Newspaper Article

Bush's Forest Plan Worse Than Fire

Edward O. Wilson. Edward O. Wilson, a professor emeritus at Harvard University, is author of many books, including "The Future of Life." This is from The Washington Post

2003

Overview

The health-by-logging approach reveals the wide separation between two opposing views concerning the best use of U.S. forests. The administration, seeing the forests as a source of extractive wealth, presses for more logging and road-building in wilderness areas. Its strategists appear determined to mute or override the provision of the 1976 National Forest Management Act requiring that forest plans \"provide for the diversity of plant and animal communities.\" Each kind of forest or any other natural ecosystem is a masterpiece of evolution, exquisitely well adapted to the environment it inhabits. The fauna and flora of the world are, moreover, the cradle of humanity, to which we, no less than the rest of life, are closely adapted in our physical and psychological needs. Each species and its descendant species live, very roughly, a million years before suffering natural extinction. Worldwide, habitat destruction combined with the other three of the four horsemen of environmental ruin - invasive species, pollution and unsustainable logging - have increased the rate of extinction by as much as a thousandfold, thereby shortening the average life spans of species by the same amount.

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