Where Is Mark Udall's Common Sense and Compassion?

It used to be the environmental organizations and their toadies like Mark Udall who accused the timber industry of slash and burn tactics against our forests.

Now, they are being accused of slash and burn tactics against the economies of areas which used to rely on the timber industry and are now being asked to live off tourism revenues in burned out areas that no one wants to visit.

This is one of a series of articles and essays we are bringing forward to show just how dangerous, ruthless, and callous the environmental extremists like the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and their congressional allies like Mark Udall and John Salazar have become. What is happening in Oregon will happen here in Colorado.

Environmental groups and their allies [ like Mark Udall ] argue that tourism can take the place of the millions of lost timber dollars and revenues from these O&C public lands. But tourism jobs and revenues often simply cannot replace the family-wage jobs and tax revenues that have historically come from timber production on these lands...

Environmental groups have successfully fought efforts to salvage and replant burned areas in Oregon, even when it would benefit forest health. Tourists are not interested in seeing dead, dying and bug infested forests.

The author of this article can only be described as bitter toward the "environmentalist extremists." Before Mark Udall tries to get himself elected to the US Senate, he needs to explain how it is good public policy to allow well paid lawyers and environmental groups to destroy people's livlihoods when they don't pay taxes in the state they are laying waste to.

Wealthy, tax-exempt groups such as the Wilderness Society also work to restrict public access to public lands like the O&C Lands. They work to prohibit the construction of roads into public areas for recreational or economic use. To the Wilderness Society and its executives, and other wealthy groups such as the Sierra Club, the public should be excluded from public lands and those areas shouldn’t be a tax base for local Oregon counties. Ironically, recreationists like hikers and fishermen often access public areas on old logging roads, built by those in the wood products industry.