Quote:
Originally Posted by karfar
Going to waste? How about, it's a FOREST!!!!! It's meant to be part of an ecosystem, do you know what that means? Would you prefer to have this country become a concrete nation? And there is such a thing as "selective cutting", have you heard of that? Also, "controlled burning", have you heard of that? I think you've been brainwashed by Bush w/his little ditties about why all the wildfires are started...that's his attempt at environmentalism which is really a cloak & dagger routine to push for more logging.
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Being I'm one of those tree hugging conservationist types who also happens to live in some of the most rural and heavily forested regions of the Eastern United States, I do know a thing or two about forest management and land stewardship.
Many people often suggest select cutting as environmentally friendly manner of logging, but that is not always the case. One of the most important parts of any ecosystem is the soil and the soil mycelial to which all other plants and trees depend upon to survive. When you select cut, you are required to return to the same area of forest more often and usually over the same skidder roads and trails with very heavy equipment (skidders), there by disturbing and even destroying the surface layer of soil. Since you are select cutting, you do not open up the canopy of trees to much sunlight and few new young plants appear due to shade. However, when you clear cut a given tract of land, you open up the canopy to all the sunlight it will ever see and in doing so, fast growing weeds, grasses, and green stemmed shrubbery will take root and grow at a phenomenal rate due to lack of competition for soil nutrients and abundance of sunlight. The soil is then better retained by the fine network of root systems
Those clear cut tracts which quickly develop into grassy and weedy tract full of soft stemmed new grow. These weeds and grasses often offer soft mast foods for forest herbivores such as deer, rabbit and squirrels as well as a variety of foul and cover for them to breed. As the forest begins to regrow, the dynamic changes and hard wood soft mast trees such as persimmon and paw paw will grow and eventually as it further matures it will begin to have hard mast trees such as oak, hickory, and walnut which obviously bare their fruit later in the season.
I have no doubts that there are unethical logging companies and people who practice poor land stewardship, but it is in the logging companies best interest to preserve the soil in order to ensure rapid regrow for future harvest.
Unless people wish to dig dirt and live in holes or mud dobbed houses or steel structures, then you are going to have to cut a few trees down. Look around the average home and then think of what wouldn't be there if you didn't use wood. Are you sitting in the dirt yet? You could call and complain but the copper in the telephone wire had to be mined, but I suppose smoke signals work.
There is a reason forest management is a science and in my opinion an art. It can be done right or wrong, but to say it shouldn't be done at all, really?
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