| This study addresses three long-term forest management questions. The first question is whether Australia should be harvesting its native forest or whether plantation forests should provide needed wood fiber. An ecological economics view of sustainability is used to argue for some harvesting of native forest to take place. The argument is that native forests are a conditionally renewable resource and should be used, and plantation forests are not necessarily sustainable given their requirement for non-renewable resources. This native forest harvesting should concentrate on sites, ecosystems, and silvicultural practices that ensure regeneration, maintain site potential, and allow ecologically mature forests to develop. The second question asks how existing linear programming-based forest planning models can be adapted to include some notion of intergenerational equity. Two alternative approaches to modeling are suggested, both based on MAXMIN objective functions. Nominal net revenue and each period's present net worth with values discounted relative to each period are used as criteria for the welfare of each period. These approaches are only a partial solution to considering intergenerational equity in forest planning models, but are proposed as an improvement over current practice since only slight modifications to standard formulations of the forest planning problem are required. The third question is how issues from intergenerational justice and intergenerational equity can be incorporated into forest management. A theoretical framework from intergenerational justice is that the current generation should attempt to act justly toward the future. From this framework, the conservation of options approach to intergenerational equity is selected. If forest condition, as defined by a set of forest compositional and structural classes, is used to represent the options available to the next generation, then the current generation can attempt to act justly toward the future by moving toward a more balanced forest condition. A balanced forest condition represents more options to the next generation than an unbalanced one. Each question addresses the needs of future generations, by passing on conditionally renewable resources, by incorporating intergenerational equity concerns in forest planning, and by attempting to act justly toward the future by passing on a more balanced forest condition. |
