USA: Native Forest Council on 160 public lands bills (S-22) that “protects” 200 million acres
This bill is a Trojan Horse. It’s bad. It’s far worse than the
Clinton NW Forest Plan’s “protections” of which it guts, Just look at
Title IV. According to Sen Wyden & Rep DeFazio S-22 will double the
logging in the form of massive commercial thinning. Further it will
reduce current regulations and protections, mandates collaboration as
the process for forest management (defenders and destroyers of nature
finding common ground?), promotes “stewardship contracting”,
thinning, and logging to “restore” the forest. All too similar to
and uses much of the same language and arguments for the Bush
Administration’s “Healthy Forests” bill.
Look at its supporters,
tiber industry folks and DLC timber Democrats? While S-22 has some
good parts much of those are merely crumbs thrown in to mollify or
buy us off. However, the Native Forest Council and many other
organizations oppose it for its costs and how it makes so much worse.
We need less logging, not more. We need more protection for Class 3 &
4 streams, not less. We need more concern for deforestation and
climate change, not less. Here in the West the bill mostly “protects”
lands (in particular onthe Mt Hood NF) that are of lower value or are
already administratively protected one way or another while it
mandates collaborative restoration logging “treatments” on the rest.
Out here some stewardship contracting, “restoration” logging sales are
even described in the FS docs as “heavy commercial thinning” and are
in a naturally recovering post-fire area of mostly 120 year old large
douglas fir trees. Sen Wyden and Rep DeFazio are both publicly
advocating for at least a doubling of the logging in order to “save
the old growth” as if 120 year-old growth or baby old growth weren’t
equally important or even more important to the future than just the
big old growth trees. Desperate greens and timid or sold out
Democrats, supported or frightened by timber dollars (directly or
indirectly) can’t wait to ram this giant but quite bad Omnibus bill
thru Congress before anyone wakes up to just how bad it is. I printed
one section of Title IX and it is 300 pages and if you can understand
it – it’s horrible. So beware of what you support. Read the whole
thing first. Many blessings and best wishes, Tim Hermach, Native
Forest Council http://www.forestcouncil.org
— Posted to http://forestpolicyresearch.com via gmail to posterous and
also to forestpolicyresearch@yahoogroups.com