by Ken Ward Jr., Staff Writer

The Charleston Gazette

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Forest Berg hauled a slice of a 420-year-old Douglas fir to downtown Charleston Tuesday to protest Bush administration forest policies.

Berg is part of the Ancient Forest Roadshow, a group that is traveling the country to raise public awareness of threats to public forests.

"It weighs about a thousand pounds," Berg said, pointing to the six-foot diameter "Doug" mounted on a flatbed trailer parked on Capitol Street.

The tree, which stood more than 200-feet tall, used to live in the Williamette National Forest in western Oregon.

In a news release, the Ancient Forest Roadshow noted that the tree was 11 years old when Shakespeare wrote "Romeo and Juliet." When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, the tree was 195 years old.

But in 2002, the tree was cut down, as part of the Berry Patch timber sale.

John King, a roadie with the Ancient Forest Roadshow, said that Berry Patch is "just one example of more than 150 planned timber sales that target nearly 80,000 acres of mature and old-growth forest in western Oregon and Washington."

Now, environmentalists are hauling a slice of the tree around the country "to allow Americans to see for themselves what could be lost, not just in the Northwest forests, but also in West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest."

Berg used to spend summers as a seasonal forest and park ranger, but left that job to spread the word about threats to America's ancient forests.

"The public needs to know that with a former timber industry lobbyist, Mark Rey, overseeing the management of our national forests, a fox is guarding the henhouse," Berg said.

Berg said that old forests play vital roles in regional ecosystems, providing habitat for unique species and supporting a broader variety of plants and animals than younger forests.

Anna Sale, an organizer with the Sierra Club's West Virginia office, joined the forest group for a brief press conference to highlight concerns about Bush forest policies' local impacts.

"We're seeing some of the Bush administration's forest rules come home to West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest," Sale said.

Sale cited two proposed timber sales in the Mon forest, the Lower Clover sale and the Upper Williams sale.

In all, the two sales propose more than 2,700 acres of logging, according to U.S. Forest Service records.

Both proposed sales are being handled under a Bush administration rule change finalized in June 2003.

Forest Service officials say that the changes "clarify and reduce the complexity" of the rules that govern public involvement in forest activities.

Environmental groups say that the changes seek to cut back on public rights to receive notice of pending timber sales or other national forest decisions, comment on such projects before they are finalized, and ultimately appeal the agency's decisions.

In the two proposed sales on the Mon, Sale said, forest officials have sought public comment without first completing detailed environmental assessments.

Instead, she said, the agency will only release those assessments after it has made a final decision. "This leaves the public out of the process," Sale said.

In a report issued Tuesday, the Sierra Club said that the Bush process "asks citizens to give input on logging in the Mon without telling them anything about the possible harm to the environment."

Last week, the Bush administration proposed to throw out a Clinton-era rule that protected the last remaining untouched wilderness areas in the national forest system. This "roadless rule" essentially outlawed mining, drilling and development on about 60 million of the forest system's 190 million acres.

Under the Bush proposal, governors would have to petition the federal government to protect remote forest areas from road building that opens those areas to logging and other development.

Rep. Nick J. Rahall, D-W.Va. a ranking Democrat on the House Resources Committee, said that, under this proposal, federal policy governing these areas "would cease to exist, and instead become a patchwork quilt consisting of the individual political preferences of state governors."

"The administration has done a Pontius Pilate by essentially washing the federal government's hands of protecting the last pristine areas of national forests in America from unnecessary road building," Rahall said.

Environmental groups are also concerned about the effect new Bush policies will have on ongoing revisions to the management plan for the Mon's nearly 1 million acres of forest.

"The current plan restricts logging and motorized access on nearly 25 percent of the forest, but as happened in national forests across the country under the Bush administration's watch, these protections may be weakened," the Sierra Club report warned.

The Roadshow will move to the Lewis County Fair in Weston today and a monster truck rally in Mineral Wells on Friday before returning to Charleston on Saturday.

To contact staff writer Ken Ward Jr., use e-mail or call 348-1702.


Informant: Earth First! Media

21.07.2004

Burning of the Amazon rainforest has made Brazil one of the world's top 10 polluters, raising pressure on the Government to curb destruction of the jungles.

The Government should publish within months a long-delayed inventory of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions, which is expected to challenge the view that the Amazon serves as the "lungs of the world" by converting carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Instead, it will show that a majority of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to global warming, come from smoke linked to deforestation, and not fossil fuels.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3579481&thesection=news&thesubsection=world

From Greenpeace News-headlines Digest, Vol 15, Issue 7

Published: July 18, 2004

READERS' OPINIONS

The Bush administration has taken apart so many environmental regulations that one more rollback should not surprise us. Even so, it boggles the mind that the White House should choose an election year to dismantle one of the most important and popular land preservation initiatives of the last 30 years — a Clinton administration rule that placed 58.5 million acres of the national forests off limits to new road building and development.

