To the editor:
Why doesn’t the Indiana Division of Forestry Director defend his plans for logging in the Yellowwood State Forest Back Country Area in the fair give-and-take of a public discussion or forum?
That’s easy! It’s simply because he is unable to logically defend his logging plans when they are subjected to actual scientific scrutiny.
Forestry has been using really old science for the last decade to justify their indiscriminate trashing of our Indiana forests in order to support their own bureaucracy. It is indeed a strange world where foresters with a B.S. in forestry from Purdue (did I say B.S. from Purdue?) can call themselves scientists, while at the same time, the forestry director and the DNR assistant director simultaneously disparage and then deliberately ignore the Back Country biological inventory work done by 46 real live scientists — 30 with graduate degrees, including 19 PhDs — from 12 Indiana colleges and universities, three government agencies, three consulting firms, a park system, and the New York Botanical Gardens. Hello?
I would like the forestry director to please explain why he is speeding up the current timber sale and timber harvesting process in the very center of the Back Country Area. Might it be to kill rapidly mounting public opposition to his plans?
Why did he not advertise the Back Country timber sale details in the Brown and Monroe county newspapers, as he has done in the past? Why suddenly change and only put them in the Columbus and Martinsville papers? Come on! (Indiana state law dictates that the notice has to be advertised in at least two local newspapers at least two weeks before the sale.) Aren’t Monroe and Brown counties just as much (or even a little bit more) “local” to the whole of the Back Country Area than Bartholomew County? Geez!
Bartholomew County? Really?
The Division of Forestry has lost sight of its mission and its perspective, but, most importantly, it has lost its moral compass since 2008. Current forestry officials are not successfully dealing with, or even trying to publicize, a growing number of very important issues that really do threaten the health of Indiana forests. They would rather attack the bearers of the bad news than to deal with the news itself. It’s called institutional xenophobia.
Tell us more of the invasive species in Indiana that they have “forgotten” to mention publicly. You know, Thousand Cankers Disease, Sudden Oak Death, Asian Long-Horned Beetles, etc. Tell us how those were never really, actually, technically, ever here, and how they currently are taking extra special care to inform the public of them in a timely fashion. Tell us everything is all right. Tell us that invasives are not spread to all your logging cuts on commercial logging equipment and DNR vehicles. Is it really the campers? And their dogs?
Tell us why the meeting promised to Brown Countians for citizen input into the 2015–2019 forestry plan was scheduled after the plan had been printed and distributed several months earlier, and why 200-plus Brown Countians had to travel downtown to the state museum in Indy during a Colts home game amid Tuesday rush hour traffic to to give our belated — and therefore moot — input.
Remember how angry and loud that crowd got as they increasingly realized that their input time would be cut off prematurely by forestry officials? Recall that the director never answered one single policy question from the audience during that entire meeting, and how he would only accept written questions to be answered individually later online, two-plus months later? (P-f-f-f-f-f-t). Come on, ‘fess up! (Was he aware that a videotape of that meeting still exists?) So many questions to answer, so little time.
The issue here is no longer merely one of differing logging philosophies; it has become one of basic honesty, decency, and fair play on behalf of representatives of our Indiana state government.
The hallmark of our representative democracy needs to be transparency in all our governments’ dealings. Well, I promise to help the director of forestry and assistant DNR director to become much, much more transparent.
Have a day,
Chas. Cole, for the friends of Yellowwood
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