Your government is at work to cheat you again.
You only have until Friday night to tell the U.S. Forest Service that its plan to timber in North Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest is a bad idea. Or at least an idea that needs more study and more time for the public to digest it than just a day. After all – this isn’t just Forest Service land. It’s your land. Our land. Public land.
The Forest Service on Dec. 2 rolled out this monster plan (we’re talking about an affected area twice the size of Atlanta) to cut and market trees on as much as 60,000 acres, perform prescribed burns on 50,000 acres, herbicide up to 74,500 acres and put 360 miles of new bulldozer paths for all that work in the Chattahoochee National Forest. And the Forest Service set a 38-day window for public comments on the 206-page environmental assessment.
Surprise! Friday is the last day of that public comment period.
Never mind Christmas. Never mind the New Year holiday. Never mind football playoffs and impeachment and the Iran crisis. We were all supposed to somehow divine that the Forest Service’s pleasant sounding “Foothills Landscape Project” was something that needed immediate attention.