I strongly support current and future logging in the Green Mountain National Forest. The environmental mistakes of the past will not be repeated. The USFS in Vermont employs an array of experts and projects are designed and managed from their outset to mitigate all negative impacts. In fact, if anything, the projects are overly conservative and logging could expand significantly beyond its current and projected levels.

The truth is that we need to rely on our own local resources. Every tree that we do not responsibly harvest and process locally into products, is a tree that is cut somewhere else. I am personally aware of the devastation that occurs every year in the forests of Southeast Asia, where mostly Chinese logging companies destroy vast tracts of forest to feed the consumption of products in the U.S. and the West. Forests that are far more sensitive, diverse, etc. than our own.

The elitism, hypocrisy and selfishness on display by misguided radical environmentalists is disgraceful. Where does the paper you use in your printer come from? Where did the pellets you burned in your stove come from? How were they transported? Where was your flat-pack furniture made? Did the factory that produced it run on renewable energy?

Apparently, it’s OK to devastate the rest of the world, just as long as we don’t allow it in our own backyard. The root issue is consumption. Yes, we all need to do our part to lessen our impact, but we also consume things as all humans do. And I can’t think of anyway better to do that than to responsibly use our own resources, instead of others.

Leon H. Smith

Middlebury