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12/30/03
My family and I have been using the Mount Nimham
forest for recreational purposes for over 30 years and are vehemently
protesting your decision to create a Model Forest on these lands.
These lands are well under way to becoming mature climax forests,
which if left alone, could someday create a continuous corridor
of old-growth forest all the way from Connecticut into New Jersey.
How wonderful that would be for everyone to marvel and such a
beautiful habitat for all the animals that live there. Just think,
someday we might be able to have our own National Park right here
on the East Coast.
There is absolutely no logical reason to log
Mount Nimham. If the DEC wants to use this land as a showcase
for large landowners who want to log their land, so that they
may be enticed to preserve a part of it and thereby curtail development,
there are alternative ways of accomplishing this without impacting
on Mount Nimham. First of all, as Ann Finissi suggested at our
last meeting at the Lake Carmel community center, we could use
private land as a Model and offer the owner of that land some
tax deduction for incentive. Also, as I suggested at the meeting,
you can still use Mount Nimham as a Model, but videotape and narrate
the whole procedure as to what would have been done, rather than
actually doing it. These tapes could be highly instructional and
would serve as valuable teaching aids. Lastly, the trees that
he would have selected for logging could be identified and tagged
for those who want to see living examples.
Please consider that our planet is going to undergo
drastic changes in the coming years. Climatologists are predicting
warming of our atmosphere by as much as 4 degrees in the next
50 years. This is almost as much climatic changes we have had
in the past 10,000 years since the melting of the last glacier.
Does anyone know with certainty what species will survive? Exotic
pathogens come into our country in many ways and threaten existing
species. Only by maintaining biodiversity in our forests can we
hope to ward off their extinction. The very same species of trees
that you select for logging may have been the ones that would
have been" naturally selected".
Please let them grow old on their own.
Sincerely,
RM
Carmel
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