Free Republic

Earth First! made headlines with its tree-spiking in the 1980s, but the guy who helped make the anti-logging tactic famous didn't invent it. Mike Roselle even titled one chapter of his new book "Why I Quit Spiking Trees." In it, the co-founder of Earth First!, the Rainforest Action Network and the Ruckus Society described how the practice brought old-growth timber cutting to national awareness, but became a public relations disaster for the protesters. "I think the Wobblies can take credit for it if they want, but it's been around as long as logging," Roselle said, referring to the Industrial Workers...

In a move to protect endangered species, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Thursday that his department had reversed a Bush administration decision to double the amount of logging allowed in and around old-growth forests in western Oregon. Veering between swipes at “indefensible” moves by the Bush administration and pledges to step up noncontroversial timber sales, Mr. Salazar said in a conference call with reporters that he was reinstating a compromise reached 15 years ago to limit logging with the goal of protecting watersheds, trout and salmon fisheries and endangered birds like the northern spotted owl. “Today we are taking action...

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack gave his personal approval for a 381-acre clear-cut in America's largest stand of temperate rain forest. Not cool, President Obama. Not cool at all. The Obama administration has approved the sale of timber from the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. The 17-million acre forest is the largest stand of continuous temperate rain forest in the U.S. and contains a lot of old-growth trees. It's basically a snapshot of what the world looked like before we rolled heavy onto the scene. The U.S. Forest Service gave the green light for the sale after approval from Secretary...

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday struck down the Bush administration's change to a rule designed to protect the northern spotted owl from logging in national forests. U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ruled from Oakland, Calif., that the U.S. Forest Service failed to take a hard look at the environmental impacts of changing the rule to make it easier to cut down forest habitat of species such as the spotted owl and salmon on 193 million acres of national forests.

The U.S. Forest Service will announce a "timeout" on new road-building and other development in designated roadless areas of national forests today, sources say, prolonging a seesaw battle over a policy first announced in the waning days of the Clinton administration. The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which former President Clinton issued shortly before leaving office in 2001, protects nearly 60 million acres of national forest land from logging and other development, largely in Western states. It has faced a protracted court battle that pitted conservation groups against the timber industry and several of those states. The Bush administration let the...

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — The Department of the Interior has told a federal court that it will not defend the Bush administration's decision to cut back protections for the northern spotted owl. The action could affect logging in western Oregon.

GRANTS PASS, Ore.—The Obama administration has notified a federal court that it will not defend the Bush administration's decision to cut back protections for the northern spotted owl. In a motion filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., lawyers for the Department of Interior said they based the decision on an inspector general's report finding political interference in owl protections by a former deputy assistant Interior secretary, Julie MacDonald. If the spotted owl measures developed by the Bush administration are withdrawn, it would become difficult for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to go forward with plans to...

HOULTON, Maine — James Hogan was a logger at Louisiana Pacific Corp. for 21 years when he was first laid off in 2004. He spent four years scrounging odd jobs and selling personal property to keep solvent before getting hired as a woodloader at Treeline Inc. of Lincoln in July 2008. The 46-year-old town man had almost recovered from that financial disaster, clearing $600 for a 55-hour workweek, when Treeline laid him off on Jan. 28. Since then, Hogan has searched for logging work from Fort Fairfield to Bangor without success.

Whoever said that money doesn’t grow on trees was dead wrong. For years, my grandfather harvested and sold old-growth Redwood timbers to saw mills scattered throughout California’s Santa Cruz mountains. But that was before environmentalism went mainstream and the state introduced some of the world’s toughest rules and regulations to govern the logging industry. Gone are the monstrous bulldozers of my grandfather’s years that dragged felled virgin trees over the forest floor, destroying habitats and neglecting streams and rivers in their paths. Today, California’s timber harvest operations rely on a system of checks and balances. Registered foresters, technology-savvy loggers and...

