Forest Service

Firefighters from the Maryland Forest Service deployed Friday to contain two Eastern Shore wild fires made worse by dry conditions and stiff winds. The largest was a 12-acre blaze in woods and fields near Cordova in northeastern Talbot County. The fire is believed to have been started Thursday by a spark from farm equipment, according to Forest Service fire supervisor Monte Mitchell. A second fire began Friday in Somerset County. Two or three acres were burning on land owned by the Department of Natural Resources.

Trees are losing ground to pavement in many U.S. cities, Baltimore included, according to a new federal study. Tree cover in urban areas is declining at a rate of about 4 million trees per year, according to a U.S. Forest Service study published recently in the journal Urban Forestry & Urban Greening .  Researchers at the Forest Service's Northern Research Station used satellite imagery to determine that 17 of the 20 cities analyzed...

MISSOULA, Mont. - With the start of another Western wildfire season, we ought to reflect on the lessons learned from last summer's wildfires, which drew national attention. The public learned that wildfires are an essential and natural process as much a part of the landscape as wind, sun, snow and rain. More than ever, people now realize that wildfires do not destroy a forest, but that logging, road building, grazing and other heavy-handed management activities are the true source of our forest health problems.

Amid the oaks and hickories of the Green Ridge State Forest, a 46,000-acre tract of wooded slopes and stream valleys in Western Maryland, all may not be as idyllic and remote from the ills of modern civilization as geography might suggest. In a statement, the Maryland Natural Resources Police said it charged 10 people with drug violations on a recent Saturday. In addition the agency said, during the first nine months of this year, it made more than 120 arrests on charges of illegal drug use. In response, Natural Resources Police said, it will begin an enhanced enforcement effort to curtail illegal drug activity in the forest, about a two-hour drive from the Baltimore area.

WASHINGTON -- The Forest Service authorized extensive new logging yesterday for the next 10 years in the Tongass National Forest in southeastern Alaska, the nation's last expanse of old-growth temperate rain forests.The plan calls for cutting 220 million to 267 million board feet of timber annually: about enough to load 50,000 logging trucks or build more than 20,000 houses a year.It is less than the region's loggers and Alaska's congressional delegation have sought, but more than leading environmental groups deem acceptable.

RIDGEWAY, Pa. - The signs are in the trees. Here, a cluster of leaves, thin yellow instead of vivid green. There, the luxuriant foliage of the forest canopy broken by a crown of spiky bare branches.Across a 90,000-acre-stretch of Pennsylvania's Allegheny National Forest, trees are dying at an alarming rate.To combat the decline, the U.S. Forest Service wants to sell logging rights to timber companies, so they can cut back some of the failing woods and provide room for the forest to regenerate.

A federal judge has temporarily halted a proposed logging operation in a small roadless section of the Sierra Nevada after concluding that the U.S. Forest Service project, intended to reduce the wildfire hazard, could actually increase the fire risk. In an order handed down late Tuesday after a Sacramento, Calif., hearing, U.S. District Judge Morrison C. England Jr. found that environmental groups challenging the sale had made a strong case that timber debris left from the project would stoke future blazes and that logging would harm wildlife habitat.

BITTERROOT NATIONAL FOREST, Idaho -- Tom Hearne, an administrator who spends his workday in Seattle, behind a desk, doing a job he loves, is talking about passion. Real passion. Like being outdoors, for long stretches, in beautiful settings, with great people.Real passion. Like camping last month along the Salmon River's wild and scenic stretch, on land tamed by a hermit trapper, with a small band of volunteers searching for clues about people who lived there in ancient times.Mr. Hearne, 52, was among five volunteers helping with a U.S. Forest Service archaeological dig.The work of volunteers like Mr. Hearne is not meant to be pure entertainment, though the swift-running Salmon, tree-studded ridges and hiking trails that stretch for miles are tempting.

Hundreds of campgrounds, picnic areas and other recreation facilities in national forests and grasslands - mostly in the West - could close under a sweeping U.S. Forest Service cost-cutting plan. Every one of the roughly 15,000 campgrounds, trailheads with a bathroom and other developed recreation sites in the 193 million acres under the agency's authority is being evaluated. The value of each site is being weighed against the cost of maintaining it, federal officials say. Forest Service officials say they are being forced to juggle priorities as the system faces a $346 million backlog in maintenance, a growing tab for fire suppression - now 42 percent of expenditures - and an annual budget that was cut 2.5 percent to $4.9 billion for 2007.

NO LONGER is the U.S. Forest Service eager to appease the logging industry. The federal agency is putting a new emphasis on using its 192 million acres for recreation and tourism, instead of favoring exploitation, which last year cost taxpayers $88 million in subsidies.An 18-month ban imposed last year on new logging roads on federal land gave rise to this change.Recreation now accounts for three-quarters of the economic activity generated by Forest Service lands. Meantime, timber sales have plummeted 75 percent.

