Save the forest, cut down the trees

I am constantly in awe of the number of articles one can find involving the Bush administration tossing aside years of research based on a feeling. This time, it involves timber harvesting in the Sierras:

The Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment -- the brainchild of Bush administration appointee Jack Blackwell, the U.S. Forest Service regional forester for California -- supersedes the Sierra Nevada Framework, a Clinton- era scheme fully implemented in 2001 that emphasized ecological restoration and halted most logging throughout the Sierra's 11 national forests and one special management area.

Blackwell's amendment has been the working model for the Sierra's national forests since January, but until it was officially affirmed by forest service chief Dale Bosworth in November, it was not considered a permanent plan.

At this point, the only way that the amendment can be altered is through a "discretionary review" by Mark Rey, the undersecretary of natural resources and environment for the U.S. Department of the Interior. But such a move is extremely unlikely; Rey has a Dec. 15 deadline to initiate a review and has not signaled any such inclination.

Environmentalists generally were enraged by Blackwell's plan. They point out that the Sierra framework was a scientifically based process that took nine years to complete, and focused heavily on protecting the Sierra's most vulnerable biological community: Old-growth forests, with their attendant complex of endangered animals such as the California spotted owl and the Pacific fisher.

Blackwell's amendment, on the other hand, was largely his own vision -- one driven by a determination to reduce the vast quantities of "ladder fuels" in the forests, such as brush and thick stands of small trees.

"This (the amendment) was Jack's decision. He personally wrote it," said Matt Mathes, a spokesman for the forest service's California region. "Jack's feeling is it would be a betrayal of the forests to let them burn, a betrayal of the public trust to let homes burn."

1-2% of old growth trees, important for animals such as the California spotted owl to survive, will be removed in the name of forest conservation.

Hopefully those animals don't live in a science based world, but the one that continues to grow in the heads of those in the Bush administration.