There will be a special meeting of the Bankhead Liaison Panel held on July 13, 2010 at 6:30 PM. We will meet at the Lawrence County High School Library in Moulton, Alabama which is located at 102 College Street. Please note this is a NEW meeting location for us. This special meeting will not replace the regular July 29 meeting of the Liaison Panel. On the agenda is a review of the Compartment 101 Timber Sale that was brought up at our last meeting, as well as the Bankhead Liaison Panel and collaborative process. Juliana Birkhoff of Resolve will facilitate this meeting. Some panel members may remember Juliana as she & Mary Lou Addor facilitated our meetings during the early years of the planning of the Forest Health & Restoration Project. As always, all meetings of the Liaison Panel are public meetings. All members of the community are invited to attend.
This meeting has been called because of objections raised by Wild South to an ongoing 191-acre timber sale in Compartment 101 of the Bankhead National Forest, adjacent to the northern boundary of the Sipsey Wilderness. The sale is part of the Bankhead Forest Health and Restoration Project, the Final Environmental Impact Statement for which was issued in Sept. 2003, and is included in almost 10,000 acres of thinnings, which are designed to restore existing loblolly plantations to native forest types. Wild South has objected to the large number of hardwoods being harvested on this site and maintains that the two stands included in this sale should never have been included in the EIS in the first place. Unfortunately, this did not come to our attention until the contract had been concluded and logging had commenced.
The hardwood forests of the Bankhead have suffered much over the years, having been mowed down by the tens of thousands of acres and converted to loblolly pine plantations. It is now the job of the Forest Service to restore many of these plantations to hardwood forest. If you care about and use the Bankhead, please consider attending this meeting and letting the new Bankhead District Ranger know that you support true hardwood restoration, not hardwood harvest.
--
Mark Kolinski
Alabama Program Manager
WildSouth
11312 AL Highway 33, Suite 1
Moulton, AL 35650
256-974-6166
canyonman@wildsouth.orghttp://www.wildsouth.org Janice Barrett
Outreach Coordinator
Wild South
11312 AL Hwy. 33, Suite 1 Moulton, AL 35650
256-974-6166
http://www.wildsouth.orgjanice@wildsouth.org
