Andy thanks for your comments. The federal system is not allowed to be certified.
A good bit of the USFS and some BLM lands are in protected areas and therefore are not harvested and not managed (wilderness areas etc.) I agree that federal and state forests are important in carbon sequestration. When their management plan includes harvesting, I think they should be used for buildings or other of the many forest products.
There are many forests as you mention, that are operated with timber production as one of the primary goals. Each USFS management plan (a 10-year planning horizon) identifies what the forest stands are used for and how they will be managed. These are public processes that take into account the many voices of the nation for how a specific forest or section of a forest is managed. I think this works well, except sometimes litigation stops the plans from being accomplished. For USFS managers sakes, it would be ideal if they could plan with public input and approval and then implement without legal battles. It would also help if we had markets/uses for much of the timber that is thinned to prevent forest fires, or we begin to use more prescribed fire to reduce the fuel buildup. Alas that is a problem in a lot of national forests, especially in the West. In the South, at least in SC, our national forests and national parks use prescribed fire as a restoration tool as we recognize that pine savannahs are important habitat types for plants and animals and with prescribed fire it reduces wildfire damage.
We don’t need to overcut but we do need to recognize that some thinning and some harvesting are important tools to prevent natural disturbances that are damaging to humans, towns, and special places if we plan to live, work and play where forests are located.