a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Friday, August 23, 2002 Hazard trees?On paper, and in Washington, cutting down "hazard trees" looks awfully good: The Forest Service allows a logging company to take down a nearly-dead, tilting-over, dry, or ready-to-topple tree -- one that might start a fire or fall on somebody's head -- and gets money for it. The timber companies get excellent, sometimes old-growth wood, and everyone's happy. The trouble is that on the ground, "hazard trees" become a loophole. Karen Coulter, who monitors timber sales in Oregon, tells me that access roads have been wildly redrawn by Forest-Service workers to veer under good old-growth trees so the trees can be marked as "hazards." The Forest-Service workers are not usually people in uniform; sometimes they're locals with summer jobs who want to give work to local logging companies (and keep themselves employed)."We have photographs of some of the so-called hazard trees that were green and so forth, and we also have photographs of the situation that I told you about, with the skid trails deviating wildly," Coulter said, in an interview for a story I haven't written yet. "The funny thing about one [trail] in particular is that you can see where the old skid trail was ... They moved off the old skid trail, even though it was still wide-open, in order to catch these trees. They flagged it for road, to catch every single tree." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:15 AM | |
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