I don’t know where HCN
editor Paul Larmer lives, but his statement about the U.S. Forest
Service that, “Instead of being the primary driver of all
management activities, logging has evolved into just another tool
— like fire and erosion control — to be employed in
maintaining healthy forests” sounds as if the Forest Service public
relations office wrote it (HCN, 5/16/05: The wisdom of the ground
troops).
It certainly is obvious to me, during my review
of countless federal logging proposals in Texas, gussied up as
projects to save the federally endangered red-cockaded woodpecker,
that the Forest Service has simply found another excuse to hide its
logging behind. At least in Texas, and I suspect in most of the
rest of the nation, logging is still the “King Hammer” that the
Forest Service uses for every conceivable purpose. I am tired of
seeing beautiful rolling landscapes logged and turned from a
diverse mixture of pines and hardwoods to evenly spaced, “open,
park-like” pine monocultures, burned every two to five years, no
matter what the Forest Service’s own ecological research
says.
How long will it take High Country
News to catch on that the Forest Service dog cannot be
taught new tricks? That dog does hunt (log) and trees are what it
is pointing at.
Brandt Mannchen,
Forestry Chair
Houston Sierra Club
Houston,
Texas
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Logging is an excuse, not a management tool.
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