There are no compelling reasons to repudiate that rule and no obvious beneficiaries besides a few disgruntled Western governors and the timber, oil and gas interests that have long regarded the national forests as profit centers. It's not even a case of election-year pandering to Western voters; indeed, early returns suggest that most Westerners below the rank of governor do not like the Bush proposal at all. Especially aggrieved is the so-called hook and bullet crowd — anglers and hunters who, though overwhelmingly Republican, have become increasingly disenchanted with the administration's timid and in some cases careless policies on wetlands, mercury pollution and oil and gas exploration on sensitive public lands.

One explanation is that the timber industry's allies in the Agriculture Department, where the proposal was hatched, sensed they were running short of time to complete their demolition job on the forest protections they inherited from the previous administration. Over the last three years, the department has weakened carefully devised agreements aimed at preserving old growth trees in the Tongass National Forest, in the Pacific Northwest and in the Sierra Nevada. It has persuaded Congress to adopt a fire-prevention strategy aimed at least as much at helping the timber industry as it is at saving communities from devastation. And it has proposed revisions in forest management policies that would short-circuit environmental reviews, weaken safeguards for endangered species and limit public participation in land-use decisions.

For broad impact, though, nothing quite matches the decision to scuttle the roadless rule. Nearly three years in the making, that rule essentially gave blanket protection to some of the last truly wild places in America, critical watersheds for fish and wildlife and important sources of drinking water for metropolitan areas in the West. The Bush administration offers instead a less protective and more uncertain system under which state and local officials would become the moving force in deciding whether to log or conserve forest lands. This represents a big swing in the ideological pendulum, essentially returning control of an important part of national forest policy to the very people from whom Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, both Republicans, wrested it when they established the Forest Service a century ago.

Killing the roadless rule is also indefensible on fiscal grounds. There are already 365,000 miles of roads in the roughly 90 million acres of national forests that are and will remain open to commercial development. Many of these roads are in poor shape, crying out for maintenance. It makes no economic sense to build more.

The administration promises that prohibitions on roads and logging will be continued on a much smaller number of roadless acres already protected under forest plans that predated the Clinton rule — a "just trust us" attitude that inspires universal suspicion among conservationists. White House officials argued further that the rule's one-size-fits-all policy ignored local needs, and that two unfavorable court decisions had left them little choice but to junk the Clinton program and propose a new one.

This is disingenuous. It is true that district judges in Idaho and Wyoming had invalidated the rule. But the administration offered only a perfunctory defense in Idaho and not much more in Wyoming. More to the point, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned the Idaho decision, and there was a good chance the 10th Circuit would overturn the Wyoming decision. Indeed, the real motive for the rollback may have been to get the new rule out before the legal landscape shifted completely in favor of the old rule — or before somebody less attentive to the needs of the timber industry moved into the White House.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/opinion/18SUN1.html


Informant: bigraccoon

by Tracy Williams

Wednesday, 14 July 2004

THE fight to save the Ludlow tuart forest is gathering steam after developments last week threatened to make it an election issue.

Politicians from both sides expressed views on the forest protest and the plan to mine at Ludlow.

Shadow environment minister Brendon Grylls called on the Government to remove the protesters.

Mr Grylls said protesters were trespassing illegally and should face fines of up to $500 if they refused to leave.

He said protesters were camped with inadequate sanitation and in tree platforms that had the potential to cause damage to the tuart canopies.

"If it's good enough for the mining proponents to face strict conditions and stiff penalties for non-compliance, why have the protesters been allowed to invade the tuart precinct without some sort of control on their activity?" he asked.

"While I support the right to protest as an important part of our democracy, the minister should ensure that the laws are enforced at all times."

Forest protester and camp spokesperson Ritchie Davis, 32, a timber mill worker from Walpole, is on annual leave to help with the protest.

He said Mr Grylls' claims were unfounded and the minister should visit the site before he passed judgement.

"We have been using chemical toilets similar to the ones used in caravan parks and camping grounds," he said.

They were replaced at the weekend with a compost toilet that was offered to the group by the Sustainable Technology Institute at Murdoch University.

"The trees we have camped in have been inspected by a tree lopper and aren't being damaged," Mr Davis said.

"The structural points are padded with carpet.

"CALM is satisfied with how we run the camp and visit every second day."

The group has received legal advice from the Environmental Defender's Office and runs workshops to inform protesters of their legal rights.

"We are not just here camping," Mr Davis said.

"If the minister said that the mining wasn't going ahead, we'd all leave here tomorrow."

Busselton's Martin Pritchard said that while Friends of the Tuart Forest did not set up the tree village, they strongly opposed any mining in the area.

