"Salvage logging" is damaging enough to forest ecology, but many of these trees aren't even dead. At least 40% of the sale is like this. This is green tree logging incorrectly promoted as salvage logging.
Pockets Timber Sale
Please contact the Dixie National Forest in opposition to the Pockets Timber Sale by May 26:
Rob MacWhorter, Supervisor
Dixie National Forest
1789 North Wedgewood Lane
Cedar City, UT 84721-7769
Email: comments-intermtn-dixie-escalante@fs.fed.us
POCKETS TIMBER SALE COMMENTS/TALKING POINTS
Not a single alternative offered by the Forest Service meets project objectives while at the same time preserving the roadless area. All the alternatives offered by the Forest Service degrade the roadless area with hundreds to thousands of acres of logging units full of stumps.
Ask for a revised Environmental Impact Statement that incorporates additional action alternatives that meet objectives such as restoring aspen forests while not destroying areas qualifying for Wilderness designation with clearcut/regeneration logging! (“Regeneration logging” is a Forest Service euphemism for clearcutting.)
An alternative exists that does just that! It has already been submitted to the agency twice, at the two ‘scoping’ periods. Demand that the Forest Service seriously study the “Sustainable Multiple Use” (SMU) Alternative submitted by Utah Environmental Congress, Grand Canyon Trust and WildEarth Guardians because it is the only action alternative described to date that meets the purpose and need for the project while preserving the Dry Lake roadless area.
The Draft Supplemental EIS does not accurately describe the roadless area attributes for the roadless areas affected. The analysis is misleading because it omits key problems with the proposed action, namely that its thousands of acres of roadless area logging would in reality destroy all of the Wilderness potential of roadless areas such as Dry Lake. The Dry Lake roadless area will not –in reality- be a viable roadless area anymore if the project is approved as proposed. (This is because when the boundaries are re-drawn a couple years from now when the Forest Plan revision picks up again, they would inevitably be configured such that the area would no longer meet the minimum size.) The Supplemental EIS is flawed because it denies this by overlooking how the boundaries would have to be reconfigured.
There is a need to save and restore some of the aspen forests in the area, but clearcutting (aka ‘regeneration’ harvests) in roadless areas (as proposed in all the Foest Service action alternatives) is NOT a viable solution, nor is it necessary to restore aspen! Impacts of overgrazing are overlooked by that approach and the proposed treatment is akin to giving a diabetic a sugar high. Analyze action alternatives that implement genuine long-term restoration solutions by fencing aspen, prescribed burning, and most important: rest the key pastures from permitted grazing as needed for at least 10 years.
Demand professional integrity! The proposed action includes thousands of acres of "dead only" spruce salvage logging, and most of it is in roadless areas. About 40+% of this dead-only salvage logging is in forests that have been documented to in fact be uninfested green mature spruce/fir forest. This was documented in the field work accompanied by UEC’s 2008 appeal of the initial decision for this project. The NEPA analysis still omits this central fact and the EIS must be redone in light of this failure to be fully honest with the public.