Ken Salazar, President Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, was in Medford, Oregon this week to tour the “Pilot Joe” demonstration project and hold a Town Hall meeting where he sought to downplay the impact of a new Northern Spotted Owl critical habitat designation and announced yet another lengthy administrative forest planning process for 2.5 million acres of western Oregon forests managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), including the Oregon & California (O&C) Grant lands. This latest announcement comes nearly 2 ½ years after Secretary Salazar illegally withdrew the 2008 Western Oregon Plan Revisions. Ever since, Oregonians have heard a host of unfulfilled promises. “This latest bunch of PR is just another example of this Administration’s inability to grasp the realities facing the forests and rural communities of western Oregon,” said Tom Partin, President of the American Forest Resource Council (AFRC). “Instead of taking concrete steps to implement a meaningful timber program based on sound science, Secretary Salazar has outlined a flawed strategy based on one failed pilot project.” When the Secretary came to Roseburg in October, 2010, he talked about two pilot projects spanning 20,000 to 30,000 acres that would be both ecologically and economically viable. The Pilot Joe project was narrowed from the potential 50,000 acre scope of the Applegate Watershed to a mere 245 acres...
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1 comment:
Let's see....didn't the stupid tree huggers say that they were not responsible for lumber mills being shut down? Didn't they say that it was the price of lumber? Didn't they say that all lumber was being exported? Pilot project is just government speak for don't do anything and soak the taxpayer while you are doing it! A good example is the Valles project where the know-nothings campaigned to manage the Valles Caldera government land. They have shown conclusively that they have no idea how to manage wildlands.
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