|   logging at Ninham Mt. | Mary
Oct 11, 2003 1:42 PM | | FYI: New York State is planning on logging Ninham Mt. (Carmel, NY). For any one who has ridden there, has heard about it or who is passionate about keeping riding trails open please get involved. I have just heard about it and don't have all the information (yet) but here is what I know. The DEC is supporting this and there will be many negative effects besides temporarily losing a one of the greatest places to ride and permanently changing the landscape as it is now. Just to name a few..burning, herbisides that may be harmful to our water sources, blasting, cutting down of old trees, endangering wildlife, including the eagle who has recently returned after 30 years, and not to mention the Native Amarican History on the mountain including (as sources have it) a sacred burial ground. I ride at Ninham and would love to get as many people as possible involved in saving this mountain from what will be a money maker for NY State. I will post more info when i get it but you can request a copy of the DEC (sugar coated) report from the Carmel Town Hall at 845- 225-3943 and also contact the Kent COnservation Society to find the date of the public hearing--it is either the 1st of 2nd of december 2003. Thanks!!
Mary Oakes
Trailmasterstouring.com |
| Good for them! | gordon
Oct 12, 2003 1:15 PM | | Good logging is good for the forest and is supported by all who care about the outdoors.
This country needs more logging, not less. |
| Good for them! | BobL
Oct 12, 2003 9:57 PM | | Pretty general statement. And generally ignorant as well.
I care about the outdoors in a big way, yet I generally disdain logging. "Good logging" is a very subjective statement. And "supported by all who care about the outdoors" ???? Really?
So you know how other people think and what they suppport? Man, you must think you're God! |
| I am glad you admit you are ignorant. | gordon
Oct 13, 2003 12:02 PM | | Admitting your problem is the first step.
And if you do not care about the outdoors why are you on this site? |
| I am glad you admit you are ignorant. | sasquatch
Oct 13, 2003 2:51 PM | | Maybe it's time that you confess your own ignorance. It's absolutely ignorant to assume that you know what others think. Many people who care about the outdoors dont support logging, even "good logging" as you state. You are ignorant about the complexities of harvesting wood in our forests. While we're on the discussion, I'd love to hear your definition of "good logging". And where do you come up with the theory that this country needs more logging? From pres Bush (since we all know he is an expert in forest ecology and management)? or from our friends over at Weyerhauser(of course they dont have a vested interest)? While you are just a troll, I had to support Bob L in calling you out as an idiot. Later, Sasquatch |
| Calif. has simply shifted logging abroad | Truth
Oct 14, 2003 8:25 PM | | Report: State has simply shifted logging abroad
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SACRAMENTO - California's efforts to protect its own forest land are spurring more logging in other nations, particularly Canada, to feed construction in the nation's most populous state, according to a new state report.
The 1,400-page draft report by the state Department of Forestry, the "Changing California, Forest and Range 2003 Assessment," is set to be presented to the Board of Forestry at its meeting this week.
"The more we don't produce here, the more it will come from other areas. We're just shuffling our environmental impacts somewhere else," William Stewart, chief of the state's Fire and Resource Assessment Program, told the Sacramento Bee.
The Bee obtained an advance copy of the report, which reflects a continuing theme by the logging industry. Environmental groups have accused state regulators of having a too-cozy relationship with timber companies.
The report also echoes a speech last month by U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth at the World Forestry Congress in Quebec City, in which he worried about "undermining the health of the world's forest ecosystems through consumption patterns that are out of balance with production."
Among the report's findings:
California consumes nearly 15 percent of all of the wood and paper used in the United States, the most of any state.
California's lumber production is at its lowest level in 20 years, while its timber harvests have fallen 60 percent since 1988. Nationally, logging on federal lands has fallen to its lowest level in half a century.
The state imports about 75 percent of its wood and paper products from Oregon, the U.S. Southeast, Canada and Europe.
