Comments on: Largest Conservation Deal in History a Taxpayer Funded Crapshoot?

By: Kristin Kolb

Kristin Kolb — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:05:58 +0000

This is the third so-called “largest conservation deal in history” I’ve heard about in the past 2 years.

Which certification system will be used and how will logging practices be monitored? I’m curious. The devil’s in the details.

Green in the new black, especially with timber giants.

By: Lloyd Rowsey

Lloyd Rowsey — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:19:31 +0000

Uh, you got it straight, Joshua. I was best friends with Don Miller, the first Regional Archaeologist (in about 1970) in the California Region of the Forest Service. He opposed the Go Road on the Klamath National Forest but pretty much had to follow the Agency’s line and support it. And when he went public (in about 1995) and told a reporter on the Sacramento Bee that a federal court in Arizona had required the FS in Arizona to conduct archaeological surveys before any ground breaking activities were started (as required by ARPA), including timber sales, and explained that the organization was ignoring that court order in California because California is a different part of the Forest Service organizational structure from Arizona, his days were numbered. Under Don the archaeology program in the California Region had grown from one person to over forty, and he was the first (or second) president of the California Society of Archaeologists. But the Agency imported a Mormon Mafia Forester from Washington DC, to head up the Natural Resources Department in California, and be Don’s boss. (Don was an Archaeologist, Foresters run the Forest Service.) This forester was strong on “getting out the cut” — which after all was (and is) the Agency’s main source of “paying its way.” The guy saw things rather simply and Really Believed in the free enterprise system. Don lasted maybe two years working for him.

It is atrocious what happens to old growth timber on Forest Service lands these days. But it’s been happening for centuries. Howsoever, Plum Creek is a battle more than worth fighting for, and I hear tell that “Environmentalism is the new Marxism, the new secular religion.”

So you got the cards, Joshua. Play ‘em tough.

By: Lloyd Rowsey

Lloyd Rowsey — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:18:23 +0000

What I remember about Montana from my 23 years with the Forest Service is that Montana has fires that “we only put out when their time has come” because (natural) winds blow 80-100 mph. And, there is a Mormon clique in the Forest Service, centered in Utah and Montana, called “The Montana Mafia.”

I strongly doubt that Weyerhaeuser or any other timber giant does anything in Montana that they don’t do in California and Oregon and Washington state. Or that they would do in the deep south, had it not all been turned into timber plantations by the end of the 19th century.

By: Tom Joad

Tom Joad — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:06:57 +0000

We have something similar going on down here in Florida, with U.S Sugar being paid $1.7 billion of the taxpayers money for land which the taxpayers will then have the spend a couple of billion more to restore.