Letters to the Editor 09/25/2012

To the Editor:

The environmental incompetence that infests the Oregon State and National Forest Service is an embarrassment. Our forests are being destroyed by a failure to act.

The widespread destruction of our forests by the spruce budworms could have been halted by logging and the use of pesticides.

A well-managed logging program could also reduce the underbrush and help reduce the size and ability of wildfires to spread, but oh no, that would mean some evil timber company would be making a profit from our public forestlands.

It is reported the Sisters Ranger District of the Deschutes National Forest is 318,000 acres and that in the last 10 years 180,000 acres in that district have burned. At 18,000 acres per year, noted as the average annual fire size, the entire Sisters District will have been burned in another eight years. What will all of those poor forest service employees do when the trees are all gone?

There is nothing more depressing than hiking in a forest of dead and burned trees and knowing that it did not have to be that way.

It is sad to see the only economic benefit our forest provides is to a rapidly growing wildfire-fighting industry.

If we logged the Sisters Ranger District at the rate of 3,000 acres per year (one percent per year) we would have a never-ending supply of 100-year-old trees. This well-managed logging program would provide jobs and tax revenue for schools and additional recreational maintenance and development. Underbrush would be contained and controlled, a road system would aide in the rapid access to naturally occurring lightning strikes.

Logging at the rate of one percent per year will not put any wildlife species in danger, they will adapt just as they will from the current 16,000-acre wildfire.

Our sawmills are disappearing. When they are all gone our timber prices for home and building construction will increase significantly.

Log here and log now before it is too late.

Dave Marlow