Comments Snoqualman has made
Truce, or surrender?
Kudos to Mitch Friedman for articulating a vision in which everyone involved with public forests gets along, where the lions lay down with the lambs. It sounds really quite remarkable. But, sadly, most things which sound too good to be true are, in fact, too good to be true. And that's what's wrong with Friedman's collaborative vision - it's just too good to be true.
What Friedman is essentially proposing is for the conservation community to actively sign over a large proportion of the federally owned forests to the timber industry, in perpetuity. This isn't some philosophical discussion about favoring or opposing the idea of "zero cut." This is about conservationists actively promoting high - breathtakingly high - cut levels on public forests, and ignoring the kind of long term damage that those cut levels would inflict not just on salmon and other aquatic resources, but the whole range of things that we value about public forests.
The numbers he tosses out are astounding. 2.3 billion board feet of timber just waiting there to be thinned? It's a sad fact that thinning forests can often have even worse effects than clearcutting them. Many more acres are affected, and vastly more roads required, to extract any given amount of timber volume. But, we are told, thinning just lets a little light into the dense, dark, overgrown forests, and hastens the day when they too will become old-growth. Sounds great, but again, those things that sound too good to be true almost always are too good to be true. And that's the sad truth about thinning. It requires massive road construction, and depends totally on ground based yarding, which means lots of heavy machinery driving all through a forest to drag logs away, compacting and severely damaging soils, and sending that soil straight into streams and rivers, choking fish. It opens up stands where trees have protected each other from wind, meaning that many of the leave trees end up blowing down. Thinning does not hasten the development of old growth, in fact its effects are quite the opposite. It leaves a degraded, unnatural forest. The "emerging scientific consensus" in favor of thinning that Friedman talks about has emerged largely among those researchers whose funding depends upon finding justifications for increased logging.
People do not know how to do better than mother Nature in creating old growth forests. Forests are not "restored" by carving roads through them and logging them. Even in drier forests where fire suppression has led to unnatural fuel buildups, there is little or no evidence that thinning is of much benefit. Some places may just have to burn, and that's not necessarily bad. Burning has far fewer bad effects than the kind of roading densities and ground yarding that would be required for thinning on the scale envisioned by Friedman. Thinning and brush clearing does make sense in areas immediately surrounding houses and communities, but not beyond that.
Of course we need a timber industry, and there is no danger at all of it going away. Some of Friedman's ideas deserve to be tried out - on private lands, not public forests. When the National Forests were created a century ago, they were essentially the leftovers, the places the timber industry didn't want, less productive lands, usually mountainous or higher elevation. The timber industry got the good lands, and that is where creative new ideas in forestry should be tested out. Logging in National Forests has never been anything other than a subsidy to a favored few corporations. Just when the conservation movement has finally gotten cut levels down to bearable levels, along comes Friedman wanting to push them up again. He sounds more like a timber lobbyist than a tree hugger.
We'd all like to see the "calloused hands" of Friedman's old time logger doing productive work. But, please, let's have that happen someplace other than on the National Forests. The subsidized, public lands based timber industry is finally on the ropes, just as the buffalo hunters and whalers were before them. Let's hope that it dies. The forests will be far better off without it. Let's not put it on life support as Friedman proposes, allowing it to further destroy the only public forests we have left.
On It's time for conservationists to collaborate with an agency they've long demonized posted 3 years, 9 months ago 103 Responses