Feds allow logging in Giant Sequioa Forest

[jfern]

Copied from a DailyKos diary

Conservation organizations challenged the Bush administration's decision to log Giant Sequoia National Monument in federal court in January of 2005. The groups also encouraged the administration and the court to look to neighboring Sequoia National Park for a better way to manage the rare forest.

The Sierra Club, Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign, Earth Island Institute, Tule River Conservancy, Sequoia Forest Keeper, and Center for Biological Diversity jointly filed the complaint in San Francisco Federal District Court.

"These magnificent giant Sequoia forests are found nowhere else on earth," explained Bruce Hamilton, Sierra Club Conservation Director. "It makes no sense for the Bush administration to sacrifice such a spectacular national treasure. It also happens to be illegal."

The Giant Sequoia National Monument was created within the Sequoia National Forest to forever protect the groves and their eco-systems from the logging-oriented practices currently governing our forests. The Forest Service, under the guidance of the Bush administration, proposes logging to supress fire and logging to protect the public from the trees within the forest.

The Forest Service claims that logging of large trees is necessary to prevent severe forest fires. Actually, logging of large trees removes the most fire-resistant elements--the big trees! Highly flammable brush grows in the open spaces where the logged trees once stood. This brush is more flammable than the trees it replaced so the wildfire intensity and severity is actually increased a few years after the so-called "fire prevention" logging occurs.

You can send letters to the California Senators in an effort to prevent the logging of a national treasure.

Send letters to:
Senator Dianne Feinstein
One Post St., #2450
San Francisco, CA 94104

--and--

Senator Barbara Boxer
1700 Montgomery St., #240
San Francisco, CA 94111

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/2/15/81314/3556

[CottonBear]

1. Holy shit! God's gonna get us if they do this.

Those forests are Nature's cathedrals. The whole ecosystem is about fire and surviving fire. :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared:

[Zenlitened]

2. What sane person would want to cut down trees...

... of an age and type that exist nowhere else on Earth? I swear, it's all about spite with these whack-jobs.

And that point about preventing forest fires is a FACT, an indisputable fact. It's brush -- burning fiercely and igniting the canopy -- that fuels massive fires, not tall, established trees:

...logging of large trees removes the most fire-resistant elements--the big trees! Highly flammable brush grows in the open spaces where the logged trees once stood. This brush is more flammable than the trees it replaced so the wildfire intensity and severity is actually increased a few years after the so-called "fire prevention" logging occurs.

Unbelievable. We are living in a Hell made real.

[China_cat]

3. protect the public from the trees within the forest?

What are they going to do? Eat people?

[glitch]

4. At what point do we realize the civil contract has been broken

and start acting accordingly?

[jfern]

5. State's rights only apply to conservative issues

It has never applied to liberal issues, and never will.

State's rights is for lynching blacks. It's not for following California environmental laws.