Three US governors join forces with Indonesia and Brazil to keep carbon locked up in endangered tropical forests Though it didn't seems to make an enormous splash in the press, the deal reached this week between three US states, Indonesia and Brazil seems like a fairly big deal in terms of rainforest protection. The agreement was brokered at the climate summit convened by California's ecosavvy governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Along with fellow governors from Illinois and Wisconsin, Schwarzenegger signed an agreement that could see carbon credits earned from forest protection in Indonesia or Brazil incorporated into US emissions trading schemes. Partly,...

An experimental fire planned for beetle-killed lodgepole pines in Rocky Mountain National Park should help determine when the trees are most flammable. Officials incessantly cite the increased risk of fire danger in beetle-killed forests as the prime reason to cut and thin dead lodgepole pines. But controlled burns also could prove a useful tool in treating blighted stands of pines, especially when it comes to regenerating new stands. The risk of a crown fire is thought to be greatest in stands comprised primarily of standing dead trees with red needles than among healthy, green trees. Sometime in the next few...

PORT MORESBY (AFP) - Environmental group Greenpeace said Thursday that its activists had boarded a logging ship in Papua New Guinea to prevent it exporting timber to China. Greenpeace Australia Pacific said four activists climbed on a loading crane aboard the ship Harbour Gemini at Paia Inlet on PNG's southwest coast to stop logs being loaded. Greenpeace argues the ship is being operated by Malaysian-owned logging company Rimbunan Hijau, which it accuses of breaking PNG's forestry laws. "We need to urgently protect these ancient forests to save our climate," Greenpeace campaigner Sam Moko said in a statement. "Greenpeace is asking...

Is it possible that one of Oregon's 36 counties could disappear? And if so, would anyone step in to provide basic services to its residents? The answer to the first question, according to many in and out of government, is yes, and soon. At least two Oregon counties, Curry and Josephine, warn they may stop providing state-mandated programs as soon as a year from now. But no one is sure who would step in to take over services such as elections and law enforcement, which has county leaders concerned and the state scrambling to put together a system for saving...

Top federal judges ruled this week that their own court has gone too far in holding up logging projects, saying western judges from now on must show more deference to the agencies planning the cutting. The ruling involving an Idaho timber sale is a blow to environmental groups that have increasingly relied on federal courts to block projects they see as unsound. The decision is especially striking because it comes from the federal appeals court that encompasses most national forest land in the West and is known for its liberal bent and for often siding with environmental interests. The...

With two-thirds of Oregon county governments, including Lane County, facing financial crises, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski on Monday urged residents to accept modest local property tax increases and more logging on federal forests to help stave off deep cuts in county law enforcement and other critical services. Those steps are just two of 54 recommendations in a task force report delivered to the governor on Monday. Kulongoski commissioned the report last year to address the imminent loss of about $238 million in annual federal timber payments, including $47 million a year to Lane County. The top recommendation was for Oregon...

Agriculture chief's priority: avoid jail By MATTHEW DALY, Associated Press Writer Sat Feb 23, 10:12 AM ET WASHINGTON - He overhauled federal forest policy to cut more trees — and became a lightning rod for environmentalists who say he is intent on logging every tree in his reach. After nearly seven years in office, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey still has a long to-do list. Near the top: Persuade a federal judge to keep him out of jail. Rey, a former timber industry lobbyist who has directed U.S. forest policy since 2001, also wants to set up state rules making it...

In the 1930s, when the United States was mired in a Great Depression, Congress wisely and with great vision approved the O&C Lands Act to guide the management of federal lands that once belonged to the Oregon & California Railroad... The act established a method for funding Oregon counties, allowing them to provide such vital services as public safety and road maintenance. Now, because of the efforts of the environmental movement and its litigious attorneys, the O&C funding formula that was successful for decades has been severed. Environmental groups and their allies argue that tourism can take the place of...

