🚀 go-pugleaf

I can personally attest to the need for this legislation. I just returned
from a vacation in northern Idaho, and travelled the eastern border of
Oregon and along the Snake and Salmon rivers in western Idaho. If you
have never been in this part of the country, this area is where the high
desert meets the forests of the western Rockies. It is a transition zone,
and the climate and soil are such that forests are not easily established
here. This is exactly in Foley's district. The cutting is in a state of
high frenzy right now, probably because a lot of private owners are
trying to cut before they're told they have to stop. Quayle's stupid
(tax-payer supported) Committee on Economic Competitiveness (or whatever
it's called)--its mission to get rid of "excessive" regulation--has
just convinced the Forest Service to severely weaken the appeals process
for proposed timber cuts. I read an Idaho paper said that this ruling
will allow an additional 30,000 truck loads of timber in '93. This is
horrible. Once these transition zones are cut, they never come back. It
probably took millions of years, as the ice receded, for these forests
to be established.

Eastern Oregon is in its 7th year of drought. The economic situation is
very bad. Take a drive through there; to see what the people are doing to
their land in order to survive will make you sick. The trees that have
been left standing are dying. There was one section I drove through--near
a wildlife refuge on highway 395--where there was at least 20 miles of
dead trees on both sides of the road.

These people are basically eating themselves alive. If you need to be
convinced that the environmental policies of the Reagan/Bush years
are bankrupt, shadow my vacation route. There will be no doubt in your
mind that the way this country consumes natural resources is evil.

(I'll tell you about the paper mills in Lewiston, Idaho, and Pasco,
Waashington if you care to hear about it.)

								MPA