I completely agree with this. Question..why aren't those giant firs that were scorched a few seasons ago around places like Bend harvested? Seems to me it'd be a wasted of material to leave it all standing like they do
I agree, the forest should burn occasionally, and agree with most of what you said. However, I strongly disagree with your conclusion because you totally ignore the conditions that have developed over the last 25 years, and ignore the serious need for thinning. History teaches us that the Native American Indians managed the forests for thousands of years. Every couple of years they would set fire to the forests and clearings to burn the undergrowth, for several reasons. First you mentioned tree crown fires, which are the most destructive type of forest fires. Keeping the undergrowth low reduced the chance for crown fires. The problem we have today is. 25 years ago, all types of forest management stopped, not just logging and thinning. The special interest groups also file legal papers against setting fires used to thin undergrowth. The Native American Indians also set regular fires because it promoted new growth at a height beneficial to the animals. Today, most new growth the animals prefer for food is too high for them to reach. Unless they evolve into giraffe type animals, they must move to more open locations that promote shorter undergrowth, such as clear cuts and along roadways. As far as the weather conditions, they cycle. I agree the conditions this season are horrible. The weather conditions this year have been very similar to those that caused the great fire of 1910. However, in 1910 they did not have bulldozers, satellite images of the fires to know where and how big the fires where, air fighting resources, or even roads to get to most of the fires. The fire of 1910 was fought from pack mule trains. Yet they put that fire out. We can not stop our fires with all of our high tech new equipment because of the huge amount of fuel that has accumulated over the last 25 years due to lack of forest management. I respect your information, don’t understand your need to try to belittle, unless it has to do with your guilt of posting a faulty conclusion.
You're thinking about the Willamette Valley proper where soft woods were burned and hardwoods took their place. This never happened in the high cascades. In the near term you can expect to see an uptick in the number and intensity of fires (particularly during a drought) but over time that will abate. The forest eventually a steady-state if left alone (after all it did just fine without human help in the previous 10,000 years of the Holocene). This is absolutely not how a healthy forest functions. Look at a fully unmanaged area like a wilderness area; the understory still exists but it's usually a lot more spartan than what you find in a managed/replanted parcel. The trouble with replanting and clearcuts is that you usually end up with either a monoculture of trees or a monoculture of scrubby flora that turns out not be that great as either forage or habitat for most species. There's been an accumulation of understory fuel for generations, not just the last 25 years and it's still there because fires don't burn everything, everywhere and it can take decades for the landscape to reach a normal steady-state when finally left alone. Part of what we're seeing with the increase in the number of very large fires is a cumulative effect of a lot of factors, including decades of harvest mismanagement, overly aggressive fire-fighting tactics and the gradual change from a fir dominated forest to a pinyon forest (in some areas). Guilt? Hardly. If I come across as an overly acerbic asshole that's because I am. Mainly I saw a lot of misinformation being tossed around that I felt needed to be addressed. If you think I was specifically calling out a single individual then all apologies.
Nik, I don't think people are saying the forests need to be logged, just thinned. The fires are so destructive because there is too much fuel for the fires that they're too easy to lose control. Setting fires for the purpose of a controlled burn is fine, but not if the whole place is a tinderbox and can't be controlled. This article confirms this. http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/politics-government/article25912591.html While dry weather and repeated lightning strikes were part of what made the 2014 fire season so severe, the condition of the state’s forests also was to blame, Everett said. “Our first line of defense is the condition of the forests,” Everett said. “Right now, our forests are stressed out.” State officials estimate that about 30 percent of forests in Eastern Washington — about 2.7 million acres — need restoration treatments, such as thinning trees or planting fire- and insect-resistant ones. Government agencies, private landowners and timber companies only complete treatments on about 140,000 acres statewide per year, Everett said. That has left many Washington forests crowded, filled with small trees and wood debris that fuel fires and make them burn hotter. The densely packed trees also are forced to compete for light, water and nutrients, making them more susceptible to insect infestation and fire damage, Everett said. Historically, small fires served to clear some of the trees naturally, but in the past century fire crews have extinguished many of those fires to protect nearby homes and businesses. That has left many forests overgrown and more susceptible to major fires, Everett said. “The problem is we’ve taken fire out of the forest system in the past century,” said Peter Moulton, the state’s bioenergy policy coordinator. “If you’re going to suppress fire, you have to figure out some way to mimic its role in forest health.” That’s where thinning and controlled burning comes in. During thinning, crews will typically remove small saplings and brush while leaving larger trees that are more fire-resistant. A 2012 assessment from Oregon’s Federal Forest Advisory Committee found that every $1 spent on forest treatments such as thinning potentially avoids $1.45 in fire suppression costs.
