Defenders: Bush-era Forest Service plan disrupting sacred places

The so-called 'Healthy Forests Initiative' is altering landforms sacred to indigenous peoples. Log skidding not only scars surviving trees, the massive machines crush ancient landmarks.

Now, land within the proposed Okawita Paha National Monument in the southern Black Hills is at risk according to Charmaine White Face of Defenders of the Black Hills:

The US Forest Service is planning on logging and-or burning 43,516 acres in the Hell Canyon Ranger District under a project called the Vestal Project. Sixty percent of the area is National Forest acres and and almost all of that area will be logged. More detailed information is available at the Friends of the Norbeck website.

Comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Study were taken until February 13, 2012.

The Forest Service has been under fire from tribes after ancestral remains were disturbed at other sites sacred to indigenous.

In New Mexico, the Forest Service is both plaintiff and defendant in litigation surrounding grazing permits to historic Latino land-grant recipients.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released new data stating that last month:

also marks the 26th January and 323rd consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last month with below average temperatures was February 1985.

Mother Jones' Blue Marble: mega-fires in the West likely this year.