Forest Service plan preposterous

The Coeur d'Alene National Forest is the most heavily roaded and one of the most devastated of all the forests in the entire National Forest system, containing some 9,000 miles of logging roads - an average of 10 miles of road per square mile of forest (and up to 20 and 30 miles in some areas) - and, as a result, the North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River watershed is one of the most damaged watersheds in the National Forest system.

It is preposterous, therefore, that the Forest Service is planning to build still more roads and cause more devastation, by logging thousands of more acres of forest, in a watershed that the Forest Service and timber industry have ravaged consistently over the past 70 years - in the name of forest management.

As a result of so-called management, the water quality has drastically deteriorated and severe flooding frequently occurs, because of the roaded, denuded forest, causing the riverbed to rise from excessive deposition of rubble and sediment - a major cause of the tragic decline of fish populations.

The flooding also disperses great amounts of heavy metals, including lead, cadmium, arsenic, and zinc, into the wetlands of the lower Coeur d'Alene River (which have caused the deaths of thousands of swans and other wildlife), Lake Coeur d'Alene and the Spokane River watershed.

Roads and logging are the ruination of watersheds. And now the Forest Service proposes to violate the last vestiges of native forest in 16 beautiful tributaries and gulches that form the Beaver Creek watershed (a major tributary of the North Fork River), encroaching on the very fountainhead of the North Fork River-Irreparable first order streams from which its waters emanate.

Such intrusions into these remnants of a lost paradise, and the habitat of many declining species of wildlife, including wolves, fishers, black bears, cougars, wolverines, and lynx, are unjustifiable from any moral and ethical standpoint. These islands of native forest represent a rare portion of all that is left of the once great wilderness that blanketed the Coeur d'Alene River watershed, and, as such, deserve to be respected for all their unique beauty and biological diversity.

To replace douglas fir, grand fir, and lodgepole pine species of trees with yellow pine, tamarack, and white pine, with the presumption that the Forest Service can design a more fire and disease resistant forest, boarders more on illusion and fantasy than on nature's purposeful reality. (And this conscienceless idea, which calls for the ruthless poisoning of innocent ground squirrels, who have lived peacefully in the forest for thousands of years - and the displacement of before mentioned wildlife and many other species - lacks all humanity as well.)

For the past 10 millennia these beautiful forests have been managed by the insects, microbes, plants and animals that inhabit them, and in the process they have left the forest and mountains untrammeled and unscarred, their beauty inviolate. And fire has an essential role in the ecology and restoration of our forest.

In less than three quarters of a century the Forest Service-Timber industry complex has brought deplorable devastation to the waters, forests, and wildlife alike in the North Fork watershed, and, for that matter, throughout the entire national forest system.

When is the Forest Service going to start becoming responsible to the earth, its forest, wildlife, and future generations - rather than to the timber industry and modern-day robber barons - and realize that its arrogant history of deforestation has played a major role in the current global warming crisis (our forests are our greatest shield against global warming, storing tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, while producing oxygen, necessary for all life on earth), as well as in the greatest extinction rate the civilized world has ever known (100 to 300 species of animals, plants, and insects become extinct every day) - a holocaust brought on mainly by global deforestation, including the ruthless and arrogant destruction of our national forest?

The North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River watershed has suffered heavy abuse from 70 years of logging and the concurrent lack of any moral, ethical and aesthetic sensibility. The only moral and ethical thing the Forest Service can do now for this great watershed - having betrayed its stewardship trust-is to leave it alone and let nature heal itself - by stopping the bulldozers and chainsaws from any more destruction. In so doing, it will benefit this fragile earth, its wildlife, and current and future generations to the utmost.

"Whatever befalls the earth

befalls the sons and daughters

of the earth. We did not weave

the web of life. We are merely

a strand in it. Whatever we

do to the web we do to ourselves."

-Chief Seattle

Frederick K. Bardelli is a resident of Osburn.