It is destructive enough when the U.S. Forest Service builds roads into critical wildlife habitat in order to cut down the forest and haul away the logs. It adds insult to injury when the logging roads are built even though timber companies refused to bid on the trees the Forest Service wished to sell!
This booklet will look at two environmentally destructive road projects on the Flathead National Forest of Northwest Montana. In the cases of Bent Flat and Sunset Beaver, the Forest Service did not receive a single bid on either timber sale in the 1980's, but went ahead and spent $840,000 of "hard money" (your tax dollars appropriated by Congress) to build 27 miles of new road and reconstruct 14 miles of existing road in the timber sale areas. Now the Forest Service acknowledges that the timber sale environmental documents on which the road construction was based are insufficient for the timber sales to proceed!
This scenario is common. When timber buyers balk at paying the price for federal timber and road construction, the Forest Service simply uses your "hard money" tax dollars to build the roads for them. It provides this subsidy in an attempt to lure the timber industry into remote and steep roadless lands where the costs of building the roads and conducting the timber sale often exceed the market value of the trees. This is an environmentally destructive and economically foolish practice which you can help stop!
