ROADLESS  (CONT)

Whitestone Southeast Logging actually left 400,000 board feet of logs to rot at a Tongass forest logging site, abandoning the timber because it wasn't commercially profitable to haul out. This, despite the Forest Service spending $2 million to prepare the timber sale, offering trees to Whitestone for $4 each and paying the company to bulldoze a logging road.

Spurred by the Taxpayers for Common Sense report, the U.S. House of Representatives last month approved a measure to end federal funding for building logging roads in the Tongass. The bipartisan amendment, which now runs smack-dab into the Bush Administration's roadless repeal, passed on a 222-to-205 vote and bars the Forest Service from designing or building any new logging roads next year in the Tongass.

It's true that many timber-dependent rural economies throughout the Pacific Northwest have suffered mightily as logging in public forests have been cut back during the past decade, and many of them have rightly called for public officials not to abandon them as economic forces pass them by. They too deserve a place in a sustainable economic future for the region that harvests timber off public and private lands in a fashion that respects ecological and economic health.

But opening up roadless areas, which cannot be undone, is not the way to achieve such a vision. It's a short-sighted approach that is sure to damage the region's thriving hunting, angling and outdoor recreation industry.

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