"Jerry" wrote in message .com...
"Larry Harrell" wrote in message
m...
"Rico" wrote in message
rthlink.net...

snip

It's funny how the forests managed themselves fine for millions of
years, but now all of a sudden they need 'management' or some terrible
thing
is going to happen, here in the last two seconds of the eons of natural
history.


Ha!....I've been waiting for that one to surface. Forests were
"thinned" naturally during those times and fire resistant trees were
allowed to grow with plenty of water and space. For many decades,
we've been putting fires out and fuels, both live and dead having been
accumulating. It is now reaching a critical limit and we're seeing the
effects of that now: worsening droughts, insect attacks and
catastrophic fires. We can't wave a magic wand and fix the forests. It
takes "management", which means careful and gentle manipulation of the
forests to enhance the health and survivability of the remaining trees
we want to have as our future old growth.

Yes we can wave that magic wand, in the form of fire! That's how the
forests have existed all these millions of years (without managing)
Controlled fires is a natural and balanced way to thin the forests. Man has
suppressed fires for so long, of course the forest is out of balance.

You said it yourself. The forest is out of balance. Surely there is a
compromise that will reduce fuel loads AND protect good trees that we
want to keep. I call it a "reverse high-grade" which leaves the
biggest and the best and takes out the crappy trees, the suppressed,
diseased malformed trees.



Today's modern thinning projects don't leave logging slash and
improves wildlife habitat. Today's overstocked forests are a
"biodiversity desert". Yes, we can gently and carefully improved
today's forests into a more natural state. When we can re-introduce
fire back into these ecosystems, we will have completed our task.

Doesn't this seem reasonable?

Only thing is that when you give the "go-ahead" to thin forests so you can
then maintain them with controlled burns in the future, I'm afraid you start
a never ending cycle. Bush and the forest industry will always find excuses
to go in and "thin" the forest so it can be made more healthy. Ya know what
I mean?

Trees grow and forests change. There IS a maintenance factor involved
when (and if) forests get cleaned up. In the future I forsee a type of
"surgical" logging that picks and plucks individual old growth trees
as they become "available" by old age, disease or damage. I would even
go as far as to sell them to foreign countries for a fat price per
board foot of tight-grained, knot-free wood. (Rather than selling it
to American mills for a song.)

Bush can only be in office for 2 terms. Restoring forests from decades
of fire suppression will take much longer than that. 190 million acres
of National Forest are at risk to catastrophic fire. Congress WILL act
next year and the new problem will be the Forest Service's lack of
manpower and timber expertise. After downsizing in the 90's the USFS
has lost most of its field-going timber people. With the government
spending untold millions on planning these projects, how can they be
implemented without quality people to put the plans in effect on the
ground?? The complexity of these projects will be staggering and you
can't just take people off the street and have them practice sound
forestry (as was done in the past).

My bold prediction: The USFS will use unqualified and under educated
fire fighters to implement thinning plans.



On the Placerville Ranger District, we logged 300 million board feet
of dead and dying timber during those times. Outside of arson fires,
Placerville remains free of big fires. They had a very aggressive
thinning program there during the late 90's before the Sierra Nevada
Framework shut it all down. We cut trees mostly in the 9-18" size
range. Even though we were free to cut trees up to 29", we chose to
keep the "good" trees in that range and kept crown closure at 70%,
restoring stands to a more natural state. Trees over 30" were strictly
off-limits. Is this a bad thing? Why was this type of "eco-forestry
management" eliminated?

You know, Larry, you sound very responsible and truly believe in what you
are saying and a lot of it makes sense. Where I find the problem is having
an administration that just doesn't give a flyin-flip whether the forest
community continues as a semi-natural environment and only cares for the
money the logs will generate. A decent environment does not exist under the
Bush administration, period. And what is frustrating about these newsgroups
and continual debate on environmental issues is that you would "think" that
nearly all the people who visit these newsgroups would be able to see
through Bush's policies and see this administration for what it is, only
entirely concerned over the money they can get off our environment's
exploitation. But in these newsgroups you see so many so called "concerned
citizens of nature" defending Bush! It's beyond me.

Jerry

Bush or Gore? The evil of two lessers! They're both at the ends of the
spectrum and, left to themselves, they'd both harm our forests. It was
Clinton who eliminated sound thinning practices in the Sierra Nevada,
during the late 90's with the Sierra Nevada Framework.

Where's Teddy Roosevelt when you need em?

Larry don't be afraid of eco-forestry

cross-posted to alt.forestry call the cavalry!