New West: Recent editorials by timber industry spokespersons are a wildly misleading attempt to promote increased logging of western U.S. forests under the guise of reducing wildland fires and mitigating climate change. The timber industry fails to mention, however, that logging is one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions (Schlesinger, “Biogeochemistry: an analysis of global change”, Academic Press, 1997). A recent scientific study found that completely protecting our national forests …