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Several decades ago, some thinkers, including the famous MIT economist Paul Samuelson in the 1970s, built models to study forests as a renewable resource; Samuelson calculated the "maximum sustained yield" at which a forest could be cleared while being regrown.

The intergovernmental panel’s findings in 2018 could not have been more clear: “In the long term, a sustainable forest-management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fiber or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit.”

The “Alaska model,” as it has come to be known, holds an overarching policy to prevent overfishing and though the enshrinement of sustained yield in the state constitution it has largely been a success.

“If you go too quickly, you have an age-size-class gap, and that will affect our long-term sustained yield,” he said.

“Managing public lands for multiple-use and sustained yield on a landscape scale is a challenge that BLM should not take on alone,” Rugwell said.