ABSTRACT
Two matters, one empirical and one conceptual, are of critical importance in understanding the economics of multiple-use management of public forest lands. The first concerns one widely acknowledged and generally wellknown fact: the extent to which recreation resources have emerged as the dominant resources on the public forestlands during the second half of the twentieth century.1 Except on the Pacific slope forests and the southern forests, the value of national forest recreation resource services substantially exceeds the value of national forest timber resources. For the National Forest System overall, the value of annual recreational services is roughly double the value of the annual timber sales (see chapters 2 and 7). Curiously, the implications of this development have at times been overlooked in analytic policy studies. Failure to recognize this development often leads to flawed policy recommendations by those whose analyses implicitly assume that systemwide national forest policy prescriptions can be made largely on the basis of national forest timber data.2
