Good logging and bad


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Posted by David Sherman on Monday, January 16, 2006 at 12:16PM :

In Reply to: Re: Log homes ! posted by daniel on Monday, January 16, 2006 at 3:29AM :

You're right on about Pacific Lumber, Hurwitz, Maxam, etc. You're also right that the loggers knew what that company was doing was wrong.

There's disinformation on both sides, though. It's true that in most areas it only takes 40 years to grow merchantable saw logs. However, that's on a tree plantation that's like a big corn field. The native old-growth forests on the coast, the redwoods in California, and the cedar and fir forests in Washington and Oregon took 1000 years to produce those big trees that we used to see rolling down Hwy 101 on one-log loads. Cutting those trees was like mining, not farming, because nobody is going to wait 100 years, let alone 1000 for another "crop" of old-growth timber. Now that the big trees are gone, except for a few in various "tree museums", we're stuck with plantation-grown 2nd growth unless we import it from Canada where they're still logging coastal cedars that are 8' through.

Inland, where forests naturally burned pretty often, it's a lot different, and a timber plantation doesn't look quite so different from a "natural" forest. Much of the land that burned in the big fire in 1910 and was intensively replanted is only now producing trees big enough to log. An "old" ponderosa pine might be 300 years old, and an "old" lodgepole 50 years.

I too know of people who have kept their family timberland for many generations and managed it to produce a good income without destroying the forest. Unfortunately that kind of management rarely pencils out for the wall-street types who figure in the time value of money and the cost/MBF of different forms of logging and conclude that the way to make the most money is clearcut everything today, have the cash in hand as soon as possible, and then sell the cut-over land based on its potential to grow trees (or subdivisions) and let somebody else deal with it. Burlington-Northern/Plum-Creek did this all over the Cascades in the 1980s, clearcutting Mountain Hemlock at 3000-4000' where even today there's nothing but brush growing back. On the coast, after about three intensive cuttings all the land will grow is alders, blackberries, and scotch broom. It's just like farming -- you have to take care of your land so the land can take care of your plants. The only difference is it takes so long to get a crop that it's very tempting to "cut and git out" rather than taking care of the land and forest so the next generation can continue to get good timber off it.



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