Nearly 3 ½ years ago, Weyerhaeuser asked state officials for approval to clear-cut 106 acres on a steep mountain slope fronting on Stillman Creek in Lewis County. This was a slide-prone drainage. But a Weyerhaeuser geologist found "no potentially unstable areas" in the area to be harvested and the state approved the logging. Earlier this month, the huge storm that enveloped Southwest Washington triggered numerous slides on this slope. Slides crashed into Stillman Creek, a major tributary of the South Fork of Chehalis River, adding to the destructive mix of mud, wood debris and floodwaters that inundated homes and farms...

Pine beetle kill trees have new purpose. Playing with Lincoln Logs as a child meant getting to be an architect constructing dream homes. Now, in Summit County, that toy is the inspiration for making those homes a reality while putting the lodgepole pine beetle kill trees to use. Using a log lathe machine, the bark is removed (which kills the pine beetle), smoothed and a notch is put in it similar to they way Lincoln Logs look so the logs will seamlessly fit together. And as this business has come together, it has gained state attention. Recently, a representative from...

WASHINGTON -- A federal rule that allowed expedited logging on national forests saved thousands of homes during the recent wildfires in California, the Forest Service chief said Thursday.

A federal appeals court has ruled the U.S. Forest Service violated federal law when it allowed logging projects without analyzing their effects on the environment. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with environmentalists who challenged a Bush administration rule that exempted certain timber sales and prescribed forest burns from environmental analysis. The Wednesday decision by the San Francisco-based court overturns a lower court ruling that favored the administration. The Sierra Club and Sierra Forest Legacy sued in 2004 challenging the Forest Service rule, which has been a key component of the Bush administration's "Healthy Forests Initiative."

About 20 piles of downed pine and aspen trees will be burned Wednesday and Thursday ... The trees were cut down this fall by crews building a buffer between the forest and neighborhoods to prevent the spread of wildfires. Once more snow falls, some of the 250 piles of timber remaining on the upper bench of Donovan Park will be burned.

New mill to turn dead trees into pellet fuel. Colorado's first wood-pellet mill owes its birth to pine beetles that are killing millions of trees near the town of Kremmling and across northwest Colorado. The diseased trees will be the new Kremmling mill's chief input - a new twist for the pellet-fuel industry. The 18,000-square-foot plant is billed as the largest west of the Mississippi. It's slated in February to start grinding trees into environmentally friendly pellets for wood-pellet stoves and industrial and commercial pellet boilers. Many of the trees are too skinny or too cracked and old to be...

When the U.S. Forest Service received no bids on two small timber sales in Eagle County earlier this year, the agency's local rangers encountered what is becoming a problem throughout the intermountain West. The federal agency got a lesson in market economics and the three-way tug of war over lumber in national forests. There were no bidders for the timber "salvage" sales designed to remove trees killed by infesting pine beetles. The Forest Service also wants to sell the dead trees so they won't add extra fuel to wildfires. The glut of dead trees is occurring at a time when...

Local foresters predict that up to 90 percent of lodgepole pines will die in some areas near West Vail. Local firefighters say that creates a veritable tenderbox that could easily ignite and spread. Sackbauer was pleased to see lots of work being done near his home this summer to reduce the risk of fire spreading, either from the forest into the neighborhood, or vice versa. workers created a 200- to 300-foot barrier of “defensible space,” a clear-cut area that aims to help stop the spread of fire. The town also hired a six-man “hand crew” to cut trees on town-owned...

WHITEFISH, Mont. — William P. Foley II pointed to the mountain. Owns it, mostly. A timber company began logging in view of his front yard a few years back. He thought they were cutting too much, so he bought the land. Mr. Foley belongs to a new wave of investors and landowners across the West who are snapping up open spaces as private playgrounds on the borders of national parks and national forests. In style and temperament, this new money differs greatly from the Western land barons of old — the timber magnates, copper kings and cattlemen who created the...

