On 12/2/95, Bob Flynn writes:
> Bret,
>
> The Salvage Rider by no stretch of the imagination allows logging in
> designated Wilderness Areas, and as someone who has spent my entire career in
> industry, I assure you that no one in their right mind has any desire to log
> in those areas. Sometimes we become so polarized by these emotional debates
> that it is difficult to be objective.
>
> Bob Flynn
>
Bob,
My understanding of the rider is that "all applicable
environmental laws" are suspended, which would of course include the
wilderness act of 1964. Just to be sure, I checked my copy of the
sufficiency rider, and you are correct, existing wilderness areas are
excluded from the rider (Section G, line 2A). I would like to take the
opportunity to point out that the following laws *have* been suspended:
1) The Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act('74)
2) The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976
3) The National Environmetal Policy Act of 1969
4) The Endangered Species Act of 1973
5) The National Forest Management Act of 1976
6) The Multiple Use Sustained Use Act of 1960
**7) All other applicable Federal environmental and natural
resource laws.
If the proposed salvage logging is biolgically and environmentally sound,
why must all of the laws be ignored to permit these salvage sales to
occur? Someone of course will say the it's to keep the sales from being
tied up in court by environmentalists, but the environmentalists wouldn't
consistantly win in court if the laws weren't being broken.
On another issue, David South gave us some figures the other day
regarding how much federal land has been "protected from logging." I did
some checking on this, and our numbers are a little bit differant.
Wilderness Areas are the only public lands not available for logging
(until the next rider, anyway) and these wilderness areas make up only
3.9% of the total U.S. land area, and 3/4 of this is in Alaska. Only
1.8% of the land area of the lower 48 states is protected. Almost half
of the protected wilderness east of the mississippi is in the Florida
Everglades National Park. Of the 413 wilderness areas in the lower 48,
only 4 of them are larger than 400,000 hectares. Canada, on the other
hand, has 65% of it's land area designated as wilderness, Austrailia 33%,
Brazil 28%, and China 19%. Also, of that miniscule 1.8% in the lower 48
that is designated as wilderness, slightly more than 1/4 of that is
virgin forest. I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't exactly
call 1/4 of 1.8% adequate set-aside.
Bret Diamond
Oregon, USA
diam9018@tao.sosc.edu
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