Fire rekindles debate over forest thinning

Sacramento Bee ^ | July 28, 2002 | Stuart Leavenworth

[farmfriend]

GIANT SEQUOIA NATIONAL MONUMENT -- Last week, the Packsaddle Grove looked like it was toast. A wind-blown wildfire, fed by underbrush, was raging toward the sequoia grove in the southern Sierra, shooting flames 200 feet high.

Then the fire hit a patch of trees the U.S. Forest Service had recently thinned and "treated" with a controlled burn. The fire was quickly downsized. Instead of jumping into the treetops, the blaze crept along the ground, where fire crews could easily snuff it out.

[snopercod]

That should have been three words.

We type funny here in North Carolina.

[Carry_Okie]

Source URL:

Sierra Club Policies Main

	Articles of Incorporation
	Bylaws and Standing Rules
	Purposes and Goals
	Conservation Policies

Sierra Club Conservation Policies

Fire Management on Public Lands

1. Fire is a natural, integral, and valuable component of many ecosystems. Fire management must be a part of the management of public lands. Areas managed for their natural values often benefit from recurring wildfires and may be harmed by a policy of fire suppression. Long-term suppression of small wildfires may build up conditions making occasional catastrophic conflagrations inevitable.

2. Every fire should be monitored. Naturally occurring fires should be allowed to burn in areas where periodic burns are considered beneficial and where they can be expected to burn out before becoming catastrophic. Human-caused fires in such areas should be allowed to burn or be controlled on a case-by-case basis.

3. In areas where fire would pose an unreasonable threat to property, human life or important biological communities, efforts should be made to reduce dangerous fuel accumulations through a program of planned ignitions. New human developments should be discouraged in areas of high fire risk.

4. When fires do occur that pose an unacceptable threat to property or human life, prompt efforts should be undertaken of fire control.

5. In areas included in or proposed for the National Wilderness Preservation System, fires should be managed primarily by the forces of nature. Minimal exceptions to this provision may occur where these areas contain ecosystems altered by previous fire suppression, or where they are too small or too close to human habitation to permit the ideal of natural fire regimes. Limited planned ignitions should be a management option only in those areas where there are dangerous fuel accumulations, with a resultant threat of catastrophic fires, or where they are needed to restore the natural ecosystem.

6. Land managers should prepare comprehensive fire management plans. These plans should consider the role of natural fire, balancing the ecological benefits of wildfire against its potential threats to natural resources, to watersheds, and to significant scenic and recreational values of wildlands.

7. Methods used to control or prevent fires are often more damaging to the land than fire. Fire control plans must implement minimum-impact fire suppression techniques appropriate to the specific area.

8. Steps should be taken to rehabilitate damage caused by fighting fires. Land managers should rely on natural revegetation in parks, designated or proposed wilderness areas, and other protected lands. Where artificial revegetation is needed, a mixture of appropriate native species suited to the site should be used.

9. The occurrence of a fire does not justify salvage logging or road building in areas that are otherwise inappropriate for timber harvesting. Salvage logging is not permitted in designated wilderness areas or National Park System units.

Adopted by the Board of Directors, March 17-19, 1989

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[farmfriend]

You have to remember, their agenda is not conservation, it is socialism.

[farmfriend]

Somehow I knew that post was yours before I ever got to the bottom.

[Carry_Okie]

It's the smoking gun.

[The Californian]

Bump

[Carry_Okie]

As a fouth generation Californian, an amateur in habitat restoration, engineer, and author of a book on environmental policy, I find the kind of forest and wildland management proposals I see coming out of the Sierra Club to be an outrage.

As far as I am concerned, many of those people belong in jail, or better yet, should be forced to weed starthistle, broom, german ivy, and hemlock for the rest of their un-natural lives.

[Sacajaweau]

Watching millions of acres of forest burn together with the loss of wildlife and risk to property owners and fire personnel doesn't seem logical if we view forests in its simplistic form as:

1. A renewable source of supply via reforestation

2. providing usable products

3. providing jobs in the logging industry

Let's get with the program and not watch another asset wasted. Its the Alaskan 2002 Folly continued aka "Let's just let our assets sit there. We can look at them."

What the hell do you think these assets are for!! God didn't put anything on earth to just look at!! That's what the sun and moon and stars are for.

Sac

[backhoe]

Feel free to borrow:

Enviralists:

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Every living thing fears wildfire, and it perfectly illustrates years of muddle-headed mismanagement. It also reveals the fanatical agenda behind the smiley-face of the ecology movement.

[sauropod]

ping for later study

[brityank]

I nominate this for "Post of the Week" == outstanding synopsis of the underlying attitudes of the unknowledgeable watermelon luddite useful idiot enviralists.

I think they (the environmental orgs and their ilk) are positively horrified by the prospect of death, and think that nothing should ever die. That's why so many of them are vegetarians. I'd bet not a one of them has seen a dead body (then again, neither have I....). They don't want to kill animals for food, and they don't want to kill trees for wood. War and the military are always uncalled-for. Gun control is a given, because guns are for killing.

Theirs is a happy, fuzzy-warm world of the sort seen in small childrens' books.

The fact that it doesn't correspond to the realities of life on Earth makes no difference to them -- the world ought to be death-free, and they'll do all in their power to make everybody pretend it can be so.

The dirty secret is that they're basically children playing at big-people games -- and as often happens when children use adult equipment, things and people get broken and killed. But of course, like all children, when it happens they'll claim it wasn't their fault.

