(Larry Harrell) wrote in message . com...
(Aozotorp) wrote in message ...
http://www.berkshireeagle.com/Storie...035387,00.html

Article Last Updated:
Saturday, December 07, 2002 - 12:18:27 AM MST


Cutting down the forest for the trees

Just over the Vermont line from Rowe is a vast lowland forest called Lamb
Brook, filled with giant beech and maple trees that provide food for bears and
shelter for migratory songbirds. A few years ago, the U.S. Forest Service
proposed to open up this part of the Green Mountain National Forest to logging,
but an immense popular outcry and a successful lawsuit in federal court by a
local environmental group, Green Mountain Forest Watch, saved Lamb Brook. For a
little while, anyway.
Anyone who's taken a driving trip out west has seen the way the national
forests are managed there, whole hillsides scalped to the bare earth for mile
after mile and replanted as tree farms.

Obviously, this person has not actually BEEN out west. Most of what I
see on Federal lands are overstocked and unhealthy forests.


As it will be again = if they find no large timber to cut!

This
person has to be talking about Pacific Northwest private timber
industry lands. Again, clearcutting (over 5 acres) has been
specifically banned since the early 90's in the USFS Region 5
(California).

In Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine,
the hillsides are greener. The difference lies in citizen participation. The
National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires decisions on the national
forests, including the writing of the "forest plans" that govern their use, to
be open to citizens. Out west, the timber industry dominates the process.

Is that why Federal timber volumes in the West are down by at least an
order of magnitude since the Spotted Owl? Why didn't the timber
industry block the decision to voluntarily and radically reduce timber
harvests to protect the unlisted California Spotted Owl in California
(including the nearly universal ban on harvesting trees over 30" in
diameter)?

Oh they did much better! Since the 1981 seminal research report on
old-growth forests which indicated that some species may need
old-growth forests to survive, the Froest service immediately
responded to this hard question by logging as much old growth forest
as it could in the 1980's!

Indeed it was one ploy of the Forest Service to focus on the Spotted
Owl over all the other species of concern so that they could minimize
the view of the problem at hand = Thus minimizing the other species!

Finally in 1992, District Judge Bill Dwyer ordered the Forest Service
to end all such old-growth cutting until protection for all the
endangered species in the forests was considered!

A Panel set up by the Forest Service to study this concept found there
was little if any scientific information on the other species of the
area! This included 328 species which very little was known about!

The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan called for surveys that would protect
these old-growth species until it was established what specific needs
each would have to survive@!

However the Forest services response was to act as if no plan was to
be viewed. Biologists wer not allowed to go out and carry out these
surveys! Operations in progess were stopped! Even so the Forest
service sought to exempt species from protection until Judge Dwyer in
1999 ordered no such exemptions would exist without the surveys!

With Dwyer gone and the Bush regime in control, Bush is set to return
to the old 1980's clear cutting = especially after meeting in closed
door meeting with timber interests!