"It's been tried. It broke down, ..."
My neighbors and myself resent having to accept low standards or no standards at all imposed on us by outsiders. We've had policies from outsiders shoved down our throat for 40 years and we're sick of it. We're tired of choking on smoke and breathing the stench of dead carcasses floating in our streams. Where does the federal government get the power and authority to say that the people of Idaho County, Idaho, through our local elected government, can't regulate potential sources of wood smoke in Idaho County (something not even discussed by federal regulators) or can't require that the levels of temperature, oxygen, and silt in our streams are maintained at higher standards than the federal government's. Nothing offends people living in rural areas more than being told they're to stupid to govern themselves better than the federal government is doing.
Nothing offends people living in rural areas more than being told they're to stupid to govern themselves better than the federal government is doing. I live in a rural area ma'am. My family has been in California for five generations. I own a mixed forest for the purpose of research. I would argue that my local government is every bit as stupid, if not worse than the Federal resource agencies.
I agree with your complaint in principle, but with one proviso. Every regulatory mechanism, local or federal, acts upon the presumption that all we can do is to minimize the harm that people might do. They do not operate as if the landowner was improving anything.
No regulatory system encourages landowners to push the state of the art in their management technology. Only competitive free markets do that. Were private landowners marketing habitat attributes as a product, we'd see vast improvements in performance, quality, and efficiency. The key then is to have a means to validate measures of that performance and encourage research, development, and experimentation toward patented processes available for license.