AR-News: (U.S. - Ca.) misleading Forest Service photos

[Mary Finelli]

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
Forest Service Brochure Contains Misleading Pictures
Daily Grist, April 12, 2004


Pictures used by the U.S. Forest Service in a brochure arguing for heavier 
logging in California's Sierra Nevada forest are deliberately misleading -- 
and, say critics, validate concerns about the USFS paying a public relations 
firm $90,000 to help push its perspective. A series of black and white 
pictures in the brochure, dated from 1909 through to 1989, show a forest 
increasingly thick with closely spaced trees and underbrush, meant to 
demonstrate that the now-fire-prone forest needs thinning, unlike the 
"forests of the past."  But the first photo, from 1909, doesn't show a 
naturally thin forest at all: It was taken right after the forest was 
logged.  And about that forest:  It's not in the Sierra Nevada; it's in 
Montana.  In 1998, the USFS "used this same sequence of photos and 
misrepresented it to make it seem like it came from the forest just above 
Ashland, Ore.," said Timothy Ingalsbee of the Western Fire Ecology Center.  
"I can't believe they are still doing this."  The USFS defended the use of 
the photos, saying they represented typical conditions across much of the 
West.  "We needed to be accurate, but not necessarily precise to the 99th 
degree," said a USFS spokesperson.

straight to the source:  Billings Gazette, Associated Press, 11 Apr 2004
http://www.gristmagazine.com/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=2290

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