After reading the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition’s (SAFC) “Protect our Public Lands” commentary in this paper, I thought your readers would be interested in a different perspective on the “roadless” issue.

SAFC, along with the who’s who of environmental groups across the country, have conjured-up numerous scary scenarios of public lands being raped and pillaged to convince people to oppose wise stewardship of our natural resources on these lands. However, the myths environmental extremists have carefully developed over the past decade to convince us that timber harvesting and road construction should be halted on national forest lands are rapidly falling apart.

Let’s take a close look at some of these myths.

While these extremists claim to champion forestland wildlife in their scenarios, they ignore the mountains of scientific evidence that point to the benefits of forest disturbances, including timber harvesting, in creating diversity for wildlife on forested landscapes.

The “roadless area” debate, the subject of SAFC’s commentary, prompted every state wildlife agency — those in this state, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Tennessee — in our region to question the wisdom of setting aside more lands to a de facto “no management” status. The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, in a public statement, said, “In many instances, the proper habitat manipulation to benefit a particular wildlife species may require some road or firebreak construction to implement management prescriptions such as prescribed fire, timber harvest or timber stand improvements.” Likewise, the Virginia Board of Game and Inland Fisheries passed a resolution stating, in part, “These misguided policies are harmful to wildlife and the management of wildlife in general. Policies that ban the harvest of timber are particularly devastating to grouse and woodcock which are dependent upon the new growth resulting from timber cutting.”

Another environmental myth perpetuated by the preservationist movement is that forests can remain healthy without deliberate management prescriptions. One only has to look at the 1988 Yellowstone fires and the devastating fire seasons since 2000 in the West to see the fallacy in this philosophy. Science tells us that we can use a combination of prescribed fires and timber stand improvement techniques to greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the risk of these catastrophic fire scenarios.

Locally, damage caused by the southern pine bark beetle outbreaks can be minimized through strategic timber harvesting techniques. All landowners, including the U.S. Forest Service, have a moral obligation to minimize the spread of the insects to keep the populations in check. Unchecked, this small insect can wipe out entire stands of mature pine forests very quickly. While some affected landowners may have ambivalent feelings toward the insect and its damage, their inaction toward the insect could have a devastating impact on any neighbor who wants to maintain healthy, mature pine forests on their land.

All these myth-based arguments and others, including public support, being advanced to halt timber harvesting and road construction on public lands have been developed and maintained through generous philanthropic foundation grants. They use this tax-exempt money to commission their own polls, studies, reports and media campaigns utilizing the millions of dollars they receive annually. If you have enough money, you can buy just about any opinion you want.

Why would these people want to distort the issues and ignore sound scientific evidence? This question bugged me for a long time until I came across the answers — Deep Ecology and The Wildlands Project.

Deep Ecology, based on pantheism, is the philosophy/religion driving the contemporary environmental movement. Their vision for our country is to set aside a minimum of 50 percent of our lands in wilderness with no human intervention — it’s called The Wildlands Project. Just do a word search on the Internet using the two terms and you’ll be astonished at what you discover. I highly recommend one particular Web site www.wildlandsprojectrevealed.org — that is well organized and explains the principles and strategies of these radical approaches to saving “biodiversity.”

Interestingly, one of the first actions The Wildlands Project promotes is to stop logging on public lands.

I submit that the greatest threat to our public lands are the tenacious environmental fanatic groups whose agenda is more about social engineering than environmental improvement.

(Henson is a registered forester and executive director of the Southern Appalachian Multiple-Use Council, a Waynesville-based advocacy group for the timber industry. He can be reached at shenson1@earthlink.net.)