Your 5-minute letter is needed by February 11 to stop logging damage to a recovering burned area near the Great Bear Wilderness!
But the Flathead National Forest wants to log in them anyway and we need your help to see that they don't! Please take 5 minutes to copy and paste from the letter below (or create your own) and send an email to:
comments-northern-flathead-spotted-bear@fs.fed.us
Include "Trail Creek Fire Salvage Project in the subject line!
OR
Download here as a pdf, print, sign, and post the sample letter to Matt Shaffer, 650 Wolfpack Way, Kalispell, MT 59901.
The Trail Creek Fire Salvage Project can be viewed and downloaded here.
Here's the sample letter:
Matt Shaffer - Project Leader
Flathead National Forest
650 Wolfpack Way
Kalispell, MT 59901
Re: Comments on proposed Trail Creek Fire Salvage Project
Dear Mr. Shaffer;
From the perspective of fish, wildlife, soils, and water quality, your proposal to remove some 1,400 log truck loads of trees from the remote Trail Creek Fire area near the Great Bear Wilderness should be called “Post-Fire Theft” rather than “Fire Salvage.” Trees in burned areas are absolutely essential to wildlife and ecosystem resilience. They are not in need of “salvage.” As 264 scientists told Congress in a letter last September:
". . . numerous scientific studies tell us that even in the patches where forest fires burn most intensely, the resulting wildlife habitats are among the most ecologically diverse on western forestlands and are essential to support the full richness of forest biodiversity . . . This post-fire renewal, known as 'snag forest' is quite simply some of the best wildlife habitat in forests, and is an essential state of natural processes . . . post-fire logging does far more harm than good to public forests."
(DellaSala et al., September 2015, Open Letter to U.S. Senators and President Obama from Scientists Concerned about Post-Fire Logging and Clearcutting on National Forests)
You should focus instead on problems being caused by your logging roads and the noxious weeds along them. You’ve already been awarded Burned Area Emergency Restoration (BAER) money to spray 88 acres of weeds along existing roads, so you don’t need to sell logs to pay for it. The last thing you should do is put logging and road building machinery in there, spreading those existing weeds across the landscape!
Because you did the right thing in the late 1990s and decommissioned 20 miles of roads in the area to protect grizzly bear security and fisheries by removing their culverts, you only have a few culverts causing problems for fish and water quality on the remaining roads. But you now propose to rebuild 7 miles of those previously decommissioned and re-vegetated roads so you can log in Grizzly Bear Security Core and then have to deconstruct these roads again to re-secure bear and fish habitat! This is an unacceptable disruption of Security Core, a senseless waste of taxpayer dollars, and would cause repetitive reconstruction/deconstruction releases of sediment from roads that were previously “waterproofed” and simply need to be left alone.
That leaves the planting of elk forage and trees as the only “restoration” work you say you need money for. Yet your BAER reports, your proposal and news articles say that vegetation began sprouting immediately after the fire. All you really need to do is keep logging and road rebuilding machinery off this area so that natural regeneration doesn’t get trampled and can continue to green up as it has following fires for millennia!
You have already sold three roadside fire-related timber sales in the area since the 2015 fires and you reworked the pre-fire Cedar Chipmunk Timber Sale so it is now logging fire-killed trees - all with no public involvement. Now you want to rule out formal public Objections to your Trail Creek Fire Salvage Project by seeking an “Emergency Situation Determination.” Don’t do it! Moreover, you already have numerous “green” timber sales units authorized near the Trail Creek Fire area.
Don’t waste your time and taxpayer money writing an Environmental Assessment or Environmental Impact Statement that tries to rationalize the need to violate Forest Plan Grizzly Bear Security Core standards for several years with the Trail Creek post-fire logging proposal. Instead, remove or clean the several culverts you are having trouble with, leave the culvert-less decommissioned roads alone, and let the area continue recovering as nature intended.
Sincerely,
Name:
Address:
Swan View Coalition wishes you a Happy New Year and says Thank You for your support of our work in 2015!
May 2016 bring you good luck, good cheer, good friends, and lots of time in the great outdoors!
And may the only hangover you experience be snow-laden trees like these in the Swan Range's wildlife-rich Krause Basin!
Swan View Coalition wishes you a Happy Winter and Holidays!
Winter Solstice just ushered in two feet of new snow in the Swan Range, so it's not too late to celebrate Soltice!
May this Winter and the Holidays bring you much love and good cheer, time with family and friends, and replenishment of the spirit in all of us!
We need your help TODAY to stop Congress from attaching damaging logging riders to the pending must-pass spending bill!
Pro-logging members of Congress, including a number of western democrats, are attempting to boost logging, boost "collaboration" and weaken public environmental review of logging projects.
This is being done by attaching controversial, secretive "riders" to the upcoming must-pass Appropriations Bill!
The Forest Service supports streamling the National Environmental Policy Act to speed up logging projects, largely delegating NEPA's widespread public involvement to small groups of local collaborators. Companion authority to increase Congressional funding of private "collaborative partners" is also being sought!