As someone else said, if this is getting play in the western press, just maybe there is hope that the sheeple are awakening to the damage that these orgs have and are doing to our country and way of life. Thanks, farmfriend.

[brityank]

Ping. Maybe -- just maybe a little -- the sheeple are awakening.

[Looking for Diogenes]

Forest Service officials say it generally costs $800 to $1,000 to thin and set prescribed fires on a single acre of forest -

[the]"Sierra Nevada Framework" ... requires the Forest Service to aggressively thin fuels from 2.5 million acres of "urban interface zones." [$2.5 billion if done at Forest Service expense, just for the Sierra Nevada.]

Often, the thinning has taken place in remote wildlands instead of around at-risk communities.

To offset the costs, the timber industry has long lobbied the Forest Service to combine thinning with commercial logging. In California, the Forest Service would like to cut and sell some "medium-sized" trees -- up to 24 inches in diameter -- and use the revenues to pay for removing unmarketable brush, said Mathes.

the plan is under attack from timber interests, who want to log larger trees in more remote areas,

There are some contradictory statements here about what the logging companies want to do.

The questions I don't see answered: Are the logging companies interested in logging the areas that most need to be thinned and limit themselves to the smaller trees? And would the revenues from the timber sales actually be sufficient to pay for the brush clearing?

The logging companies never seem to get interviewed for articles like these, so their plans are not clear.

[Carry_Okie]

I do it on my place for free.

[Alamo-Girl]

Bump!

[Looking for Diogenes]

I also thin and cut, on an 8 acre patch. But the value of my time doesn't make it cheap!

[farmfriend]

The logging companies never seem to get interviewed for articles like these, so their plans are not clear.

A letter to the editor bringing that up might be appropriate. Perhaps dropping a line to the reporter would help as well. He does a lot of their enviro stuff. His articles are usually as fair as you're going to get out of the Bee. I think he is the one who wrote all the ones on how the enviro movement was ripping people off. It might be time to bring that up again.

[r9etb]

Tell me..how does one select or single tree harvest in such hilly areas? Have you ever cut on a mountianside? If so, who did you fall timber for? Did you fall the trees upwards on the hill or down, or did you fall them sideways?

I'm just telling you what they did. And now, in the same terrain, they clear cut. And the reason why they clear cut is because it's cheaper and easier for them to do it that way. That's according to an old hand forester with whom I'm acquainted, not just my opinion.

Back when felling a tree was much more labor-intensive, they used to selectively log the more hilly areas, too, and drag the trees to the top of the hill. This was not particularly kind to the land in the drag line areas, but logged areas were also not so prone to the erosion and flooding problems that accompany clear cuts, either.

Beyond that, it's not honest to imply as you have that clear cuts are used only on unhealthy stands. Standard practice these days is very often to clear cut everything in healthy stands -- take a flight into Seattle to see that this is the truth. They do this because it's technically easier for them to do so, not for any forest health reasons.

[Looking for Diogenes]

Perhaps dropping a line to the reporter would help as well.

Done. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Carry_Okie]

Tell me..how does one select or single tree harvest in such hilly areas?

Does a 200% slope qualify? Yep. I've done it. Go take a look. 40-48" dbh too. I climb as well.

Have you ever cut on a mountianside? If so, who did you fall timber for? Did you fall the trees upwards on the hill or down, or did you fall them sideways?

Almost always uphill starting from the bottom and rastering up the slope. I had to bend leave trees out of the way because our felling corridor was less than ten feet wide. We high-leaded the logs out using a fir on the ridge as a gin-pole. All it took was a Cat loader and a 5/8" bull line over a high lead snatch block on a choker.

Clearfell or clearcuts are one of the most IMPORTANT TIMBER MANAGEMENT TOOLS available to the foresters.

It's illegal to do that around here. There are other places where it is indeed the best thing to do because of blowdown problems or because the re-entry times are on the order of a hundred years due to slow growth rates. Around here we can re-enter in 15 years, take a 60% cut of trees over 12" dbh, and still obtain sustained yields.

It is a tool that is used to spot out unhealthy stands to be replanted with better yeilding and healthier timber types. Does Aspen require clearfell as do other shade intolerant trees?

I'm seeing more group selection techniques. I'm even seeing understory cable yarding with dog-legged corridors (you can't even see them when they are done). When these guys are done, after two years, most people would swear that there hadn't been a logging job on the site. That happens more frequently to agricultural monocultures. Often those "unhealthy stands" are so because they were planted for production and the optimal harvest date had long passed. Around here the goal is uneven-aged stands.

Since when do we have umpteen thousand experts on timber and forest health when not one of these geeks has ever held a saw in their hands or hooked a chokker or ran a log loader.

Excuse me, I've done the former, but not the latter. I've got a 28" 0-44 skip tooth and a topping saw. I've set chokers on a 110° day. On the other hand, do you top? I do. I do it for fun, not as a profession, although my trees are pretty serious (up to 180 feet).

The point of my little vignette is this, there are all sorts of conditions that vary radically from place to place. There are different goals, styles, and methods even within those differences. There are also some simple truths that do translate between locations. Thinning and prescribed fire, when well executed can save an overgrown stand, release nutrients, kill pathogens, and improve the general health of groundcovers. I wish I could broadcast burn, but the condition of my neighbors' properties precludes it.

Got a problem with that?