Voices

Clear-cutting national forest: a bad plan

DUMMERSTON — Unless people get active to stop the plan, thousands of acres of Green Mountain National Forest that are about 10 miles from Brattleboro will probably be clear-cut logged soon.

“They are coming hard with the the chainsaws to Green Mountain National Forest,” Chris Matera told me.

Matera lives in Northampton, Mass., and was the main subject of a New York Times article about logging. To get an idea of what this logging will look like, see “before and after” photos that Matera took last year in New Hampshire at: www.maforests.org/WMNF.pdf.

“What a sorry site it will be to look down from the top of Mount Snow and see clear cuts instead of that beautiful intact forest we see now.”

Activists are focusing on stopping logging on publicly owned land. Banning clear-cut logging, or all logging, on those sites would result in logging companies buying more land, which in turn would keep that land from being converted to vacation houses, roads, parking lots, and strip malls.

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