The downturn means fewer jobs in counties such as Siskiyou and Del Norte, where a quarter of residents' income is from public assistance. |
| Newsweek - Hotshot firefighter calls for thinning | Truth
Oct 14, 2003 8:29 PM | | By Samuel Sheridan
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue This summer marked my second season as a wildland firefighter, and my first as a Hotshot, a member of a 20-person crew flown in to fight especially difficult fires anywhere in the United States. So I'm a relatively inexperienced grunt, not a scientist. But as this year's fire seasonwhich usually begins in April in the Southwest and wraps up in November in the Northwest and Californianears its end, the need for changes in the way our nation's forests are managed has become apparent to those of us on the front lines.
ON THE GROUND, we're sure of one thing: wildfires are getting more explosive and less predictable. The last 100 years of successful containment of natural forest fires (by the Forest Service and its growing army of foot soldiers, bulldozers, helicopters and planes) has allowed an accumulation of brush and young, tightly packed trees that have turned our forests into time bombs. Now they burn too hot, and instead of just scarring the big trees a fire consumes them. I've walked through countless areas where the fire has "nuked black," leaving only limbless, charred poles for trees, and ash six inches deep. This is "bad fire," so hot that 300- to 600-year-old trees and even veteran firefighters do not always survive them. This summer Rick Lupe, a good, competent fire supervisor with more than 20 years of experience, died when a routine procedure of intentionally burning brush and undergrowth (a "prescribed burn") turned into an unpredictable bad fire. Lupe died in the face of fire behavior and fire models that we've never dealt with before.
Earlier this season, I was dispatched with my crew to fight the Divide fire, deep in New Mexico's Gila National Forest. To contain the blaze, which started with a lightning strike and had burned 5,000 acres, we literally fought fire with fire. This meant setting smaller fires to burn up all the grass, pine needles and shrubsthe "ground fuels"inside the boundaries of a shallow trench we dug around the main fire. I carried the drip torch, a watering-can-like device that releases a thin stream of fuel past a flaming wick used to light the ground fuels. Once we safely burned the ground fuels, the main fire died when it reached the fire line. Watching two-foot incandescent flames of the burn crackle up the hillside in the deepening gloom of twilight, my supervisor, Dewey Rebbe, turned to me, his face illuminated by the rosy glow, and said with satisfaction, "That's good fire there."
We need to bring "good fire" back. Fire was a natural part of the landscape for millions of years, with widespread, less intense forest fires preventing much hotter ones later. A thousand years ago a ponderosa-pine forest would have looked stately and parklike, with a density of about 40 trees per acre. Natural wildfires would wash through every two to three years, consuming the understory but only scarring the mature trees. Now vast tracts of our forestsones where man has kept fire outare packed with more than 1,000 trees per acre. The lack of natural fire has left our forests loaded for bad fire.
It is obvious we have to start thinning our forestssome foresters and scientists predict that 30 million to 40 million acres need to be thinnedbut the question is how. The issue is contentious and pits the environmentalists, who want the forests left alone, against the timber companies, which want unrestricted logging access. Neither side's answer is satisfactory. Some logging has to be done, but the kind of logging that prevents firescutting down small trees and underbrush, while leaving the strong, healthy trees that can withstand a fireis not commercial. Logging companies, unfortunately, can't make much more than particle board from this small stuff, and the labor is intense. A compromise is in order:
environmentalists must accept that letting loggers have some of the good trees is necessary to save the forests, and the timber companies need to be more concerned with the long-term picture, especially when they have contracts to log on public land.
The good news is that once areas have been thinned, it's relatively easy for them to be burned safely every few years to prevent future bad fires. What is needed of the president, Congress, the logging companies, the environmentalist groups and the public is farsightedness (something the inheritors of Manifest Destiny have never been famous for). We need to look at the forests and think about them 100 years from now, 200 years from nowand maybe more. What's needed are healthy forests in as near a natural state as we can get. One that includes fire.
Sheridan is currently with the Gila Hotshots in New Mexico. |
| Good for them! | Truth
Oct 14, 2003 8:44 PM | | BobL,
Shall I call you "I Am." |
| Good for them! | BobL
Oct 15, 2003 8:42 PM | | Call me whatever you'd like.
