Free Republic

Despite the anti-forestry scare tactics of celebrity movies, trees are the most powerful concentrators of carbon on Earth. Dr. Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeace and chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. in Vancouver. It seems like there's a new doomsday documentary every month. But seldom does one receive the coverage that Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio's latest climate-change rant, The 11th Hour, is getting. When we're bombarded anew with theatrical images of our earth's ecosystems when the film opens across B.C. this Friday, I'm concerned that we're losing sight of some indisputable facts. Here's a key piece...

So Much For Saving The Spotted Owl By MICHAEL MILSTEIN   A spotted owl on National Forest land west of Veneta, Ore. (Photo by Torsten Kjellstrand)     OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK, Wash. — Two decades after the wrenching drive to save an obscure bird divided Americans and reshaped the economy of the Pacific Northwest, the northern spotted owl is disappearing anyway.Even the most optimistic biologists now admit that the docile owl — revered and reviled as one of the more contentious symbols the nation has known — will probably never fully recover.Intensive logging of the spotted owl's old-growth forest home...

SEATTLE - A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday to stop Weyerhaeuser Co. from logging in spotted owl habitat on four parcels of private land in Washington. U.S. District Judge Marsha J. Pechman did not grant, however, an additional request by the Seattle Audubon Society to stop the state of Washington from granting permits to log in spotted owl habitat. The injunction from logging covers spotted owl habitat within 2.7 miles of the center of four circles of land in southwestern Washington that are owned by Weyerhaeuser. "It really shows the Endangered Species Act still has some teeth in...

9th U.S. Circuit - Sen. Smith's brother blasts decisions, then faces blowbackWednesday, July 25, 2007 It's a common refrain in Northwest timber country: Misguided federal judges are hastily shutting down logging instead of letting professional foresters do their jobs. Now the refrain is coming from a judge on the top federal court in the West -- who also happens to be the brother of Oregon Republican Sen. Gordon Smith. In an unusually blunt and wide-ranging opinion on a lawsuit over a small Idaho timber sale, Milan D. Smith Jr. blamed his own court for taking the law too far and...

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — Bush administration efforts to boost salvage logging after wildfires suffered a loss Tuesday when a federal appeals court upheld a ruling that had stopped harvest of burned trees in an old-growth forest reserve on federal lands in southern Oregon. The 2-1 ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling by U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken in Eugene that stopped the U.S. Bureau of Land Management from logging 23.4 million board feet of timber from 961 acres burned by the Timbered Rock fire outside Medford in 2002. The...

Environmentalists are quick to lecture the rest of us about the ways of nature. Don't clean the dead trees off the forest floor, it's natural. Cattle and horses on the range aren't native, so let the grizzlies and wolves devour them, it's natural. Man isn't part of the ecology, lock him out of vast areas of land, it's natural. It's interesting to note how the "natural" argument only applies when it is used to impose the radical environmental agenda. Case in point, the Northern Spotted Owl. Spotted owls, we were told a decade ago, were disappearing because big bad timber...

Don Young calls measure 'terrorism,' proposes selling forest to Alaska. The U.S. House of Representatives has limited federal spending on logging roads in the Tongass National Forest... part of the 2008 Interior appropriations bill. It now goes to the Senate. If the amendment is approved, it would block spending on roads constructed for use by private companies for logging operations. This is the fourth time that Reps. Steven Chabot, R-Ohio, and Robert Andrews, D-N.J., the measure's co-sponsors, have tried to curb the spending program, which has been described as a federal subsidy for the private logging industry. "To call them...

Residents are pulling for a neighbor who was forced to amputate his left leg below the knee using pocket knives after a tree fell on him, pinning him for about 11 hours. Al Hill, 66, was cutting trees on a property near the Big Dipper Mine last Friday when a tree fell on his leg and trapped him, authorities said. Alone in the woods and in an area where cellular phone service is spotty or nonexistent, Hill was forced to take the extreme measure to save himself. Eventually, a neighbor in the area heard Hill's cries for help. Eric Bookey...

A two-year campaign by environmental activists that set beautiful women in sexy lingerie against photos of denuded boreal forest ended yesterday as the corporate parent of Victoria's Secret pledged to use "greener" paper in its mammoth catalogue run. Limited Brands, a retail giant that publishes 350 million Victoria's Secret catalogues a year, will no longer use suppliers who obtain paper from any caribou habitat in Canada unless the paper has met the stringent requirements of the Forest Stewardship Council, the company said. It's the latest round in an ongoing battle where commodities - be it coffee, cotton or conifers -...

The U.S. Forest Service has not developed national guidelines to assess the risks communities face from wildfires and is unable to ensure that the most important fire prevention projects are funded first, an independent government audit has found. And while the majority of catastrophic wildfires occur in the West, nearly 58 percent of the total acres treated in fiscal year 2004 were in the southeastern states, the report said. "The Forest Service cannot clearly identify the level of risk to communities from wildfire," it said. "It cannot demonstrate to stakeholders its accomplishments in reducing those risks with the funds provided."...

