Timber mill official says forest service caters to environmentalists
Copyright 2001 Associated Press
June 15, 2001
SPEARFISH, S.D. - A Spearfish timber mill official says the U.S. Forest Service is catering to "radical environmentalists," after two groups appealed a decision allowing logging in the Jasper Fire area.
"I think the people in the Black Hills are losing because forest health is going down the tanks and I see nothing being done to reverse that at the (Black Hills National Forest) supervisor's office," Pope and Talbot General Manager Jim Rarick said.
The appeal delays until at least July 10 the cutting of 14.4 million board feet of burned timber.
It was filed last week by Donald J. Duerr of Biodiversity Associates in Laramie, Wyo., and Brian Brademeyer of the Black Hills Group of the Sierra Club in Rapid City. The groups say the Forest Service should have spent more time studying the effects of the fire.
Rarick said claims made in the appeal of the Forest Service favoring the timber industry are far from the truth.
"We see a lot of rhetoric but not much action," he said.
"These groups have appealed basically every decision in the past two or three years, and they continue to cry about the timber industry getting favorable treatment from the Forest Service when the fact is there have been no timber sales on the Black Hills National Forest for 18 months," he said. "If that is favorable treatment, we don't need it."
Rarick said the management of the forest has been getting worse every year.
"We see the bugs continue to spread, we have seen the effects of last year's fires, and unless the Forest Service here in the Black Hills can stop catering to the radical environmentalists, we are going to see continued problems with bugs and fire."
Brademeyer defended the claims made in the appeal. He said the decision to allow loggers to salvage the timber was based on the 1997 Forest Plan revision which has been ruled as defective in court.
"They were ordered to correct the plan before they did any more projects," he said.
The position of the Sierra Club is that "logging is the most shortsighted thing you can do to a forest, it has to be stopped," he said.
The Forest Service is not protecting a single acre from logging, he said.
"The only way to protect anything is to end all of this logging," he said.
He said the logging may be seen as a reward to the timber industry for arson.
"If this is perceived as a reward to the timber industry for arson, although the timber industry was not involved in any way in the actual arson, that sends a bad message," said Brademeyer.