Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

“Science”, the Bush Administration, and The Bottom Line

In Fire’s Wake, Logging Study Inflames Debate
Logging after fires is becoming more and more important to the bottom line of timber companies. It generates about 40 percent of timber volume on the nation’s public lands, according to Forest Service data compiled by the World Wildlife Fund, and accounts for nearly half the logging on public land in Oregon.

But there is much more to the dispute than money. The Oregon State study was published in Science, the prestigious peer-reviewed journal. It appeared after a group of professors from the university’s College of Forestry, which gets 10 percent of its funding from the timber industry, tried to halt its publication.

Professors behind the failed attempt to keep the article out of Science had earlier written their own non-peer-reviewed study of the Biscuit fire — a study embraced by the Bush administration and the timber industry. It said post-fire logging and replanting were exactly what was needed to speed growth of big trees and suppress fire.

Sierra Club magazine recently published a little photo essay about a “vacation trip” to the “Biscuit” fire area in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest. It was pretty awful — a clear cut of many very old, very big trees — some of which were still viable. Worse, the logging company apparently also cut trees outside the area they’d been approved for. You can read more about it on the Sierra Club web site.

This all reminds me of the controversy over cutting white pines in northern Minnesota. As in Oregon, the Minnesota DNR has a history of embracing bad “science” (which isn’t really science at all) to support its money-making schemes and our natural environment is suffering for it.