly affecting 20% of the roughly 200,000 acres that make up the forest, and indirectly affecting a much wider area.

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These two proposed 'restorations' critically endanger the watersheds of both Lake Monroe and Patoka Lake, the sources of drinking water for hundreds of thousands of Hoosiers, as well as endanger human well-being and multiple species that depend upon mature forests.

Intentionally burning public forests and using abundant federal dollars to do so is now happening across the entire national forest system. Burning our forests at a time when there is already too much carbon in the atmosphere and when forests everywhere already seem to be catching on fire at an alarming rate seems like a very bad plan. Instead, we should be protecting the existing forests on our public land. Studies show that mature forests are much more restorative to people and capable of sequestering more carbon than young forests. Furthermore, the eco-services they provide make them much more valuable standing than cut for timber. It is time to protect and repurpose all mature forests on public land and nurture degraded forests toward a healthy old growth condition.

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There are two possible ways to achieve this goal.

Ideally, the US Forest Service would move rapidly to make changes to forest logging and burning, acknowledging the severe environmental challenges of the 21st century. They should also listen to the will of the majority of the people who oppose resource extraction from our national forests — often done at taxpayers’ expense.

In Indiana, this means creating a new forest plan for the Hoosier National Forest that ends resource extraction. Should they fail to do this, a promising option is for the federal government to redesignate national forests as 'national parks and preserves,' since the National Park System is designed to conserve the ecosystems and beauty of important wild spaces. Inclusion of the term 'preserve' means that recreational opportunities such as public hunting, fishing, foraging and backcountry camping are allowed.

The Hoosier National Park and Preserve? There is a growing national movement to accomplish this transformation, evident in an article that appeared in Sierra Club Magazine titled “A Modest Proposal: We Need More National Parks.” One of the proposals put forth in this article is the redesignation of the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia into the High Allegheny National Park. There is also a precedent for such a proposal in our region: the redesignation of the Shawnee National Forest to the Shawnee National Park and Climate Preserve in Illinois.

The reasoning behind this appealing movement is that the millions of acres administered by the US Forest Service are vulnerable to damaging resource extraction, whereas land-designated national parks are mandated to be left 'unimpaired.'

This all comes at a time when our planet is increasingly feeling the devastating impacts of climate change, experiencing massive losses of biodiversity and declining public access to an intact natural world. Preserving more of our public forests will address all of these concerns and is a politically bi-partisan issue.

Finally, I want to suggest that our souls depend upon such places, as a location to encounter, develop a relationship with, and perhaps even find a love for the more-than-human world.

David Haberman is a professor emeritus in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University. He has taught courses on religion and ecology, and he is currently researching forests and climate change.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Hoosier National Forest should be a national park for protection