Citing pushback from Republicans and the timber industry, the Biden administration has pulled its proposed old-growth forest plan. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore announced the decision in a Jan. 7 letter to forest supervisors.
As previously reported, the Forest Service proposed slight increases in old-growth protections in a draft environmental impact statement, which would have allowed logging in old-growth forests under the guise of wildfire mitigation.
Comments by Bill Imbergamo, executive director of the industry-friendly Federal Forest Resource Coalition, followed the typical circular logic used to justify increased logging on public lands: “Old growth forests are succumbing to fire, insects, and disease, and they need management to make them healthier and more resilient.”
Meanwhile, “Forest management” and other human interventions are responsible for damaging forest resilience by exacerbating the threat to our forests from “fire, insect and disease.”
Photo: Old-growth cedars grow on the Kootenai National Forest in Montana (Photo by Don Paulson/Jaynes Gallery/DanitaDelimont.com).
