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.
