Lawsuits
Stand in the Way of Forest Protection
By U.S. Congressman John Peterson (R-PA/5)
October 14, 2004
Our nation’s
155 national forests provide Americans with recreational opportunities,
beautiful scenery, natural resources and a sense of pride. These
forests, including Pennsylvania’s own Allegheny
National Forest, deserve our strong protection.
But protecting
our national forests does not mean locking the people out, throwing away
the key and letting nature take its course. It is this philosophy, espoused
by activists at the Allegheny Defense Project (ADP), which has prevented
the Forest Service from protecting our forests from disease, decay, insect
infestation and other threats, and has cost our region jobs, threatened
tourism and reduced revenues for schools and townships.
True forest
protection means understanding and using the tools of scientific forest
management, a concept that President Bush has wholeheartedly embraced
through his Healthy Forests Initiative.
During the
1990s, we saw the Clinton Administration throw the forest management book
out the window. Our decades-long commitment to managing our natural
resources was replaced by bureaucratic gridlock, government red tape,
and restrictions on the use of public lands for recreation, hunting and
responsible resource management.
While this
approach might have kept urban dwelling environmentalists happy, it had
no basis in scientific fact or on-the-ground reality. This one-size-fits-all
approach to forest management placed control over our national forests
in the hands of Washington bureaucrats and judges, most of whom have never
visited our national forests or met the people whose lives were affected
by their decisions.
The result
of the Clinton Administration’s experiment in land management can
be seen today. More than 21 million acres of public forest have
burned in 328,000 wildfires since 2000. Two-thirds of the trees
in our national forests are deteriorating. The spread of disease
and insect infestation threatens to destroy whole regions of our Eastern
forests. Clinton’s policies were a miserable failure, and
our nation’s forests have been paying the price.
Soon after
taking office, President Bush worked with Congress to begin the Healthy
Forests Initiative, which returns science, local input and common
sense to the process of managing our public lands. Using the tools
provided by the Initiative, federal agencies have made significant progress
toward thinning high-fuel areas at risk of wildfire, undertaking reforestation
projects, treating disease and insect infestation, and engaging in salvage
activities following natural disasters like the blowdown which occurred
last summer in northwest Pennsylvania.
As a result, hundreds of thousands of acres of national forest will be
less prone to devastating wildfires, disease, decay, and environmental
degradation. The Healthy Forests Initiative has been one of the most significant
environmental accomplishments since passage of the Clean Air and Clean
Water Acts in the 1970s.
Despite these
positive changes, significant roadblocks remain before we can truly restore
our forests to a healthy condition. Half of Pennsylvania’s forests
have a regeneration problem, according to forestry experts at Penn State
University. Ironically, the roadblock that prevents the Forest Service
from addressing this and other forest health issues are self-proclaimed
environmentalists, most of whom have no academic credentials or field
experience.
These activists,
who are strong on ideology but weak on scientific training, have hijacked
the forest management process through costly lawsuits and time-consuming
appeals. Rather than let the Forest Service do its job to protect our
forests, these activists prefer to exploit our legal system and change
the mission of the Allegheny National Forest from a multiple use forest
into a wilderness with a “no trespassing” sign posted at the
gate.
By locking
people out of the forest, the ADP rejects years of proven science, ignores
the needs and input of local communities, neglects the health of the trees
and animals living in the forest, and eliminates hunting, recreation,
and timber harvesting. Timber yield has been reduced from 80 million board
feet in 1992 to 16 million in 2003. The ADP imposes their ideology on
our communities by exploiting the legal system, wasting taxpayer dollars,
and placing forest management decisions in the hands of a judge instead
of forest management professionals.
The U.S.
Forest Service has close to 100 years of experience managing healthy forests
based on the hands-on expertise of foresters, ecologists, fish and wildlife
biologists, soil scientists, land managers, and other professionals. They
conduct rigorous environmental reviews, follow strict legal guidelines,
and conduct a public process with public input before making forest management
decisions. They are the experts.
In their
zeal to separate the trees from the people, the ADP recently filed a lawsuit
to prevent the salvage of thousands of trees that have been rotting on
the ground since last summer’s severe windstorm. The ADP would rather
leave the trees on the ground to breed insects, spread disease and even
catch fire rather than let the trees be removed. To say that the ADP “can’t
see the forest for the trees” is an understatement. Until the public,
the media and the courts reject the extreme ideology of the ADP and like-minded
groups, our forests will continue to deteriorate and our communities will
continue to suffer.
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