THE long-running row over how best to manage America’s forests just got more heated. Environmentalists and the California attorney-general have filed lawsuits countering a federal plan for the management of forest fires. They say the plan is a sop to logging companies and will damage forest ecology.
The US Forest Service’s fire-management plan unveiled last year would quadruple the amount of commercial logging in forests covering 4.5 million hectares of federal land in the Sierra Nevada mountains. That is around 6 per cent of the total federal forested land. It proposes to sell contracts to cut big, commercially valuable trees and use the cash this generates…