Firefighters from the Maryland Forest Service deployed Friday to contain two Eastern Shore wild fires made worse by dry conditions and stiff winds. The largest was a 12-acre blaze in woods and fields near Cordova in northeastern Talbot County. The fire is believed to have been started Thursday by a spark from farm equipment, according to Forest Service fire supervisor Monte Mitchell. A second fire began Friday in Somerset County. Two or three acres were burning on land owned by the Department of Natural Resources.

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. -- No one could claim surprise last week when tall flames raged across more than 3,000 acres and consumed 254 homes. The ingredients for a devastating wildfire have long been in place in the Tahoe basin, where 32,000 houses are tucked into an overgrown forest of pine and fir. Three million visitors a year come to relax on the shores of one of the deepest and clearest lakes in the world. Investigators said the blaze was started by an illegal campfire. It was mostly contained, and some firefighters were beginning to withdraw, they said.

Citizen activists have been a bane to the Bush administration - particularly on environmental regulations. They ask questions. They file lawsuits. They try to thwart nearly every administration attempt to cut the red tape surrounding use of the nation's natural resources and wind up adding greatly to the cost of these gambits. So the administration has decided to simply eliminate the bothersome environmental reviews previously applied to management plans for the 193 million acres of national forest.

Hundreds of campgrounds, picnic areas and other recreation facilities in national forests and grasslands - mostly in the West - could close under a sweeping U.S. Forest Service cost-cutting plan. Every one of the roughly 15,000 campgrounds, trailheads with a bathroom and other developed recreation sites in the 193 million acres under the agency's authority is being evaluated. The value of each site is being weighed against the cost of maintaining it, federal officials say. Forest Service officials say they are being forced to juggle priorities as the system faces a $346 million backlog in maintenance, a growing tab for fire suppression - now 42 percent of expenditures - and an annual budget that was cut 2.5 percent to $4.9 billion for 2007.

SELMA, ORE. -- Three government SUVs guarded a road to nowhere. Nearby, a middle-aged couple camping out in a trailer manned a round-the-clock checkpoint next to a locked gate, on the watch for environmental protesters. A few miles beyond, the drone of chainsaws rose from a deep ravine while a hovering helicopter plucked blackened logs from the floor of the burned forest and ferried them to the nearest road. Begun late last summer, the logging is the first in the country on nearly 60 million acres of remote national forest land protected by a Clinton administration decree that was set aside last year by the Bush administration.

SALEM, Ore. -- The debate over immigration, which has filtered into almost every corner of American life in recent months, is now sweeping through the woods, and the implications could be immense for the coming fire season in the West. As many as half of the approximately 5,000 private firefighters based in the Pacific Northwest and contracted by state and federal governments to fight forest fires are immigrants, mostly from Mexico. And an untold number of them are working here illegally.

A 68-year-old woman, trapped with her husband in a snowbound automobile in California's Sierra Nevada mountains for more than two weeks, wrote a note to her children shortly before she died:"Your father passed away," wrote Nada Jean Chaney, who had recently moved to the mountains from Santa Clarita, Calif. "It was very peaceful. His last words were, 'Thank the Lord.' "The bodies of the woman and her 75-year-old husband, Kenneth, who became stranded in a March snowstorm when they took a wrong turn while driving home from Fresno, Calif.

WASHINGTON - The Forest Service made changes yesterday in the way it plans management of national forests, shortening the process by years while eliminating the primary tool used by environmentalists to challenge logging and mining in protected forests. The action, which the Forest Service said would cut its planning process from 10 years to two years, drew cautious applause from timber industry spokesmen, who said they hope the change will speed approval for logging. Conservation groups and ecology professors said the new policy takes too much of a piecemeal approach to forest planning and would allow the timber and mining industries to severely damage national forests.

ROANOKE, Va. -- Along a rocky path of the Appalachian Trail, Sherman Bamford pointed to a mist-shrouded mountainside in the Thomas Jefferson National Forest, where 121 acres could soon be up for public auction. The land is on a list of about 300,000 acres of national forest the Bush administration has proposed selling to help fund the operation of rural schools and offset cuts in federal aid. Forest Service officials said yesterday that they do not expect to sell more than about 175,000 acres in order to reach their goal of raising $800 million.

Maryland residents again have the chance to protect their national forests under the latest proposal by the Bush administration to sell public land to pay for funding for rural schools. This would include over 10,000 acres in the nearby Monongahela and George Washington and Jefferson national forests and an additional 21,000 acres elsewhere in the Appalachian region. We have a finite amount of public land available for habitat protection, hunting, fishing, hiking and other recreation, especially for Eastern metropolitan areas such as Baltimore.