And what shall I call you? By the selective article copy and paste, I'd guess Chris Vargas ?
How come the name change from 2dirtwheels? |
| Northwest Forest Plan faulted by one of its authors | Truth
Oct 14, 2003 8:31 PM | | Northwest Forest Plan faulted by one of its authors
By Jeff Barnard
The Associated Press
REDDING, Calif. The man who helped write the Northwest Forest Plan says it is not working.
After a week of reviewing the on-the-ground reality of the plan intended to balance logging on Northwest national forests against the northern spotted owl and salmon, former U.S. Forest Service chief Jack Ward Thomas said it is failing to fulfill its promises to people as well as the environment.
The plan has been overcome by lawsuits and political and economic pressures to the point that a timber harvest that was supposed to continue at a reduced but reliable level has degenerated to thinning and salvage operations that cannot keep up with the need to protect forests from catastrophic wildfire, Thomas said.
"The promises of the Northwest Forest Plan to the people of the communities has taken a back seat to the precautionary principle," Thomas said. "We've been so careful to do no harm that we've overlooked the promises to the people.
"My mantra (while serving as chief of the Forest Service) was to tell the truth, obey the law and take care of the land," Thomas added. "I've got real terrible concern whether we are taking care of the land."
As a wildlife biologist for the Forest Service, Thomas helped write the court-ordered protections for old-growth forests and wildlife that become the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994. President Clinton named him chief of the Forest Service in 1993. He served through 1996 and is now a professor of conservation at the University of Montana.
Thomas was called in by Jack Blackwell, Pacific Southwest regional forester, as a consultant to a team reviewing the plan's performance on four national forests in Northern California the Klamath, Six Rivers, Shasta-Trinity and Mendocino which make up a third of the area covered by the forest plan.
In the first eight years under the plan, the California forests produced 775 million board feet of timber, compared with 1.3 billion board feet promised under the plan, Blackwell said.
The review found that thinning projects to promote old-growth-forest characteristics in younger stands inside late successional reserves areas off-limits to commercial logging to provide habitat for species like the spotted owl have not been carried out, leaving them vulnerable to fire, Blackwell said. Only 3 percent of the 546,600 acres proposed for thinning have been done.
Thomas leveled particular blame on the policy known as Survey and Manage, which requires surveys for 304 sensitive species of plants and animals before logging can take place.
Thomas said the surveys put too fine a screen on evaluations of logging projects, and suggested the policy be reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences.
The surveys drive up the cost of forest management by $36 to $115 per acre, and seriously slow the timetable for being able to turn out timber-harvest projects, Blackwell said.
The Forest Service is currently working on an environmental-impact statement to loosen the requirements under Survey and Manage.
The review team's suggestions include ways to speed up thinning projects to reduce wildfire danger in forests close to rural communities, an area known as the Wildland Urban Interface, or WUI.
One suggests amending individual forest-management plans to exempt wildfire thinning projects inside the WUI from Survey and Manage requirements before offering logging projects. Another would speed up consultations over impacts to endangered species inside WUIs by lumping individual projects into broad programs.
At Thomas' suggestion, the review team also called for increasing Forest Service flexibility in spending its budget, which is now strictly controlled by law. Linda Goodman, Northwest Regional forester, said national forests in Oregon and Washington have faced the same problems, and she looks forward to changes in Survey and Manage.
Andy Stahl, executive director of the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, was skeptical about the need for change.
"If the Forest Service just obeyed the law and followed the plan, all its troubles would be over," he said. "It was a decade of lawbreaking that led to the Northwest Forest Plan."
Chris West, vice president of the American Forest Resources Council, a timber-industry group, said the changes have been sought by the industry for a decade.
