Forest protection depicted through film, slides, music

The Big Wild Roadshow, a multimedia presentation on current logging practices in the Northern Rockies, will be shown Wednesday at 8 p.m. in the Benjamin Mays Center. Presented by Joshua Burnim and Martin Stephan, two forest activists from Idaho working to preserve the “Big Wild” forests in the Northern Rockies, the evening features slides, video and live acoustic guitar music to illustrate illegal logging activity on public lands. The public is invited and admission is free.

“Current logging practices on public national forests are destroying our natural heritage while costing the taxpayer millions from below-cost timber sales when there are alternatives,” said Stephan, currently a graduate student at Boise State University. “The ‘Big Wild’ of the Northern Rockies contains the most unprotected wilderness in the U.S. outside of Alaska, and it’s being sold off and destroyed by federally subsidized logging.”

Burnim and Stephan moved to the Northern Rockies and became involved in the Cove/Mallard forest protection campaign in central Idaho after seeing a similar presentation on illegal forest practices in 1996.

“I came out to Cove/Mallard base camp to learn the issues for myself,” said Burnim, a recent graduate of Colgate University. “Here in the last intact ecosystem in the lower 48 states, I saw the results of the U.S. Forest Service’s policy of ‘getting the cut out.’ This taxpayer subsidized clear cutting is devastating the public’s wilderness.”