Forest Service OKs Plan to Log Trees

[Khephra]

GRANTS PASS, Ore. -- The U.S. Forest Service signed off on a plan Thursday to log thousands of acres of trees killed by a huge forest fire in 2002 -- a decision that will probably bring a legal challenge from environmentalists.

Under the plan, loggers will be allowed to cut 370 million board feet of timber, enough to build 24,000 homes, from about 20,000 acres of federal land over the next two years. That is far less than the timber industry had sought.

The area in the rugged Klamath Mountains of southwestern Oregon was burned two summers ago when four fires started by lightning merged into the nation's biggest and costliest blaze of the year. It burned across 500,000 acres, threatened 17,000 people and cost $153 million to fight.

The question of what to do with the burned timber has sparked intense political and scientific debates, and environmentalists have already indicated that they may challenge the plan in court.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-timber-salvage,0,3455551.story?coll=sns-ap-nation-headlines

[stepnw1f]

1. Challenge Everything Done While This Adminitration Runs The Show.

They are Corrupt as hell.

[quaoar]

2. Trees are bad

The Forest Service and the timber industry always make this sound like it is necessary to protect lives and manage the forests efficiently. But what generally happens is the timber companies come in and clear-cut everything in sight and leave a moonscape traversed by taxpayer-funded access roads.