Editor:
The ongoing controversy surrounding the Allegheny National Forest has been prompted by radical preservationists bent on stopping all timber management. They use several approaches toward their goal of zero cut. For a variety of reasons, zero cut will drastically affect this forest. We are all familiar with the economic impacts that will result from a zero cut policy. Recently, after hearing the arguments from both sides, a Federal judge ruled that logging and the Indiana bat can co-exist on the Allegheny. This is good news but we cannot think this finishes the radical attack on our way of life and our ecological/economic pictures.
Recent news releases report that the Rainbow clan is coming once again to the National Forest. When a radical group, the Allegheny Defense Project, began their attack, it was over a USFS plan to manage 5,000 acres of dead and dying trees. Their only victory occurred with that lawsuit against the Forest Service. The judge ruled that the impact from cutting 5,000 acres was significant and so ordered the Forest Service to do a full blown Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Mortality II management project. The Forest Service has not yet completed that EIS for Mortality II.
Meanwhile, the value of those trees had declined. If cutting 5,000 acres of dead and dying trees represents a significant impact upon the ANF, and if cutting threatens the Indiana bet, then we must also consider the impact of 20,000 Rainbow's on a small area of the ANF a significant episode deserving of a comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement.
As good stewards of the unique forest resource, all of us in Forest, Warren, McKean, and Elk counties should contact the U.S. Forest Service to urge a completed EIS prior to allowing the Rainbow's use of this threatened and endangered resource. The sheer numbers will trample young tree seedlings, wild flowers and important insect species beneath their feet. Nesting neo-tropical birds will be disturbed. Campfires use firewood, some or all gathered in the ANF, and that wood could have rotted providing for valuable fungi and insects. The smoke of the campfires will disrupt many animal species, including the Indiana bat.
If we who live here are to suffer from the idiocy of some of the monkey-wrenching activities of radicals over this forest resource, we, too, can demand that those some radicals (or folks like them) must abide by the same laws and regulations they use to destroy our communities and landscapes.
In fact, the ADP radicals gather every fall in the ANF and an EIS should also be completed to assess their impact upon the forest.
Write to the Forest Service headquarters in Warren requesting the EIS
for
the Rainbow gathering. Write to you U.S. Representative and U.S.
Senator
demanding the same thing. Write Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck in
Washington, D.C. demanding the EIS. Enough is enough. It's time folks
stand up to these green bullies, pagans, and sympathetic bureaucrats.
We
ALL must play by the same rules, those of us that suffer from radical
action
and the radicals themselves.
Sincerely,
Douglas Carlson
Forest County
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