I saw a clearcut in my Olympia neighborhood. It was ugly. It damaged a salmon stream. It destroyed habitat. And nobody but a few investors looking to make a buck benefitted.
The kids in our neighborhood who used to walk through a beautiful forest with 100-year-old trees got a devastated landscape. Thankfully, a local environmental conservation group bought the property and the community is helping to restore it.
But that’s not what usually happens. We’ll see more of the same if the “Fix Our Forests Act” passes. It is a shameful giveaway of our public lands to logging interests. Instead of preventing future wildfires, the bill would allow more logging of our oldest, most-fire resistant trees, potentially exacerbating the situation it claims to fix. Instead of spending money hardening the communities susceptible to burning, it will destroy our beautiful old growth forests and weaken environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, which were passed by a Republican president.
This is not forest management. We are being robbed of our natural resources to profit the richest in our society. This bill will damage the wellbeing of our citizens, our environment on which we depend, and defies science and common sense.
Please call your senators to vote against this shameful theft of our natural resources.
Esther Kronenberg
Thurston County
