JULY 2007

From the AP, picked up by the Washington Post:

Logging Plan Halted in KY Forests

From the Lexington Herald Leader:

Group Hunting Old Growth Forests

APRIL 2007

THURSDAY, APRIL 26, 2007

CITIZEN GROUPS SUE FEDS OVER RECORD LOGGING, BURNING
PLANNED FOR EASTERN KENTUCKY'S DANIEL BOONE NATIONAL FOREST

CONTACT:
Joe Childers, Getty and Childers Law Offices, Lexington, KY., 859-259-1900
Paul Lovelace, Kentucky Heartwood, Morehead, KY., 606-356-2539
Steve Chaplin, Heartwood, Bloomington, IN., 812-331-1475

LEXINGTON, Ky. - Public citizen groups Kentucky Heartwood and Heartwood on Wednesday filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Lexington, Ky., seeking to halt record amounts of logging and burning proposed for the 700,000-acre Daniel Boone National Forest in Eastern Kentucky.

The lawsuit alleges the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife violated numerous federal laws when a new 15-year land use plan for the forest was adopted in 2004. The groups allege the federal government did not take a fair look at the health of forest species, the detrimental effects of mining, logging and development, or at accurate scientific data while developing and adopting the land use plan.

"These grass-roots groups have exhausted all of the avenues made available to them by the Forest Service, to no avail,” said Lexington attorney Joe Childers. “Their members decided to bring this lawsuit to protect a public resource that is highly valued by the vast majority of Kentuckians."

Heartwood, an Eastern U.S. forest protection group, and the unaffiliated Kentucky Heartwood, which focuses on publicly-owned lands in the state, will ask that the new forest management plan be rescinded and that the largest salvage logging project in the history of the forest, the Morehead Ice Storm project, be halted.

"The Morehead project is a particularly blatant example of the type of management planned for this important natural resource," said Kentucky Heartwood spokesperson Paul Lovelace. "Now going on five years old and really still not underway, it was a bad idea then and it's a much worse idea now."

The Morehead project resulted from a 2003 storm that knocked out power for days in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The Forest Service still wants to log nearly 13,000 acres affected by the storm, and while doing so plans on building 109 miles of roads, clearing 147 acres for stacking logs and spraying 700 acres with poisonous herbicides.

The Forest Service also wants to drastically increase logging throughout the forest, even though the agency told the Associated Press in 2003 while lobbying for the new plan that "the level of logging would be lower than the current management plan.” Forest Service officials have recently announced plans to increase logging throughout the forest next year by more than 1,000 percent over recent levels. The plan also calls for record burning of over 50,000 acres each year in the forest.

"Nobody wants burning in the Central Appalachian region anymore. Global warming experts and public health experts are against it, as are scientists who say it's not the effective oak management tool first thought. And then there are the folks who have to breathe the pollution every day," said Heartwood spokesman Steve Chaplin. "Even the federal Government Accountability Office has called Bush's Healthy Forest Initiative, which provided all these forest supervisors with too much money for burning, a failure."

"The current Daniel Boone Forest Plan reads as a 'how to' guide on forest exploitation", Lovelace added.  "The Forest Service gives priority to logging, burning, mining and drilling, unnecessary state and federal road-building, power lines and numerous other construction projects.  Meanwhile, human health, animal habitats, biodiversity and natural beauty pay the price. We cannot afford continued mismanagement."

In 2002 when federal officials first announced the new management plan 18 other state conservation groups joined Kentucky Heartwood in calling for revisions that would end commercial logging, ban ATV use and end coal, oil and gas extraction. The plan now being challenged in federal court allows for all those activities.

In 2005 the National Forest Protection Alliance, a coalition of more than 130 environmental groups, named the Daniel Boone as one of 11 "endangered" national forests in the U.S.


THE END