Extremist views of logging threaten the environment.

• Author: Phelps, Jack E.

Extremism, which Webster defines as "advocacy of extreme political measures," frightens most reasonable people today. Webster connects it with the state of being radical, which is a sharp departure "from the usual or traditional." While every sane person recognizes the inevitability, even the importance, of change, most people understand the need for balancing competing interests as society moves forward.

Not so the extremist. He demands change immediately regardless of the consequences to those who don't share his vision of the past or the future. It's "damn the torpedos, full speed to the left." This drove Maximilian Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety to take control of the French Revolution and institute the Reign of Terror, in which thousands of ordinary and innocent French peasants literally lost their heads.

Extremists today, at least in this country, do not haul people off to the guillotine. But like their political cousins the Jacobins, they act without regard to facts and without regard to the human costs of their policies. An article in the July, 1996, issue of Outdoor Life illustrates this perfectly. The headline reads: "Two Visions of the Tongass, game-rich habitat, or a stricken moonscape? Those are the choices."

Granted, headlines are meant to grab the reader's attention, and are often sensational even if the content of the article is not. Unfortunately, this does not hold in the current example. The article trots out all the myths associated with the extremist environmental agenda so familiar to those of us trying to make an honest living from the forest while maintaining the rich fish and wildlife values we share with other Alaskans.

The litany includes the notion that logging is destroying fisheries and deer habitat, and that logging companies gobble up trees and ravage the landscape with no regard for the natural environment. The writer describes the result of timber harvest as "sterile, fishless rivers and ... fragmented, lifeless forest habitat." This would be tragic if accurate, but it bears no...