got
nailed .
Wood poachers have been targetting forests from Oregon through BC. Good to see they get caught occasionally. I wonder what will happen to the wood they seized.
It seems like I saw somewhere they are also cutting burls off the giant redwoods in CA. I the
bas@#$%# lose their arses in the legal system.
The article said "U.S. Forest Service estimates $1 billion worth of timber is stolen each year from public and private lands."
Now that is a lot of wood and money. It is sorry people indeed who stoop to do this.
Arlin
It is unfortunate that they would stoop to this, but if they are facing only 15 months time for an activity that brought in $800,000 that sentence is not much of a deterrent.
If the Sierra Club didn't continously sue the USFS to prevent all logging on all National Forests across the US, perhaps some of this wood might get to be sold and used legally.
Note, I am against all thieves, but you can put me down as against the conversion of our national forests into parks.
Parks are for preservation, forests are for wise use. Wise use does not always include no logging whatsoever.
Alaric said:
It is unfortunate that they would stoop to this, but if they are facing only 15 months time for an activity that brought in $800,000 that sentence is not much of a deterrent.
Paying some scuzbag lawyers enough money, and that will be reduced. Welcome to the "justice system"
Some poor old lady whose hubby died, and she never wrote a check before goes 2 cents over on a check that bounces, gonna get smacked harder than these goobers.
Martin are you calling what these guys did logging?
Those scumbags wander around in the woods and cut the bark off trees to look for curly wood. I saw it when I visited my SIL a decade or so ago. Lots and lots of trees with a 2" by 5" axe mark in the side of the tree and the bark missing. Of course once they do that the spot in the tree with no bark leads to a defect and a place for the tree to start to rot.
On a contract I cut firewood on in NY there was a grove of veneer grade birdseye maples. I was sworn to secrecy about where they were. I hear that ~5 years ago someone snuck in and grabbed them with a skidder in the middle of the night. Because of the logging in the area in general nothing strange was thought about it. Skidder was dropped off late in the afternoon/evening, in the morning it was gone and so were ~40 maple trees worth upwards of $10K each.
Steve N said:
Martin are you calling what these guys did logging?
Well, technically it is called "high grading".
I said in my post above that I don't agree with any form of theft. These guys stole trees from all of us, and should be in jail for a much longer period of time than they will be.
However, by continuously suing the USFS to prevent all logging, the Sierra Club is stealing the opportunity for us to use trees as well.
Perhaps if at least some of these trees were available for purchase legally, the thieves might not have resorted to theft. Note, I am not making an excuse for these thieves, rather my point is that locking up the national forests is not good policy for a large variety of reasons.
The worst part of the entire deal with the Sierra Club is that our tax dollars pay for their lawyers, so they have an army of lawyers making money off the taxpayers, by locking up natural resources that we should be able to use.
