New Economy in the Rural Northwest?

Booming timber towns with three-shift lumber mills are a distant memory in the densely forested Northwest. Now, with the housing market and the economy in crisis, some rural areas have never been more raw. Mills keep closing.

People keep leaving. Unemployment in some counties is near 20(!) percent.

Yet in parts of the region, the decline is being met by an unlikely optimism.
Some people who have long fought to clear-cut the region’s verdant slopes are trying to reposition themselves for a more environmentally friendly economy, motivated by changing political interests, the federal stimulus package and sheer desperation.

So far the good news. I understand the government is trying to help unemployed people by creating jobs, but this is a waste of money and effort according to me.
Before I turn down the whole idea, it might be easier to be something more specific about the plans.

The general idea is to create jobs and help the environment in one action.
Unemployed loggers are looking for work thinning federal forests, a task for which the stimulus package devotes $500 million; the goal is to make forests more resistant to wildfires and disease. I really can not believe it.

$500 million… $500 million for thinning federal forests.

In a region with an unemployment of almost 20%, they are giving $500 million for thinning federal forests.

It is good that the government wants to invest in orde to give unemployed people a decent job of course and it is even better that they are helping nature in the same way but there must be other ways to invest those $500 million.
Even if we presume that you can put more than half the people of that 20 percent to work, those jobs will only be created on short-term. It would be much better to invest on long term.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/business/energy-environment/29forests.html?pagewanted=2&em