You'll have to refresh my memory, but it depends. In some cases the fire completely burns out the understory and leaves the big trees alone (this is the norm in a regular fire regime) so those big trees end up being the "seedstock" for the next generation of trees, as well as providing a buffer against erosion and improving slope stability ... so there can be a lot of reasons to leave them behind beyond simple economic concerns. If the the big trees were mostly consumed, then it's not really commercially viable a lot of times (depends heavily on road access, density, terrain, ownership, etc.)
Ok, now you are posting many flat out lies and misinformation on just about every topic. HOWEVER, I now know your agenda. You believe that the forest should not be managed at all. The leave everything natural agenda, and then you hope for successful boom bust cycles. YOUR AGENEA IS NOT WORKING, AND WILL NEVER WORK, WAKE UP!!!! THE PROFESSORS THAT TAUGHT YOU THIS WERE WRONG!!! We manage our own bodies to stay healthy, or do you? We must manage our forests for them to stay healthy. We no longer live in a natural world. WAKE UP!!
My agenda? I completely believe that forests have to be managed in settled areas. So no, you really don't know what I'm talking about and that's clear from your reaction. As for what I was taught in school. I've lived it and worked it, this isn't some hypothetical academic problem to me
Part of the problem with using human intervention to thin is cost. There are far fewer logging operations now than 20-30 years ago and the margins on a selective cut are a lot tighter than a clearcut, so it can be tough to incentivize companies to bother with it - economies of scale are a big reason there are lot fewer small logging companies anymore in the Pacific Northwest. The other problem is the sheer scale in terms of millions of acres that would have to be treated for there to be a meaningful impact. And that assumes you could even come up with a plan that would satisfy the litigious environmental groups. I don't know what the solution is, it's a real problem.
Managed only in settled areas? Now you’re trying to misdirect us from your true agenda. We now call un-managed forest areas dead zones, not wilderness areas. I can show you many very large dead zones created in un-managed forests. Reason for the large dead zones; very few plants can survive in un-managed areas. This also means there is little to no food to eat for the animals and birds, so they leave. What has happened in the un-managed forest/wilderness areas is the crown cover has grown so thick and tall, it does not allow any sunlight to filter to the forest floor. Without sunlight, photosynthesis will not take place for the undergrowth or younger trees, so they die. Your natural wildness area agenda loves the forest to death, literally.
The article says it costs a lot more to let the forests go and deal with the fires than to thin them out and control the fires. Makes sense.
Give the guy a break. He's one of the smartest guys who posts here and he has no "agenda" about any of this.
The Native American Indians used fires to manage the PNW forests, not just in the Willamette valley. And it went on for thousands of years, according to Indian lore. The fires were mainly used to improve habitat to attract game animals. The fires made hunting easier and more productive with less travel. The earliest documentation of thinning fires was in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho. Lewis & Clark reported in their journals of being shocked by their Nez Perce Indian guide intentionally starting a forest fire. From my old memory without checking dates, I believe they were 3-5 days journey from the nearest village, and on the return trip. This fire was started in the same area where Lewis and Clark almost starved to death on their trip west. They went many days without seeing anything to eat. They eat several of their young horses to stay alive. There where very few areas over a 10 day period that had feed for the horses. That large wilderness area in the Bitterroots described in the L&C journals is a classic description of an un-managed dead zone wilderness. Maybe the Indian guide was using the fire to improve the habitat for the game animals and the horses? That is only my guess. Lewis and Clark did not understand why he started the fire, they just reported it. Even history teaches us that un-managed forest wilderness areas turn into dead zones. Why repeat history?
Perhaps, but again I see this as more of a logistics problem than a political one. Low manpower, low political will, no money in it.
If the government is spending $200M fighting the fires, but it would cost $50M a year to keep the undergrowth cleaned out, someone is going to bid for that $50M contract and provide the service. No? The government was doing it all along. Then during the Clinton years, they stopped. And they tried that controlled fire that almost burned down the Los Alamos labs So I don't think it's a new idea.
I'd love to see my country stop spending fortunes on policing the world and funnel it into infrastructure for a change. Forest management is cheaper than having an army on the border of North Korea or military bases in Germany I think, without doing the math. While they're managing the forest they might also bury the power lines and build high speed rails. Maybe a few desalination plants to pump up the water supply
