🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <33D2C4C8.3295@forestmeister.com> Joseph Zorzin <redoak@forestmeister.com> writes:
>Robert Plamondon wrote:
>
>> With tight regulation of private timber, you're putting all your eggs
>> into the government's basket, then putting the basket up for grabs
>> at each election.  This is far too optimistic and complacent a
>> strategy for me.  Diversity, even with a low average level of quality,
>> is much more robust than monolithic control.  It's like the difference
>> between a monoculture forest and old growth:  it's not all of a piece,
>> and catastrophe is far less likely.
>
>I'm not sure if anyone wants tight regulation of all private land. After
>all, Fidel Castro is the last surviving communist. <G> 

Communists are admittedly a quaint relic from a vanishing age, but
control freaks and statists are with us always.  

>Certainly any
>harvesting that will erode the land, pollute the streams, or cause a
>conflagaration (Sp?) should be discouraged. In Massachusetts we have a
>minimum regulation law to prevent these extreme problems.

>The real issue is all the bad silviculture that results from loggers
>convincing landowners that they know what's best for the woods. Most
>land here is still harvested without a professional forester's
>involvement. And few loggers understand the intricacies of silviculture.
>The loggers are trying to make a buck so they harvest whatever will make
>them a good profit. They leave the culls, they leave the low value
>beach, poplar, hemlock, etc. and remove the high value red oak, cherry
>and others- what we call "high grading". The land may not looked raped.
>The job may be neet and clean as a whistle but still be bad forestry.

Maybe I'm just living in paradise and don't know it.  I'm about to
take delivery of my third cord of wonderful, high-grade firewood that
came from cull trees in private stands.  The owners cut the
unprofitable trees (maple, alter, oak, ash, and stunted fir trees) to
open up the canopy for the bread-and-butter tree, Douglas fir.  The
guys around here sure seem to know what they're doing.

But it's all one -- good forestry, bad forestry, only a forester
knows for sure.  When my parents had their campground in Redwood
country, we would occasionally get a tourist who would ask us if the
last redwood tree had been cut down, though they had just spent
hours driving through redwood forests (many of them old-growth
stands with enormous redwoods extending to within inches of the
road), and in fact were in one as they spoke.  Yet these same people,
who were so blind that they could pass within feet of the largest
trees in the world without seeing them, were fervent conservation
activists.  We were amazed.  Our tentative conclusion was that their
brains had been taken over (or possibly eaten) by space aliens.

So when someone proposes that tighter governmental controls over
private timber might be a good idea, I remember that the world
contains a lot of space-alien campers who vote.

	-- Robert
-- 
Robert Plamondon, High-Tech Technical Writing, Inc. 
36475 Norton Creek Road * Blodgett * Oregon * 97326
robert@plamondon.com * (541) 453-5841 * Fax: (541) 453-4139
http://www.pioneer.net/~robertp