Dan's Outside

More Anti-Environment Shenanigans

From Sierra Club Compass:

Kibosh on the Kaibob.

Way out there in the Grand Canyon Game Preserve, a land inhabited by the Mexican spotted owl, the northern goshawk, and the Kaibob squirrel, the U.S. Forest Service planned to burn and log 17,000 acres of forest. The Bush administration’s “Healthy Forest” plan defends such projects as necessary to protect communities from catastrophic fire. Only in this case, the nearest community is 48 miles away, and the East Rim Timber Sale on the Kaibob National Forest targeted old-growth, fire-resistant trees.

The Forest Service yanked the sale on Tuesday, saying that its surveys on spotted owls and goshawks in the region had gotten too dusty and would have to be updated. Cathie Schmidlin of the Kaibob National Forest says the agency doesn’t know what it’s going to do next.

Perhaps it will address the concerns raised in a lawsuit brought by The Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, who contend that the project would have logged thousands of old-growth trees while offering little fire-reduction benefit. The government triumphed in the first round when a federal judge ruled in its favor, but the case has been appealed by the environmental groups.

Schmidlin said the decision to withdraw the logging plan had nothing to do with the lawsuit. [Sierra Club Compass]

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February 15, 2006 - Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary