The same could be said of an individual forest owner. The lumber for your house must come from your land. All the hundreds of wood-based items that we use must come from nearby trees. That's about four pounds of wood per person each day. Your needs for clean water, healthy soils, wildlife viewing, and recreation must also come from the same forest.
Nature reserves have an important role in our forest.
But bringing our forest consumption close to home helps illustrate the tremendous need to manage most forests in a long-term, sustainable manner. Failure to manage wisely puts the burden of supplying our consumption on some distant forest and compromises the future of us all. His work suggests that each acre of productive forest in the USA removed from harvest results in many more acres harvested in lesser developed countries with much looser stewardship standards. If you're concerned about tropical rainforests, you should probably be an advocate of forest management here in the Upper Peninsula. The Sierra Club is trying to stop all commercial harvest on national forest lands.