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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (38804)	6/26/2007 11:59:15 AM
From: Oral Roberts	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541743

So you and Mary know more about forestry then a life long forester. Interesting.

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (38804)	6/26/2007 12:50:04 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541743

Mary is right on this one! steve No, you are both wrong. The reason is that you don't know what 'sustainable' is. Forestry is a long term enterprise, and the sustainable rate of cutting was always at or above the rate we actually cut, by law. There is a concept called Departure From Non-Declining Even Flow, which means that you cut a little bit faster for a decade or two in order to establish new forests that grow much faster. After a period determined by certain calculations, you then revert to a lower rate of cut in perpetuity, and that rate is higher than if you had NOT departed from even flow. If we had been able to continue harvesting at the rate we were harvesting, we could have INCREASED the yield, and still cut the wood we need forever. The reason for this is that old senescent forests grow at a negative rate, because more trees die or rot than are regrown. New forests grow much faster than old sick ones. Not just a little bit faster. Maybe three or four times as fast as the old forests they replace. I am NOT saying this should be done everywhere it is possible, but there are places in the Northwest where it makes more sense than what is happening now. Industrial forest land also is managed for sustainable yield, although like you I do not necessarily like the way it looks in the short run. These companies are now finding that their land is worth more as vacation properties for people with money for trophy homes, so they are converting it to non-forestry uses AFTER CUTTING OFF THE TIMBER. NOW THERE IS A REAL PROBLEM, AND IF THE PEOPLE MESSING WITH SUSTAINABLE FORESTRY REALIZED THE EFFECTS THEY ARE HAVING, THEY WOULD THINK TWICE ABOUT IT. National Forest harvest rates are set after an extraordinary amount of analysis that adjusted the harvest to account for other non-wood yields, such as wildlife habitat, fisheries, recreation, and the like. Interfering with a long term plan that spans centuries without understanding the consequences has grave effects that we will not see for many years. See, you have to know what the overall objective of the land owners is. It doesn't have to be all timber. Sustained yield applies to all the other forest resources as well. Once you settle on the kind of forest you want, you have to stick with the plan for decades, if not centuries. These tree huggers don't get that part at all. We haven't run out of lumber because we are importing it from Canada, China, and Russia and other places that don't kowtow to hysterical declarations about the last rainforest. I grant you that the greed factor drives management decisions on some large forest land owners. There is a way of dealing with this, and I invite you to investigate it. Put simply, it involves citizens collaborating industrial landowners and government agencies to build the kind of environment that we really want. I know of a place in Montana where this is really happening, although not without a lot of debate. Check this out. Vital Ground, it's called. The people involved are putting THEIR MONEY WHERE THEIR MOUTH IS, not their mouth where other people's money is. vitalground.org forests.org matr.net You might also check this piece out. encyclopedia.com