| Columbia River Dissenters
Series: Tom Kovalicky (excerpted)
(Note: This is a lengthy interview, but worth reading if only to fully understand the forces of "environmentalism" working against our national forests and other federal land for decades, which are just now coming to bitter fruition as forests succumb to insects and incendiary conflagrations. The excerpt is from Page 37 of 58 pages. Note from IR: It surely shows the mentality of so many of the Forest Service employees. Not all of them, but many, many of them have been working against the people for years. ... a forest supervisor for several years, Tom Kovalicky, who did an interview after he retired. Here is a paragraph from the lengthy interview explaining he was working for the environmentalists. Because of him, we now have over 300,000 acres of dead and dying timber. He was warned many times ... this would happen, but as you can see by this article, he admits he would contact the radical environmentalists any time he had orders to "log," so they would be ready to appeal.)
October 21, 1999
Tape 1, Side 1 21 October 1999 TK = Tom Kovalicky CH = Clark Hansen OHS Inv. #2724
TK: Well, you know, since the politicians made no, weren't hiding the fact that they were allied with the timber industry, I made no bones about the fact that I was allied with the environmental community, the fishing community, the hunting community, the berry picking community, the recreation community and the newspapers. And so every time they got nasty, I just called up a reporter and said “Lookit, are you aware of what they just asked us to do, or told us to do?” and they would jump on that, as you could well imagine. You know that was real great stuff here for 4 or 5 years, wondering what Tom was going to do next, but it worked beautifully, because they immediately got with the story, neutralized everybody’s negative impacts on us. You know, you asked me earlier how did we know how good we were doing. Well, if you went back and looked in the records, I told you about the awards that this forest was winning both as a forest and as individuals working here, but you got to go back and look at the fact that we were constantly in a newspaper article or a national magazine and the 4 or 5 books that have been written about things we've done on this forest. That was our feedback that we were OK. We never lacked national priority or publicity. National Geographic, Audubon Society, Smithsonian -- they've all done feature articles on this forest.
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