OpinionJanuary 28, 1996

If an unmanaged forest is a dying forest, as certain chainsaw enthusiasts say it is, when can we expect the obituary on more than 3.5 million acres of unmanaged forest east of here?

That is the total amount of Idaho land contained in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness and the adjoining Selway Bitterroot Wilderness. And if there's anything seriously wrong with either, it's a surprise to the tens of thousands of people who visit the wildernesses every year.

Yet proponents of a measure now before the Idaho Legislature to help the state try to wrest control of national forest land away from the federal government talk as if the only way to keep forests healthy is by logging them. Tuesday, Lewiston labor leader Phil Church said in a Turnabout column on this page, "Our forests are dying for lack of management!"

Where do people get this stuff? It's as if someone said it could never snow until the president signed a proclamation calling for snow, and people went on repeating it despite rapidly accumulating evidence to the contrary.

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The fact is that unmanaged forests, wildernesses in other words, get along just fine without human help. They have been doing it for centuries, most of those centuries passing before forest managers ever arrived on the scene.

And you needn't be a scientist to discern that. All you need do is walk up one of the trails in a nearby wilderness. If what you see about you is death, this country could benefit from a good deal more of such death.

The assertion that more management is needed to prevent national forests from dying is only one of the pieces of flapdoodle being peddled to justify this state land grab. But it is one of the most transparent pieces of flapdoodle. If the land grabbers get their way, how long will it be before we hear a timber executive say of a once-great forest what the officer in Vietnam said of a once-vital village: "I had to destroy it in order to save it"? J.F.

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