Healthy forests initiative in action

Clinton declared Sequoia National Forest a national monument, to be permanently free from timber-cutting. Guess what?

Thanks to Needlenose for the link.

A bit more about the monument, from the Sierra Club:

The Sequoia Task Force of the Sierra Club is protesting   the Forest Service's decision to allow commercial logging to go forward in   a logging project that is TODAY bulldozing huge swathes and removing ancient   trees, many several centuries old, on ridgetops adjacent to five giant sequoia   groves in the Giant Sequoia National Monument. This timber sale is called the   Saddle Fuels Reduction Project and is all about removing big trees, not about   fire control. This project will take more than 5 Million Board Feet of big   timber! We have asked for an immediate halt to this project!

As Harper's reported over the Summer, the crowns of the trees in these ancient groves contain totally idiosyncratic ecosystems -- trees growing out of huge clots of soil blown up and trapped, odd sorts of small mammals and amphibians never found at ground level -- most aspects of which are completely unknown to science. Logging destroys these ecosystems. The crowns of any plantation forests which will replace old growth trees will be completely sterile, a "redwood desert", as these ecosystems take centuries to develop. Such barbarism!