U.S. Forest Service officials have released a plan to reduce destructive wildfire potential on about 8,100 acres of forest land east of Estes Park. The goal of the Thompson River Fuel Reduction Project is to reduce the spread and intensity of wildfires that could affect private property and municipal water supplies in and around the Big and Little Thompson rivers and to protect the forest’s ecosystem. Historically, small fires thinned forest undergrowth and kept the chances for a large wildfire to a minimum. But through much of the 20th century, people suppressed those fires. That left a more dense undergrowth,...

Tree-thinning to begin in fall in Colorado, Wyo. The U.S. Forest Service is launching a major effort to battle bark beetles across an 80,000-acre swath of Colorado and Wyoming, its largest assault to date on the fire-prone forests. The plan, announced Friday, calls for thinning and tree removal in five Colorado counties and two in Wyoming. The program, aided by $8 million in new federal funding, relies on partnerships between the federal agency and the mountain counties where rust-red trees are causing the most danger to humans. Mary Ann Chandler, a Forest Service spokeswoman, said the agency has structured the...

Despite the anti-forestry scare tactics of celebrity movies, trees are the most powerful concentrators of carbon on Earth. Dr. Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeace and chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. in Vancouver. It seems like there's a new doomsday documentary every month. But seldom does one receive the coverage that Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio's latest climate-change rant, The 11th Hour, is getting. When we're bombarded anew with theatrical images of our earth's ecosystems when the film opens across B.C. this Friday, I'm concerned that we're losing sight of some indisputable facts. Here's a key piece...

So Much For Saving The Spotted Owl By MICHAEL MILSTEIN   A spotted owl on National Forest land west of Veneta, Ore. (Photo by Torsten Kjellstrand)     OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK, Wash. — Two decades after the wrenching drive to save an obscure bird divided Americans and reshaped the economy of the Pacific Northwest, the northern spotted owl is disappearing anyway.Even the most optimistic biologists now admit that the docile owl — revered and reviled as one of the more contentious symbols the nation has known — will probably never fully recover.Intensive logging of the spotted owl's old-growth forest home...

SEATTLE - A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday to stop Weyerhaeuser Co. from logging in spotted owl habitat on four parcels of private land in Washington. U.S. District Judge Marsha J. Pechman did not grant, however, an additional request by the Seattle Audubon Society to stop the state of Washington from granting permits to log in spotted owl habitat. The injunction from logging covers spotted owl habitat within 2.7 miles of the center of four circles of land in southwestern Washington that are owned by Weyerhaeuser. "It really shows the Endangered Species Act still has some teeth in...

9th U.S. Circuit - Sen. Smith's brother blasts decisions, then faces blowbackWednesday, July 25, 2007 It's a common refrain in Northwest timber country: Misguided federal judges are hastily shutting down logging instead of letting professional foresters do their jobs. Now the refrain is coming from a judge on the top federal court in the West -- who also happens to be the brother of Oregon Republican Sen. Gordon Smith. In an unusually blunt and wide-ranging opinion on a lawsuit over a small Idaho timber sale, Milan D. Smith Jr. blamed his own court for taking the law too far and...

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — Bush administration efforts to boost salvage logging after wildfires suffered a loss Tuesday when a federal appeals court upheld a ruling that had stopped harvest of burned trees in an old-growth forest reserve on federal lands in southern Oregon. The 2-1 ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling by U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken in Eugene that stopped the U.S. Bureau of Land Management from logging 23.4 million board feet of timber from 961 acres burned by the Timbered Rock fire outside Medford in 2002. The...

Environmentalists are quick to lecture the rest of us about the ways of nature. Don't clean the dead trees off the forest floor, it's natural. Cattle and horses on the range aren't native, so let the grizzlies and wolves devour them, it's natural. Man isn't part of the ecology, lock him out of vast areas of land, it's natural. It's interesting to note how the "natural" argument only applies when it is used to impose the radical environmental agenda. Case in point, the Northern Spotted Owl. Spotted owls, we were told a decade ago, were disappearing because big bad timber...