"At least now we have an administration committed to meeting these changes and once and for all implementing the plan as envisioned," he said |
| Mountain Residents Brace for Wildfires | Truth
Oct 14, 2003 8:36 PM | | Mountain Residents Brace for Wildfires
By CHELSEA J. CARTER
Associated Press Writer
LAKE ARROWHEAD, Calif. (AP)--The summer stillness in Southern California's mountain resorts is being broken this year by the roar of chain saws, the crash of falling trees and the warnings of extreme fire danger.
``I have been telling everybody to take everything that's valuable and take it down the mountain and store it,'' said Jaina Ko, 36, who has begun packing items ranging from tax papers to pictures to take from her Lake Arrowhead home to the safety of the city below the San Bernardino Mountains.
Ko and other residents of towns in the San Bernardino National Forest northeast of Los Angeles began taking such steps after fire experts warned of the potential for catastrophic fires because of the numbers of trees killed by drought and a bark beetle infestation.
The threat is so severe that Lake Arrowhead officials have been holding informational meetings with residents and business owners, and the Mountain Area Safety Task Force, a coalition of fire, law enforcement and local and state officials, has been put in place.
Lake Arrowhead, sitting more than 5,000 feet up the mountain range, has about 14,000 permanent residents and another 14,000 part-time residents. Thousands more people live to the east around Big Bear Lake and elsewhere in the San Bernardino forest.
Campground fires have been banned and tree removal services are working at a record pace to clear out dead trees near homes. Don Kniss, a manager for Great Scott Tree Removal Services Inc., used to get about 150 calls a month and now is getting more than 400, he said.
The U.S. Forest Service has given the state about $3 million to remove and replace trees killed by the drought-aggravated beetle infestation and has brought in firefighting crews from out of state to the San Bernardino.
``The problem is not being exaggerated,'' said Tracey Martinez, spokeswoman for the Mountain Area Safety Task Force. ``We are very concerned about the fire danger up on the mountain. We are doing everything we can in the event there is a large, catastrophic fire.''
For now, there is little opposition to thinning trees within the San Bernardino forest. Both the Forest Service and timber industry are pressing to continue thinning the forest in future years, even when rains are abundant and the beetle threat abates.
For most residents, the only way out of the forest is along narrow mountain roads threaded through towering trees. Forest Service supervisors said their biggest concern is evacuation in case of a major wildfire.
Business owners, meanwhile, were coping with fallout from news reports of the danger.
``Yes, a fire could destroy 150 homes. But just the threat could put 150 home owners into bankruptcy,'' said Lewis Murray, executive director of the Lake Arrowhead Chamber of Commerce.
Murray said local real estate agents have begun to experience ``a small crunch'' and the retail and lodging industry were ``a little soft.'' But he also acknowledged it was unclear how much of the falloff had to do with the fire danger or the state of the economy.
``Everybody wants to talk about the fire danger. Nobody has been talking about how we are more prepared now than we ever have been for it,'' he said.
Jeff Gruett, a tree service owner who lives in the Orange County suburb of Tustin and also has a home in Lake Arrowhead, said he came up to the lake seven months ago to do one clearing job and hasn't left because of demand.
``It was like being an ice cream man on a hot summer day. They just came swarming,'' he said. |
| Forester takes holistic view of woods. | Truth
Oct 14, 2003 8:41 PM | | Forester takes holistic view of woods
By Mark Grossi
FRESNO BEE
SHAVER LAKE - John Mount needs spotted owls, flying squirrels and some really creepy fungus to build a better forest.
Mount's job as a professional forester is to make a profit each year from a private forest around Shaver Lake and Dinkey Creek. He cuts down trees and sells them.
But, strolling through a mountain meadow at about 5,300 feet, he praises a log that might rot for 200 years and make uncounted generations of bugs happy. Rotting logs and bugs. Why does he care?
"If you lose part of the food web, you're not going to have a healthy forest," said Mount, 64. "People talk about saving the spotted owl's bedroom -- nesting sites in trees. You need to save the kitchen, too. The spotted owl eats flying squirrels."
This is one holistic forester. He believes his approach will make more trees available to harvest now and in the future.
