A rambling rant regarding “Sustainable Forestry?”

We need ten times the old growth stands we presently have because big forests are carbon sinks, taking carbon dioxide and producing oxygen and of course we are blowing carbon in the air at a deadly pace.  Forests in the Western U.S.  are suffering.  Insects, fires, air pollution are killing portions of our forests.  When houses burn up in an area that hasn’t been made firesafe, its the same as having the trees that were harvested wasted as far as lost resources.

British Columbia is still heavily clear cutting stands of Old Growth Western Red Cedar, Douglas Fir, Sitka Spruce, Pine -yes you can still get super tight old growth that has been fresh cut and the Canadians are doing some very heavy clear cuts as far as I’ve seen flying over BC.

If an area has been logged, and millions of acres of our forests have been, we need to be stewards of the land, with judicious thinning to prevent the new growth from coming back like a thicket and using up tremendous amounts of water, and we need to to allow trees to have enough room and sunlight to grow large. This allows the trees in the forest be more spread out and fire safe like our old growth forest was.

Old growth trees have thick bark, which helps make them fire resistant. Visitors to old growth areas see time after time black scars running sometimes 100 feet up a big tree from a fire that could have been hundreds of years ago, or from multiple fires over the years. In the West, the fires of recent years have often become gigantic, with flames crowning to the tops of trees and spreading up mountainsides as if propelled by a blowtorch. The brand of fire suppression of the past 50 years by the U.S.Forest Service and state firefighters is now seen as a mistake, because fire is natures way of cleaning out the underbrush, making an area park like and leaving room enough for trees to grow to large dimension.

For the past 20 years in the Western States, we have had a ‘bug epidemic’ killing trees in California. In Southern California it has come to a head. In the Angeles National Forest, the Lake Arrowhead/Big Bear area timber stands have been decimated due to the combination of at least four factors: Complete fire suppression when possible, moratorium on logging and thinning , poor air quality, drought. The weakening of the natural resistance of timber stands from lack of water, bad air and choked undergrowth has caused the death of up to 90% of the forest in parts of San Bernardino County.

Crossroads supports logging that takes into consideration the factors of the long term health of our timberlands, fire prevention and sustainable forestry. Anyone who thinks we should let nature come back totally on her own after an area has been logged needs to study what has historically happened and the devastation that can occur from lack of maintenance. It is sad to see, but once we have changed nature’s original layout, we have to do our best to help her mimic those first landscapes as the forest regenerates. If it grows back on its own random schedule, we have problems.

We are pleased to see the National Park Service in our backyard at Yosemite National Park, finally having crews thinning, piling, and burning underbrush along the Southern Yosemite Highway entrance to prevent another conflagration like the Yosemite fire that charred many thousands of acres in 1993.

For years the norm was to crush and landfill, or to burn the wood from a building, or the whole building. Even now, if a building is scheduled for demolition or even for deconstruction, Crossroads feels it is wasteful to do away with a well built structure in good condition. we have seen tremendous structures in excellent condition, taken down to make room for a big box store or parking lot. This is an insult to the resources that were used to build the building, and the people that planned, designed, and built the structure.

From our point of view, America has often failed to build on the brilliant manufacturing and labor of her past. When a building is constructed, it is the culmination of a lot of parts, pieces and processes. Did you ever think about the metals used to make brackets, bolts, door and window hardware, roofing, screws , nails, etc etc.

People scouted for areas to get suitable ore for the steel , people mined the ore, sorted out impurities, trucked ore to foundries, and processed high quality steel for all kinds of uses. Our thousands and thousands of highly skilled engineers and steel mill workers proudly made some of the best steel in the world for 100 years. Iron workers, builders and millwrights skillfully followed plans and put materials together making skyscrapers, factories, sawmills, commercial buildings, homes.

Consider how wood ended up at lumber yards and then in a home or school or courthouse for the last 150 years. Some old growth forests were two thousand years old when timber cruisers scaled and estimated yield for lumber companies, timber fallers and buckers cut the trees, before steam and diesel power, men drove teams of oxen, skidding logs out of the forest (easier said than done), when timber was close to water, logs were put in the river or lake or ocean, then chained together in line and pulled by boats to sawmills or rail stations. Otherwise logs were transported by flume, horse and mule, train, or truck to a sawmill.

Now think about the many thousands of proud sawmill workers, doing their part to make an excellent product to help build America. Before milling logs need to be debarked, broken down to cants, resawn, planed, sometimes moulded to pattern. Picture just one guy out of 300 in some sawmill in Washington or Oregon or California (there were thousands of mills in the West), say he was a planer man who set up one machine in one mill out of thousands, but imagine a guy working 40 years, honing his knowledge of wood and machinery skills to make the best product ever seen up to that time. America had the best timber and the best sawmills in the world. Carpenters, welders, millwrights, built the mills and kept the machinery running. So you have the proud people, many dedicating their entire careers to making a top quality product.

The forests of the Pacific Northwest supplied lumber for structures all over North and South America, England and some in Europe, supplied timbers and masts for shipbuilders all over the world. The point is that when we tear out a building and crunch the iron and put it on a boat to China or India, this is a mistake.

When we take a wood framed building that is still viable and crunch it and landfill or burn it (this still happens today to usable buildings, some of which could house dozens or hundreds of small businesses) it is not only an insult to the planners and architects and engineers who designed the structures, all the workers who manufactured the materials, the railroad workers, tugboat crews and the truck drivers who transported the goods ,and the builders and laborers who toiled to make the best possible and longest lasting structure they could, it is also an insult to mother nature and our once bountiful natural resources that this great land has provided us.

Americans have wasted a lot of our resources not by using them, but by squandering them and also by squandering much of our past labor by wrecking usable structures.

It is insane to take a sound warehouse and tear it down to build a big box store that sells mostly goods manufactured in other countries. America needs to reinvent her manufacturing genious. We need to instill pride in our youth, not to teach them how to make a fast buck by investing in fluff and figuring out how to con others to believe that fluff is worth more and more and more, till the bottom falls out and the many are left broke while a few are left wealthy. We need to produce quality goods and buy our own products here at home. Part of government’s role should be to have import tariffs to offset the worlds cheap labor, and to make reasonable taxes for the small and large businesses that are making worthwhile products.

Long story short, Crossroads Recycled Lumber is proud to be saving some of our most precious natural resource, originally made from our old growth forests, and cleaning up, refurbishing and remanufacturing quality products for reuse by people like you who appreciate Americas heritage, natural resources, and the beauty strength and quality of lumber and timbers manufactured from old growth wood.

At last Marc Mandel is going to enter the discussion on saving the planet with a wider potential audience, the world wide web. He’s been running Crossroads Recycled Lumber for many years and has a unique and varied open minded outlook on this earth where we live and how we have to save it so we can continue to live here.

Kick around and read. At the very least you’ll learn something. Read more about Marc’s blog here…