🚀 go-pugleaf

jokim@jarthur.claremont.edu (John H. Kim) writes:

>In article <2469anINN9vn@gambier.rick.cs.ubc.ca> v5x092@rick.cs.ubc.ca (Sacha Michel Mallais) writes:

>>this rate of logging forever.  We have to stop sometime.  When we
>>reach an equilibrium that balances the number of trees that reach harvest
>>age and the number that are harvested, then we will have sustainable
>>forestry, and _not_ before.

>You have to be careful when thinking about where this equilibrium is.
>Unlike animal populations, where the regenerative quality of the
>population is proportional to the population (few animals produce
...
>Or if you take it to an extreme, whereas it is possible to hunt an
>animal species to extinction, you can cut down all the trees and
>so long as you plant new ones you'll eventually get them all back.
>Not that I recommend cutting everything down.

You miss a couple of points here.  The forests are not only the trees.
Part of the reason why the trees in the temperate rain-forests are so
huge is that the OTHER plants and animals in the area help to make sure
that the soil and nutrients are maintained in an optimal state for the
trees. Slash-and-burn clearcutting, in removing the "competition" of
these plants and creatures also removes their (long term) benefits.

Without those creatures to maintain the ecology, we are simply 
living off the accumulated benefit of millenia of work on their
part.  In time those savings will run out.

Because of the length of time it takes to run a cycle, however,
the cost of this procedure may be unclear until a couple of generations
from now.  By then, if we have eaten all of the old growth, then we
will be unable to recreate the cycles currently in existence.

Part of the value Clayoquot sound is that it is the last area of 
significant size that hasn't been logged to near-extinction.
It has some hope of maintaining that ecology long enough for us to
be able to study how it works, and possibly to regenerate that
beneficial cycle in othere areas which have now been desecrated.

>The closest animal analogy would be a population augmented by a
>wide-scale hatchery program.

>The problem as I see it (logging problems are not limited to British
>Columbia) is that so long as every child of every logger insists on
>being a logger, and so long as every logger has 2+ children, the

It's worse than that.  Part of the reason why logging companies
insist on clearcutting is that it will make mechanization of
the second pass much easier.  This will mean fewer jobs for the
same area of forest cut.  (query: How many board feet/hectare
is being taken out of current second-growth compared to old grwoth?)
-- 
-- 
Stephen Samuel 		(604)822-9248		samuel@cs.ubc.ca
In Biblical times, Lebanon was known for its great cedars.
What Rome did to Lebanon, we are now doing to BC.