Jul. 27, 2004 - 21:49 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Researched

The first book of Bill Bryson I read was "Mother Tongue," wish I still had it, somehow I think it found its way into the Goodwill box. I have also read his, "In A Sunburned Country." Just finished the other day was, "African Diary." I have great respect for the man from reading his books.

Now I am reading his, "A Walk In The Woods." Published in 1998. Haven't got too far yet in reading about his trek on the Applachian Trail. I am trying to get through Chapter 4, but some of what he says slows me down and makes me think. I shall quote:

"Compared with most other places in the developed world America is still to a remarkable extent a land of forests. One-third of the landscape of the lower forty-eight states us covered -- 728 million acres in all. Maine alone has 10 million uninhabited acres. That's 15,600 square miles, an area considerably bigger than Belgium, without a single permanent resident. Altogether, just 2 percent of the United States is classified as built up."

"About 240 million acres of America's forests are owned by the government. The bulk of this -- 191 million acres, spread over 155 parcels of land -- is held by the U.S. Forest Service under the designation of National Forests, National Grasslands, and National Recreation Areas. All this sounds soothingly untrampled and ecological, but in fact a great deal of Forest Service land is designated "multiple use," which is generously interpreted to allow any number of boisterous activities -- mining, oil and gas extraction; ski resorts (137 of them); condominium developments; snowmobiling; off-road vehicle scrambling; and lots and lots and lots of logging -- that seem curiously incompatible with woodland serenity."

"The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no -- though that was the original plan. It was conceived a century ago as a kind of woodland bank, a permanent repository of American timber, when people grew alarmed at the rate at which American forests were falling. Its mandate was to manage and protect these resources for the nation. These were not intended to be parks. Private companies would be granted leases to extract minerals and harvest timber, but they would be required to do so in a restrained, intelligent, sustainable way."

"In fact, mostly of what the Forest Service does is build roads. I am not kidding. There are 378,000 miles of roads in America's national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way -- it is eight times the total mileage of America's Interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world in the control of a single body. The Forest Service has the second highest number of road engineers of any government institution on the planet. To say that these guys like to build roads barely hints at their level of dedication. Show them a stand of trees anywhere and they will regard it thoughtfully for a long while, and say at last, "You know we could put a road here." It is the avowed aim of the U.S. Forest Service to construct 580,000 miles of additional forest road by the middle of the next century."

The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessable stands of trees. Of the Forest Service's 150 million acres of loggable land, about two-thirds is held in store for the future. The remaining one-third -- 49 million acres, or an area roughly twice the size of Ohio -- is available for logging. It allows huge swathes of land to be Clear Cut, including (to take one recent but heartbreaking example) 209 acres of thousand-year-old redwoods in Oregon's Umpqua National Forest."

"In 1987, it casually announced that it would allow private timber interests to remove hundreds of acres of wood a year from the venerable and verdant Pisgah National Forest, next door to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and that 80 percent of that would be through what it delicately calls scientific forestry -- clear-cutting to you and me -- which is not only a brutal visual affront to any landscape but brings huge, reckless washoffs that gully the soil, robbing it of nutrients and disrupting ecologies farther downstream, sometimes for miles. This isn'r science. It's rape."

And yet the Forest Service grinds on. By the late 1980s -- this is so extraordinary I can hardly stand it -- it was the only significant player in the American timber industry that was cutting down trees faster than it replaced them. Moreover it was doing this with the most sumptuous inefficiency. Eighty percent of its leasing arrangements lost money, often vast amounts. In one typical deal, the Forest Service sold hundred year old lodgepole pines in the Targhee National Forest in Idaho for about $2 each after spending $4 per tree surveying the land, drawing up contracts, and, of course, building roads. Between 1989 and 1997, it lost an average of $242 million a year -- almost $2 billion all told, according to the Wilderness Society. This is all so discouraging that I think we'll leave it here and return to our two lonely heroes trudging the lost world of the Chattahoochee."

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I'm not an expert, neither can I verify all his figures as correct, nor whether some of this was held back and not done by the Forest Service -- yet -----.

But from what I have been reading in the news our beloved administration is going gung-ho toward the raping and scraping bare our lands we love.

I have seen the results of some of the clear cutting. A slim fringe of trees on the roadsides to keep people from noting the land behind them have been clear cut. But get around and look at the backside to get the full effect.

I remember noting when I was in the mountains of Japan the weird difference in heights of trees along the mountain sides until someone told me that as the trees were cut more seedlings were planted. One could get a good idea of how long ago an area was clear cut and seedlings planted by the comparitive heights of the trees.

From what I hear some of the timber interests have planted quick growing, trash trees to fill in their clear cuts rather than do as the Japanese and conserve and provide for future harvesting of the precious wood.

it appears to me that Brer Bush is trying to accelerate the irresponsible cutting of our forests in Alaska as well .

I think Mr. Bill Bryson is reputable in his reporting and assume (ass outa u and me) that his writing on this matter is well Researched . . . . . . . �

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