Logging Inudstry = Good for environment?

dave_54

Interesting statistical information, but could you provide links and sources to each of your claims?

Thanks.

[edit on 7-11-2005 by loam]

Originally posted by cavscout

When you add the need to keep the fires at bay due to ever encroaching civilization, however, the ground cover is allowed to grow so dense that it creates a fuel for the fire that causes the super-fires we have been dealing with in recent years.

Not completely true. It has more to do with the type of tree. There are jack pines dominated forest areas that crown out with very short fire intervals. It really depends on the tree. Prescribed burns will remove a lot of the fuel load. However many crown fires need trees with poor self pruning and ladder fuels to crown out and not nessacarily a large fuel load. Also some trees that have been brought over to the US for logging purposes have cause some pretty big fires in themselves. Just like the Eucolyptus trees in California.

In its natural state, the forest will not supply enough fuel to burn a fire so hot that the ground is kilned 15 feet down or create a fire so hot it is nearly impossible to put out.

umm fire in some boreal peat beds will remain extremely hot for a long time. They really don't crown out to often. It doesn't require a whole lot of heat to crown out and spread. Just the right type of trees.

So sorry if it hurts nature worshipers feelings to "hear a tree scream" when it gets cut down, but logging is the best means of caring for the forest.

Unfortunately PETA gives a bad image of conservationist and preservationists. Read Aldo Leapold and maybe you'd get a little better idea.

But logging isn't the best way. It is one way yes. Not in the sense of logging for major comercial purposes. Just forest management. Prescribed burns are constanstally run to remove fuel load. Also most fires aren't started by natural means, but rather people. In the past, fire supression helped result in certain trees (one example furs in a ponderosa forest) that would not be allow to survive in the normal fire regime. But they were able to crown out after the trees got so big. In these instances the forestry department has to and will go into these forested areas and clear out the succesionary trees.

The assertion that you can do "anything you want" with trees that are on your property is incorrect. In 1992, George Herbert Walker Bush signed a law that made it illegal to harvest a giant sequoia tree. Furthermore, president Bill Clinton signed an executive order declaring a huge swath of California forests as a national monument right before leaving office. This act of the pen outraged many in my community, including the Tule River Indian Reservation (look it up on a map, largest one in California) because it was totally unneccesary and created loopholes and management problems in the designated "Giant Sequoia National Monument." Read the following story it details it well.

www.cfbf.com...

Shortly thereafter we had the "McNally" fire in 2003 which was a HUGE fire, you can google this one if you'd like. I know this issue very well. My family currently owns the only privately owned grove of giant sequoias, (other than the Tule reservation) and we used to manage it quite well. Now we are SEVERELY limited in what we can do to PREVENT DAMAGE TO OUR SEQUOIAS because of measures that were pushed through for pure political expediency. Don't think that we are a bunch of tree-cutting nuts though. We are environmentally conscious, and we feel that people who have a connection to the land will always manage it better than some political bellweather beauracracy. The science is on the side of smart management, period.

And by the way, environmentalism is a religion to some folks. Several people (granola-hungry environmentalists for those of you who can't take a joke) have come to my family's land to climb the Stagg tree (5th largest in the world) because it is the only place they are allowed to. You can google that one too.

Originally posted by informatu
The assertion that you can do "anything you want" with trees that are on your property is incorrect. In 1992, George Herbert Walker Bush signed a law that made it illegal to harvest a giant sequoia tree. Furthermore, president Bill Clinton signed an executive order declaring a huge swath of California forests as a national monument right before leaving office. This act of the pen outraged many in my community, including the Tule River Indian Reservation (look it up on a map, largest one in California) because it was totally unneccesary and created loopholes and management problems in the designated "Giant Sequoia National Monument." Read the following story it details it well.

The giant sequoia groves in Sequoia National Forest have been protected under Forest Service policy since 1952 -- the year they were officially withdrawn from harvest. In practice, harvesting had already ceased years before. In 1992 Bush made the the internal policy into an executive order. His actions did not change anything on the ground. It merely changed the existing policy from an internal administrative decision into executive policy. It sounded good during an election year. Clinton came along later with his election year gimmickry and created the National Monument, which was completely unnecessary and arguably endangered the groves. The scientific community opposed the monument designation as ecologically unsound. The battle over how to best preserve the groves continues to this day, with science and proven forest management practices losing to emotional appeals from the well-meaning but uninformed urban eco-left.

California has the strictest forest practices regulations in the U.S. -- so strict that owning forest land is an economic drain on small landowners. As a result, small landowners are selling their land and contributing to urban encroachment. This creates the paradox where environmental regulations are the causing a loss of the very resources the regulations are supposed to protect. The best way to preserve open spaces is to create economic incentives to keep them open. Knee-jerk overregulation of land use does not protect anything. Let a farmer or rancher make a profit from sound forest management and you will preserve far more forests in the long run. This is the current UN position on forests and forestry.


Everyone here is aware of the Sierra Club position on National Forest harvesting. In 2002, the Society of American Foresters (the professional association of foresters and related fields) made an offer to the Sierra Club. The SAF would grant the Sierra Club space in the Journal of Forestry to defend their position on public land harvesting and in exchange the Sierra Club would grant equal space to the SAF in the Sierra magazine to argue for the continued management of public forests. The Sierra Club did not even respond to the letter. One can only speculate on the trembling fear the Sierra Club executive board felt over a fair and accurate scientific discussion on the topic. They tucked tail and ran. But let's be fair -- the local Sierra Club Working Groups and rank-and-file members that actually live in rural and forested areas overwhelmingly support active management, but are overruled by the national headquarters and outvoted by urban members (California is the most urbanized State with ~93% of the population living in urban areas).

Here are a few links that might be of some interests. I pulled em up from the US forestry department website. I know the second one is from a scientific journal but not really sure where the forest service website got the second one from. I believe it was a USDA project but I'll have to see if I can find the actual publication data.

Here's a pdf examining the affects logging had on the Casper Creek watershed in N. California. It's easy to understand and covers several methods of logging erosion factors and its a long but rather informative read.

Here's a recent one published in Enviormental Management Vol 35 No4 410-425. It's from this year 2005.pdf It is on Dynamic Zoning harvesting method. It's another nice but long read. I only got through a little bit but bookmarked it. Seems this could be an alternate method of logging that will allow harvesting yet help manage the forest land and not have a negative impact on the wildlife.