Sunday, November 6, 2016

WI timber industry, high up in DNR, to 'harvest' more state land

It makes perfect sense under the rules - - or, more precisely, their intentional absence - - at Scott Walker's 'chamber of commerce mentality' Department of Natural Resources that if you replace your senior, career forester with an forestry industry owner and trade association leader, the DNR will move more expeditiously, and with fewer internal and eternal questions raised, begin cutting trees on many more thousands of state-owned, DNR-managed lands for 'harvesting' on a greater percentage of public land:
Wisconsin officials are earmarking nearly 40,000 more acres of state forestland for intensive logging — a move pushed by the Legislature to provide a fresh source of timber to the forest products industry.
Management
And, yes, the DNR is making state land available for cutting because the Legislature said that needed to happen, but, seriously, does anyone think that all these moves are not coordinated, just as state land sales were mandated by the Legislature - - and also with the eager cooperation of Scott Walker's hand-picked DNR Secretary and former developer Cathy Stepp.

The special interest move enabled by Team Walker to get a timber industry executive into the upper ranks of the DNR is as blatant as the DNR's handing over high-volume perpetual groundwater well permits to big ag operators who donated to Walker's campaign, or giving donors first dibs on primo lakefront state-owned, DNR-managed lands, or smoothing the way so another big donor might get his hands on acreage inside the public's property known as the Kohler-Andrae State Park to blend into a high-end 18-hole golf course, club house and parking lot ticketed for construction on a forested, dune-and-wetlands-and-Native American-artifact-rich nature preserve along Lake Michigan near Sheboygan.


All of this mutually-beneficlal Legislative/Walker/donor/DNR/special interest overlap under the current cash-and-carry administration is par for the course.


One more thing:

The reason why most GOP electeds and lobbyists across the country fell in behind Trump is because they would get on a national scale what Walker is handing out here if Trump were to win Tuesday.






1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Silly rabbit -- of course we need to harvest more trees to make disposable diapers and depends for when Walker's economic policies, the you-know-what, hits the fan. I know it doesn't seem possible, but things will eventually be so bad that even the dysfunctional Wisconsin media rightwing echo-chamber will not be able to tell us the stink smells good.