Picture a childcare business with the motto, “Caring for the children and serving parents.” True to its word, it hires on a small team of talented, dedicated people who really love kids and do a great job watching over them.
Yet, there’s another, much larger side to this business kept on the downlow. The same entity tasked with looking after our little ones also employs other staff to kidnap and sell them to child trafficking rings.
Of course, this is an absurd scenario. No company with such an extreme—and obscene—conflict of interest could possibly exist, much less be considered a legitimate enterprise.
Except if you swap out “caring for the children” with “caring for the land,” and trafficking children with logging, grazing, drilling, and mining—then add in billions per year in taxpayer funding—this exact scenario perfectly describes the U.S. Forest Service’s “management” of National Forests.
Yes, the very government agency sworn to protect public lands from the depredations of industry is, at the same time, the single largest threat to these ecosystems through the federal timber sale program, livestock grazing permits, and other extraction schemes.
Eco-Integrity Alliance 