David Maywhoor

I thought that Mr. Maywhoor's presentation was interesting and very much well meaning. I understand his points that is a negative thing to have the government using public taxpayer land to clear cut forests. It is obviously a very passionate topic for him and one that is important to the environment of Ohio. His organization seems well-meaning as well. However I did disagree with several points that Mr. Maywhoor made, namely that the use of public land for forestry shoudl be completely done away with. While he notes that the clear cutting of forests is short-sighted in terms of the environment I would also argue that his view taht all public land should be preserved and not used for logging is also short sighted. The reason I say this is that he does not take into account the local economies that are supported by public land logging. He noted that many of the communities that use public land for logging arefairly poor and rely on the logging for jobs etc. To completely cut all those jobs and take away the local economy of some communities could be devastating to the people that live there. It seems as if Mr. Maywhoor was calling for the abolishment of logging without creating a viable future option, especially for the local communities involved. The other issue I took a different stance on which I believe Eric Reece would agree with me on is the fact that the money from logging is mainly used by the communities. Maywhoor suggested that the money be distributed around the state equally to maximize fairness for the taxpayers of Ohio. However as it is I believe the money created from the logging needs to stay mainly in the communities from which it came. It does not make sense in my mind to distribute those funds to places in Ohio such as Cleveland or Cincinnati which have no interests or economic ties to Ohio logging. In order to create a better future for those communities that are logging it is necessary to give back the resources created from logging includign better education, jobs, and community improvemment projects. If these steps are taken then perhaps we could eventually ween off public logging and still have productive, sustainable communities.