Monday, July 14, 2008

Hugging Trees not Communities

Mineral County an unlikely, feisty player in national legal drama
Wednesday, July 09 2008 @ 07:51 AM MDT
by John Q. Murray

A small county along the Montana-Idaho border with 82 percent U.S. Forest Service land and a population hovering around 4,000 souls, Mineral County was an unlikely player in a national legal drama.

Wildfires that burned nearly 40,000 acres around Superior and in the Upper Ninemile in 2000 prompted the Forest Service to recommend a large-scale restoration and salvage project--the Lolo post-burn.

Just as the logging work was getting underway in February, 2003, two environmental corporations, the Ecology Center Inc. and Sierra Club Inc., filed separate lawsuits against the project. Read More

When groups file lawsuits just because they know that it will be tied up in court long enough that the timber will no longer be good enough to harvest, it is an incredible waste of natural resources. It’s also a shame that these groups can’t appreciate the importance of logging to the small communities that depend on it. They seem to place more importance on tree than a community of families.

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