Editor,
The U.S. Forest Service is on the brink of making the same mistake they did 50
years ago: clear-cutting the Mon. What they’ve forgotten is in 1973, citizen protests stopped them
as we are trying to do now.
The U.S.F.S. plans on clear-cutting close to 3463 acres – nearly five and a
half square miles of the Upper Cheat River portion of Monongahela National Forest,
including mature and old-growth trees that President Biden specifically called out to protect for their
value in slowing climate change, in his Executive Order issued last Earth Day, April 2022.
Another aspect of history the U.S.F.S. seems to have forgotten is the consequences of earlier clear-
cuts: the floods of 1907, 1936 and 1985 when heavy rains hit steep slopes denuded of trees and sent
flood waters cascading into the Cheat River, downstream into Pittsburgh, turning downtown
streets into canals wreaking damage of $5 million and $250 million.
We face the same dangers today. Clear-cutting is an ugly forest management practice that decimates
not only every standing tree but, in its wake, the forests’ former networks of tree roots die and no
longer holds the soil. The forests proposed for this upcoming operation are on slopes above farms and
towns, some so steep that the U.S.F.S. plans to bring helicopters in to reach the trees.
This cost to carry out the operation will exceed any gains from the timber taken, by an
estimated $1.4 million dollars.
That may be a low estimate of the potential loss. The most recent harvest, there were no
buyers. The century-old trees were chipped and sold to a local charcoal
factory.
The land proposed is home to 225 bird species and sixty fish species and federally protected northern
flying squirrels, Cheat Mountain salamander and rare green
salamander. Endangered Northern long-eared bats and other bat species slalom through the
tree trunks. Brook Trout thrive in the Christal waters.
The Forest Service’s principal rationale for the Upper Cheat River project to create varied-age
landscapes, early successional habitat. But right next door is all kinds of private property, already clear-
cut, patchworked around the proposed National Forest project by entities such as Western Pocahontas,
the State of WV and private land owners.
What’s rate in the East is old growth. Monongahela’s old trees now store over a century’s worth of
carbon, keeping it from wreaking exponentially more havoc in causing extreme heat, cold, droughts and
floods.
Just last month the Forest Service withdrew a plan to log 2000 acres of older forests in Oregon’s
Willamette National Forest, Headwaters of the McKenzie River.
We’re asking the Forest Service to change course on the Upper Cheat River Project,
to reconsider its role as purveyors of publicly owned resources to private industry. The ultimate long-
term value of our National Forests is to the public, in clean air, clean water, recreation and the carbon-
eating power of big old trees. We hope the U.S.F.S. will rise to a higher purposed and protect them.
Joseph W. Dumire
