🚀 go-pugleaf

>taganov@unixg.ubc.ca (Robert Edgar Froese)

>I believe that the issue is really neither logging or clearcutting, but
>whether man has a right to shape his environment to suit his desires. 

I believe the issue is how society choose to manage public lands,
particularly forest lands:  will they be managed to produce a wide
range of amenities, including commodity production, on a sustainable
basis?  Or will they be used in an extractive mode, so that all amenities
except fiber production are destroyed in the interest of short term 
economic benefits for a few, with even the capacity to produce fiber 
is degraded?

>Logging, and clearcutting as a logging method, is a visually dramatic
>illustration of man doing this shaping.

And like many technologies from the past, it's ugly side effects 
became evident, and more appropriate technologies were developed 
to replace it.

>Many people find logging to be distasteful and ugly.  

I'm a second generation tree farmer.  I have no problem with cutting
down trees and selling them.  But my family, and most of the timberland
owners I know, would *never* clearcut their land.  And we expect the 
goverment to manage public lands in a similar high quality manner.

>This is to a degree
>a recent phenomenon, as logging has taken place on a significant scale in
>B.C. since the last half of the 1800's.  Why is this phenomenon recent?  I
>believe the answer lies in the changing attitudes in society.

Indeed, this seems obvious.  The "frontier" era in North America was a
historical anomaly of the first order:  a rich continent, overrun by an
industrializing culture.  It made perfect sense under those circumstances
for the goverment to do all in its power to encourage resource exploitation
and development.  

Today, those same policies begin to look inappropriate.  Indeed, they 
generate outrage, civil disobedience, political opposition, perhaps even
international boycotts.  Yet there will always be an apologist for 
Business As Usual.  A pleasure to meet you, Robert.

  [ ... Cliched breat-beating about freedom which I generally agree with ...]

>This Province, and this Nation, were built by the people who discovered
>how to mine and refine ores, to produce the metals and build the machines
>that were emplyed by the loggers.  
               ^^^

Indeed, such extractive industries were exemplary in that time and place.
Now the Province faces a choice of maintaining (at considerable public
subsidy) archaic and destructive practices of extractive industry, or
making the commitment to a transition towards a value-added, knowledge
intensive economy.  

We agree that environmental protection is a luxury.  But environmental
degradation is most expensive to reverse.

>Today, ...  we are paying foresters not to produce lumber.  

Er, who is paying who how much not to do what?  Why?
Are we talking about government buying back concessions, or something 
more complex?

Also today, other foresters are still harvesting huge blocks of native forest
in unsustainable ways at unsustainable levels.

>Some day our credit will run out.  

Indeed.

>Forestry cycles are 75-150
>years, and the change from undisturbed to disturbed less obvious.

This length of the rotation is a significant difference.  One aspect is 
the longer period an investment exposed to the discount rate:  if you
choose to start from scratch, your investment gives no return for 75-150
years.  So the economics of investing in a new crop are quite different
in forestry.  Clearcutting not only damages the productive capacity of 
the land, but it requires large amounts of capital exposed to the discount
rate for long periods of time.  Or else is simply deforestry.  Regenerating
clearcut sites can be most difficult, and is relatively expensive even on 
forgiving sites.

>I believe that the scientific arguments surrounding the selective logging
>vs. clearcutting debate receive less attention because of the visibility
>issue.  Minds have slammed shut around the concept that anything on such a
>scale directed by man must be evil and functionally destructive.  

I have a background in science, and try to keep an open mind.  I have a
strong interest in forests, and have traveled a bit, and seen a few 
interesting forests.  IMHO, clearcutting is too destructive a practice 
to be the subject of government subsidy.  I will be happy to share, to my
limited ability, arguments against clearcutting.

>I
>acknowlege that there are many good, strong scientific arguments around
>clearcutting issues that deserve attention, however in general the concept
>is held to be inappropriate mainly because of an emotional reaction. 

Hmm, a bit technocratic here, aren't we?  There are good sources of 
scientific information about the emerging body of evidence indicting 
clearcutting in everything from soil damage to fisheries depletion to
halitosis and foot odor.  (Haha, made up those last two).

But most people don't read even pop science.  They go out and look at 
the moonscape clearcutting leaves, and say, "This is OUR land, and they
did THIS to it?!" and go home furious.  Stumps don't lie.  Clearcutting
is deforestry, a wholesale replacement of complex natural ecosystems with
glorified agriculture.  Is it any surprise the lay public finds it 
objectionable?  They may not know the science, but they know what they like.
Who are you to be objective about their emotional responses to public 
policy?  Or are you arguing that public values should not be an important
factor in public policy?

>Clearcutting really symbolizes the man influencing the environment theme
>because of its scale.  

Clearcutting really symbolizes the destructive slash and burn agriculture
of the ancient Maya, and is indeed a sublimated form of human sacrifice. 8^)

Clearcutting really symbolizes the triumph of the Christians over the 
bloodthirsty druids, and thus is a stern repudiation of human sacrifice. 8^)

Geez, Robert, having a technical discussion will be easier if we can
drop the semiotics.  Humans have influenced, and will continue to influence,
the environment in dramatic and subtle ways, both good and bad.  To wax
poetic about using maximally destructive forestry techniques for symbolic
reasons rather blurs the issue, don't you think?  Myself, I think most
_industries_, at least, are more motivated by economics than symbols.

>If we were to selecively log, it is argued, we
>would be influencing our environment less and this would be better.  The
>issue as to whether clearcutting is a negative influence is passed over.

Who's passing it over?  I have plenty of dirt on clearcutting:  it 
represents an instant, irreversible commitment to a single silvicultural
method that damages the soil, the water, much wildlife, requires expensive 
intervention, and eliminates the recreational and spiritual use of the land.

If we selectively log, we preserve many other forest amenities besides fiber, 
while still producing saw timber.  Are you rejecting the values of non-fiber 
amenities, or the rights of the public to preserve these amenities?

>Hamish Kimmins once said that if foresters didn't do a better job of
>getting their message out the management of forests would be shifted from
>foresters to sociologists or geographers.  

Actually, in the US, we're using more landscape ecologists, fish and 
wildlife biologists, recreation planners, and restoration ecologists
these days.  If forester == timber beast, well, good riddance.  In the
past decade, foresters have done some serious damage to the public lands
in the US, and their prestige and credibility is accordingly compromised.

(Not to knock all foresters, I respect most with whom I have the 
pleasure to be acquainted.) 

If foresters can't manage public lands the way the public requires, then
perhaps the public is better served by geographers managing their forests,
at least the geographers I know would make the attempt to understand them
before destroying them.

>If people don't begin to appreciate their roots, the
>root of the prosperity that they take for granted, and accept the rational
>evaluation of issues rather than the emotional, our credit will run out and
>the fears that people harbor will come to life.

Let me see if I've got it:  "If we stop clearcutting, Terrible Things
will happen."  Hmm, you know, the USDA Forest Service has been threatening
us with Timber Famines for almost 100 years now, and somehow they just never
seem to materialize.  Only a modest percentage of the US lumber supply 
comes from public lands (~11%), yet they contain much of the water supply (esp.
in the West), recreational potential and fish and wildlife habitat.

I maintain that clearcutting is a destructive, inappropriate management 
technique for most public lands.  Would you be so kind as to explain to me 
why this isn't so?

					Cheers,

					Jim Hurst

>	"Clearcutting is not a crime."

Perhaps that should be:

	Clearcutting is not a crime.  In Canada.  Yet.

	Eh?