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Show Eleven Environmental Groups Appeal Griffin Springs Management Project Local, state, and regional environmental groups have united unit-ed in opposition to the Griffin Springs Resource Management Project GSRMP, calling it a disguised timber sale for which Mary Wagner, Dixie National Forest DNF Supervisor, recently signed the Record of Decision. But an Escalante lumber manufacturer with an interest in the project is challenging the numerous appeals by seeking standing as an "Interested Party" to the process. Stephen Steed's fledgling Skyline Forest Resources, Inc., claims dependence depend-ence upon National Forests for raw materials and the Griffin Springs Resource Management Project as essential to the long term sustainability of its operations. opera-tions. Steed says the project will help secure and maintain much-needed jobs in Escalante and surrounding areas and is needed to control infestation by the spruce bark beetle, the same insect that has devastated the forest on Cedar Mountain. The following groups have all filed appeals on the proposed Griffin Springs Resource Management project: Aquarius Escalante Foundation; Boulder Regional Group (Boulder, Utah); Center for Biological Diversity (Tucson, Ariz.); Ecology Center (Missoula, Mont.); Escalante Wilderness Project (Escalante, Utah); Forest Guardians (Albuquerque, N.M.); Redrock Forests (Moab, Utah); Sierra Club Glen Canyon Group (Moab, Utah), Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (Salt Lake City, Utah); 'Utah Environmental Congress (Salt Lake City, Utah); Western Watersheds Project (Hailey, Ida.). Other groups or individuals individu-als of whom the Escalante Wilderness Project is unaware may also have filed appeals. The GSRMP is the first of six decision blocks carved out of the former Aquarius Ecosystem Restoration Project. "The so-called 'Aquarius Ecosystem Restoration Project,'" says Patrick Diehl of the Escalante Wilderness Project, one of the appellants, "would devastate tens of thousands thou-sands of acres in the heart of the high, dry, slow-recovering forests of the Aquarius Plateau, crown of the south central Utah landscape and source of our precious pre-cious rivers." Diehl's news release states: "The 'treatments' that the USFS would inflict on 10,000-foot high Griffin Top, the current 'decision block' would include clearcutting over 500 acres of aspen (and then burning over 100 acres of the clearcuts) and selective cutting of over 3,000 acres of sprucefir forest, much of it old-growth. "Over 10 million board feet of lumber would be taken off the Aquarius, at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of $1.4 million. Many miles of skid trails only 100-150 feet apart would be created cre-ated in the course of the logging, and over 12 miles of old logging roads would be re-opened and reconstructed." Steed, however, says that upholding the appeals by the environmental groups and subsequent sub-sequent delays will severely affect forest health on the area proposed for management currently cur-rently under attack by spruce bark beetles. "This will cause extreme mortality in the Engelmann Spruce component on the EscalanteTeasdale district dis-trict as has occurred on the Cedar district of the Dixie National Forest ..." The environmentalist groups claim that the DNF is refusing to consider conservation alternatives alter-natives in which the natural cycle, consisting of beetle infestations infes-tations in the spruce and fir forestdeath for-estdeath of some mature spruce treescreation of openings by large wildfires fueled by beetle-killed beetle-killed treesregeneration of aspen clones in the fire-made openingsrecovery of the spruce and fir forest, would be allowed to continue as it has for millennia. millen-nia. Others located in the Cedar District of the Dixie National Forest who have watched the spruce bark beetle in recent years rapidly decimate the once healthy forest claim that it has been the environmental groups who have caused the devastation devasta-tion by tying the hands of forest supervisors through endless litigation liti-gation and political influence. |