[click image]Government halts forest road-building for 1 year
By MATTHEW DALY – 2 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration is calling for a one-year moratorium on road-building and development on about 50 million acres of remote national forests.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack issued a directive Thursday reinstating for one year most of a Clinton-era ban against new road construction and development in national forests. The 2001 rule banned road building and logging in more than 58 million acres of remote national forests, mostly in the West.
Conflicting court decisions issued since then have left the rule's legal status in doubt.
Vilsack said his interim directive will provide clarity that should help protect national forests until the Obama administration develops a long-term roadless policy. The directive gives Vilsack sole decision-making authority over all proposed forest management or road construction projects in designated roadless areas in all states except Idaho.
Idaho was one of two states that developed its own roadless rule under a Bush administration policy giving states more control over whether and how to block road-building in remote forests. More than 9 million acres of roadless national forests in Idaho will remain under state control, Vilsack said.
Colorado was the only other state to write its own roadless plan. The state has been working with the Forest Service to clarify language and hoped to complete work in the next few months on a plan to protect more than 4 million acres of roadless national forests. But Vilsack's directive overturns the state's efforts, officials said.
Confusion over the roadless rule extended beyond Colorado and Idaho.
In alternately upholding and overturning portions of the 2001 Clinton rule, federal courts "have created confusion and made it difficult for the U.S. Forest Service to do its job," Vilsack said in a statement. The new directive will ensure that the administration can consider activities in the affected areas while long-term roadless policy is developed and court cases move forward, Vilsack said.
The directive's most immediate effect is to halt plans for road construction in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. About 35 miles of roads are proposed as part of several timber sales pending in the Tongass, the nation's largest federal forest.
Obama's proposed "time out" is "needed and welcome," said Trip Van Noppen, president of the environmental group Earthjustice. "Roadless areas are important as the last remaining pristine areas in America, and they are a great bulwark in how we will protect our environment in an era of climate change."
Right after vineyards, roads are the most damaging to watersheds of anything we do. Logging is exponentially less harmful than conversion to agriculture, especially viniculture, and there are logging roads and there are logging roads, with the very least harmful being the most expensive and so rarely picked by timber companies, but we already have so many millions of miles of abandoned and crumbling roads that might rather be repaired, we can goddam do without another new road in our National Forests, anywhere in our timberlands, for the rest of time. If this bozo wants to promote putting them to bed properly before opening new ones, well, I'm open to that, but a one-year halt is just shit. Especially now. It doesn't pay to log when NOBODY is building. Big timber won't be the least upset about this PR gesture.
Sometimes our ancestors new better!
ReplyDeleteBiochar...
http://www.examiner.com/x-6818-Fort-Collins-Green-Living-Examiner~y2009m5d29-Biochar-a-life-preserver-for-the-environment
Oh crud...
ReplyDeleteknew
You don't even need to char it at all. Just take all organic waste and compost it with worms and spread THAT around. Also, inoculating your soils, EVEN IN ORCHARDS, with earthworms increases your yield and keeps your plants healthy enough to resist pests. If you take out the STUPID corporate profit motive from the production of food, the planet itself has everything we need to produce clean and healthy food forever.
ReplyDelete:mad:
Of course - they used to do just that, but then chemicals became easier, but they wiped out the good stuff too so the addiction to chemicals worsened. It's been 33 years since I left Wisconsin so I don't know what it is like today, but when I left, the small farmers (300-500 acres) mostly still employed the old ways. Recycled the animal waste, spreading it on the fields early in the spring before the thaw then tilling it in when the fields dried enough to work.
ReplyDeleteYou ain't done dirty work until you've cleaned out the winter cattle shed. A large three sided shed, about 40 feet square, with a roof about fifteen feet from the ground.
During the winter the cows would seek shelter from the wind and the manure would freeze on the ground. By spring the frozen pile would be eight feet deep.
When it thawed, my job was to clean out the shed. A John Deer tractor with a raisable scoop on the front. The scoop had long tines on the front of it. I would load it onto the manure wagons and the farmer would spread it on the fields. In exchange I got to live in a thirteen room farmhouse on five acres with the nearest house a mile and a half away!
(I digress)
When I got to California I was shocked by the huge farms, thousands of acres, being leveled with big laser guided blades. North of Sacramento huge tracts of flooded land for rice and giant plumes of smoke when they burned the stubble - at least they don't burn it anymore - and in the delta, plowing when the wind was blowing 35mph with huge plumes of soil blowing away in the wind!