Cry for the People

And what's left of the forests after the profits are made and gone. The taxpayers paying for the clean up not the sawmill owners who harvested and ran. My comment wasn't published by the OpinionjournalThey have one voice only like all wingnut blogs.

It's really death of a forest a priori. That's why he ran out of logs. The government's own forest ecologists don't agree with either the cause's Petersen cites , or the conclusion. Businesses operate until the base dries up. I walked these forests as a biologist for years and nowhere is more hammered than northwest Montana. The Yaak valley hillsides look like a dog with manage. In Libby the whole town is superfund site including the once fish-bearing Libby Creek. Not anymore thanks to years of creosote polution from a defunct plywood mill. The mill closed because as in Oregon, not enough trees of that girth were left. They simply no longer exist. They got all of them. Clearcutting old growth and replanting on species that are never thinned because the trees are too small to be profitable creates an overgrown condition susceptible to insect infestations and wildfires. The logging caused it and the mitigation failed.

It's a vicious cycle. These "cry me a river" ad populums may play well in Peoria, but in the mountains of Montana all that's left is the legacy of overharvesting, out-of-business industry and the devastated watersheds they created for profit. And now the taxpayer pays for their profits and the cleanup. Isn't that a familiar theme these days.