(Cross-posted at the new Appalachian Voices blog)

The Citizen-Times has more on the National Forest Sale (covered here, here, here, and an alternative plan here)

The U.S. Forest Service has more than 200,000 comments to sort through, and Western North Carolina rangers have calls to take -- some from landowners and some from developers.

The Forest Service is finding people have plenty to say about a proposal to sell public land to help cover costs of a rural schools program.

Except, as we discussed earlier, any money that is made here doesnt stay here.  It goes right back into the Federal Treasury! So NONE of the money from the 10,000 acres we would lose would be garunteed to stay in our area, and the South gets pennies on the dollar compared to other states!

Way to go on this folks!

There's more...

The Environment just became a major issue for the 2006 election. In an incredibly blatant bait and switch, Bush has inserted orders to the Forest Service to engage in the largest sale of federal land since Teddy Roosevelt established our national forest system.

Large Sale of Forest Planned: The White House wants to help pay for rural roads and schools by auctioning 300,000 acres of what it considers non-vital parcels.

The Bush administration Friday laid out plans to sell off more than $1 billion in public lands over the next decade, including 85,000 acres of national forest land in California.

Most of the proceeds would help pay for rural schools and roads, making up for a federal subsidy that has been eliminated from President Bush's 2007 budget.

Congress must approve the plans, which several experts said would amount to the largest land sale of its kind since President Theodore Roosevelt established the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and created the modern national forest system.

"This is a fire sale of public lands. It is utterly unprecedented," said Char Miller, professor of environmental history at Trinity University in Houston, who has written extensively about the Forest Service. "It signals that the lands and the agency that manages them are in deep trouble. For the American public, it is an awful way to understand that it no longer controls its public land."

There's more...