WASHINGTON – The federal government spent nearly $11 million to salvage timber from an Oregon wildfire in 2002, yet it stands to get less than $9 million from selling the wood, congressional investigators say. The Bush administration and its Republican allies in Congress have said lawsuits filed by environmentalists caused delays that added to the cost of the fire. The report by the Government Accountability Office acknowledged that the delays cost money, but said the administration's decision to dramatically increase logging, coupled with the size of the fire and the complexity of environmental laws, were actually to blame for the...

Logging trucks are again rumbling through town after a nearly 15-year hiatus. The Forest Service has reopened - or has plans to reopen - numerous drainages south of Eagle Ranch to logging... There are currently two active sales south of Eagle, with another in the works, said Cary Green, the White River National Forest's timber management assistant for the Eagle area. The 60-acre Beecher Gulch salvage timber sale, on Hardscrabble Mountain, sold in 2005, and about 500,000 board feet of timber is currently being harvested... A typical 2,000-square foot, single-family home requires about 27,000 board feet of framing lumber, paneling...

BOILING SPRING LAKES, N.C., Sept. 23 (AP) — Over the past six months, landowners here have been clear-cutting thousands of trees to keep them from becoming homes for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. The chain saws started in February, when the federal Fish and Wildlife Service put Boiling Spring Lakes on notice that rapid development threatened to squeeze out the woodpecker. The agency issued a map marking 15 active woodpecker “clusters,” and announced it was working on a new one that could potentially designate whole neighborhoods of this town in southeastern North Carolina as protected habitat, subject to more-stringent building restrictions....

Millions of mountain pine beetles are swarming the Rocky Mountains...looking for new trees to destroy. The Colorado State Forest Service wants residents to help stop the spread of the devastating pest before the Pike and San Isabel national forests take on a brown cast like those in Summit and Grand counties. "It's currently at an epidemic level," ... Dead trees are a sign the forest is unhealthy; they also pose a fire risk. The U.S. Forest Service... Trees are succumbing by the millions. "If the beetle is successful in getting underneath the bark of the tree, mama mates and burrows...

SAN FRANCISCO, United States (AFP) - A federal judge has blocked a plan by the US government to allow commercial logging in California's Giant Sequoia National Monument, handing a victory to environmentalists who had sued to protect the ancient trees....(excerpt) California's Democratic attorney general, Bill Lockyer, who filed a lawsuit in 2005 aginst the Bush administration's plan, hailed the ruling as "a resounding victory for the Giant Sequoias, towering treasures that symbolize the magnificent beauty of California's Sierra Nevada range and inspire awe in all of us."

OAKRIDGE, Ore. — For a few decades, this little town on the western slope of the Cascades hopped with blue-collar prosperity, its residents cutting fat Douglas fir trees and processing them at two local mills. Into the 1980’s, people joked that poverty meant you didn’t have an RV or a boat. A high school degree wasn’t necessary to earn a living through logging or mill work, with wages roughly equal to $20 or $30 an hour in today’s terms. But by 1990 the last mill had closed, a result of shifting markets and a dwindling supply of logs because of...

Experts and emergency management officials in Grand County worry that a large stretch of forest devastated by pine beetles may be waiting to burn in a massive wildfire. At least a quarter million acres of lodge pole pines are either dead or dying because of the mountain pine beetle. They've turned once green forests into large areas of dead, red colored trees. "Some of these county roads are very thin," Billy Sumerlin, director of Grand County's Natural Resources department said. "It makes it very difficult for fire apparatus to get in, especially if we're in the process of trying to...

A 40-foot log used by protesters to block access to the Mike's Gulch timber salvage sale in Oregon’s Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest was illegally cut from a nearby botanical area, according to forest officials. The tree was used to block the Eight Dollar Road bridge spanning the Illinois River. The Silver Creek Co. paid $300,052 for the fire-killed timber that was damaged by the 2002 "Biscuit" fire. Woodrow "Woody" Forest, a member of the Oxygen Collective environmental group, said his group was committed to stop the logging. "We aren't fooling around," said Forest. "We're going to stop this logging even...

KERBY — A 40-foot log used by protesters to block access to the Mike's Gulch timber salvage sale in a roadless area of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest Tuesday morning was cut from a nearby botanical area, according to forest officials. One irate activist called it a "petty" point, and said the U.S. Forest Service and John West, president of the firm that purchased the roadless sale, had cut countless trees illegally [snip] Illinois Valley resident Annette Rasch, a longtime environmental activist who was at the protest, discounted the issue. She said she did not know where the log came...

Experts paint grim picture for local trees, eye future forest.. It seems there’s just not much good news for trees these days... Pine beetles decimating lodgepole pines across the West ...foresters are already looking ahead to what the landscape will look like in the future. “This mature pine forest is a goner,” said Cal Wettstein, district ranger for the Holy Cross and Eagle ranger districts. “We’re focusing on the next forest.” Asked what the future holds...Wettstein said simply “large fires.” Over the next two decades, the beetle-killed trees will shed their needles and their branches, then fall down and contribute...