PORT ANGELES — Job growth or bird habitat preservation. Timber dollars for better schools versus clean streams for spawning salmon. “Intensively managed” tree harvests or “responsible selective thinning” of state forest lands.
Many of more than 100 attending the state Department of Natural Resources’ public hearing on sustainable forest management presented these choices Wednesday night.
Comments from a who’s who of North Olympic Peninsula government leaders, timber-related industries, business and economic development interests and environmental voices let their views be known to Natural Resources Board members.
And those voices were as diverse as the Peninsula is wide.
While Sue Shipman with the Olympic Peninsula Audubon Society said, “Not all of us want to see trees cut down,” Carol Johnson, North Olympic Timber Action Committee director, urged the harvest alternative for “intensive management of Department of Natural Resources land.”
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The rest of the story appears in Wednesday’s Peninsula Daily News.