On June 14, 2023, the New York Times published an opinion by Robert Worthington, a philanthropist who pledged $1 million to plant a million trees, to combat climate change by removing and storing carbon dioxide (Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/14/opinion/climate-change-trees-global-warming.html). After planting 650,000 trees and $250,000 remaining, he expresses willingness to invest the remaining amount, and more, if the Forest Service would allow conservation investors like him to participate in timber sales, not for cutting down the trees, but to preserving them.

Worthington describes what Henry George outlined as a “maladjustment in the cooperative sharing of societal wealth.”  On one hand, the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate warns of the potential loss of lives due to inaction on climate change, specifically the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. However, on the other hand, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service and the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management engage in timber sales, resulting in the annual loss of 12 million mature trees since 2010. This loss equates to a reduction of 576 million pounds of CO2 sequestering capacity each year, equivalent to adding 57,000 more cars on the road annually. While some tree harvesting is necessary to thin forests of dead or dying trees, government harvesting primarily focuses on cash flow, generating up to $300 million per year since 2001.