Oregon: Remember Mount Hood’s Boundary Clearcut?

Among the more grotesque of the thousands of clear cuts that sprawl
across the Mount Hood National Forest is a nearly 800-acre complex
along the west shoulder of Vista Ridge called the Boundary clear cut.
The Boundary cut is remarkable in that it quite literally defines the
boundary of the Mount Hood Wilderness for nearly two miles, following
an painfully straight line right over the lakes, streams and canyons
that stood in its way. The surgical precision of following such an
arbitrary slice across the terrain betrays an astonishing degree of
defiance and disregard for the management directive that comes with
wilderness designations. The Forest Service planners who sold this
timber in the late 1980s and early 90s were clearly carving off
whatever could be rationalized under the narrowest interpretation of
environmental law — if this was a lawful timber sale, at all. After
all, how could cutting a pristine forest to the edge of wilderness
have anything but a harmful effect on the adjacent wilderness value?
The price of this recklessness is substantial. The impact to the
forest and watershed are the subject of this two-part article. This
part focuses on the broken mindset that led to the devastation, and
how it illustrates a fundamental flaw in the U.S. Forest Service
mission: that this agency is simultaneously tasked with both
protecting and exploiting the resources under its management. The
first flaw in agency mindset that led to this environmental tragedy is
the notion that high-elevations forest can be farmed like so many rows
of corn. At an elevation of 4,800 feet, the forest here consists
almost entirely of slow-growing noble fir. In this zone, “sustainable”
logging becomes tree mining, as it will be decades before these
forests recover, and centuries before they regain their former stature
as a mature ecosystem.
http://wyeastblog.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/boundary-clear-cut-part-one/

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