I recently saw a C-Span segment with an excellent spokesperson for ethanol.  Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth from South Dakota.

She made it all sound just wonderful, even though we know it is not.  Filled with agribusiness lobbyist talking points, her presentation was impressive.

If only wind, water, and solar generated electric power used in plugin vehicles had this kind of support, maybe it would have a chance.

It's not looking good though.  We are off on a biofuelish, capital and environment wasting sidetrack.  

Only immediate and conclusive high publicity demonstration projects of home based solar and wind powering electric vehicles can counter this.  

We are talking national and global emergency here, in the face of nuclear bunker busting imminent in Iran, in the short term,  and an east coast, as well as gulf coast hurricane season, in the long term.

Not to mention record drought related fires and storm related floods  all over the US.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

  Please pinch me and tell me I am having a nightmare?  

  Or can someone who understands this better explain why this is okay?

  patrick

The excuse the corporate "foresters" needed to turn all forests into tree farms.  Yellowstone  National Tree Farm.  Sounds great!

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

You guys have some major mis-conceptions about forestry and 'tree farming', more to follow.

Working for most of my career in California, this is rather foreign to me. With the bounty of agricultural waste here, the biofuels industry gets their burnables for almost free. Converting over to forest fuels apparently will take a subsidy, transportation costs and a re-tooling of some of the processes, too.

While there IS an excess of small pulp trees most everywhere in the West, this is still a rather finite source for the power-hungry Americans. Although trees grow back, and quite rapidly, at that, it isn't sustainable in the amounts that will make a huge difference.

Yes, there IS a lot of potential to use the overstocked trees. Their value, along with merchantable timber, can offset the high costs of restoring our National Forests in the West. While this style of management won't be palatable to some folks, through carefully controlled planning and project oversight, good things CAN come out of this, if you just give us a chance. This scenario is surely much, much better than letting the forests burn, releasing all that carbon and toxic greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere and thinking that high-intensity fire is "natural and beneficial" for our forests.

A healthy demand for forest fuels will certainly help us manage the forests back into better shape but, we can't present this as a cure-all for our energy needs. Restoring ecosystems IS still the Forest Service's most important job, IMHO. I abhor the implication that others still feel we'd clearcut the forests without their opposition and their both legal and illegal "monkeywrenching". Since 2000, we haven't seen "wholesale destruction" and 1000 acre clearcuts, as promised by the "preservationist industry".

The question should be: to what condition do they have to be restored? I don't think there is one blanket answer, so I will try to suggest what can work.

I like the idea of managing the context and the ecosystem, not the output. I don't like that there is no output (in some people's minds, not you, Backcut).

After all, in the words of a fairly famous (in the ecologists' circles) tropical ecologist Dan Janzen, and I am paraphrasing: a tropical (he was talking about that, but it really applies to all) forest that doesn't pay for itself is a non-existing tropical forest.

We cannot subsidize management of an ecosystem without having the ecosystem pay for itself, since outside subsidies (both monetary and physical) will not sustain the effort. The human and monetary sacrifices will not be tolerated for long both by the government and the people.

I cannot take credit for these ideas, although this has been brewing in my head for a while. We (environmentalists and broader human race) need to reconsider the idea of preservation in a world full of 7 billion people.

In other words, forest products clearly are a necessity for survival of forests. Wood is one, and it is most definitely a renewable source.

From the literature, Western forests are undercut by something like a factor of 2-4 when compared to a sustainable yield level. It is not necessarily a negative thing, since in my opinion the current sustainable yield model is flawed, but it forces other areas of the world/US to be overcut. SE US forests are overcut, as are tropical forests (especially illegally), which are going to the developed countries for a cheaper price than the wood is actually worth (never mind the externalities even). One can check out most recent issue of the biweekly SAF publication (Forestry Source) on the layperson coverage of the illegal wood issue.

Essentially, by forcing ecosystem management/preservation cuts a la (I'm sorry I cannot remember the SF eco-lawyer from Truce Almighty) 'that guy' on the National Forests, we are further subsidizing (monetarily and physically) an unsustainable paradigm. We should shift our focus to ecosystem management/conservation cuts a la TNC or Land Conservancy, where the output (which we should not manage for but should accept as an outcome of sucessful management) provides a profit and sustains a management effort. Leaving the forests alone will not work because these forests do not exist in a vacuum, but rather on our very overpopulated Earth.

This leaves us with the fuel loads in the West, and mostly degraded forests with terrible quality of wood (for sawlog purposes) in the East due to continued pillaging of our forests by diameter-limit/cream cuttings. The ecosystem management could easily provide for a continued output of biomass (which is that 35% statistic: I will not claim that I have an idea of what the actual number is) as we try to improve the quality of our forests in the East. Anyone only has to ask a forester (not a logger) about low-value wood markets and they will sigh, since those are few and far in between.

There is a point of mentioning other forest products: hunting, mushrooms, edible vegetation (such as wild leeks, even garlic mustard, or what have), but the value of these is far outweighed by the value of good wood in the marketplace. Clearly, a good paradigm of forest management will have a positive effect on the ecosystem function, rather than outputs, but hopefully these and other outputs will be good as a result.

I ran out of steam here, lok forward to hearing from the rest of ya'll.

While an entire book could be devoted to why our National Forests need to be restored (and how), reversing decades of mismanagement on both extremes will prove to be a huge undertaking. About 10 years ago, the price tag on restoring parts of our western forests was over 15 BILLION dollars. I'm sure that figure has now ballooned up to at least 30 billion.

Fire suppression, high-grading, clearcutting and "preservationism" have all had major impacts on our National Forests. The time has come for us to more closely mimic natural processes and restore our forests back to a more "natural" state, at least as much as the current reality of a man-dominated world can allow. Like Atreyger says, we do have to think globally and act locally, by reducing demand for wood harvested and imported by us, especially in third world countries, where little to no environmental controls exist. That means cutting more of our own wood using the latest and greatest science in the world. NIMBYists equate this with arrogance but, it IS the truth. Atreyger is right to say that we shouldn't be managing the output but, welcoming the board feet and forest fuels as a merchantable by-product of ecosystem management.

Seeing the slant of the Forest Service wander to and fro with the whims of each Administration is tough on us "Freddies". For example, I was happy with the oldest of Roadless Rules, in place before Bill Clinton's plan. His plan really didn't change much but gave the Roadless Areas a tiny bit more protection without an outright ban on logging and mining. Now, Bush comes along and brings the potential for states to re-open Roadless Areas to development, increasing the possibility of destructive activites and guaranteeing wasteful lawsuits. "Healthy Forests" were a very rare example of how a good plan can bring together both political parties for the greater good. Luckily, the Democrats were able to convince the Republicans that the original version of "Healthy Forests" was flawed and gave too much power to people like Mark Rey, while cutting the public out of the loop.

Let's hope that science will dictate what we do with particular pieces of land, from now on. Let's also hope that the public will learn the science and let us "Freddies" earn trust, over time. Finally, let's hope that the science will triumph over partisan politics, rhetoric, campaign contributions and idealistic dogma-drama.