Letter-to-the-Editor printed in Oct. 25, 2007 Harrisonburg Daily News Record:

Dear Editor:

The Rockingham County residents who live next downstream of the proposed logging and road building at Marshall Run on the George Washington National Forest have every reason to be concerned (see Sept. 28, 2007 DNR).

On my visits and hikes in this place it is obvious from the looks of the stream courses that at times great volumes of water sweep through and out of the area.

The Forest Service is proposing “modified shelterwood”, a form of intensive industrial cutting that typically removes around 75-90% of a clearcut. The FS misleadingly refers to this as “selective” logging. Sites proposed for logging and roads include very steep slopes and mature or old growth forest.

This area is part of a larger parcel of National Forest that qualifies as a “roadless area” that the FS improperly did not “inventory” as such. Such tracts are rare and precious in our landscape. Here you can find peace and quiet and escape from the hubbub of development.

The FS can't take care of the roads it has got, with a nationwide backlog of billions of dollars of maintenance work. Yet here they go proposing to smash another 2-1/2 miles through the woods.

According to the Forest Plan this area supplys “remote habitat for wildlife” sensitive to human disturbance. The proposed roads and logging would compromise, degrade and destroy the very conditions the FS is supposed to be promoting.

On top of all this the FS is proposing to set fire to 1300 acres here. This would require another 2 miles of “control lines”, meaning more bulldozers churning their way through the Forest. Moist hollows, cool slopes, riparian areas and other inappropriate sites would be burned.

The government employees entrusted with taking care of our public forests need to withdraw this ill-conceived and needlessly destructive proposal.


Steven Krichbaum