Amid Pisgah logging plans post-Helene, Forest Service shuts out public • Asheville Watchdog

Amid Pisgah logging plans post-Helene, Forest Service shuts out public • Asheville Watchdog

In early April, a U.S. Forest Service office in east Tennessee’s Cherokee National Forest issued a memo inviting the public to weigh in on its recovery operations in the wake of Tropical Storm Helene. The storm had felled trees across tens of thousands of acres of the forest, the agency said, and those trees posed the risk of fueling wildfires. Now, it was proposing what it called “heavy fuel reduction” on nearly 3,000 acres, including through “…