Forest Biodiversity And Clearcutting Prohibition Act

Excerpt from Forest Biodiversity and Clearcutting Prohibition Act of 1993: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Specialty Crops and Natural Resources of the Committee on Agriculture, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, First Session on H. R. 1164; October 28, 1993 I would like to emphasize for those who are listening - I know the subcommittee members know this - but when we are talking about national forests, we are talking about forests owned by the public, owned by average Americans; and there is no question in anybody's mind, if you sit and talk with anyone even remotely in volved with this issue, that the average person does not want to see us clearcutting our forests, that if people want to make money by going into the national forests owned by the public and harvest ing logs, they should do it according to a system of management that is prescribed in such a way that is consistent with the public interest as well as the economic interest of the timber industry. In recent decades, the Forest Service has depleted this country's biodiversity in nearly 70 percent of our Federal commercial timberland through various forms of even-age logging. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Wild Forests presents a coherent review of the scientific and policy issues surrounding biological diversity in the context of contemporary public forest management. The authors examine past and current practices of forest management and provide a comprehensive overview of known and suspected threats to diversity. In addition to discussing general ecological principles, the authors evaluate specific approaches to forest management that have been proposed to ameliorate diversity losses. They present one such policy -- the Dominant Use Zoning Model incorporating an integrated network of "Diversity Maintenance Areas" -- and describe their attempts to persuade the U.S. Forest Service to adopt such a policy in Wisconsin. Drawing on experience in the field, in negotiations, and in court, the authors analyze the ways in which federal agencies are coping with the mandates of conservation biology and suggest reforms that could better address these important issues. Throughout, they argue that wild or unengineered conditions are those that are most likely to foster a return to the species richness that we once enjoyed.