Dear Editor,
Unless activists stop the plan, thousands of acres of Green Mountain National Forest near Killington and Mount Snow will be logged.
“They are coming hard with the chainsaws to Green Mountain National Forest,” said Chris Matera, a civil engineer and founder of Massachusetts Forest Watch, a citizens group formed to protect New England public forests. “What a sorry sight it will be to look down from the top of Mount Snow and see clear-cuts instead of that beautiful intact forest we see now.”
Matera was the main subject of a New York Times article about logging. To get an idea of what this logging will look like, see “before and after” photos that he took in 2017 in New Hampshire at maforests.org/WMNF.pdf.
Activists are focusing on stopping logging on publicly owned land. Banning clear-cut logging, or all logging, there would result in logging companies buying more land, which in turn would keep that land from being converted to vacation houses, roads, parking lots and strip malls.
Banning logging in Green Mountain National Forest would be one of the best things Vermont could do to stop climate change, Michael Kellet said. According to the Lowell Sun daily newspaper, Kellett was a “key player” in the creation by President Obama of the 87,400 acre Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine. Logging is banned in national monuments. Kellet runs a group that has the website restore.org.
In recent years, the group 350 Vermont has used non-violent civil disobedience to fight climate change. In California in 1996 about 1,000 people were arrested for non-violent civil disobedience to stop logging in the privately-owned Headwaters forest. The protesters won when the federal government bought 7,000 acres and permanently banned logging there.
Eesha Williams,
Dummerston
