Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

Mr. Longworthy. Thank you, Senators, for your patience. My name is Ed Longworthy. I live in Boise with my wife who also lives in Boise. Back in the Jurassic period, geologists tell us, there were some mighty dinosaurs crashing around the primordial swamps. Among them was Brontosauras, which means thunder lizard. This reptile was 70 feet long, 20 feet high, and weighed up to 35 tons. Its sheer bulk rendered it an exceeding clumsy animal and since its brain weighed less than a pound, its stupidity was probably also excessive. It had to have a second brain or ganglia at the base of its tail to control the parts that trailed behind it, like the rear-end driver on a fire truck ladder. You can imagine the tremendous amounts of food required to ac tivate this overgrown monster. It was a herbivore or plant eater and some scientists reasoned that it literally ate itself out of exist ence. It consumed the plants or just smashed them down faster than nature could grow them. 487 In other words, it was too big for its habitat, a biological mistake. And like all biological mistakes, it became extinct. Now all we find of it are fossilized bone buried under tons of sediment. Smaller creatures, in better balance with their environment, took over the range of dinosaurs. Now we mammals of the late Quarternary period may be in clined to congratulate ourselves on having outlived the dinosaurs. Pretty hard to imagine such ungainly, greedy dragons competing with us today, isn't it? Or is it? Let us consider the modern logging truck, Take a drive between Boise and Lowman some weekend and count how many of these thunder lizards threaten your peace and tranquility. They are 65 feet long, 14 feet high and when loaded outweigh Brontosauras by 5 tons. Legally, that is. Many exceed the legal weight limits and Brontosauras too. In appetite they rank with any dinosaur, requiring outrageous amounts of increasingly expensive fossil fuels to activate them, be sides gobbling up thousands of acres of trees from our fragile wa tersheds. They range farther and farther across the steep mountain slopes in their insatiable greed. And the road required to support their excessive weight begin to resemble railroad grades. These roads mangle the forest system like dinosaur trails and will likely provide enough sediment to bury the trucks. May we look forward to fossilized logging trucks? They are no less at odds with their own habitat than the dinosaurs. They are too big for their own survival and too expensive. One fully For hauling cost about $60,000. Add to that the licensing, permits and operating costs and we can see why lumber is being priced out of the market. And why mills depending upon logs from greater and greater distances are being shut down. Now, the timber industry is telling us they can reduce some of the environmental damage from logging trucks by using helicop ters in the steeper areas. We maintain this is still dinosaur think ing. How can a piece of equipment costing ten times as much as a logging truck harvest timber any more economically? Wouldn't they literally raise the lumber sky high? And they need the roads and trucks anyway to collect the logs at some central point. So we have seen the results of ancient evolution run amuck and modern technology run amuck. We can begin to evaluate the self defeating relationships between big appetites and small minds. Some things are just too big. We can't afford them. Maybe the industrialists should study paleontology.