EH - 108 : Forest Management

The RG in Eugene weighs in and misrepresents the entire debate completely. It is interesting that the RG gets national play on the truthout internet website. The salvage bill proposed by Walden is a disaster, but the matter is about getting into an area while the fire damage is immediate and doing incrementally no additional damage to extract value from a recently torched forest vs going in after three years of recovery like at Biscuit now and doing eco damage for wood that has lost most of its value.

There are so many rules and conflicting agency opinions, that special interest enviros embedded in government stop things by not meeting the conditions of the law. Survey and manage would work fine, if left to local people to protect local property owners who had an economic investment off of keeping the land productive. Why not allow unlimited logging from the end of the fire to the beginning of the rainy season in matrix lands only. There wouldn't be enough time to take significant volume, but you could remove hazards and set up decks for an planned logging operation the following year on very eco-friendly foresting terms. Local people are able to make able decisons when present with clear information - our BLM RAC empowered $2.1M in projects yesterday by consensus in half a day - rewarding 31 of 37 projects. All employ people, locally.

In Douglas County - 50% of the land is federally owner and off the local tax base. Mostly unmanageable forest - because the economics has been quashed completely as a message that ground zero battles can create zero return. timber and real Enviro are close enough to manage the land well, if the rules makers and economic vultures are both left out of the equation. Communities can manage themselves very well, thank you, without the need to send half of our collective incomes to the government as taxes to return the same money through congressional pork allocation. Let us just keep our resource management here and we can make what we need and sustain the resource to be livable to the standards of our communities.