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Originally Posted by lookout123
and if we have no thinning like the policies have required in recent years, states like arizona will continue to lose hundreds of thousands of acres each year to uncontrollable wild fires. walking through the forests in arizona it is easy to see why the state loses more and more forest each year - dead trees lie where they fall, areas with dieing trees choke out the new growth underneath waiting for the next lightening strike or whatever the catalyst may be this time. when it starts, it is difficult to stop.
i don't support unregulated stripping of the timberland but the idea that we are helping the environment by keeping a hands off policy is mistaken.
i couldn't speak to CO's condition, but in arizona, which is extremely arid (but it's a dry heat  ) the problem is that there is too much fuel for a fire. once it starts, there is little chance of stopping or diverting it. |
Actually, the problem is far more about fire management than it is about timber sales. The logging companies are not interested in those dead, fallen trees (timber slash). The ones on the ground are usually in no condition to use for commercial lumber. What has happened under current fire suppression techniques is that slash has been allowed to accumulate far beyond whatever it would in a forest that was not being subjected to fire management. The policy of putting out every possible fire has had the effect of allowing too much dead fuel to accumulate, and when it finally catches fire, it catches good. That why the FS has started doing controlled burns throughout the West.
The FS has anything but a no thinning policy. It has banned the wide spread clear cutting of stands of timber in the West, but it still does what is called Timber Stand Improvement. Crews of forestry techs spend the better part of 7 or 8 months each year (they stop when the snow flies) cruising and marking forests for selective logging.
Arizona was once largely natural grass land, btw. It has become desertified by over grazing and over logging. A study of the climatological data over the past 100 years bears this out. 100 years ago Arizona was both slightly cooler and slightly wetter than it is now. Arizona's forests should NEVER have been subjected to either commercial timber sales or artificial fire suppression. The result is what you see today.