Western Larch, © George Wuerthner
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If tree farms are forests, then sewage
lagoons are lakes Anonymous |
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See also Forests, Oregon and Wilderness. Controversy around forest fire is increasing. Here are some general references: The best scientific advice on how to manage fire in western forests—before they burn, as they burn and after they burn—can be found in Managing Fire-Prone Forests in the Western United States (pdf file), which is downloadable here with the permission of the lead author under the condition that it is used only for limited educational use. Fire Risk in East-Side Forests (pdf file) is an excellent scientific summary from the US Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station. Thinning, Fire and Forest Restoration, by Rick Brown of Defenders of Wildlife addresses the factors to consider in determining the best mix of prescribed fire and small-tree thinning to achieve ecological restoration goals. Reforming the Fire Service: Analysis of Federal Fire Budgets and Incentives by Randal O'Toole of the Thoreau Institute contains a brilliant analysis of bureaucratic behavior and the fire-industrial complex. The Western Fire Ecology Center, a project of American Lands, offers much needed information and perspective in the fire debate. Evan Frost's Collection of Quotes on Fire and Forests Conservation biologist Evan Frost collected a tremendous set of quotations from ecologist, foresters and others, both recent and historic that help put the current controversy about fire risk to forests and restoration of fire into fire-dependent forest ecosystems. Frost was working for Northwest Ecosystem Alliance at the time. Re-Educating Smokey Bear on Merits of Fire Smokey has done his job too well. 98% of Americans can finish this sentence: "Only ...." Livestock major factor in unhealthy forests Yes the exclusion of fire and the intrusion of chainsaws are two major reasons for the decline of the arid forests of the Intermountain West. But the third factor, most often left out of the debate is the grazing of domestic livestock. Money grows faster than trees One can make more putting their money in a passbook savings account than investing in trees. It's Time To De-Road the National Forest System Too many roads have been built and cannot be maintained on the National Forest System. Fund
Federal Forests With Recreation Receipts
As general appropriation dollars dry up, the
Forest Service needs a new source of funding. The
Lesser of Two Evils is a more
recent, and I think more New Mission for the Bureau of Land Management Due to both fraud and flukes, BLM has nearly 3 million acres of federal forestland in western Oregon that more properly belongs in the National Forest System. Natural History of Western Larch Its seedlings prefer scorched earth. A conifer that sheds its needles every year, the western larch has a contrary nature. Each autumn before the needles fall, the trees turns from its iridescent green to the most golden gold. Bottomline on Option 9 analyzes the good, the bad and the ugly of the President's Northwest Forest Plan. Increase Supply to Alleviate Wilderness Shortage The best way to address this shortage is to increase the supply. Maine Woods compares and contrasts the forest situations in Maine and Oregon. Oregon Natural Resources Council is the premier organization working to conserve and restore Oregon's forests. American Lands is the premier organization working to conserve and restore the nation's forests. THE SPOTTED OWL DESERVES A MONUMENT Down in Enterprise, Ala., a monument pays homage to the boll weevil. Arriving from Mexico in 1892, the weevil rapidly destroyed the one-crop economy of the Old South where cotton was king. It forced the region into a more diversified -- and profitable -- livelihood, a fact recognized by the citizens of Enterprise who built the monument in 1919. Within the same span of fewer than 30 years, we may see a monument dedicated to the northern spotted owl in Roseburg, Ore. This is the estimated time that it would take to complete the logging of the old-growth national forests in the Pacific Northwest unless the owl, in its designated role as "indicator species," can save them. Despite this summer's declaration from biologists in a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service report that the spotted owl and the public ecosystem that it benignly represents are in danger of extinction, the ruling may be politically compromised into ineffectiveness. Then the next generation, our immediate children, will have to make the tough choices of what to do when the remaining 10% of the old-growth forests are harvested. And if the owl prevails? Then, like the cotton farmers of a century ago, we will be forced to make these choices ourselves -- and make them in the next few months. That's fair. Ours is the generation that failed to heed the warning about the owl and its ecosystem when it was sounded 15 years ago. Ours is also the generation that reaped record harvests and exported record volumes of raw logs and chips at record prices in the past three years.
I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which we all have.
If a man walks in the woods for the love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off the woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
The greatest wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.
We have incurred the violent hostility of the individuals and corporations seeking by fraud and sometimes by violence, to acquire and monopolize great tracts of the public domain to the exclusion of settlers... As to the forest reserves, their creation has damaged just one class: the managers and owners of the great lumber companies, which by illegal, fraudulent and unfair methods, have desired to get possession of the valuable timber of the public domain, to skin the land, and to abandon it when impoverished well nigh to the point of worthlessness.
The Lord has broken the staff of the
wicked,
The critical question of "standing" would be... put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated before federal agencies and federal courts in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of pubic outrage. Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation. See Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects, 45 S. Cal. L. Rev. 450 (1972). This suit would therefore be more properly labeled as Mineral King v. Morton.... The problem is to make certain that America's beauty have spokesmen before they are destroyed.... The voice of the inanimate object, therefore should not be stilled.
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed—chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much toward getting back anything like the noble primeval forest. During a man's life only saplings can be grown, in the place of the old trees—tens of centuries old—that have been destroyed. IT took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods—trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the might forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time—and long before that—God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot same them from fools—only Uncle Sam can do that.
These temple destroyers, devotees of ravishing commercialism seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the Mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the hearts of man.
Government protection should be thrown around every wild grove and forest on the mountains, as it is around every private orchard, and trees in public parks. To say nothing of their values as fountains of timber, they are worth infinitely more than all the gardens and parks of town.
Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees to make pulp for those bloody newspapers and calling it civilization.
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