Don, Others,

You spent much of your career in the Grand Canyon Area.  This notice came out today about a suit involving logging in the Kaibab Plateau.  It is from the Center for Biological Diversity.  What is your opinion or observations on the matter.

  Center Sues for Recovering Forest Near Grand Canyon

  To save thousands of acres of Arizona forest still convalescing after a devastating wildfire, this Monday the Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, and WildEarth Guardians sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service over planned logging on the Kaibab Plateau north of the Grand Canyon. The "Warm Fire Recovery Project," approved for part of the Kaibab National Forest hit hard by the Warm Fire of 2006, is actually a poorly named timber sale that would log 73 million board feet of recovering trees, allow tractor logging on 9,114 acres of sensitive soil, reopen 95 miles of logging roads that would impact local watersheds, and remove large trees from 3,460 acres of federally protected habitat for the threatened Mexican spotted owl. Earlier this year, the Center and Sierra Club successfully challenged another federal logging project on the Kaibab Plateau: the Jacob Ryan timber sale.

  "Burned forests are naturally recovering now, and logging will irreversibly harm that recovery," said Jay Lininger, a fire ecologist with the Center. "Fire-killed trees are biological legacies that link the old forest with the new one. Logging them erodes soil and robs it of organic matter, spreads weeds, increases fire hazard, and destroys wildlife habitat that will take centuries to replace."

  Check out our press release, where you can read the lawsuit and other documents, and learn more about our campaigns for forests and ecosystem restoration.

Ed Frank

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and all science." - Albert Einstein

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