🚀 go-pugleaf

Murdock <murdock@environment.ws> wrote in message news:<Xns9524B9C056F2FSDF82LSDKFJSD@216.65.98.77>...
> Bush Seeks More State Say Over Federal Forests
> 2004-07-12 
> By Christopher Doering
> 
> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - State governors would gain more control over 
> federal forests under a Bush administration proposal on Monday that 
> environmentalists said would gut a Clinton-era rule to protect nearly 60 
> million acres from logging.
> The proposal, announced by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman in 
> Boise, Idaho, would effectively exempt states from federal restrictions 
> on logging and road construction in environmentally sensitive forest 
> areas unless a governor identified specific lands to be protected.
> 
> Read more at
>  
> http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/opb/news.newsmain?
> action=article&ARTICLE_ID=660059
> 
> ----------
> Bush is at it again!
> 
> This time this joker Bush is kissing up the lodging industry at the 
> expense of the ecological balance, environmental preservation and 
> stability, natural resource protection, and, above all, the 
> sustainability and livelihood of resources important to human and wild 
> life survivability.
> 
> The Bush administration, in consistent with its exploitive nature, is 
> pulling a new political maneuver to exploit the forest by pushing for a 
> new law that render greater vulnerability of the preservation of the 
> national forestry resources to axes and greed of the lodging industry.
> 
> If the new law is passed, a corrupted governor (whose bank account is 
> endowed by the timber industry) could easily and effectively single-
> handedly chop down thousands of acres of trees. The proposal by Bush 
> open an easy avenue for the timber industry to further get richer at the 
> expense of large-scale environmental impacts.
> 
> Perhaps Bush should be the tree for dogs to piss on. Only then he might 
> gain some understand of what it's like to be pissed on.

And the flood of environmentally slanted reporting begins! While there
is a slight connection between the potential of road restoration in
Roadless Areas and logging, there are a huge amount of controversial
steps involved in taking logs from a Roadless Area. Add to that the
big fact that the Roadless Areas don't hold much in the way of easily
extractable timber.

This move by the Bush Administration is equivalent to the "stealth
tactics" that Clinton used to enact his Roadless Rule days before
leaving office. However, Clinton's move was purely a political ploy as
opposed to Bush's slick way of letting his Republican governors make
the decisions.

I am NOT in favor of allowing road reconstruction to access timber
(which can only be logged in the name of "forest health"). In today's
America, it would be wasteful and expensive to propose ANY kind of
project involving logging in Roadless Areas. Courts are VERY likely to
shoot down most projects proposed in Roadless Areas. We need to
concentrate on restoring truly unhealthy forests and maybe, after 20
years of that, we can think about "restoring" the unhealthy parts of
some of those Roadless Areas (if we can even call them that, anymore).

In the meantime, this can only be bad for Bush's re-election so,
"preservationists" can revel in knowing that <G>.

Larry,     Roadless Warrior

PS The "lodging industry" is going to be pissed....lol