Montgomery County, VA resident and Preserve Montgomery County volunteer Lynda Majors submitted the following account of tree felling devastation in the Brush Mountain and Craig Creek area.

Monday the trees were cut from Craig Creek all the way almost to the top of Brush Mountain. This is in the Inventoried Roadless Area of the Jefferson National Forest.

To actually see it is mouth dropping – the destruction – all trees just dropped in the “Right of Way.”  I could see a car going by tonight on Craig Creek Road from where I was standing at the top. This is what the Forest Service decided to do with the people’s forest, an Inventoried Roadless Area, that was supposed to be preserved forever with no tree cutting or road building.

The Forest Management Plan was developed to preserve the land for wildlife, water, and recreation, not to put a bomb in our backyard and destroy with sedimentation and erosion our streams and water supplies.  This destruction is unconscionable and unfathomable to me.

I am a baby boomer. My generation rebelled against our parents and what they were doing to the world with war and the environment. But now we are doing the same thing and are leaving a world that is not fit for our children to live in. Our cities are running out of water, and our oceans are dying.

We have tried so hard for more than 3 years to prevent our corner of Virginia from being another corporate wasteland but we get rolled over at every turn, not because we don’t have science on our side, but because the influence of money is more powerful than science at every level from DEQ to VMRC to BLM to USFS to two Governors and multiple judges.

It is horribly sad for me to realize that the government at every level is against the citizens and our participatory democracy is in name only.

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