Selective Tree Harvesting

[Tripwire]

This is something that pisses me off every year, especially during the summer.

What is "Selective Tree Harvesting?"
It is the remove of certain tree from a forest and leave others in place. Another tirm for this is "forest thinning."

What does it do?
Traditional timber harvesting invovles "clear cutting," removing an area completely of all trees. Thinning (I will use this from now on) has loggers go out and only remove certain trees and leaving others.

So, what's the point?
The point of this whole story economics, the government, enviromentalists, and fires. Everyone today agrees that the removal of a whole forest is bad. However, due massive fire suppresion efforts, the forests in the USA are so dense that crown fires (these are the fires that kill whole trees and damage the topsoil) are becoming very frequent. Plants shit stuff (aka leaves and needles) like animals do. This waste becomes dry and very flammable, becoming the fuel for fires.

Everyone agrees that the forests should be "thinned." Now, here is the conflict. A lot of entrepenuters want to go out and do the thinning because there is a market for it. Furthermore, when they are done, they can light controlled burns to remove the waste.

The enviromentalists say no to this because of two reasons. One, money is evil (actually, the "LOVE" of money is evil) and that killing trees is wrong. What they believe should be done is that the US government should rake the entire forests of the country and dump all the waste in some landfill. There are two major flaws to this. It does not reduce the density of forests (i.e. the reason for crown fires) and it just makes the forests more unhealthy.


The Government
Current, Bush (I think this is probably one of his only good things) agrees that the private sector should be in charge of the thinning process, because raking the forests (like all 1 billion acres of it) would costs trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The enviromentalists' viewpoint is of course "how can we trust these people that will probably only take all the big trees?"


The Solution(my opinion)
The government should use it's role in this just like it does with the rest of business (like the SEC). It should monitor for any wrong doing and rine those for doing so. This mean forest rangers in scout planes flying over trimmed sights making sure the private firms are doing their jobs correctly. Hiring 500 more forest rangers is a hell of a lot cheaper than using 50,000 fire fighters each year. That and scout planes are a lot cheaper than water dumping aircraft.


Why did I ramble on this?
This pisses me off that this thinning is not enacted now! Arizona is getting torched (we have a lot of forests believe it or not). Show Low got toasted last year. Now Tucson is getting hit. Soon this whole state will lose all it's forests, which will become black fields of ash and waste. I personally think enviromentalists are very narrow minded, only focusing on one plant or animal and not looking at the whole scope of things.


What are your thoughts people?

[Moniker]

I am intrigued by your views, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

[othell]

You forgot the part about how after a brush fire has run its course, all the ash and burned remains help to fertalize and revitalize the soil.

Not only that... There are a number of plants which depend on forest fires to help spread their seeds.

The problem right now, is that we put out many of the naturally created forest fires. Well... actually... this is not the real problem. The real problem is that we do not do more controlled burns to clear away the forest floors.

It's a necessary part of nature that must continue in some form... Otherwise we'll continue to experience these huge fires that are extremely hard (and dangerous) to control.

[Tripwire]

othell, there is a deference between brush fires, controlled burns, and crown fires.

Brush fires are not related to forest fires because they involve burning open, brushy areas. A lot of these areas are in southern CA. Brush fires can't really be controlled very easily (except with fire lines) because they are basically the natural cycle of life. Best way to fight these things is three ideas:
1. Make good fire lines/breaks.
2. Always remove brush 100 feet from a home.
3. Use livestock as a control. Sheep and cattle love brush as food.

Controlled burns are fires that burn the various leaves and crap on the floor. This is healthly because it removes the crap and rejuevenates the soil. It used to also select which trees live and which die, that way a balance of the ages was always meet. Trees can survive if their bases and lower branches are the only things burned.

Crown Fires is the issue here. Due to extremely dense forests, crown fires are extremely likely and spread very easily. Once a fire is in the crown of a tree, the tree is destroyed.


So, what is the point? Controlled burns are good, but they just continue to add to the density of the forest.

A unlike a controlled burn, a crown fire rapes the soil. Controlled burn's heat is about 500-800 degrees and are very breif. A crown fire lasts several hours in one spot and burns from 2000-3500 degrees. At that heat, the topsoil is baked and crystalized, virtually destroying it. And any seads released and that manage to survive can not grow because there is no healthy soil. Try to think of this as a chicken egg. At a low level heat (chicken's butt or incubator), the egg turns from yolk to chick. Putt the egg in boiling water or up to a blow torch, and the chick is detroyed.

This is why thinning is important. When you got 20-30 trees per acre, you got a good healthy forest. When you got 500 to 3000 trees per acre, you've got litterally 100 foot matchsticks.

[AGT-WildBillGates]

Up here in Minnesota we had what some belived was the jet stream come all the way to the ground. Well I dont really subscribe to that idea but the result was the same. We have mile after mile of trees knocked over in northern Minnesota and at the time the wood people wanted to go in and remove the fallen timber. But the democrats in Minnesota killed that idea and now every year..even wet years we have high fire warnings.

