The Nation - News from Nov. 9, 1986

Taxpayers have been subsidizing environmental destruction for years, and most public lands should be turned over to the private sector, a study by a conservative think tank said. John Baden, an economics researcher at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who prepared the report for the National Center for Policy Analysis, said the Forest Service plans to build more than 200,000 miles of roads, principally to facilitate logging. But Baden said that existing roads “have been extended into the ecologically fragile back country of the Rocky Mountains and Alaska, where they are causing massive soil erosion and damaging trout and salmon fishing.”