Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

Mr. Wardwell. Thank you, Senator. My name is Ed Wardwell. I years. I have looked at this question for some time, and I do support the conservationists and sportsmen, the land for saving part of the re maining wilderness, about 50 percent of it. I have tussled with this question for some time now. I was at a meeting and talked to some people that had a report from the Idaho timber industry, and showed that they were, according to their report, they needed to have a 20 percent of the annual pro duction need of these forest lands, according to this recent report, the Idaho timber industry. I wondered why that was true, because as far as I understood, the land they were cutting on now should be in a sustained yield, and they shouldn't need anymore land to continue their operation, but that they needed it for maintenance to keep up their operation. I talked to some other people here in the State of Idaho involving timber resource, and they pointed out that what had happened is that the allowable cut for a very large area, let's say a national forest, was used as a guide when the only real accessible parts of that area were cut on. So in other words, we had an allowable cut for a large area that was cut on a smaller portion of that, so they were overcutting because of those errors in preplanting both by the industy and the Forest Service. So by those previous mistakes, we are expected to let them go ahead and take some more wilderness to continue their operations. I feel that's a mistake, because we have already been mistaken, and cut too much on land that was already accessible to them. Why allow them more land to cut and continue that mistake? It seems to me that we should recognize the problem, the indus try does have a problem, but this wilderness that does exist now does not create the unemployment we have, and releasing of that would not help the unemployment problem. The conservationists' proposal