RACE had accomplished an incredible feat - forcing the U.S. Forest Service to withdraw all of it's ongoing timber sales, even if it turned out to be temporarily - simply by pointing out to the agency how they were breaking the law. It was an amazing feat for a rag-tag group of pretty much unfunded, unaffiliated local primarily rural residents.

But selling the national forest's trees and having them logged is just too deeply ingrained in the culture of the Forest Service, and there was no way they were going to rest until they got their timber sales program back functioning. Their legal team must have analyzed that the best way to do that was to put out the sales individually. It is worth mentioning that some of these sales were already "sold." Now isn't it an amazing concept that a few people in an agency can "sell" trees on publicly owned land, even though most of the public doesn't want them sold?

I can say that with some confidence because there has been a number of polls taken in the past by credible polling organizations consistently found that the public didn't want their national forests logged - especially if it cost the taxpayers money, which it almost always did. It seems pretty beyond absurd to me that an agency could be authorized to have our national forests sold and logged and not even make money on it. But that's the reality - then and now.

And in spite of the resolutions from the counties, a petition campaign that was growing daily, (eventually collecting 16,000 some signatures opposing clearcutting on the forest, which was a clear indication of the local southern illinois sentiment about logging on the Shawnee) and the protests of RACE, the Forest Service pushed ahead with getting those timber sales going. It is the consumate example of how the Forest Service doesn't know much more than selling and logging our national forests.

Instead of being punished for their years of one page findings of no significant impact for dozens and dozens of logging projects in some of the oldest forests on the Shawnee. We know that they targeted some of the oldest hardwood stands on the Shawnee because that was documented in a presentation by Max Hutchison at a RACE meeting. Hutchison, a naturalist from Belknap, Illinois, was one of the primary scientists that were did the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory. The inventory was the first such inventory in the country, and became the model (for better or worse) for the nation.

In Hutchison's presentation, he stated that they had identified different types of habitat and tried to find the best, most undisturbed examples of that habitat to put in the inventory as natural areas. He pointed out that they had preliminary methods for identifying where they thought these areas might be. When it came to old growth hardwood forest in southern Illinois, many of the best stands appeared to be on the Shawnee, as one might imagine. However, when the researchers actually went out to the identified stands to ground truth their paperwork, when it came to the old growth forests on the Shawnee, they had been logged.

Can you imagine that? The Forest Service went out and targeted the oldest, most natural stands of trees on the Shawnee before they could be protected. Wow! That really shows where the agency culture lies - in the cutting of trees not in the protecting of natural areas. Oh, they will tell you now that was then and this is now, but it's still the same in my opinion.

But that's just an aside as to what we were up against. I can't remember just how long it took for the first timber sale to come out. It wasn't that long - probably a month or months. It was called "Town Hall." Town Hall was an isolated block of forest up near Ava, Illinois. That's a long way from where I live. Nevertheless, I and others were determined to try to stop Town Hall from being logged. That would me to an experience that I guess would change my life - or at least have a big influence on it. That experience was filing suit against the Forest Service in federal court representing myself trying to get an injunction to stop the logging.
To be continued