Battle looms over logging practices

Special to the PWW

This article was reprinted from the February 1, 1997 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

NEW YORK - On Feb. 4 the U.S. Court of Appeals at Foley Square will hear National Audubon Society v. Hoffman, a U.S. Forest Service appeal of a 1995 Vermont Federal Court ruling.

The ruling found plans by the U.S. Forest Service to build roads and clearcut in Lamb Brook, a 5,500 acre wild area of Vermont's Green Mountain National Forest to be in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act. This was the first case of its kind in the Northeastern United States.

The Forest Service proposal entailed building three miles of roads and stripping over three million board feet of timber from Lamb Brook, one of southern Vermont's largest roadless areas. The proposal includes over 300 acres of clearcuts (cutting all standing timber as oppsed to selective logging).

Lamb Brook spans Bennington and Windham counties in southern Vermont on the Green Mountain National Forest. According to some of the nation's leading biologists, the area contains critical black bear and songbird habitat.

The suit was brought in 1994 by coalition of environmental organizations including Green Mountain Forest Watch, Conservation Law Foundation, the National Audubon Society, Vermont Audubon Council, Sierra Club, RESTORE: The North Woods, and the Wilderness Society. Also joining the suit were a number of local land owners and the former Forest Service employee who drafted the agency's land management plan for the Green Mountain National Forest.

The Forest Service proposal was also opposed by Vermont's entire congressional delegation, the planning commissions Readsboro, Vt., the town in which the project lies, and the State of Vermont's black bear biologist.

In a ruling issued December of 1995, federal Judge J Garvan Murtha held that the Forest Service decision that the project would have "no significant environmental Impact" was, "arbitrary and capricious." He ruled then: "[O]n its face, the proposed action, which includes clearcutting of over 300 acres and its admitted attendant effects such as intrusion into bear and Neotropical bird habitat, is 'significant' under any reasonable construction of the term." He also found that the Forest Service Environmental Analysis "confusing and at times seem to misrepresent the intensity of the Forest Service's proposal."

"The Forest Service has allowed the timber industry to butcher the National Forests of the Pacific Northwest," said Mathew Jacobson, executive director of Green Mountain Forest Watch, a grassroots conservation group based in Brattleboro, Vt, which initiated the lawsuit. "Now that they've run out of timber, they're looking at the forests of New England. "

Jacobson pointed out that "three million board feet would make a board one inch thick and one foot wide long enough to stretch from the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont, through the Federal Courthouse in Foley Square, down to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, DC, and on into southern Virginia."