Tiny bat touches off dispute over North Carolina logging

Man vs. nature, an ongoing struggle in U.S. forests

October 8, 1999
Web posted at: 8:14 p.m. EDT (0014 GMT)

From Correspondent Aram Roston

MURPHY, North Carolina (CNN) -- The Indiana bat may be just an inch and a half long and weigh only as much as four pennies, but the endangered creature has touched off a big dispute between environmentalists and loggers in western North Carolina.

When a colony of the bats was found living in a dead tree this summer in the Nantahala National Forest, the U.S. Forest Service was forced to shut logging down in several areas.

While some of those logging tracts have reopened, others remain off-limits -- a decision that has frustrated loggers in an area where locals have made a living harvesting trees for generations.

"The bat, let him live. Let me live, too," says logger Dennis Curtis, who buys rights from the Forest Service to log on National Forest land.

The Southeast has become a hub of the timber industry in the United States, particularly since decisions protecting the endangered spotted owl cut production in the Northwest.

The Indiana bat is but one point of contention in the environmental sparring over 1 million acres of national forest land in western North Carolina. While only a fraction of Nantahala's 500,000 acres are logged, some environmentalists believe even that is too much.

"I can understand how small sawmill operations have a difficult time competing with multinationals," says Andrew George, head of the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project. "Still, public lands belong to the public."

By this time in the fall, scientists believe the Indiana bats have left the forests and gone into caves to hibernate for the winter. The debate they have started, however, shows little sign of hibernation.

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