[Acharne]

all i can do is agree trip.. i'm not just uber educated on this topic, but from what you've said it appears you are :P. this doesn't effect me much (oklahoma), so i really find it difficult to give a personal opinion on the subject, but i think you have a good one.

if crown fires (which, as you say, can destroy the forests) can be prevented so easily, why not do it?! the environmentalists do need to see the big picture, instead of just being like "omg omg! save the trees!1!11 if one dies, i dunno wtf i'll do!!1 k, gonna go hump some treez now!!11!111!"... i dunno, maybe they don't realize they're messing stuff up in the long run.

[AGT-WildBillGates]

Originally posted by Acharne
the environmentalists do need to see the big picture, instead of just being like "omg omg! save the trees!1!11 if one dies, i dunno wtf i'll do!!1 k, gonna go hump some treez now!!11!111!"... i dunno, maybe they don't realize they're messing stuff up in the long run. You would think they could save more trees by getting a job and buy the land the trees sit on then going camping way up in a tree for months at a time. But where else can you see a man lower poop in a bucket from 200 feet?

[choco]

taken from my evn sci 100 lvl shitty GER course final paper:

As of September 2002, forests in Northern Idaho were being swarmed by beetles, old mountainside mines, spurred by flooding, were churning up old mining pollution and on the whole the forests were unhealthy. Many attribute the illness of the forest to years of fire suppression and logging that have cause significant wayward damage to the forests ecosystem (Egan 1).
Years ago when the area was being developed, land managers followed a policy of strict fire suppression, that is, containing and trying to minimize the amount of valuable old growth forest lost to fire. However, the land managers didn’t have the foresight to predict that their actions would have negative implications years down the road; areas built up undiversified and old forest that act as fuel for any future fires, the difference being however these fires will be more destructive, burn hotter, and cause more risk to loss of human loss than any natural and unregulated forest would. Until 1994 it was the policy of firefighters in the area to combat all forest fires, then in 1994 devastating fires fueled by previous years’ fire suppression, hot-windy days and a ten year draught led firefighters and politicians to review their policies. Wildfires were defined as any unwanted fire, and are combated with varying intensity based on the safety of the fire fighter, the loss of natural resource involved, and cost of suppression. The new plans called for, in some cases, prescribed fires, which are fires set by the land managers to “reset” certain areas of the forest. Prescribed fires included both fires set by the fire managers and natural fires which were kept at a contained level of burning (USDA Forest Service 1).
In search of ways to save the health of the forests and reduce the chances of a large scale destructive fire, forestry officials have come to the conclusion that they must burn and log sections of the area and tear out some roads in hopes that nature will reclaim the area. The Bush administration is in favor of such a plan, especially with the prospect of being able to strip the areas regulations and allow the timber industry to log the area free of regulations. Oddly enough this May, Bush signed an agreement stating that he would definitely not be planning on lifting any logging regulations in the area, even if such dire circumstances were at hand. Environmentalists however protest all plans offered out by the Bush administration on grounds that they are attempting to deceive people to gain logging rights using lengthy court appeals and counters. (Egan 2).
On a more regional scale, the timber industry in Idaho has been on the decline for the past decade, and has come to a head here after the turn of the decade. Actions of recent environmentalists and politicians have drastically cut down on the amount of raw materials that logging companies have to work with. The building of new roads has been completely banned, more and more forest is being declared as National Forest and is therefore being protected from logging. Only 7.5% of the state is legally considered to be loggable. In the past decade, dozens of lumber mills and an estimated 30,000 jobs have been lost because of the battle with environmentalists and politicians. Normally, once the timber is cut, it is sold at an auction, but normality has gone by the wayside as environmentalists persistently tie up the auctions in court, slowing the process to a creep and in most cases the cut timber goes to waste, costing the respective companies revenue. Many of the logging companies are willingly moving to Canada to find higher revenues and less red-tape.

[DeathinaCan]

If so many forests weren't clear-cut, or removed wholesale earlier on during the settlement of North America, the loss of one forest or even multiple forests wouldn't be a huge issue. Now though, the environmentalists bitch and complain about natural habitats.

Thinning out forests, or selective logging works on many different levels. You don't need to create man-made forests (most animals/undergrowth can't live in these, too little wind resistance and not enough diversity), as well it allows a company to select certain trees to harvest, and of course it will reduce the risk of forest fires.

All in all, if humans of 100 years ago weren't so hell-bent on the complete and utter rape of the Earth, we wouldn't be in the mess we are now. Half assed "save the environment" measures won't cut it. This planet is pretty much fucked for the next couple thousand years, unless we find an effective way to reverse all the harm we've caused.

I'm not one of these Green peace, longhaired, pot-smoking hippy types, but I do enjoy the outdoors. I think Agent Smith said it best when he classified the Human species as a virus. Time to control the outbreak, and fix this bitch up before we all fry.