In other words, Congress is trying to take another giant step behind closed doors to buy "public support" for damaging logging projects, leaving most American citizens behind!
Please call the Capitol Switchboard RIGHT NOW at 202-224-3121! They will direct your call so you can leave a message for your Senators and Representatives to not allow logging riders to be attached to the Appropriations Bill!
Or, you can find your Senators' Contact Information HERE and your U.S. House of Representative's Contact Information HERE!
Please also call the White House at 202-456-1111 to help insure President Obama does not follow the Dept. of Agriculture and Forest Service down this disasterous path!
You can read about the pending riders to the Appropriations Bill at http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060029355 .
THANK YOU for taking a few minutes to ACT TODAY!
Our Holidays 2015 newsletter celebrates spirited grass-roots conservation, faith, passion, and the support of our members!
We include encouraging words from Thich Nhat Hanh, Pope Francis, First Nations, and American Indian Tribes.
We report on Keith Hammer receiving the prestigious Macfarlane Plank Award from Friends of the Clearwater, thank you for meeting Cinnabar's Challenge Grant with your donations, and ask for your help raising $16,000 in December to meet our year-end budget!
Here's our newsletter's table of contents and you can click here to view or download it as a pdf:
We hope you enjoy the newsletter and will continue to support our work!
Fish, wildlife, wilderness, and people are counting on us - and you!
Swan View Coalition wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving!
We give thanks for a wonderful places to live, nearby public lands that are such a huge part of them, and to all of you that help us keep it that way!
May your Thanksgiving include lots of time with family and loved ones!
This is the last call to have your donation matched by Cinnabar Foundation!
Won't you DONATE NOW to help us restore quiet habitats for fish, wildlife and people? Your donation will do double-duty if received this week!
And don't forget our Annual Membership Meeting is Sunday, November 22, at 4 pm. Join us at the Mountain Brook School Library, 2353 Foothill Road, for a quick recap of our accomplishments and election of officers. At 5 pm we'll have a potluck dinner and no-alcohol social hour, followed by a regularly scheduled Swan Range Community Music Jam Session. So come on over and stick around for some good fun and music!
Nearly two-thirds of our work is supported by individual donations from people just like you, so please hit the DONATE NOW button today or send a check to 3165 Foothil Road, Kalispell, MT 59901!
Thank you!
Only a few weeks left to have your support of our work doubled by Cinnabar Foundation!
Won't you DONATE NOW to help us restore quiet habitats for fish, wildlife and people? Your donation will do double-duty if received soon!
And don't forget our Annual Membership Meeting is Sunday, November 22, at 4 pm. Join us at the Mountain Brook School Library, 2353 Foothill Road, for a quick recap of our accomplishments and election of officers. At 5 pm we'll have a potluck dinner and no-alcohol social hour, followed by a regularly scheduled Swan Range Community Music Jam Session. So come on over and stick around for some good fun and music!
Nearly two-thirds of our work is supported by individual donations from people just like you, so please hit the DONATE NOW button today or send a check to 3165 Foothil Road, Kalispell, MT 59901!
Thank you!
Though burning wood to produce electricity releases more carbon into the atmosphere than burning coal, the European Union says it releases no carbon at all - a bald-face trick of accounting!
This lie may be adopted by the U.S.'s EPA if it also ignores the many decades it will take for new trees to hopefully re-store that carbon and balance out as "carbon-neutral."
In other words, Europe is massively subsidizing the burning of wood to meet its 20-20-20 climate goals while actually increasing carbon emissions - while simultaneously and falsely claiming wood burning is as "renewable" as solar and wind and has no carbon emissions.
The U.S. already supplies half of Europe's wood pellets and is staged to repeat the same lies and mistakes at home as it also looks to reduce coal consumption!
Click here for Climate Central's must-read, in-depth report written in easily understood terms!
University of Montana researcher Diana Six and others fault logging as a misguided substitute for the natural forest thinning being conducted by beetles.
In the journal Forests, Six and fellow researchers find the U of M, the Forest Service and others have failed to report failures of logging to maintain resilient trees while beetles have an innate ability to retain the most adaptive trees as they conduct nature's thinning.
They caution that misguided attempts to "do something" may simply over-log forests and point to research finding unlogged stands of both spruce and ponderosa pine have retained more live trees after beetle attacks than mechanically thinned stands.
They conclude "The manner in which policy makers have accepted beetle timber harvest treatments as a panacea for responding to bark beetle outbreaks in North American forests raises a number of red flags. . . It is perhaps no accident that the beetle treatments that have been most aggressively pushed for in the political landscape allow for logging activities that might provide revenue and jobs for the commercial timber industry. . . management should be led by science and informed by monitoring."
Click here for a summary article of Six's research in Mother Jones.
Click here for the paper by Six, Biber and Long in the journal Forests.
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