Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 5, 1993 TAG: 9309050098
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SELMA LENGTH: Long
Bennett owns a sawmill that employs about 40 people in this small town in the mountains west of Lexington. A founding member of the Appalachian Forest Management Group, he's one of the most vocal proponents of logging in Western Virginia's two national forests.
"We're afraid we're going to lose the whole timber-sale program," Bennett says. That, in his opinion, would spell environmental doom for the almost 2 million acres of federally owned forests.
Trees die. That's a fact. In the Jefferson National Forest, they're dying faster than they're growing, Bennett says. It makes economic sense to use those trees to make the furniture, homes, paper and other products Americans cannot do without.
It makes ecological sense as well. When fires, floods or insects wipe out mature forests, nature begins the slow process of rebuilding an ecosystem. Seeds germinate and sprout, providing food and shelter for wildlife.
But for years, forest fires and pests have been controlled by human intervention, stifling nature's own regenerative cycle. Bennett argues that logging can mimic nature's healthy changes in the forest.
"With a little help from mankind, [the forest] can do a whole lot better."
He'd like to see twice as much logging than is done in the Jefferson National Forest, where an average of 2,000 acres of the forest's 708,000 acres are harvested annually.
Thus runs Bennett's philosophy, which he says is as "green" as any environmentalist's viewpoint.
"I have known all along in my life there's nothing wrong with sawing down trees and making sure the forests come back," he says.
The son of an Alleghany County dairy farmer, Bennett grew up with a love of woods, hunting and fishing. He started logging as a teenager, then went to Dabney Lancaster Community College in Clifton Forge to study drafting and engineering. But he stuck with cutting trees for a living.
In 1985, he started his own sawmill; sales reached $6 million this year.
Bennett, 46, revels in taking visitors on a tour of his mill, with the ubiquitous sawdust and the piercing whine of saw blades chewing through logs.
A short man with rugged good looks, piercing blue eyes and steel-gray hair, he wears the duds of a modern-day lumberjack: blue jeans, a work shirt and a well-worn pair of sturdy boots made specifically for loggers by White's, a Washington state company.
A stuffed bobcat stands atop a file cabinet in Bennett's office. The wall is lined with awards and citations from various groups - the National Wild Turkey Federation, the Virginia Wildlife Federation, the Virginia Forestry Association.
He and two other loggers formed the Appalachian Forest Management Group in 1984 because "nobody seemed to want to stick up for us." The group now boasts 700 members, including loggers and their wives, carpenters and sportsmen.
In 1991, the group received a Forestry Activist Award from the American Pulpwood Association. A letter of nomination from Westvaco said the group provides "an active voice to counter those of `environmental extremists' in the continual debate over the management of state and national forests in western Virginia."
Bennett, who has testified before congressional committees, sees himself as a warrior in the fight over the country's natural resources, countering "misinformation" from the environmental camp.
He adheres to the so-called Wise Use movement, a national backlash to the past two decades of environmental reform. The movement has followers among loggers, miners, property owners and others, generally political conservatives, who want all federal lands opened to development and believe that environmental regulations are "locking up" the country's natural resources.
"I heard someone say it's going to boil down to a social and political civil war," he says.
In Western Virginia, Bennett will be on the front lines of a pitched battle over the Jefferson National Forest, which is updating its 10-year management plan.
"I feel good going into this one," he says. Any time he gets to talk about complex forestry issues is a good time.
Some of Bennett's opinions:
Natural biological diversity? No such thing. There are so many non-native species of plants and animals in Appalachia that the forests are not, nor will they ever be, what they were 50 or 100 years ago.
Ecosystem management? "It's definitely going to involve manipulation of vegetation." (Logging.)
Clear-cutting? "It's either going to be doing it where the public can put up with it, or don't do it."
Below-cost timber sales? The U.S. Forest Service "is a pretty fat-cat agency to begin with." If the agency would trim its operational expenses, the revenue from tree sales would begin to catch up with the costs of running the timber program.
"I could talk about this forever," he says convincingly.
by CNB