The issue at hand is not and never has been whether certain individuals use timber products, because we all do. In this debate there has been no general opposition to logging. The issue is clearly whether or not the type of industrial timber extraction practiced on the Shawnee National Forest is an appropriate operation, to which Ms Wright flippantly refers to a handful of trees, consisting of more than 250 (100 year old plus) mature trees.

The fact that Ms. Wright chose to compare Joe Glisson’s personal firewood cutting permits to a commercial timber sale borders on absurd. Ms. Wright stated that she saw the permits but failed to mention that the permits were specifically for dead and downed marked locust trees. Ms. Wright’s attempt to compare Glisson’s permits for collecting two chords (stacks of wood measuring 4’x4’x8′) of dead wood per year to Carbondale Veneer’s single purchase of hundreds of living, habitat providing, oak and hickory trees seems steeped in vindictiveness.

While wood is a renewable resource, the dilemma facing the forest ecosystems in this area is the negative impact forest fragmentation has on interior dwelling species. Numerous wildlife species are showing very troubling population declines. Cripps Bend is significant habitat because of its location in the heart of the largest tract of contiguous Shawnee forest land.

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Mr. Huetteman’s reference to wood resources as being infinitely renewable is troubling, considering the fact that some of the world’s present desert regions are known to have been the result of some past human exploitation of once thriving forests.

Touch of Nature’s environmental ed staff