Sustainable forestry in the balance

In the United States we increasingly restrict wood production in the name of sustainability while going abroad for an ever larger share of the wood we consume, even though our own forest resources per capita are greater than the rest of the Earth. The unintended consequence is we transfer impacts of harvesting and consumption elsewhere. If we believe impacts of harvesting and consumption are primarily positive, we should embrace them locally. If we believe impacts are negative, we should take responsibility for them locally and mitigate them. Sustainable forest management requires scalable solutions across geopolitical units: states, regions, nations, and Earth. There are some simple measures of sustainability applicable across all these scales to establish sideboards for sustainable forest management.