There are two key places where we differ: economics and biodiversity. We differ here because your viewpoint is one of either/or, whereas mine is subsantially more nuanced. First, economics:

Your discussion of land and its use touches on land use and "repurpose" and "engines for communities". The real world isn't like that. For example, when I was looking at land in Whatcom County, WA two of the big things that were never mentioned in real estate listings but were vitally important to the property were CREP and development swaps.

CREP is a federal program administered by counties. In Whatcom County it kicks ass. You literally say "dear Whatcom County, I would like to sell you back your river." Whatcom County comes in, does an assessment, plants a shit-ton of native species and gives you CA$H MONEY$$$ in perpetuity so long as you promise to keep your cows away from the "riparian buffer" and observe the stewardship that they're paying you for. CREP in Whatcom County is no joke - they'll pay you $560 an acre per year to keep a buffer next to your stream. CREP in most places is a total joke: the next county over will pay you back for planting your own trees if you promise to never cut them down.

Development swaps are similarly toothy in Whatcom County - you can pay someone to never farm their farmable land in exchange for being allowed to develop another part of land that shouldn't be developable. I saw all sorts of "farms" where you could never again plant a crop, which no realtor on the planet felt a need to disclose. Someone with bucks decided that it was worth paying double for the land so they could build a Starbuck's or whatever. And they had to do this because Whatcom County considers the land valuable. Skagit County? No fucks given.

It comes down to incentive: the voters of Whatcom County have incentivized river conservation, at least. They're willing to pay for it because enough of them have been convinced that without rivers there are no salmon and without salmon there are no fishing jobs. Cows next to rivers has externalities that the voters of Whatcom County have labored to capture. Chances are good, however, that if Con Agra decided that they were going to start farming in Whatcom County there'd be a different outcome.

Here's the thing: I benefit if there are clean rivers in Whatcom County even if I don't eat salmon. I benefit from clean rivers in Skagit County, too. But they're one and two counties over, respectively, so I don't really have a voice in that discussion. Should I? Should more of my tax dollars go into CREP programs for Whatcom and Skagit County in order to better incentivize clean rivers?

You know what started the Malheur standoff? land management. The argument that the forest service knows better how to manage land than the ranchers who ranch cattle on it. The way the laws are written, pretty much anyone can graze cattle on public land, and pretty much no one can graze cattle on wildlife preserves. Malheur has been a beefing spot for 50 years because there's fewer places to ranch cattle because more and more public land has been developed. BUT, since the ranchers get the land pretty much for free, when the government takes it away nobody gets paid. This causes strife very much like what you're talking about.

But we don't buy out ranching permits. And we don't buy out water rights. And we don't buy out mineral rights. We just go "hey, you might have been holding that for 100 years but since you got it for free, that must be what it's worth" while also knowing that if we create a bigger national forest we get it for free anyway. And who doesn't like national forests?

The mechanism causes exactly the problems you describe: families whose trades have been plied for generations find themselves suddenly out of a job while guys with Sierra Club bumper stickers on their Teslas talk about "costs of progress". The Market giveth and the Market taketh away.

And for some dumb reason the Market is expected to work without money.

You know why ranchers cut down the Amazon? Because a former Amazon makes them money for raising cattle while an Amazon full of trees does not. If you pay a man not to work he will not work with all his might but nobody wants to buy off the Hammonds, nobody wants to buy off the gauchos, nobody wants to buy off the guys with the mineral rights. It happens, though. When I was a kid I couldn't go to the Valle without fearing buckshot in my ass. Now? Now they film TV shows there.

Here's what I know. You can own land? But you can't own an ecology. If you're using land for something that isn't so great for the environment, then we ALL have an economic incentive to make you stop doing that. The person who needs to be incentivized the most is the person who is damaging the environment, but we rely pretty heavily on sticks not carrots. None of my tax dollars are going to preventing the deforestation of the Amazon, and not nearly enough of Brazil's tax dollars are, either, even though it's making the air we breathe. And that, I think, is the biggest change we're going to have to embrace: we can't just say "this is forest land, nobody is allowed to touch it anymore" we have to say "this is NOW forest land, here's some money for your troubles now let's figure out how you can make a living doing something other than running cattle on it."

'cuz here's the thing. It's not like we need to go back to nineteen diggity two.

There is absolutely no need to plant trees where there weren't trees even a hundred years ago. If we can get back to 1955 we'll be kicking ass. When you say biodiversity you're talking about organisms that evolved for that biome... but you're also missing that forests have the highest biodiversity. Go out to the Olympic rainforest some time. Drive out towards the ocean. What you'll discover is that really, the exact same critters are in the fields as are in the forests but in the forests there are also thousands of critters that don't like fields. And really?

That shit goes back to 1945. One of the arguments made in the Uninhabitable Earth is that 80% of the environmental damage of global warming has been caused within the lifetimes of the people inhabiting the planet RIGHT NOW.

So we don't need to fuck with the snail darters. Nobody is here to destroy biomes. Personally, I'm here to argue that people say "tradition" as a way to argue the problem is thornier than it really is because fuckin' hell I come from a long line of lumberjacks who had to try something else when all the trees were cut down and my grandfather was perfectly happy spending his life as a plumber. Shit, he owned five acres. No water rights, though. He had to steal it.