Word: galen
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...fourth-generation Idaho logger named Galen Hamilton, who is 43, and for the better part of a day we rode in his pickup truck (its bumper sticker: ARE YOU AN ENVIRONMENTALIST, OR DO YOU WORK FOR A LIVING?) along remote logging roads...
...Here is one side of the controversy that plan has generated: Loggers like Galen Hamilton are outraged. They think that the forest fires now burning up the West are connected to policies like the roadless initiative, to what might be called the sentimental neglect of forests - the failure to manage them properly, to thin the woods, clear the deadfall, and diminish the dense fuel that burns apocalyptically hot when fire does come...
...This is the worst time NOT to manage our forests," says Galen Hamilton. "Management" (according to the loggers, anyway) means intelligent logging, culling out dead and dying trees and always regenerating the forest, a process that can be accomplished within 12 or 15 years. It means, they say, attacking bark beetle and spruce budworm and other diseases. It means prescribed - that is, carefully controlled - burns to clear off choking, potentially hot-burning undergrowth...
...Galen Hamilton and others think that the Clinton roadless plan emanates from a mentality of simple-minded authoritarianism. Washington, they say, is dismissive of the informed views of the people who actually live on the land, and whose lives are most directly affected: whose school budgets are devastated and whose towns are likely to be closed down by the romantic, clueless environmentalism of elitist urbanites and ignorant pantheists...
...Galen Hamilton has his own, highly argumentative idea. Next time, I will offer the other side, the conservationist case in favor of the roadless lands...