It is amazing that the Forest Service has to spend almost half of its budget on lawyers in order to fight the lawsuits and legal challenges by environmentalist wackos.
Instead of clearing the dry underbrush and getting rid of deadwood, the Forest Service sits around doing nothing (much of the time).
The USA currently has more Forest and tree cover than it did over one hundred years ago. The population of the USA has increased several times over, we've built millions of homes, built tens of millions of furniture pieces, printed billions of newspapers, magazines, letters, papers etc. but the number of trees has increased dramatically.
Yet, even though we have plenty of trees, the tree huggers (it isn't about the animals, it's about worshipping trees) act like we are destroying the planet because we need to clear cut forests and manage the undergrowth.
I am surprised that this info made it into the major news media. Finding info that is critical of the eco-freaks is difficult to come by.
Eco-freaks are responsible for killing millions of people in the third world. DDT was outlawed by Eco-idiots even though it virtually eradicated malaria. In the years since the ban on DDT, 40 million people have died of malaria (Africa, Southeast Asia, mostly. Source: Wall Street Journal). DDT was an extremely cheap and effective way for poor countries to manage malaria. It was outlawed by rich country idiots who wanted to protect little critters because some dubious research said it harmed them (and some humans). Overall the benefits of DDT FAR outweighed the risks. It was estimated that 1000 people a year would die from DDT. What they didn't consider was that malaria kills over 1 million people per year. (Source: Wall Street Journal)