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Senator Pressler. Thank you. 



Angle Many, secretary of Black Hills Women In Timber, Hill 

 City, SD. 



STATEMENT OF ANGELA MANY, SECRETARY, BLACK HILLS 

 WOMEN IN TIMBER, HILL CITY, SD 



Ms. Many. Thank you and good morning. 



My name Is Angle Many, and I'm a founder of Black Hills 

 Women in Timber. And I've been asked to discuss a little bit the 

 impacts of logging upon our local environment. 



I started researching these impacts back in 1976, the day after 

 my husband came home and told me that he had a job cutting 

 trees. I thought that what he was doing was wrong, and I was de- 

 termined to show that to him. So I spent a lot of time with local 

 people and in libraries, and what I found out, of course, is that log- 

 gers are doing a good job out in the forest. My research backfired 

 or I wouldn't be sitting here in this position. 



I learned that we had more trees in this country than we had 

 100 years ago. I learned that many wildlife species that were near 

 extinction at the turn of the century are now flourishing. I learned 

 that wood is the most environmentally safe and cost-effective build- 

 ing material that we have. And through forest management, we've 

 reduced the number of trees lost in this country by about 90 per- 

 cent from about 5 million acres a year — or excuse me, from about 

 50 million acres a year down to 5 million acres a year. We've also 

 dramatically reduced the number of trees that we're losing to 

 insect and disease infestations. 



And one of the figures that really caught my attention, the 

 amount of land that is harvested in the National Forest System 

 every year is about one-half of 1 percent. That's all the land that 

 we're talking about, one-half of 1 percent. And that figure holds 

 pretty true in the Black Hills National Forest also. 



One of the things I realized from research was that our forests 

 are managed. If they're not managed by man, who would then get 

 to use the resource and would stabilize wildlife population, then 

 they're managed by nature, and nature often uses destructive ca- 

 tastrophes for management. 



You know. Chairman Pressler, that the Black Hills is a beautiful 

 area, and I'm sure that you're familiar with this book. Yellow Ore, 

 Yellow Hair, Yellow Pine. Almost every picture in here — and we 

 do have some blowups here — shows that the forest has increased 

 substantially in the amount of trees and the health of the forest^ in 

 the last hundred years, and this has been done at a time that we've 

 taken 5 billion board feet of timber out for the needs of American 

 citizens. These pictures of the Castle Creek area, in particular, 

 show the dramatic growth of the Black Hills National Forest in a 

 hundred years. 



We are experiencing in this country constant land withdrawals, 

 land taken out of the timber base, land taken out of different bases 

 in our country. Right now we have 170 million acres in the nation- 

 al park system and the wilderness systems alone. That makes it 

 vital that we continue to manage our national forests in ways that 

 will maximize the production of goods, the economic stability of 



