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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neeka who wrote (76009)	10/9/2004 4:04:35 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793800

The following is my own opinion and doesn't reflect the views of my former employer. I go back to objectives--those of the land owners. Forests that are choked with undergrowth and old debris hold a tremendous amount of stored energy that the trees accumulated from the sun. If all that energy is released at once, as seems more and more likely these days, the consequences to nearby communities can be disasterous. We've seen what can happen in the last five years when many people got burned out of their homes. I've seen some very well-done management of such stands along the freeway over in Montana. A spark thrown from a vehicle, cigarette, whatever, would have a tough time turning itself into a project wildfire. If the objective is forestalling a wildfire overlap into inhabited area, the important thing is to clear out ground fuels, and secondarily but just as important, what we call ladder fuels--dead limbs and debris that carry a fire from the ground into the crowns. Thirdly, increasing the spacing between remaining trees surrounding inhabited areas. All of this can be done while offsetting costs by the value of timber that is removed. In my neighborhood, people are doing this all the time. My own place has been done. What we call underburning--prescribed fire to reduce fuels in natural stands is sometimes possible, but it's difficult to do and has significant risks. When I lived up at Ripplebrook in Oregon, the compound was surrounded by classic old-growth Douglas-fir forests. We deliberately harvested some of that under the ethic that "If we can't stand having a clearcut next to our living area ourselves, how can we expect people to accept clearcuts 40 miles out in the woods." Well, now those "clearcuts" are new stands of fast-growing trees. They're much easier to manage from the standpoint of fuels management and hazards to housing. Government agencies have management guidelines that stem from their original founding charters and also from current public and political input as well as evolving scientific principles. The originating charter of the Forest Service was to achieve "The greatest good for the greatest number of people over the long term." The BLM's charter was directed more at disposing of excess public lands. Along the way, the two agencies started doing more forest management, and for a long time they brought way more money into the treasury than they took out. The environmental movement changed all that by requiring measures that cost more sometimes without adding true value. Now harvest on public lands frequently costs more than it returns, so we are back to the objectives of protecting inhabited areas. State agencies in the west (like the DNR) often got their start by managing sections 16 and 32 out of every township, which were ceded to them from federal lands. The charter for those lands was often that the proceeds from them be dedicated to public schools. As the agencies acquired land from other sources, their objectives followed suit. It is a fact that pressure groups like the Sierra Club influence public land management agencies. Often their principal mode is to file lawsuits against perfectly legitimate programs and projects that are exactly in pursuit of the management objectives the agencies are working under. This raises the cost and skews future decisions towards defensive management rather than good management. I have no respect for organizations that constantly file lawsuits against legitimate programs that are in accordance with long-established principles of forest management. The Sierra Club is one of this type. Many of its members are lawyers and do what they do best to the detriment of everyone else. PETA is another. It is even worse, and its behavior doesn't distinguish itself from that of terrorists. Organizations like The Nature Conservancy and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation achieve their objectives in an honorable way by putting their money where their mouth is. If they want to influence policy, they acquire land and set up the policies for management either by themselves, or by the government agency that they transfer the land to. I know of several very fine instances where they did this. One of them is a short walk from my place on Flathead Lake where the Nature Conservancy acquired critical wildlife habitat and is managing it for waterfowl, deer, and other wildlife. Tribal lands are also well-managed for timber right in the midst of private recreational property like my own. In my opinion, if the Nature Conservancy and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation were the only two environmental organizations in the United States, our environment would be a lot better and our management would be better. The taxpayers would be better off, and the environment would be better off. Trial lawyers would be underemployed, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. People must understand that forestry is an enterprise that takes decades, generations and even centuries to play out. I and responsible people in my profession think in those long-term units. We know that forestry isn't something that you can start and stop or manipulate like Alan Greenspan does the federal reserve discount rate. It takes long-term commitment--commitment that must persist through several lifetimes before it comes to fruition. That's forestry at its best. We're not doing it now. Many representatives of forest industry must share part of the blame for the sorry degradation of our forest policies over the last 40 ears or so. They took untenable short-sighted positions that ultimately resulted in their own downfall. I distinctly remember one such person declaring that we could manage for timber in completely unsuitable lands if we were willing to dedicate the resources to it. Throw enough money, so to speak, and you can grow timber on the moon. An exaggeration, yes. But you get my drift. Again, these thoughts are my own opinion.