Wyoming: Enviros challenge Bridger-Teton NF logging notions
Conservation groups say U.S. Forest Service officials should reconsider their attempts to attract logging interests to ridger-Teton National Forest after three regional forest supervisors wrote a letter courting logging interests late last month. George Wuerthner, ecological projects director for the Foundation for Deep Ecology, said if the three forest supervisors really wanted to improve forest health, they would leave the forest alone.
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“Basically, everything we do in forestry makes the forest more unhealthy, in my view,” he said. “It’s all designed to reduce the amount of biomass.” Wuerthner said about two-thirds of all wildlife species depend on dead trees at some point in their life. Those species include a number of insects, cavity-nesting birds, bald eagles, pine martens, bats and salamanders. “In Wyoming, martens are very vulnerable to cold,” he said. “It finds a pulpy, dead log to burrow into [when temperatures drop to extreme lows]. In areas where there are no dead logs, there are no martens.”
Ants that use dead and down trees not only provide an important food for animals such as grizzly bears and black bears, but also prey on insects that attack trees, Wuerthner said. In streams and rivers, researchers have “found
no upper limit” to the amount of wood that benefits life, Wuerthner
said. “The more wood you have in a stream, the better it is for fish
and aquatic insects,” he said. He said there is also a misconception
that beetle-killed trees contribute to more intense wildfires. While
trees are slightly more flammable during the “red phase” of a beetle
infestation, studies have shown that trees lose that flammability once
needles drop off.
A more important factor for big fires is persistent dry weather, which wipes out living trees and dead trees. Wuerthner also said logging doesn’t work to reduce insect attacks. “The level of thinning that you need to do requires taking between 50 and 80 percent of the trees out,” he said. “And the mortality of beetle-killed trees often doesn’t exceed 50 to 80 percent of trees.” Jonathan Ratner, director of the Wyoming office of the Western Watersheds Project, said the Forest Service is behind when it comes to understanding the effects of logging on forest health. “It is purely about this outdated understanding that the forests are way too dense and we need to cut, which is absolutely wrong,” he said. “What you have out there [after
logging] are these vast monocultures of lodgepole, which are not only
extremely flammable, but they produce almost nothing in terms of
wildlife habitat.”
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I saw many nice lodgepole stands in this forest years ago while researching logging in the interior west. Where it grows slow, tall, and straight, lodgepole is not a “trash” tree.
Underneath the Forest Service’s fire and forest health hoopla are the usual insidious market drivers.
Mills as far away as western Oregon have taken advantage of the ridiculously low bid prices in the interior forests. When purchased cheaply, timber can be hauled by rail or truck hundreds of miles and be profitably processed.
This is particularly true with mature, clear lodgepole as a replacement for ponderosa pine in the logged-out regions of the west. Particularly since modern mills employ high tech saw and peeling operations that allow greater use and return from smaller diameter logs.
Federal logging is about subsidizing these private mills, not sustaining public forests. If federal logging is aimed at sustaining jobs, it’d be more economical and less destructive to retrain timber workers.
–Roy Keene from stumpsdontlie@googlegroups.com
Bridger-Teton National Forest quickly moves to use stimulus money for anti-conservation logging
February 19, 2009 — Ralph Maughan
Traditional logging dwindled on the Bridger-Teton, Caribou-Targhee and Shoshone National Forests because it brought in only pennies on the dollar spent. Stimulus may be used to renew logging at a loss-
The stimulus bill has money for forests, parks, wildlife that can be used in a beneficial or negative way. It appears the supervisors for 3 national forests in the Greater Yellowstone country are quickly moving to use the stimulus money directed to wildfire reduction and forest health to restore traditional logging by means of “salvage” of dead timber. They have asked timber interests for projects. Why haven’t they asked wildlife and conservation groups?
As George Wuerthner points out, stands of dead timber are not particularly flammable. In addition, building new roads into these areas spreads noxious weeds and degrades wildlife habitat. If they wanted to create a lot of jobs, they would hire people to pull the noxious weeds. Because most of the timber mills in the area went out of business long ago, it will be long time before stimulus money will result in new timber mills and trained loggers. Logging is capital intensive nowadays and creates few jobs per dollar spent.
A word to these forest supervisors, use the money to truly improve forest health — eliminate weeds, rehabilitate erosion sources on the national forests, recut overgrown trails, reduce livestock grazing impacts, clean trash out of the forests, improve human degraded stream conditions, repair damaged roads you plan to keep open, close and obliterate vehicle tracks that are degrading the forest. This is the way to create jobs in a hurry and improve rather than harm the environment.
What is taking place here is a warning to those who love the national forests and want jobs to get involved quickly so that the money does not go to old fashioned projects that create few jobs and actually degrade the forests. Contact your local national forest now!
Remember that forests are more than just the trees.
Story in the Jackson Hole News and Guide. Bridger-Teton asks loggers for wishes. Letter links logging industry, local mills with health of national forests. By Cory Hatch, Jackson Hole, Wyo.
peacefromtrees’s last blog post..473 – North American Tree News
the first picture in this article is of an area in the Bridger Wilderness- a place, like all Wilderness areas, which would not see logging under any circumstance short of a Congressional act. It is misleading to imply that any area even near Island Lake would be considered by the BTNF when it looks for potential timber harvest areas.