It's often less about protecting a natural resource per se than it is not completely fucking up the environment. Also too, many environmentalist these days are also supporters of things like robust social safety nets.

>Quite. They also tend to care more about the resource than the
>people, which the people quite naturally will be inclined to resent.

This is not 100% untrue, but it is a bit of an unfair stereotype. Certainly radical environmentalists of this type exists, but mainstream environmentalism, especially of the kind that has actually managed to enact political change (which is a heavy goddamn lift) has usually been massively people-centric. Because people and the ecology they inhabit are inexplicably intertwined, and despite our vaunted mastery of the natural world we don't actually know how hard we can punch the planet in the balls before we discover we've made a terrible mistake.

> When I was a kid, Great
>Northern's managers prided themselves on the company's woodlands being
>in better shape, however foresters measure these things, than the
>unorganized territories still belonging to the state (absent, e.g.,
>Baxter State Park, which was left unmanaged on purpose as part of its
>charter). They had a massive woodlands department that was dedicated
>to things like scientifically managed harvesting, replanting, and so
>on. It was all very judicious.

I bow to your superior knowledge on this specific topic. What little I know about forest conservation and management in the mid-to-late 20th century involves either the west coast (One of my good friends wrote a whole book on the environmental and labor struggles that happened there in the 80s and 90s, Empire of Timber which I don't recommend you actually buy because it is an textbook and therefore costs a lot of money)) or, oddly, the UK. The UK had some real issues with conservation in the postwar era, because they thought they were engaged in responsible replanting efforts but it turns out they were actually fostering an unsustainable monoculture.

But I don't know a whole lot about forestry in New England. I do know that the forests we have now are radically different than the ones we had 300 years ago, and that the shipping industry is somewhat to blame for that inasmuch as the word blame is appropriate, but that's about it.

>Also, because the company was run by people who lived where it
>operated, and not, e.g., Quebecois venture capitalists or hedge fund
>executives from New Hampshire,*

What the hell is the deal with New Hampshire, anyway? Maine and Vermont seem like relatively sane places, politically speaking. I mean, yeah, sure, LePage, but 62% of Mainers were smart enough to vote for someone who wasn't LePage, if not quite smart enough to all decide who the not-LePage would be. New Hampshire seems like it has a disproportionate number of "I've got mine, fuck you" types wielding power in it.

-Merc
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