By Jim Reece -

Amador County Supervisors last week voted to send a letter to the state supporting logging as a means of clearing the air and curbing catastrophic forest fires in Amador and across California. The board voted 5-0 to approve a letter for Chairman Richard Forster to sign. The letter, to California Air Resources Board Chair Mary D. Nichols, was in regard to the 2008 Climate Change Scoping Plan. Forster said the draft letter was in response to the issue of the Climate Change Scoping Plan and requested Nichols to strongly support allowing the logging of high-density forest areas containing trees that were dead and dying, so to create defensible space and reduce the fuels in forests and prevent catastrophic fires, which have disastrous effects on air quality and contribute to global warming. The letter noted that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a March executive order directed the California Environmental Protection Agency and the California Resources Agency to oversee the Climate Action Team’s development of measures for wildfire fuels reduction and biomass utilization. The letter said that Amador County Supervisors are “troubled that no such measures have been outlined in the scoping plan.” The letter said that “wildfires statewide have had major impacts on air quality, contributing significantly to California’s carbon and particulate emissions.” Supervisors urged the Governor to take an active role at the federal level to demand that the United States Forest Service take action to mitigate the risk of catastrophic wildfires. The letter urged the Air Resources Board to include in its Final Draft Scoping Plan a “firm commitment by the state to join with local governments to advocate at the federal level for enhanced management on U.S. Forest Service lands, as well as an extensive program to quantify wildfire emissions that could be avoided though better forest management practices.” The letter called the efforts vital to “improving the quality of the air and public health.” Supervisors passed an accompanying resolution that noted Amador County land totaled 363,500 acres, of which 34 percent – or 87,270 acres – is federal land. The resolution, Number 08-186, calls for “immediate measures to be taken to prevent imminent catastrophic wildfires.”