This is an excellent article on the historical background of forestry, forest management, and wildfires published by the The CALIFORNIA GLOBE
Some things in life are hard to understand and explain. The theory of relativity, for example, or the origins of black holes. Other things are easy to grasp, however.
Such as: California’s wildfire woes. In the past five years summer and fall firestorms have killed dozens of people, wiped out homes, businesses and entire communities, torched millions of acres of forestlands, caused billions in property losses, and swept away untold numbers of animals and wildlife.
The cause of all this wreckage is easy to pinpoint. It’s simple as two words: spotted owl.
In the 1980s California was a superstar timber producer. Nearly 150 sawmills churned out four billion board feet of lumber every year, leading the nation. Working-stiff loggers had money in their pockets, their families thrived, and little lumber towns tucked away in the north woods boomed.
Enter the spotted owl. A night-flying denizen of the deep woods, the owl became a cause célèbre for people who had never seen one and never would. When the government moved to protect it as a threatened species, it ushered in an ugly slugfest pitting environmentalists, California state officials and the U.S. Forest Service against loggers and the timber industry.
The fight was over protecting the owl’s habitat. After lawsuits, protests and even violence, the environmentalists won.
https://californiaglobe.com/articles/two-words-explain-californias-wildfire-woes-spotted-owl/
Kevin Nelson has put together a report that is both comprehensive and succinct. Well done.
It is an article well worth reading and ends with a description of how California has painted itself into a nasty corner and may have little hope of exiting it.
Additionally, the knowledge base is almost extinct. Fewer people know how to do the things that generations of logging families once took for granted, and those who still retain these skills are often old-timers whose time is running out.
The irony here is that environmentalists, the state and the USFS are now in need of the very industry they have vilified and fought for so long. According to Dan Porter of the Nature Conservancy, the critical lack of timber industry infrastructure and know-how is “one of the biggest barriers to scaling ecological forest management.”
So let me be sure I have this right:
You identify a “problem” and then destroy a way of life as a means of solving that perceived problem. But then your “solution” creates an even bigger mess, one that causes you to go back to the very people whose communities and livelihoods you trashed, asking them to help you with your latest bright idea. But these small town Americans have themselves become an endangered species.
Meanwhile, has anyone seen a spotted owl lately?
UPDATE: This graph I prepared last year from USFS data says it all -Anthony
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These people belong in the booby hatch.
Mature conifer forests are majestic, but there is very little bird or animal life in them. Contrast that with an area logged or burned where butterflies to deer feed on the new growth – until the canopy closes over and they all leave for somewhere where there is new growth.
False. More ecobabble. I have walked, cruised, measured, recorded thousands of acres of “mature conifer forests” (a non-specific term of babble), and I can assure you they are full of wildlife.
Not completely. It has been shown that big game numbers decreased in National Forest lands once the logging bans went into effect. The animals did not have the feed required to sustain their large herd numbers. In Washington for example, some of the best elk hunting regions are on the Southwest Coast. This is one of the few places where logging was not adversely affected because it was private lands and they were able to gain the rights to continue clear cutting. So, logging continued and elk and deer numbers stayed stable or grew. We lived in Vancouver and would hunt the Gifford Pinchot National Forest up around Swift Reservoir, Mt St Helens east to Mt Adams and all locations south to the Columbia River quite often along with camping trips, hikes and fishing. Occasionally, we would go up towards the Goat Rocks Wilderness and areas south of the Cowlitz River. The best hunts were always on or near clear cuts and near younger forests or clear cuts adjacent to second growth forests. The areas from Yacolt up to the west of Mt St Helens were Weyerhaeuser forest lands and they were also very productive. The thick forests looked nice but very little large wildlife was present. Usually, the forest floor was a matted mess of moss and other inedible plants that could not sustain large herds of elk and even deer. So, there is absolutely truth to the idea that clear cuts supported larger numbers of wildlife, especially large game but also ground squirrels and rabbits and mice. Prey for birds like the spotted owl.
As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
I remember the hype about the need to shut down logging because the Northern Spotted Owl needed old growth forest to propagate.
I also remember, when Rush Limbaugh had his TV show, seeing video of Northern Spotted Owls building a nest in a broken K-Mart sign.
(Must have been an old K-Mart.)
Yes, El Rushbo also had a bit about Spotted Owl Helper. (Like Hamburger Helper)
It has always been obvious that the watermelon environmentalists didn’t give a rat’s tail about Spotted Owls. They just needed an excuse to destroy the logging industry.
If only these people could have settled for a weekly beer at Hooters…..
So owls are responsible for the drought conditions California farmers are struggling with?
Spot on! Finally someone speaking the truth. You can add Washington and Oregon to that list as well.