If you've made it this far down in this month's newsletter, I'm sure you're just looking for something to get enraged about. Here at "Tom's Turn," we aim to please:

Up in Yakutat, at the top of the Alaska panhandle, the Forest Service put 25 million board feet of big trees -- both standing and fallen -- in the Tongass National Forest up for auction over the course of two sales. In the first one, there were no bids, since the world market is well stocked with cheaper timber. Yakutat is far from the nearest mill, you see, so getting it to a domestic mill for processing would be expensive. OK, says the Forest Service, how about if we allow the raw logs to be shipped abroad without being touched? On these terms, they got bids on both sales from a company that is shipping the logs to South Korea, according to a story in the Juneau Empire.

So what's wrong with this? Well, the method of road building is highly destructive to streams, and the river system through this forest has one of the world's largest runs of steelhead and hosts all five species of Pacific salmon. Further, most export of raw logs is prohibited in order to ensure that public resources create or support domestic jobs, but they waived the prohibition. Thus, the losers are the Tlingit people who depend on the forest and the river for food, commercial and recreational fishermen who do likewise, and the wildlife that supports the hunters and fishermen. Local mill workers, the same ones cited by Alaska politicians in their endless speechifying to justify cutting the Tongass, get not a cent out of the deal. The only beneficiary is the company that cuts and ships the logs. To make it all worse, as far as we can tell the more recent of these two sales is one of the first violations of a roadless area since President Clinton put them all off-limits to logging more than four years ago. Earthjustice has challenged the second sale on behalf of the Yakutat Tlingit Tribe, but the judge has so far refused to stop the logging.

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management has just released a new, comprehensive, nationwide policy on livestock grazing, and it has scientists -- not to mention conservationists -- up in arms. The ruckus arises because several scientists report that sections of the report they drafted were turned 180 degrees to come to the conclusion that grazing is good for the public's lands -- while the draft report said the exact opposite. The Los Angeles Times describes the whole mess this way -- click here.

The report revisers then went on to say that a technique adopted by some imaginative groups over the past several years will no longer be allowed. The technique involved simply outbidding ranchers for grazing leases, then allowing the land to lie idle and recover from past overgrazing. The government now means to forbid this practice. If you win a lease, you must run cattle or sheep on the allotment or lose the lease because grazing is good for the land. This, my friends, is turning the free market on its head. The Center for Biological Diversity explains the finer points here

Tom Turner, Senior Editor
yourturn@earthjustice.org