Cut taxes, and cut trees!

From the Los Angeles Times: (emphasis added)

Scope of Logging in Sequoia Monument Plan Angers Critics

Last month, the U.S. Forest Service released a proposal for managing the Giant Sequoia National Monument that has flabbergasted environmentalists and revived their quarrel with the agency's stewardship of sequoias, which can live for millennia and reach skyscraper heights.    Though the monument designation bans commercial logging, the management blueprint would allow, in the name of reduced fire risk, the cutting of enough commercial timber to fill 3,000 logging trucks a year. ...

The argument that you must cut down a lot of trees to reduce forest fire danger is one that the Bush administration is using throughout the West as it moves to reverse Clinton-era policies. ...

Of about 38,000 acres of giant sequoia groves scattered through the Sierra Nevada, roughly two-thirds lie in the monument. Most of the rest are just to the north, in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.    Logging is banned in the parks, which have for decades successfully used controlled burning to rid groves of flammable undergrowth and to encourage regeneration of sequoias. The giant trees need bursts of heat from fire to open their cones and release showers of seeds, as well as sunny openings to foster sapling growth. ...

More than a century of suppressing wildfire on public land has allowed the buildup of dense growth in forests all over the West, but it has been particularly problematic for fire-dependent sequoias. ...

Environmentalists say they are not against any thinning, but that chopping down fire-resistant big trees is about logging, not forest health. ...

Now we are aware of the technical issues here (e.g. small vs. big fires), but the fact remains that Sequoias are unique in that they depend on fire more than other species. Not only do the seeds depend on fire, but the bark of mature Sequoias is what's allowed them to survive - up to 3,000 years - when other trees have burned down. The real risk to Sequoias is lightning, not fire. And anyway, logging the Sequoias completely defeats the goal of protecting them.



posted by Quiddity at 1/31/2003 07:09:00 AM