by Paul Kemp

Created on: January 22, 2009

I used to live in an Oregon timber town totally surrounded by public lands. For those who don't know, the U.S. Forest Service and BLM are not in the business of logging. So, who else but the private sector is going to do it?

It is the function of the Forest Service and the BLM to manage the logging activity they decide needs to be done and they do a fairly good job at this. There are lapses, to be sure, but USFS employees are not the pawns of the timber industry they are often assumed to be.

Private logging contractors do the actual logging under the close supervision of USFS employees. Years of study by biologists, geologists, archeologists, etc., are undertaken before any cutting can take place.

If a timber sale is judged to be legal and not in conflict with federal environmental laws - and if it is not appealed by outside environmental groups, a timber company may be allowed to purchase the sale and pay for any roadbuilding and logging.

Many Western states are more than one-half owned by the federal government. If these are timberlands, they need some human help in management or else nature takes a more destructive course of clearing old and diseased trees by means of catastrophic wildfire. Then the USFS is called in usually to prevent - at great cost and environmental pollution - what nature has begun.

The U.S.. environmental movement has used photos of clearcuts on public and private lands to raise a lot of money which they have used to prevent the federal land management agencies from doing the necessary culling and occasional clearcutting that are required to keep these public assets healthy. The ammount of damage to Western timber communities has been intense in this self-righteous, but misinformed crusade to prevent any logging on public lands.

Without logging, which defrays some of the expense of managing these forestlands, the people of the United States get little reurn on these national assets. Who will pay for fires-suppression? Who will pay for the roads we like to drive through the forests? Who will pay for the rural schools?

It is a shame that the environmental groups have gone to the extent they have in preventing 90% of the logging on the small portion of federal lands that are even open to logging. It is a shame that people who have no understanding of what is needed to keep Western forests healthy, have the power to vote over the destiny of the economies of whole states and especially their most endanger human communities.

The national forests was chartered for the purpose of being used for a variety of uses, among them to produce resources necessary for the people of this nation. This purpose has effectively been defeated by the lobbying efforts of the extreme environmental groups.

We all suffer when the highly educated Forest Service personnel who are paid to watch over the longterm health of our national forests aren't allowed to do their work. Forest health suffers; wildfires increase, as well as disease. Communities decay, people move away for lack of useful employment opportunities. And, then we have to import our wood products from countries with less careful environmentl practices! What an irony.

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