Murphy DEP Used Military Funds To Purchase A “Forestry Excavator”

DEP Expanding Capacity To Log State Forests

This is the final post of my series on military influence on and funding of NJ DEP forest management.

There is growing public awareness and opposition to the purchase and deployment of military equipment by local police forces, see:

• Federal Militarization of Law Enforcement Must End

The federal government arms local police forces in the United States with weapons of war. A program called “1033,” for the section of the act that created it, allows the Department of Defense to give state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies military hardware. Since its inception in 1996, nearly 10,000 jurisdictions have received more than $7 billion of equipment. This includes combat vehicles, rifles, military helmets, and misleadingly named “non-” or less-lethal weapons, some of which have featured in police raids and police violence against protesters, including recent protests for racial justice.

Well, it looks like something similar is happening to NJ DEP.

DEP just spent $129,000 of Department of Defense funds to purchase a “Forestry Excavator”. That is functionally a weapon of war on NJ forests.

Incredibly, the “forestry excavator” was purchased by DEP’s “Bureau of Climate Resilience”.

Why would the NJ DEP need a forestry excavator?

Obviously, to log NJ forests!

This is highly revealing and exposes DEP’s lies about their “forestry management” and “climate resilience” programs.

This is totally unacceptable.

Forestry excavator (Source: Google images)