Posted on 07/28/2002 1:47:10 PM PDT by farmfriend
Edited on 04/12/2004 5:41:08 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
We type funny here in North Carolina.
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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.
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
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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.
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.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.
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.
Forest Service officials say it generally costs $800 to $1,000 to thin and set prescribed fires on a single acre of forest -There are some contradictory statements here about what the logging companies want to do.[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,
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.
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.
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.
Done. Thanks for the suggestion.
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?
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