"The Gallop government was voted in on a platform of saving old growth forest and they could well be voted out because of the platforms in the old growth tuarts," he said.

http://busselton.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?class=news&subclass=local&category=general%20news&story_id=321105&y=2004&m=7


Informant: Deane T. Rimerman

by Steve Connor, Science Editor

10 July 2004

Exposed: how M&S uses wood from rainforests

How a century of destruction has laid bare the world's rainforests

It is estimated that an area of rainforest the size of Poland - some 78 million acres of land - is destroyed each year by logging, mining, farming, fire and other human activities.

Rainforests cover about 2 per cent of the earth's surface yet they harbour the greatest concentration of wildlife on earth, which led Norman Myers, the Oxford environmentalist, to describe them as "the finest celebration of nature ever known on the planet".

Between 40 and 50 per cent of all known and yet-to-be-discovered species are thought to live in the relatively small space stretching from the forest undergrowth to the tree canopy.

The richest rainforests occur in tropical climates - as opposed to the cooler rainforests of more temperate regions -- which stretch along the equator from South America and Africa to east Asia. The Amazon is home to the biggest tropical rainforest on earth but has been subjected to one of the most sustained deforestation programmes in recent history.

Last May, a team of American and Brazilian scientists found that the rate of deforestation in the Amazon has accelerated significantly since 1990 despite claims by the government in Brasilia that it is trying to curb both legal and illegal logging.

William Laurance, an expert on rainforest destruction at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, said forest loss has shot up by 50 per cent in the southern and eastern regions of the Amazon since 2002.

"The recent deforestation numbers are just plain scary. During the past two years nearly 12 million acres of rainforest have been destroyed - that's equivalent to about 11 football fields a minute," he said.

Scientists link the increase in deforestation to Brazil's $40bn (£22bn) development drive, launched in 2000 to build new roads, power lines, gas pipelines, hydroelectric power stations and river-drainage schemes.

Brazilian politicians argued that the development wasneeded to lift millions of people with no access to basic sanitation or education out of poverty. However, some scientists believe land speculation and the rapid expansion of soybean farming and cattle ranching has led to a deforestation rush.

Philip Fearnside, of Brazil's National Institute for Amazonian Research, explained: "Soybean farms cause some forest clearing directly, but they have a much greater impact by consuming cleared land, savannah and transitional forests, thereby pushing ranchers and slash-and-burn farmers even deeper into the forest frontier.

"Soybean farming also provides a key economic and political impetus for new highways and infrastructure projects, which accelerate deforestation by other actors," he said.

History has shown that whenever a road is built through pristine rainforest, deforestation of the surrounding area quickly follows with miners and illegal loggers finding it easier to move in with heavy equipment.

Illegal logging for tropical hardwood is particularly difficult to police given the remoteness of the locations and the ease with which it can be done with chainsaws and trucks.

Mark Cochrane of Michigan State University said that these initial forays into a pristine forest often go unnoticed by satellite observations: "When you view these forests from a distance, they look OK, but when you stand in them, you can see they've been thinned, and that they've changed," he said.

"You can see how they've been chewed up. It's like they have holes punched in them. These holes can make a rainforest dry out and be vulnerable to fire," he added.

Fire is perhaps the most destructive force in rainforest ecology. Both deliberate and unintentional fires are devouring millions of acres each year.

"These rainforest fires are much more frequent than these ecosystems can resist. These fires are flying under the radar and people don't realise what's happening," Dr Cochrane said.

Furthermore, a study by the University of Sao Paulo and the Smithsonian Institution has found evidence that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere - caused by global industrial pollution - cause some trees to grow faster at the expense of others, potentially destabilizing the ecosystem.

"In general, large, fast-growing trees are winning at the expense of smaller trees that live in the forest understorey," said Alexandre Oliveira at Sao Paulo.

RAINFORESTS IN FIGURES

• Brazil's rainforest is the world's biggest, covering two million square miles of the Amazon river basin

• Brazil is top of the list for deforestation with more than 2.5 million hectares (6.2 million acres) being lost each year

• Indonesia is second, losing more than a million hectares of rainforest, followed by the Congo, Bolivia, Mexico, Venezuela, Malaysia, Burma, Sudan and Thailand

• Computer models suggest there will be no rainforests left in 50 years

• Sixty per cent of the anti-cancer drugs developed over the past 10 years come from tropical forests.

• An area the size of Mexico and Indonesia combined lost its rainforest over the past 15 year


Informant: NHNE

No More Nibbling: Administration Seeks To Devour Roadless Rule Whole

The Bush Administration announced a scheme today that would effectively overturn the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The 2001 rule protected 58.5 million acres of pristine roadless lands on America's national forests from roadbuilding and commercial logging. And the American people have repeatedly declared their support for these protections: 2.5 million times in the last four years!

