Do What It Takes To Protect Trees

Idaho’s St. Joe River is a cottonwood cathedral, but the government has been cutting down the trees. This is a crime.

Every fall, people from miles around get in their boats and cruise up the St. Joe River to see a sight that rivals the sugar-maple woods of Vermont: Water, quiet as crystal. On both sides, tall cottonwoods. Leaves, yellow as fire, glowing in the cold mountain air.

And the government has been cutting down the trees.

Elsewhere, the government is protecting and planting trees so that they will stand, as do the St. Joe’s cottonwoods, along the water and hold the soil in place during floods. In Washington, owners of private forest lands worry because federal bureaucrats want such wide no-cut zones alongside streams that hardly any land would remain to be logged. In Idaho along the banks of the Coeur d’Alene River, under a government erosion-control program, cottonwoods are being planted.

But along the St. Joe River, the government has been cutting down the trees.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, whose specialty is the entrapment of rivers behind mighty structures of steel-reinforced concrete, has a book of rules. The rule book doesn’t allow big trees; it doesn’t recognize the value of root-reinforced dirt. Yet, for 80 years, the St. Joe’s cottonwoods have grown from dirt levees built to restrain the St. Joe’s floods. During last year’s floods, the trees caused no problem. While some atop the levees are in the way, others on the sides hold the levee banks in place. But rules are rules.

Officials in faraway federal offices instructed Benewah County dike officials that the trees must go. So loggers have been at work, and as portions of the cottonwood cathedral became a row of stumps on a pile of dirt, county officials told anguished citizens that the deed must be done or the county will not be eligible for federal disaster aid the next time there is a flood.

So the government has been cutting down the trees. The Corps of Engineers did not send any experts to guide the destruction that its mindless rule book requires. Yesterday, wildlife agencies pointed to bald eagles in the trees and cutting stopped - but only temporarily.

Why didn’t officials in Benewah County fight the blind idiocy of the Corps of Engineers? A cathedral is under attack. How dare the federal engineers sit in their distant offices, quoting their damnable rules?

The government has been cutting down the trees of the shadowy St. Joe. This is madness, and it should stop for good.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board