At least from MY point of view within the Forest Service, this "oversight" will probably lead to partisan political blatherings that won't lead to continued restoration of our National Forests. Boxer has always been a dyed-in-the-wool preservationist who would dismantle our timber management infrastructure (even more so than it is today).

Now, granted, the Healthy Forests program has been a miserable fizzle with very little accomplishments to parade around. However, it also has NOT been the catastrophic logging-fest that many had promised when it was first proposed.

In fact, the last project I worked on is called a "Stewardship Project", where many essential non-commercial tasks are paid for with trees thinned out from an overcrowded forest. This includes road maintenance and improvement, fuels reductions and wildlife habitat enhancement. The overall silvicultural prescription calls for commercial thinning of trees above 9" dbh, strict prohibition of cutting trees above 30" dbh, enhancement of black oak as a preferred species and retainment of overstory canopy. Where dominant and co-dominant trees are crowding each other, a few under 30" dbh trees can be picked and plucked, freeing up water and space for the best trees that will become our new old growth. Of course, perennial and intermittant stream buffers vary from 50 to 150 feet. Along with harvesting that commercial timber, sub-merchantable trees will be cut and removed, resulting in a forest that looks very much like a city park, ready for a regular program of controlled burning.

Now, I can't credit the Bush Administration for this style of forest management. We were doing something very similar back in the 90's, before Clinton pushed through a very restrictive "Sierra Nevada Framework" that stopped the cutting of trees, in some areas, above 12" dbh. This new style is something I'd like to call "reverse highgrading". People really seem to like the way the forest looks after it's all done. It's also the right thing to do, based on the latest science.

Speaking of science, I ran across this latest study that epitomizes the extremes that people will go to in order to stop cutting timber. Here's a link to an article detailing this brand new junk science.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/tech/2006/nov/2...

12 million dead trees on the San Bernardino National Forest. 7 million dead trees in Colorado, as well. 15 million dead trees on the Bitterroot National Forest. THAT'S a lot of fuel for the next inevitable fire. In the dry forests of the West, those fuels do NOT rot and turn into soil as woody debris. I have pictures of dead trees that died in the early 90's. They're still on the groung, all piled up in a jack-strawed mess of fuels underneath a green unhealthy forest.

Restoration forestry is the wave of the future and we can't let partisan politics get in the way of sound ecosystem science. If you want to do something constructive, write your elected representatives about lumber mill monopolies paying minimum rates for Federal timber. The more money we get from necessary thinnings, the more restoration work will get done without using tax dollars.