On Wednesday, the House Resources Committee passed a bill which could delay any action to create the new monument. Radanovich was among those who said placing the sequoia groves and the surrounding forest off limits to logging would increase the amount of flammable materials in the region, increasing the risk of forest fires. The President claims we need to protect these trees. A catastrophic fire, that kills the trees and sterilizes the ground, or a bug infestation that wipes out entire groves, could destroy these groves forever. But the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said Glickman s proposal does not go far enough to reduce logging.
Mechanical thinning is commercial logging in everything but name.
The trees are cut and sold by the timber industry. All the Forest Service has done is to open the door for the timber industry to drive its trucks through. In Sequoia National Park, adjacent to the land proposed as a National Monument, the National Park Service has used controlled burns rather than mechanical logging to reduce the risk of catastrophic forest fires. Healthy giant sequoia trees depend on fire to clear out competing underbrush, and sequoia cones release their seeds only when activated by a forest fire s heat. We urge the panel be built on the experience at the National Park Service, which has demonstrated its ability to create an appropriate fire environment using controlled burning without relying on logging.