Save South Deer Campaign Launched at BLM Auction

While the massive Applegate area timber sales received no bids at the BLM Auction Sept. 29th, other sales in Southwest Oregon did sell. One of them, the controversial South Deer logging project in the Illinois Valley, made history when the BLM took the unprecedented step of accepting Orville and Mary Camp?s Natural Selection model of forestry as an official alternative to the standard industrial logging the BLM promotes in their Environmental Assessment for this sale.

Though the BLM offered up over 600 acres for the Camp?s to implement their innovative forestry practices on, this amounts to only 7% of this timber sale, and the Camp?s have filed official protests contesting the project.

?When it comes to forest health and real fire safety, big business and big government literally can?t see the forest for the trees,? said Orville Camp, the fourth generation Illinois Valley logger who developed the Natural Selection Alternative. ?They need to recognize that other species create and sustain natural forests and that there is nothing humans can do to improve on this. Sustainability necessitates retaining natural forests. The most fire resistant forest is a natural old-growth forest with a closed canopy that prevents high fire hazard fuel buildups below.

?Opening up the canopy encourages high fire hazard fuel conditions. Under the BLM alternative, canopies will be opened up to meet a timber sale, and natural forests will be converted into unnatural tree plantations with the ongoing costly struggle of trying to keep nature from restoring it. Taxpayers will be subsidizing the same out-dated destructive forestry management practices that turned our beautiful valley into a tinderbox in the first place.

?It?s a vicious cycle initiated by profit driven corporate stockholders and fueled by government land managers under the guise of federally mandated fire hazard reduction. I have lived and worked in the forest all of my life, and I can tell you that Bush?s so-called Healthy Forests Initiative is a misleading misnomer of mythic proportions that is bad for forests and bad for communities. This administration and its corporate constituents are playing on the public?s understandable fear of fire. What they are not telling us is that private corporations will reap huge profits at the expense of forest and community health putting our communities at even greater risk and forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. The Illinois Valley, Deer Creek in particular, is struggling to recover from over a century of unsustainable forestry practices, and our community is committed to working with the BLM to heal not harm our valley.?

Friends of Deer Creek Valley is a community coalition committed to working with federal land managers and private land owners to create a sustainable local forest economy by restoring natural forests to late-successional old-growth conditions.

To arrange a tour of local forest land that has been using the Natural Selection Alternative for 39 years, please contact Mary Camp on (541) 597-4313 or email MaryC@RogueRiver.net.

For more information, please visit SaveSouthDeer.org.

Posted by laurel at September 30, 2005 03:54 PM | Category(s): Forest Defense/Environmental Activism