First of all, I would like to thank all who have supported our research in producing this calendar over the last twelve years. As a forest/eco-system photojournalist I have covered literally hundreds of thousands of miles of forestland in the United States & Canada and investigated many issues.

I am very impressed by Dr. Bonnicksen's initiative in his "Historic Forests Act", for a few reasons:

Over the last 10 years we have seen the shut-down of harvest sales in most all of our public forests by the Clinton-Gore administration due to environmentalist lawsuits and pressures from misguided special interest groups. Unfortunately their concept of leaving things to 'Mother-Nature' to handle, has produced some very disastrous effects to our environment. Entire forests in southern Utah are dying of disease and insect infestation. The Colorado forest in the front range are overcrowded and need to be thinned, as do our northeastern forests. The legendary Sequoias in California are being invaded by encroaching species and the duff on the forest floor is so thick, new seedlings cannot get a start due to fire suppression. Vast forest regions in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington are so overcrowded that they are dying, burning up and starting to have forest killing insects invade..... again. The Kaibab on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon is now seeing forest decline due to insect infestation.

What all of these areas have in common, is that due to the lack of Forest Service timber sales over the last 10 years, there is no wood products industry left that can go in and eradicate the problem. The mills had to shut down. The workers had to move. The loggers had to go bankrupt. No one is left to deal with these millions of acres of destruction in our public forest.

Many mills in my state of Oregon were sold at auction. Entire mills were dismantled and shipped half way round the globe and reassembled by foreign companies in Lithuania, Chile, New Zealand, and Russia. We exported our only means of dealing with major devastations to our own eco-system, with short sighted, environmentalist agendas, designed to put our workers out of work and become dependent on a world market economy.

If anything September 11th should teach us, is that a world economy is great, however, we also need to be able to take care of ourselves and our own needs when the time dictates. We no longer have that capability in most of our western forests to do that. Some of the greatest softwoods forests in the world are rotting due to over-crowding, burning down and dying, because an administration listened to environmentalists who only proved they knew nothing about the environment.

The Spotted owl was never in danger of extinction, neither was the Marbled Murrelet. The NW Salmon likewise are not in danger, this year is seeing the largest returns in history. We are seeing other types of environmental hypocrisy in the Klamath Lake, Oregon basin, denying farmers and ranchers water to grow their crops to save a "plentiful", insignificant, sucker fish, a bottom feeder who wouldn't miss or use the water the farmers need to grow the crops they feed us with. Yet like the Spotted owl, environmentalists use the Endangered Species Act to prohibit people from using their land, both public and private which provide our basic needs. They even want to remove dams, which provide our electricity. Once you no longer can use your land, then other groups like the Nature Conservancy move in and offer to acquire it, through donation or purchase, thereby removing it from useful production forever. People..... we are missing God's intent for us and future generations. It's time we re-invested in America, and just say NO to bogus environmentalism.