Don Young calls measure 'terrorism,' proposes selling forest to Alaska. The U.S. House of Representatives has limited federal spending on logging roads in the Tongass National Forest... part of the 2008 Interior appropriations bill. It now goes to the Senate. If the amendment is approved, it would block spending on roads constructed for use by private companies for logging operations. This is the fourth time that Reps. Steven Chabot, R-Ohio, and Robert Andrews, D-N.J., the measure's co-sponsors, have tried to curb the spending program, which has been described as a federal subsidy for the private logging industry. "To call them...

Residents are pulling for a neighbor who was forced to amputate his left leg below the knee using pocket knives after a tree fell on him, pinning him for about 11 hours. Al Hill, 66, was cutting trees on a property near the Big Dipper Mine last Friday when a tree fell on his leg and trapped him, authorities said. Alone in the woods and in an area where cellular phone service is spotty or nonexistent, Hill was forced to take the extreme measure to save himself. Eventually, a neighbor in the area heard Hill's cries for help. Eric Bookey...

A two-year campaign by environmental activists that set beautiful women in sexy lingerie against photos of denuded boreal forest ended yesterday as the corporate parent of Victoria's Secret pledged to use "greener" paper in its mammoth catalogue run. Limited Brands, a retail giant that publishes 350 million Victoria's Secret catalogues a year, will no longer use suppliers who obtain paper from any caribou habitat in Canada unless the paper has met the stringent requirements of the Forest Stewardship Council, the company said. It's the latest round in an ongoing battle where commodities - be it coffee, cotton or conifers -...

The U.S. Forest Service has not developed national guidelines to assess the risks communities face from wildfires and is unable to ensure that the most important fire prevention projects are funded first, an independent government audit has found. And while the majority of catastrophic wildfires occur in the West, nearly 58 percent of the total acres treated in fiscal year 2004 were in the southeastern states, the report said. "The Forest Service cannot clearly identify the level of risk to communities from wildfire," it said. "It cannot demonstrate to stakeholders its accomplishments in reducing those risks with the funds provided."...

WASHINGTON – The federal government spent nearly $11 million to salvage timber from an Oregon wildfire in 2002, yet it stands to get less than $9 million from selling the wood, congressional investigators say. The Bush administration and its Republican allies in Congress have said lawsuits filed by environmentalists caused delays that added to the cost of the fire. The report by the Government Accountability Office acknowledged that the delays cost money, but said the administration's decision to dramatically increase logging, coupled with the size of the fire and the complexity of environmental laws, were actually to blame for the...

Logging trucks are again rumbling through town after a nearly 15-year hiatus. The Forest Service has reopened - or has plans to reopen - numerous drainages south of Eagle Ranch to logging... There are currently two active sales south of Eagle, with another in the works, said Cary Green, the White River National Forest's timber management assistant for the Eagle area. The 60-acre Beecher Gulch salvage timber sale, on Hardscrabble Mountain, sold in 2005, and about 500,000 board feet of timber is currently being harvested... A typical 2,000-square foot, single-family home requires about 27,000 board feet of framing lumber, paneling...

BOILING SPRING LAKES, N.C., Sept. 23 (AP) — Over the past six months, landowners here have been clear-cutting thousands of trees to keep them from becoming homes for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. The chain saws started in February, when the federal Fish and Wildlife Service put Boiling Spring Lakes on notice that rapid development threatened to squeeze out the woodpecker. The agency issued a map marking 15 active woodpecker “clusters,” and announced it was working on a new one that could potentially designate whole neighborhoods of this town in southeastern North Carolina as protected habitat, subject to more-stringent building restrictions....

Millions of mountain pine beetles are swarming the Rocky Mountains...looking for new trees to destroy. The Colorado State Forest Service wants residents to help stop the spread of the devastating pest before the Pike and San Isabel national forests take on a brown cast like those in Summit and Grand counties. "It's currently at an epidemic level," ... Dead trees are a sign the forest is unhealthy; they also pose a fire risk. The U.S. Forest Service... Trees are succumbing by the millions. "If the beetle is successful in getting underneath the bark of the tree, mama mates and burrows...

