| By Bob Weaver
Every day in the USA there are ten square miles of woodlands (6,000 acres) cleared and concreted, along with thousands of acres of mountains leveled and deforested each year in West Virginia with mountaintop mining.
Now, in the state of West Virginia, with 3,000 gas wells scheduled to be drilled, wide right-of-ways and clearings for gas wells will equal the deforestation of mountaintop removal.
Sixty acres of the world's life-giving rain forests are felled word-wide every minute.
The loss of forests means the loss of the battle against global warming, a concern essentially ignored by the Bush administration, clinging to a few experts who claim the warming trend is based on natural events, not caused by human activity - an act of God.
Global warming has been sustained by over 300 international scientists.
The Bush administration, once again, is placing America's wilderness areas at risk, opening them for development.
Last week the Bush administration put a "for sale" sign on trees in pristine roadless areas of the Tongass rain forest in Alaska - America's largest national forest.
The status has also been extended to national forests in several lower 48 states, including Idaho and Colorado.
Conservationists from across the country are indignant that roads will be punched through some of the nation's last, best roadless areas.
Private corporations will now log America's most pristine public lands.
The opening of the national forests by the Bush administration to extraction, logging, drilling, mining and roads, has been a constant battle for years.
West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest has been threatened.
"The few remaining roadless areas of our national forests are some of the only safe harbors for America's wildlife," said Mary Beth Beetham at Defenders of Wildlife.
During President Bill Clinton's era, the Roadless Rule protected 58 million acres of roadless wild forests in 39 states.
CORPORATE WELFARE
The Bush administration's new management plan for the Tongass National Forest will raise no revenue for the US government.
American taxpayers will have to pay to build the roads the timber companies need to access the forest, an endless example of corporate welfare.
"With so much of our forest heritage already lost, every roadless acre counts. The spectacular roadless areas in Alaska deserve as much protection as those in every other state," said Larry Edwards with Greenpeace in Sitka, Alaska.
"The Roadless Rule and the courts have sheltered many of the last, best places in our national forests, even during an administration hostile to forest protection," said Franz Matzner at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"Now, with one foot out the door, Bush officials are looking for whatever way they can to give away the family silver," he said.
"The new plan suffers from the same central problem as the old plan. It leaves 2.4 million acres of wild, roadless back country areas open to clear cutting and new logging roads," said Earthjustice attorney Tom Waldo.
"The Tongass is worth a whole lot more to the American people as a standing forest than it is as a sea of stumps and logs." Waldo said.
The federal government, in defiance of the facts and the strongly expressed sentiments of the American people and all leading conservators, continue to advocate for the American wilderness.
"The Tongass is the crown jewel of our nation's roadless wildlands," said Trish Rolfe at Alaska Sierra Club.
"Wild salmon, bears, eagles, and wolves thrive there among moss-draped ancient trees, along crystalline fjords and untamed rivers. It has nine million acres of roadless areas that now lack protection."
The Bush administration has just put some of the best of the nation's wilderness on the chopping block.
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