Mount's 20,000-acre forest, which belongs to Southern California Edison Co., produced enough lumber last year to build more than 450 houses. That's as much as some million-acre federal forests, which have drastically reduced timber harvests in the past decade to protect sensitive species.
But over the past 24 years, Mount's work has paid more than timber dividends. He has made Shaver Lake, east of Fresno, safer from catastrophic fire.
With logging and small, intentional burns, Mount routinely thins out overgrowth, a major villain in immense forest fires.
As fire season dawns again this month in California, such overgrowth in the Sierra Nevada creates seasonal anxiety for public officials, mountain residents and firefighting agencies across millions of acres.
Overgrowth last year helped fuel the 150,000-acre McNally fire in Sequoia National Forest -- the biggest fire in memory there. It torched a vacant resort, forced surrounding residents to flee and burned seven nests belonging to spotted owls, which have been considered for Endangered Species Act protection.
Such a fire would threaten any wooded mountain area, including Edison's forest. But Mount believes his work might slow down such a fire and could help save developments around Shaver.\
"He's certainly keeping the fire danger down and helping the ecosystem," said Chuck Peck, executive director of the Sierra Foothill Conservancy. "The forest around there reflects more of the historic condition of the Sierra."
The historic forests were more wide open. For thousands of years, lightning fires reduced thick vegetation in this 400-mile-long range. The first European settlers in the 1800s found open, parklike forests, and they easily drove their wagons through the trees.
But by the early 1900s, public agencies began snuffing fires as quickly as they spotted them. Without the natural cycle of fires, low-growing vegetation grew, and smaller trees crowded together in open spaces.
Decades later, the forests are loaded with overgrown areas, ripe for wildfire. Clearing out the forest would now take years under any circumstances, but federal officials face an emotional debate between logging companies and environmentalists.
Environmentalists fear logging companies will take too many large trees and harm the forest ecosystem. Timber industry officials say environmentalists have gone too far in opposing most logging, thus allowing more growth in the forest.
On the Edison property, Mount said his land management does not simply mean cutting trees. He said he is mimicking nature, selectively preserving tree communities of various ages and sizes.
Edison, which owns and operates a chain of hydroelectric reservoirs that includes Huntington and Shaver lakes, gives Mount the freedom to perform restoration work as well.
Mount walked through one such area, a meadow where a sawmill existed about a century ago. He described how he is nurturing the meadow, raising a small berm in one spot to keep water in the area where grasses and sedges grow.
A large white fir tree stands, withered and brown, at the edge of the meadow. Mount said he allowed the tree to die because dead trees are part of the natural landscape.
"Something like 80 species of wildlife depend on dead trees," he said. "Aside from the obvious woodpeckers, bats and nuthatches there's an army of insects. When trees fall over, different species will use them."
He pointed to a bald eagle in the distance, among ponderosa, incense cedar and sugar pine trees. He said three bald eagles have fledged in one year around the area.
"That's a test of the forest's health," he said. "These large birds need lots of food to fledge more than one offspring."
To Mount, health also means available timber. The reduction of thick underbrush and crowded stands of young trees opens more room for healthy trees to grow larger.
Mount estimated the available timber has increased more than 50 percent in his forest since 1979 when he began logging, intentionally burning certain areas and planting ponderosa pines. He said he wants the timber to more than triple by 2033. |
| Forester takes holistic view of woods. | dave54
Oct 20, 2003 11:14 AM | | SCE has received many awards from environmental groups for their forest management practices. They manage their forest for watershed health and water yield, not timber production. In addition to other values like biodiversity and wildlife habitat, their forest operations actually turns a profit by selling the removed timber.
Despite all the praises the kudos from the environmental industry, when the Forest Service tried to implement similar management practices on adjacent National Forest land they were appealed, litigated, and criticized by the same groups. |
| re: logging at Ninham Mt. | LY
Oct 29, 2003 7:41 AM | | For more info on this subject visit www.planputnam.org get involved! |
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