SAN FRANCISCO, United States (AFP) - A federal judge has blocked a plan by the US government to allow commercial logging in California's Giant Sequoia National Monument, handing a victory to environmentalists who had sued to protect the ancient trees....(excerpt) California's Democratic attorney general, Bill Lockyer, who filed a lawsuit in 2005 aginst the Bush administration's plan, hailed the ruling as "a resounding victory for the Giant Sequoias, towering treasures that symbolize the magnificent beauty of California's Sierra Nevada range and inspire awe in all of us."

OAKRIDGE, Ore. — For a few decades, this little town on the western slope of the Cascades hopped with blue-collar prosperity, its residents cutting fat Douglas fir trees and processing them at two local mills. Into the 1980’s, people joked that poverty meant you didn’t have an RV or a boat. A high school degree wasn’t necessary to earn a living through logging or mill work, with wages roughly equal to $20 or $30 an hour in today’s terms. But by 1990 the last mill had closed, a result of shifting markets and a dwindling supply of logs because of...

Experts and emergency management officials in Grand County worry that a large stretch of forest devastated by pine beetles may be waiting to burn in a massive wildfire. At least a quarter million acres of lodge pole pines are either dead or dying because of the mountain pine beetle. They've turned once green forests into large areas of dead, red colored trees. "Some of these county roads are very thin," Billy Sumerlin, director of Grand County's Natural Resources department said. "It makes it very difficult for fire apparatus to get in, especially if we're in the process of trying to...

A 40-foot log used by protesters to block access to the Mike's Gulch timber salvage sale in Oregon’s Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest was illegally cut from a nearby botanical area, according to forest officials. The tree was used to block the Eight Dollar Road bridge spanning the Illinois River. The Silver Creek Co. paid $300,052 for the fire-killed timber that was damaged by the 2002 "Biscuit" fire. Woodrow "Woody" Forest, a member of the Oxygen Collective environmental group, said his group was committed to stop the logging. "We aren't fooling around," said Forest. "We're going to stop this logging even...

KERBY — A 40-foot log used by protesters to block access to the Mike's Gulch timber salvage sale in a roadless area of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest Tuesday morning was cut from a nearby botanical area, according to forest officials. One irate activist called it a "petty" point, and said the U.S. Forest Service and John West, president of the firm that purchased the roadless sale, had cut countless trees illegally [snip] Illinois Valley resident Annette Rasch, a longtime environmental activist who was at the protest, discounted the issue. She said she did not know where the log came...

Experts paint grim picture for local trees, eye future forest.. It seems there’s just not much good news for trees these days... Pine beetles decimating lodgepole pines across the West ...foresters are already looking ahead to what the landscape will look like in the future. “This mature pine forest is a goner,” said Cal Wettstein, district ranger for the Holy Cross and Eagle ranger districts. “We’re focusing on the next forest.” Asked what the future holds...Wettstein said simply “large fires.” Over the next two decades, the beetle-killed trees will shed their needles and their branches, then fall down and contribute...

A federal judge said Tuesday that the Bush administration had the right to overturn a ban on road construction in untouched parts of the national forests but questioned whether it could do so without weighing the possible environmental effects. U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Laporte said the Forest Service appeared to be "on solid ground" last year when it reversed a Clinton administration rule banning new roads on nearly a third of federal forests. But she questioned whether the agency violated federal law by skipping environmental studies - the heart of two lawsuits brought by 20 environmental groups and the states...

SALMON, Idaho — In a state where pine and fir outnumber residents, the loss of several privately owned spruces should hardly excite attention, let alone spark a crusade emblematic of a new trend to protect trees on private land. But in the ski community of Ketchum, Idaho, a seasonal home for the rich and famous and the last resting place of writer Ernest Hemingway, a developer's plan to cut down three towering conifers on his property spurred the city to issue an emergency order last month outlawing the felling of mature trees. Resident Lara Babalis wanted additional assurances. She spent...