A federal judge yesterday threw out a lawsuit filed by loggers who claimed that the U.S. Forest Service was under the sway of a nature-based religion. A coalition of loggers filed suit last fall against the USFS and two environmental groups, claiming that the agency was curtailing logging because its policy was being dictated by followers of the Earth-centered philosophy of “deep ecology.” The lawsuit claimed that the philosophy amounts to a religion and that the USFS was violating the First Amendment prohibition on government favoring one religion over another. U.S. District Judge James Rosenbaum said the case was a baseless waste of the court’s time and threatened to sanction the loggers’ lawyer.