The administration has never liked the rule, has refused to defend it in court (despite promises to do so) and a year ago exempted our largest national forest, the Tongass in Alaska, from the rule's protection. Today it went whole hog.

The new scheme would force governors to petition the federal government to protect the last remaining pristine forests in their states. The process officials described today is convoluted, meaningless, and mostly political camouflage: reduced to its basics, the plan is an outright repeal of the roadless rule.

Citizens will have an opportunity to comment on the plan and we will send you a WildAlert seeking your help when we have details. But because this has been so important an issue to WildAlert subscribers, we wanted to update you as soon as possible.

For More Information

- Wilderness Society statement on the proposal:
http://www.wilderness.org/NewsRoom/Statement/20040712.cfm

- Forest Service web site:
http://roadless.fs.fed.us


Informant: Teresa Binstock

by Bob Fick

The Associated Press

Monday, July 12, 2004
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~11676~2267957,00.html

Boise, Idaho - The Bush administration today proposed a new plan to open up roadless areas of national forests to more logging, confirming a draft plan published two weeks ago.

Under the plan, announced by Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman at the Idaho state Capitol, governors would have to petition the federal government to block road-building needed for logging in remote areas of national forests.

The rule replaces one adopted by the Clinton administration and still under challenge in federal court. It covers about 58 million of the 191 million acres of national forest nationwide.

Idaho was one of the first states to challenge the so-called roadless rule in federal court.

"Strong state and federal cooperation in the management of roadless areas will foster improved local involvement in the process," Veneman said.

For nearly two years, the Bush administration has been weighing changes to the roadless rule, which blocks road construction in nearly one-third of national forests as a way to prevent logging and other commercial activity.

Officials call the new roadless policy a common-sense plan that protects backcountry woods while advancing a partnership with the nation's governors, particularly in the West.

The Natural Resources Defense Council made its opposition clear even before the official announcement.

"This is a roadblock to roadless protection," spokeswoman Amy Mall said. "The administration is not concerned about states' rights."

ROADLESS RULES

Click here http://roadless.fs.fed.us/ for the complete text of the
proposed Forest Service rules on roadless areas and more government information on the policy.
http://roadless.fs.fed.us/

Veneman, whose department includes the Forest Service, made the announcement flanked by Gov. Dirk Kempthorne and U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, both Republicans.

As part of the plan, the administration said it would reinstate an interim rule for the next 18 months, requiring that Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth approve any new road construction in previously protected areas.

The administration had let the interim rule lapse last year as it considered a permanent rule to replace the Clinton policy.

As a practical matter, officials said they expect few, if any, changes in roadless policy during the next 18 months, noting that Bosworth did not approve a single new road during the two-plus years the interim directive was in place.

Environmentalists howled when the draft rule was made public earlier this month. Without a national policy against road construction, they said, forest management will revert to individual forest plans that in many cases allow roads and other development on most of the 58 million acres now protected by the roadless rule.

Environmentalists say it is unlikely that governors in pro-logging states such as Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and Utah will seek to keep the roadless rule in effect.

Kempthorne is among several Republican governors in the West who have strongly criticized the rule, calling it an unnecessary restriction that has locked up millions of acres from logging and other economic development.

Citing such complaints, the Bush administration said last year it would develop a plan to allow governors to seek exemptions from the roadless rule. The latest plan turns that on its head by requiring governors to petition the Agriculture Department if they want to protect against timbering in their state.

The Clinton administration adopted the roadless rule during its final days in office in January 2001, calling it important protection for backcountry forests.

Environmentalists hailed that action, but the timber industry and some Republican lawmakers have criticized it as overly intrusive and even dangerous, saying it has left millions of acres exposed to catastrophic wildfires.

Federal judges have twice struck down the 3-year-old rule, most recently in a Wyoming case decided in July 2003. That case, which
environmentalists have appealed, is one of several pending legal challenges, complicating efforts to issue a new plan.

The new plan will be published in the Federal Register this week, with a 60-day comment period extending into September.


Informant: Teresa Binstock

Indianapolis Star

07/12/04

The Bush administration Monday proposed lifting a national rule that closed remote areas of national forests to logging, instead saying states should decide whether to keep a ban on road-building in those areas. Environmentalists immediately criticized the change as the biggest timber industry giveaway in history...

http://tinyurl.com/5v4db


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

In den letzten 40 Jahren wurden weltweit bereits die Hälfte der Regenwälder abgeholzt. Wenn der Regenwald die Lunge der Erde ist, dann muss unser geschundener Planet noch mit einem Lungenflügel arbeiten. Und auch dieser wird sterben, wenn der Kahlschlag nicht gestoppt wird...

http://www.sonnenseite.com/fp/archiv/Akt-News/5035.php