Environmental activists and regulators are often at odds with business leaders, who believe that efforts to conserve the environment sometimes destroys jobs and profits. Rather than the use of government regulations to protect the environment, corporate leaders advocate a free-market approach. They believe that if government gets out of the way, industries will conserve the environment because it is in their economic interest to do so. The controversy over how best to preserve forests exemplifies the debate between supporters of government regulations and proponents of free-market solutions.

Many environmentalists claim that forests need to be protected through the actions of the U.S. Forest Service and government measures such as the Northwest Forest Plan, adopted in 1993, which limited logging on most federal lands. They view logging as a threat to the biodiversity of these forests. According to Paul and Anne Ehrlich...