Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

Mr. London. I'm Bill London from Benewah County. We've all learned how economics affects us. In the last 2 years, I ve certainly figured out how it affected me. But I don't really believe the rationale being used to say that we must harvest the last of the wilderness areas, roadless areas or almost all of them by the timber industry. There's a lot of reasons for timber problems in north Idaho—money problems in the timber industry. And amount of timber is not really one of them as far as I can see. There's a lot of available wood. There's a lot of contracts that are uncut. There's a lot of logs left in the woods that I personally have seen and have been hauled away. The problem is not amount of trees. The problem is competition from the Southeastern United States, the coast, et cetera. Another point is that the present roadless areas be considered wilderness. And, generally, the most remote, the most low price-setting forest. The moneys that's going to be spent putting roads into those places is going to be generally true, anyway, to be more than the value of the timber coming out. It's a short-term solution that causes us to subsidize us paying taxpayers in the United States to subsidize cheap wood. The subsidization of cheap wood does not encourage its intelligent use. What we have seen is inefficient use of wood throughout the United States—the history of the United States. And it's not going to change if we continue to subsidize it. Also, of course, that roading roadless areas is going to result in more erosion and a lot of consequent problems. For example, right now they're worried about dredging near the Clarkston and Lewiston. One of the reasons they're worried about that is because of erosion of the Clearwater River this spring. There's a lot of longterm effects that we have to consider about roading roadless areas. Much harder to reforest those areas at much poorer success rates for plantations in those areas. We need wilderness of all types. We don t need wilderness just at Alpine Lakes. We need wilderness of all sorts of ecosystems. It's been a good opportunity.