California: Got an angry voicemail for “causing” the Shutdown of Quincy’s Sierra Pacific Sawmill

On Thursday morning I got an angry voicemail message from a man who blamed me for the loss of 150 jobs that the timber industry eliminated because they were unable to produce forest products without destroying the ecosystem that very modest / weak environmental laws were created to protect. He didn’t just blame me, he also blamed other “obstructionists” like me. As the article explains below, requiring the industry to follow basic rules and laws is way too much to ask for.

Specifically, the gentleman on the voicemail told me that when I went to sleep that night I needed to think about those 150 jobs / families whose lives I’ve destroyed. It makes me wonder if there is some way to compare the amount of lives destroyed by the timber industry across the globe in relation to the small number of jobs required to execute the destruction of those same said destroyed lives?  –Editor, Forest Policy Research

Read More about Quincy logging issues here:  http://bit.ly/EPc4 and
here: http://bit.ly/13necj and here: http://bit.ly/UMzp

Environmental lawsuits have long made it difficult for Sierra Pacific Industries, the second-largest lumber producer in the United States, to obtain local timber for its small-log sawmill in the tiny Northern California town of Quincy. This week, the flagging economy hit the final nail into the mill’s coffin: The company announced on Monday that it will close the plant in May. The mill was conceived to use small-diameter logs from programs that thin trees on national forest lands for the purpose of reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire.

Get full text; support writer, producer of the words:
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/03/05/05climatewire-citing-litigation-delays-logger-withdraws-fro-9992.html

But due to a long series of administrative appeals and lawsuits from
environmental groups that object to any commercial logging in national
forests, the Forest Service has only achieved 20 percent of its
overall sales targets, said Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI). Nearly
two-thirds of this year’s timber sale program is being held up by
pending litigation, the company said.

The result is that SPI has had to haul logs from farther away to run the mill and make up for the difference. Environmentalists, however, blamed the Quincy mill closure squarely on the tanking housing construction market.

“They [SPI] chose to scapegoat the environmental community as being the reason for the bulk of their problems,” said Craig Thomas, executive director of Sierra Forest Legacy, a group that has challenged many Forest Service thinning projects through regulatory appeals and lawsuits.

Get full text; support writer, producer of the words:
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/03/05/05climatewire-citing-litigation-delays-logger-withdraws-fro-9992.html