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The issue here is not science, it is money, Peterson said.

There is the answer right there.

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"The issue here is not science, it is money, Peterson said."

B.S., and he knows it. About 87 percent of that USDA bill so many people on this forum were growling about (FARM SUBSIDIES AND FOOD STAMPS!!!) went to refund the Forestry Department, which was guttied by Clinton in 2000 to pay for his land grabbing environmental legacy. After Clinton rerouted the Forestry Dept's funding, there was no money to fight the worst wildfire season in US history.

Pererson's using the argument the Sierra Club is now using, and they're all lying.

Healthy Forest projects are routinely contested in Court By EPIC and the Klamath Forest Alliance here. We just had the Beaver Creek Project end up in court. It is a Project developed over half a decade as a demonstration project by the multi-interest Klamath Province Advisory Committee. Environmentalists were intimately involved in its design. Even so, that does not make it sue-proof by the well-funded extremist groups.

We desperately need the HFI on our Klamath National Forest - particularly my disrtict. Because of salmon, spotted owls and litigious extreme environmental groups, we haven't harvested in years.

There are three types of projects going on in my Forest and they are different. (1) Green timber sales - such as the Knob where the tree sitters were; (2) Fuel reduction immediately around endangered Forest communities in the 1 1/2 mile buffer to drop crown fires to the ground (a.k.a. "shaded fuel breaks.") These are being coordinated with new Fire Safe Councils to work on private lands adjacent to the Forest; and (3) the HFI projects that work on the Health of the Forest. These project take out fire prone brush. They thin overcroweded small diameter trees so competition is less and the trees grow bigger and stronger faster. They take out decadent snags, bug unfested trees and trees where they need to open up a stand to let sun come in for the growth of smaller trees. They take out blow-down.

Our Forest no longer takes out even a small fraction of the growth it experiences each year. The species of trees are not giant redwoods or Sequoias. They are Ponderosa pine, Douglas fire, red fir, and cedar. Lightning caused fire is an historic part of the ecosystem. The natural pattern here is not dense old growth, but a mosaic of fire-caused meadows, stands thinned by fire and even-aged stands. What the enviros are forcing is not natural. Species that depend on natural patterns to provide early seral stage meadows are suffering.

The extreme enviros whine about any green trees taken in a Healthy Forest Project. Lets get down to some realism. The lack of harvest has taken our last sawmill in Siskiyou County. (We have historically had as many as 50.) We have one peeler corer mill left for small diameter trees. Transportation costs to mills hundreds of miles away eat up profits and take local jobs and taxes.

We have no local biomass facilities. There is one in Modoc County or Arcata, I believe and one in Anderson. Both 100s of miles from the source. Transportation cuts eat up profits.

In short, we have lost our infrastructure. No one will invest in putting in a new sawmill or putting in a biomass facility unless they can be guaranteed a sue-resistant supply of material to run it on a profitable basis.

Without some profit to offset the costs of planning and studies, brushing, road treatment, thinning, underburning, restoration and and all the handwork involved, Forest projects will cost the taxpayors billions. Some marketable useable materials make it worth the while of contractors to bid on the project - even if it is just at a reduced COST to the taxpayor, rather than income to the Forest.

Right now, the federal government has been forceed into a box by extreme environmentalists where it fails miserably as a steward of public resources. These resources are burning at an alarming rate causing loss to private property, loss of fish through sediment and wildlife through habitat loss. It is heartbreaking.

We sit here amongst hundreds of miles of trees as far as the eye can see and await the fire that will take them. It is obscene that extremist groups have been able to leverage so much power that this bill isn't flying through the Senate.