Bat-Killing Fungal Disease Has U.S. Lumber Firms Fighting States

Greg Turner hoisted himself up with a rope from an unlighted 20-foot pit in an abandoned mine in Durham, Pennsylvania. His task of counting bats didn’t take long -- just seven where five years ago there were 4,000.

“There’s nobody home, basically, at this point,” said Turner, an endangered-mammal specialist at the Pennsylvania Game Commission. The agency wants to set up bat protections that threaten human livelihoods, say the state’s leading business lobby and lumber industry, which accounts for about 5 percent of U.S. jobs in that field.