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Tuolumne County groups protest forest lawsuit
About 100 people, most of them from Tuolumne County, yesterday went to Sacramento to protest California Attorney General Bill Lockyer's lawsuit challenging the U.S. Forest Service's Sierra Nevada management plan. Teresa Schilling, spokeswoman for the attorney general. "The Bush administration wants to cut down more trees. ... We want to make sure the forests are healthy for the future."
The Union Democrat
Sonora California - Tuolumne County
Tuolumne County groups protest forest lawsuit
Published: April 26, 2005
By DHYANA LEVEY
About 100 people, most of them from Tuolumne County, yesterday went to Sacramento to protest California Attorney General Bill Lockyer's lawsuit challenging the U.S. Forest Service's Sierra Nevada management plan.
Participants included members of the Tuolumne County Alliance for Resources and Environment (TuCARE), the Highway 108 FireSafe Council, Western Council of Industrial Workers, Local Lumber and Sawmill Workers 2652, the Blue Ribbon Coalition and the California Equestrian Trails and Lands Coalition.
TuCARE, a Twain Harte-based group made up primarily of ranchers and loggers, promotes "the wise use of forest resources."
The groups have joined in filing a motion to intervene in Lockyer's lawsuit.
Tuolumne County Supervisor Mark Thornton also attended and spoke at the rally.
The protesters, including some from Camino, South Lake Tahoe and other Sierra Nevada communities, rallied at Cesar Chavez Park in Sacramento, and then marched to outside the attorney general's office.
They want to halt Lockyer's lawsuit against the revised Sierra Nevada Framework, which manages logging and other activities on 11.5 million acres of Sierra Nevada forest land. The framework, drafted during the Clinton administration, has since been revised to triple the amount of logging allowed on national forests in the Sierra Nevada.
Forest Service officials say the changes are intended to cut the risk of wildfire.
But Lockyer has said the revised plan puts the forests at risk in favor of timber harvesting.
"It's a plan based on politics," said Teresa Schilling, spokeswoman for the attorney general. "The Bush administration wants to cut down more trees. ... We want to make sure the forests are healthy for the future."
The protesters said the lawsuit holds up work that could be done to keep the forests healthy and secure jobs for timber industry workers. The forests are not healthy because they are overgrown and could be taken down by wildfires, they said.
"We want to put the pressure on the governor to keep his staff under control," said Melinda Fleming, TuCARE advocacy consultant. "We don't have to sit down and take it. I'm sure there will be some kind of response."
The protesters, however, did not get as fast a response as they had wanted. They asked the attorney general to come down and talk to them, but he didn't, Fleming said.
Schilling said Lockyer wasn't in the office when the protest started about 10:15 a.m. yesterday.
"We didn't know they were coming, so we couldn't respond," she said. "We have a lot of values in common — we both want to protect the forest."
Contact Dhyana Levey at dlevey [at] uniondemocrat.com or 588-4530.
http://www.uniondemocrat.com/news/story.cfm?story_no=17186
Sonora California - Tuolumne County
Tuolumne County groups protest forest lawsuit
Published: April 26, 2005
By DHYANA LEVEY
About 100 people, most of them from Tuolumne County, yesterday went to Sacramento to protest California Attorney General Bill Lockyer's lawsuit challenging the U.S. Forest Service's Sierra Nevada management plan.
Participants included members of the Tuolumne County Alliance for Resources and Environment (TuCARE), the Highway 108 FireSafe Council, Western Council of Industrial Workers, Local Lumber and Sawmill Workers 2652, the Blue Ribbon Coalition and the California Equestrian Trails and Lands Coalition.
TuCARE, a Twain Harte-based group made up primarily of ranchers and loggers, promotes "the wise use of forest resources."
The groups have joined in filing a motion to intervene in Lockyer's lawsuit.
Tuolumne County Supervisor Mark Thornton also attended and spoke at the rally.
The protesters, including some from Camino, South Lake Tahoe and other Sierra Nevada communities, rallied at Cesar Chavez Park in Sacramento, and then marched to outside the attorney general's office.
They want to halt Lockyer's lawsuit against the revised Sierra Nevada Framework, which manages logging and other activities on 11.5 million acres of Sierra Nevada forest land. The framework, drafted during the Clinton administration, has since been revised to triple the amount of logging allowed on national forests in the Sierra Nevada.
Forest Service officials say the changes are intended to cut the risk of wildfire.
But Lockyer has said the revised plan puts the forests at risk in favor of timber harvesting.
"It's a plan based on politics," said Teresa Schilling, spokeswoman for the attorney general. "The Bush administration wants to cut down more trees. ... We want to make sure the forests are healthy for the future."
The protesters said the lawsuit holds up work that could be done to keep the forests healthy and secure jobs for timber industry workers. The forests are not healthy because they are overgrown and could be taken down by wildfires, they said.
"We want to put the pressure on the governor to keep his staff under control," said Melinda Fleming, TuCARE advocacy consultant. "We don't have to sit down and take it. I'm sure there will be some kind of response."
The protesters, however, did not get as fast a response as they had wanted. They asked the attorney general to come down and talk to them, but he didn't, Fleming said.
Schilling said Lockyer wasn't in the office when the protest started about 10:15 a.m. yesterday.
"We didn't know they were coming, so we couldn't respond," she said. "We have a lot of values in common — we both want to protect the forest."
Contact Dhyana Levey at dlevey [at] uniondemocrat.com or 588-4530.
http://www.uniondemocrat.com/news/story.cfm?story_no=17186
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Tuolumne County is my home, I was raised here,
I am a wife and I work The morning shift at a resteraunt. I have three boys all in high school. The Stanislaus Forest is our home and we love and respect it. At the same time I see that our forests are sick. They are growing themselves to death. They are burning and nothing is being done to restore them. Thousands of acres of timber rots on the stump while local lumber mills face layoffs year after year struggling to stay open.
Bill Lockyers lawsuit is insane. The environmental movement started out as a good thing but their forest management policies have left our communitee vulnerable to catastrophic wildfire and we are powerless to do anything about it. The Stanislaus forest grows at a rate of 300 million board feet a year and only 12 million of this new growth is being removed each year. This includes biomass and firewood permits. Our forests are so overgrown that you can not walk through them unless they have recently been logged.
Without the wood products industry we can not manage the forest at all. We would have no where to send the timber that needs to be thinned and we would have no money to do it. The lumber and sawmill workers are the number one tool that we have against catastrophic wildfires.
As for the environmental groups, I have heard many of them speak at meetings of how important the wood products industry is and how dangerously overgrown the forest is and then they turned around and filed this lawsuit. I believe that to some people it has become less about saving the environment and more about the hundreds of millions of dollars that the top exectives of these groups bring home each YEAR.
Must we wait for another fire like the ones that burned in San Bernadino? Over 3000 homes destroyed and close to 30 lives lost. 650 Miles of critical watershed that supplies water to the LA area destroyed.
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