🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <33CF9508.366B@forestmeister.com>,
Joseph Zorzin <redoak@forestmeister.com> wrote:

> Long before there were "environuts", the lumber industry wiped out
> entire forests- first the east coast, then the Appalachian mountains,
> the midwest, etc., etc., etc. and the industry didn't give 2 shits for
> you and any other loggers and other forestry workers. Are you so naive
> as to think the industry cares for you? And after whole sections of the
> country were wasted, the industry picked up and moved on leaving many
> thousands without jobs and a wasted environment- erosion, damaged
> watersheds, etc.

It's hard to blame this on a "lumber industry" per se.  The objective
of the first settlers was farmland, and they often just cut down trees
and burned them to clear cropland.  

In some cases, like much of New England, the land was too poor to be 
worth farming and was abandoned later.  Clearing it in the first place 
was a foolish thing to do.  In other cases, like the Ohio River Valley,
the land is worth much more as farmland even though it was historically
forested.  The main cause of deforestation in the USA has been agriculture,
and anybody who eats bears at least some responsibility for that.

The extinction of the passenger pigeon sent a shock through the national
consciousness.  Unrestrained habitat destruction combined with unrestrained 
hunting led to a rapid collapse of the population.  They went from flights
that darkened the sky to extinction in only a couple decades.  This gave
a great boost to Theodore Roosevelt's efforts to establish a national park
system, and brought conservation into the mainstream of American politics.
(Yes, I know the last passenger pigeon outlived Roosevelt.  However, the 
wild flights were completely wiped out.)

The development of a more or less unified  "lumber industry" has been 
pretty much a 20th century phenomenon.  Generally they have done a pretty
good job of managing their own timber holdings, while doing the absolute
minimum required by law.  It's easy to point to the destruction of the
1930's or 1950's, but the fact is that laws have changed and it just doesn't
happen any more.  

I live not far from Zane Grey's favorite fishing camp.  By the 1940's, 
fish were extinct in that whole stretch of the North Umpqua.  Now, that 
fishing camp has been converted to the Steamboat Inn, the whole stretch 
of the river has been limited to artificial fly fishing, and it's as 
close to fly fishing heaven as exists in this country.

Watersheds can recover, and forest ecologies are amazingly resilient.
 
> Very few "environuts" say there should never be any logging, so that
> idiotic implication you should flush down your toilet. Most "environuts"
> just want to see land management done correctly on a sustained yield
> basis. The old term "cut and run" existed long before the environuts.
> Exactly how we will manage lands "correctly" of course is debatable- and
> both sides have their extremists.

There are a surprising number of "zero cut" activists on the Left Coast,
thought they are still a minority.  There are enough of them that they
won a public vote and converted the Sierra Club to an officially "zero
cut" organization.  There is some doubt that this constitutes the view
of the members, since only 14% of the membership bothered to vote in
the election.  

The Sierra Club is a very politically powerful organization.  It's probably
not realistic to dismiss them as a fringe group.
 
> And don't ever forget that the National Forests don't belong to you and
> the timber industry- they belong to the nation. And the citizens of this
> free country have every right to speak up about how the land is managed
> or mismanaged. And they have every right to influence politicians in any
> way they want- whether you like or not. Just like the "gun nuts". Or the
> "relgious nuts".

Most of the voting citizenry never leaves pavement.  They rely on mass media
and what they see out their car windows to form their opinions.  There is
some doubt that is a reasonable way of determining land management policy 
in national forests.  I would probably be wiser to remove the issue 
completely from the political arena, turn management over to foresters and
biologists, and just give the professionals the parameters of how much
wildlife, how much timber and how much scenery we want 50 and 100 years 
from now.

Not that I think that will ever happen.  Too many politicians (on both sides
of the issue) would be unwilling to ever give up that much power. 

-- Larry