tek9tim said:
I hear you about the experience vs education issue. I am young, and I do still have a lot to learn. I did grow up in a logging town in SW Washington, and have been running saw since I was 12. I already had a decent base when I started with the Forest Service, and with them, I have cut a lot of different species in all kinds of different situations. When I say something, I say it out of experience, not just because I read it somewhere. If it sounds like it's straight from a book, that's because I teach and certify new sawyers, so I've been through the technicial explanation a time or two.
I pride myself on the fact that I have moved up slowly through the organization, and have gotten my jobs based on experience rather than eduaction, since I don't have any that's relevant.
The Forest Service certainly does have its problems. The people on the inside dislike having to do things the way they're forced to sometimes. Their hands have been tied by environmental lobbyists. The Forest Service still tries to do as much logging as they can, which isn't much, and as a result the loggers hate the Forest Service because they don't allow very much logging, and in the sales that do get through, the guidelines are not what they were in the past. Then the environmentalists are pissed because there's still logging going on.
That's about enough of :deadhorse: .
Not that I want to highjack the thread, but there is a vast difference in management among national Forests and even Ranger Districts within forests.
My take on the Forest Sevice is that there are a lot of good people there who try to do there jobs properly, but they get squeezed by political interference. The news only reports the lawsuits, grandstanding politicians, and forest fires.
Why, for example, are so many below-cost salvage sales proposed in the West, if these do little to reduce fire danger or speed forest recovery, but do pull lands out of potential Wilderness classification and cause shut downs over breaking the law (like the ESA and NFMA)? The public has been clamoring for fire risk reduction near their private property---and the Bushies push a law that allows targetting of back-country logging while skipping over already managed land and public/private fringe areas. Why? Maybe because the hard work of reducing fire danger in a meaningfull way costs more per acre than political pork like helicopter logging old-growth miles away from any development??!
Why don't forest health sales get proposed that focus on employing thousands of workers on the ground, to clear small diameter material, and chip it, burn it, or truck it out for engineered wood products, biomass fuel, or even fermentation to methanol, instead of sales that propose logging large diameter dead and dying trees and leaving the rest?
Maybe the new greener, fiscally more conservative, more job-growth oriented Congess will push the FS in this direction. Maybe they'll provide the proper funding, instead of suspending environmental laws and proposing old-growth logging to pay for "forest health improvement".
It's not so much "enviironmental lobbyists" but the FS itself getting called to account when they lose lawsuits because it isn't following the law. Political interference and old-school attitudes got them there (and a couple doosies like a faulty over-projection of timber yield and an overestimate of old-growth forest acreage, among others). "Environmentalists" don't want to "shut down the woods" (well, there are some no-nothing enviros that might want to---that's not who I'm talking about here); what they want is sustainable management for the long term that maintains forest-related jobs and maintains environmental services like biological diversity, salmon runs, clean water and air, and carbon storage.
OTH, the Spotted Owl Plan (1993?) covering parts of OR, WA, and CA did reduce the cut. It was an attempt to bring the FS up to the present science on ecosystem management, in a landscape that had had most of its old-growth forest cut and the remaining amount fragmented (There was about 20-25% late successional/old-growth on NF and BLM lands at the time, some open to logging, some in Wilderness, Parks, and Monuments). The old Forest Plans at the time were not working, in so far as "maintaining viable populations of plants and animals across their historic ranges"--The National Forest Management Act (NFMA); this was a key basis for the successful Spotted Owl lawsuit by those pesky enviros that produced the injunction stopping old-growth logging.
For this law and others like the ESA to be followed, reserves had to be established on the landscape to maintain and recover the old-growth stage of regional forests. The public widely supports the NFMA and ESA, as well as the Clinton Roadless Rule; at the time, woods workers in small towns hurt by the injunction and later cut reduction were severely pissed, no doubt. They were also pandered to--remember Bush I saying "No jobs for owls" in '92? Yes, these reserves reduced the potential cut if one thinks of the old model of converting all natural forest into short rotation tree farms. OTH, there are decades of work waiting to be done on already managed lands covered with dense young forest, both to increase growth and reduce fire danger; this work would employ thousands. Why isn't it being done?
The Forest Science used to favor "liquidating" old-growth, in it's narrow fiber production view; not anymore, not after the science compiled at the time on forest ecosystem management and certainly not today.
My 2 cents.
