OCR Text |
Show Making A New Wilderness I felt both sorrow and disappointment disap-pointment when I recently read the piece in the Daily Spectrum telling us that the Forest Service personnel have no hope of saving any of the once beautiful forest in the Cedar Breaks area. We are, as they put it, "going to have to wait from two to five years until these bugs eat themselves out of house and home" and then start a reforestation program pro-gram which means that many of us will never see another like forest in our lifetime. I have always been an outdoors person and love and appreciate the forests which surround us and I feel anger every time I drive through this area and see what looks like something from another planet. Knowing why it is like this even makes things worse. It is too bad that we can't make the environmental environ-mental saboteurs pay for the reforestation refor-estation like we do for those who cause a forest fire. I cannot see where there is much difference except ex-cept for the amount of salvage possible. pos-sible. Wouldn't be fitting if we could have the Forest Service send the bill to SUWA and the Sierra Club? Know the above will not happen hap-pen and the taxpayer will foot the reforestation costs, I have another solution which will better two situations. Let's have the Forest -Service exchange the thousands of acres of dead timber for the millions of acres which the BLM wants which is located a little to the east. Babbitt could then give this land to his environmental friends wherein they could establish their own "environmental national wilderness area." The amounts of acreage involved in-volved may sound a little lopsided, but there are other advantages. There are enough dead trees that each tree hugger could have his own tree. Such a trade could also be a plus for the leaders of these groups in recruiting new members. Think of the impact this could have on their naive friends and members on the east and west coasts if they were to receive a picture pic-ture and invitation to come and visit their very own wilderness are which they created with the help of the courts and Congress AND the bugs. W. Earl Roe Panguitch |