November 15, 2005. Watauga District Ranger Candace
Allen has canceled the Walnut Mountain timber sale in the Cherokee National
Forest. 726 acres of logging was planned in areas that would have adversely
impacted the Pond Mountain Wilderness and the Slide Hollow roadless area.
On behalf of Wild South and the Southern
Appalachian Biodiversity Project, WildLaw filed comments challenging this
project, and we filed a lawsuit over the Forest Service's failure to make public
the project documents on this proposal. We will continue to press for the
release of these documents in order to see why the agency would propose such a
poorly designed project and to help prevent similar bad projects from occurring
in the future.
Congratulations to our Staff Attorney who worked on our comments, our Freedom of Information Act request and
the lawsuit. Although not part of the lawsuit, other groups also worked very
hard on stopping this project, including Cherokee Forest Voices, the Southern
Appalachian Forest Coalition, and the Southern Environmental Law Center.
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