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Loggers
Protest NC Enviro Conference In
a follow-up to their protest and rally against the U.S. Forest
Service’s decision to withdraw several timber sales in purported
Indiana bat habitat in North Carolina, Asheville-area loggers and
other friends of forestry rallied outside a conference of several
Green groups at the University of North Carolina on September 11,
chiefly to protest the presence of Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth
First! and of The Wildlands Project.
This second rally drew more diverse attendance than the earlier
one, including “local government officials, housewives, sportsmen,
and an east Tennessee-based militia group,” according to the next
day’s Asheville Citizen-Times, which estimated attendance at
500. Among the featured
speakers were Rep. Charles Taylor (R-North Carolina), the only
forester in Congress. The
Citizen-Times attributed the high turnout to “a growing
number of people worried about fallout on private property
rights”—with specific reference to The Wildlands Project’s
proposal to create extensive new corridors of Wilderness throughout
the United States. Meanwhile,
the Forest Service backed off—a little—on its bat-related shutdown
decisions on North Carolina national forests.
On September 8, the agency released five timber sales and parts
of seven others, noting that the projects seemed to pose little danger
to Indiana bats, which in any case were measured as marginally present
or merely potentially present in the area. The Southern Timber Council stated that “it is possible
that the remaining sales will be released in mid to late October.” Back to "News" Forest Resources Association
Inc. (FRA) |
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