the big picture

[mpatch]

mpatch - I don't know what part of Wisconsin you are located in - But - there are very few tree trimmers in my area that climb residential trees with spikes.

I am located in the Door Peninsula.

 

[Matt Follett]

Clearance

I thought all you did was clear utilities.

North America is very close to zero population growth due to children. Latest I heard we were about 2.1-2.2 per woman (2.1 is considered zero population growth due to death etc.). The real problems lie with our appetite for consumption. Whether it be driving a 18 mpg SUV to the soccer game, or wanting 1 acre per home in the cookie cutter subdivision. These ideas must change if we're going to have a positive shift in our use of natural resources. Population densities in cities have been continuing to decrease, while we are continuing to improve our construction techniques. This seems silly as you would think we would be able to improve life within the city to the point of making more people want to live and work there.

Logging practices are much improved in the last 20 years; however there is still a long way to go to be able to SUSTAIN our forests. Planting trees after clear-cutting is not sustaining, as old growth, and even second growth is not simply the trees that exist in the forest, but rather the whole eco-system that co-exists with the trees, the soil, the soil fungi, the under-story plants etc. What we need to really focus on is reduction in the use of paper products, and softwood building products. That doesn’t mean stop building or stop writing, but rather increase our re-use of these products, and continue to develop way to more sustainably farm the natural resources.

View pruning can be a functional way to allow people to "see" but this is the opportunity to educate the client on good pruning practices, not topping, not lions tailing, not over-thinning etc. And not spiking is a small part of treading lightly on the earth, as is making proper cuts, rigging in sensitive areas to minimize destruction of landscapes, dragging brush by hand rather then with a skid-steer, recycling your chips, (maybe even convincing the client to keep them, so that the carbon, mineral matter, and valuable starches and sugars stay on the site were they came from, helping to improve the typically depleted urban soil.)

chow

 

[mpatch]

view cutting

The one thing that I deal with a lot is people unrealistic expectations. So for a lot of view jobs I clearly state that topping and Lions tailing can and will kill the trees. The pay top dollar for the view of the water, between $60k to $200k per acre and they want a view. The conclusion that I have come to is it's better to trim a tree improperly than to cut it down. I have also done view maintaince and a lot of trees that were butchered at one time are still alive although they look like crap. I guess better an ugly tree than no tree.

 

[trees4est]

doing so much good I can't wait to do something bad. Darkstar, don't turn into some tree-hugging freak now, take it easy. B.C. is a hotspot of logging protests, makes me sick, but none of these hippy, treehugging, pothead morons has ever figured it out.

Damn, Mister Clearance. Give the wookies a break, their viewpoint may be simplistic, but so is yours, judging from what you're writing. I know there's alot of forest out there in BC, but are you happy with cutting down the last old-growth in the Pacific NW? Maybe you are, because it gives people jobs, I don't know, that's the way alot of people feel. I'm sure it's hard to get jobs in the sticks there like everywhere in the sticks. I still don't understand how anyone can think it's good to cut that stuff down, thousand-year old trees in these crazy complicated ecosystems that can't be the same again for thousands of years. The last remaining table scraps of a vast amazing forest. Maybe just seeing the prefix "eco" really chaps you. Maybe not. Big picture I think you're right about population being the problem, but does that mean screw trying to make anything else better, just have more birth control? Actually I think that, in the big picture, "ignorance is the root of all evil". Like the ignorance of people thinking that whatever is good for them is what's good. But all this stuff is getting pretty philosophical for this forum.
Anyway, you can gripe about the bead-sucking hippies, but at least they are actively doing something that they believe in. As, I'm sure, you are. To get anywhere, you gotta at least acknowledge that the other side has some kind of point. I don't think their ultimate goal is to take away your or anyone else's livelihood, even if they don't have an answer to that part of the equation.

 

[clearance]

Yes, name calling does not help, frustration is no excuse, but... Last week the Province of British Columbia made a treaty with the Indians, Greenpeace and other such groups, logging companies (who are getting pieced of at taxpayers expense) to protect 4million acres of the B.C. coast from logging. This happened after years of protests and basic extortion by enviromental groups, they got **** Depot and other companies to stop buying wood from companies logging there. They staged an international propaganda campaign and renamed this area "the Great Bear Rainforest', which to the gullible sounds better than "central B.C. coast" It worked, you can easily see it by what tree4est says "last old growth in the PNW". B.C. is a huge place, we have millions of acres of provincial parks already, plus federal parks, plus areas that cannot be logged for other reasons. Before this recent deal, just the provincial parks made up more than 12% of the land, and no logging is ever allowed in parks here. Some of the parks here are bigger than US states or countries in Europe. The propaganda is huge, the outside interference is disgusting. Back in the 90s, Al Gore and the Kennedys helped stop a big copper/gold mine from development in the northwest corner of the province. The hippies, Al Gore and the Kennedys along with every other treehugging meddler wordwide don't care if rural communities are destroyed and logggers go broke, they don't work in the bush. That one Kennedy should have got more lessons flying planes instead of telling us how to live. The young treehuggers (hippies for want of a better name) live of thier parents or welfare cheques paid for by working people, they drive VW buses on the roads loggers built. Part of this province have already been logged three times, lots is second growth, with all the parkland there is no way we are near the "last" of the old growth. Check it out yourself, don't be spoonfed by preservationists.

 

[clearance]

And furthermore, yes there have been big mistakes made here in old logging ways, no doubt. If the logging companies would have clearcut the backside of the mountains no one, or very few would ever see it. The bad old days and ways are gone, from enviromental regs. (setbacks, spill reporting, wildlife corridors etc.) to new methods of smaller cutblocks and standing stem helilogging etc.. What happened is that some enviromental groups with an radical preservationist mindset set out in a big way in the 80s to "educate" the public. They were and are unwilling to compromise and have no reason to compromise after forcing previous and present governments to bend over and accept thier demands to preserve whatever. This happened because most voters live in the cities and are more and more distanced from the rural areas. When they are told for example, that the Grizzly bear is going extinct because of "clearcut industrial logging", they believe it and then support logging restricitions or elimination. The fact that the Grizzly is gaining in poppulation (black bears are everywhere) and that they feed in disturbed areas like burned forests, landslides and clearcuts is not considered because they have been told for years logging is killing the bears. It is the big lie method, invented and used to great success by the Nazis. It doesn't have to be true, just keep saying it over and over and over and people will believe it. They have to keep saying that something is threatened or there funding from well meaning but misled people in the cities will dry up. I know what most city people think here think, trees good-loggers bad. I remember well doing hazard tree removals for the Hydro in the Vancouver are, people would come right up and go off like I was clubbing baby seals. So many people in the cities don't have a clue about the real world, if you want an omellette you have to break a few eggs (not all of them). If you want the power to stay on, bad trees have to go, if you want employment in a province that is resource extraction dependent you have to log and mine, simple.

 

[Jim@turf]

Use this thread in the magazine?

Jim Kendrick here, publisher of TREE SERVICES Magazine ...

I'd like to use this thread in the magazine next month. I think it has a lot of great information and insight.

Any objections???? Please let me know. Just email me


[email protected]

Thanks!

 

[Tom Dunlap]

Everyone can look at the big picture but how can anyone change the view? Being responsible for the way that I fit in the big picture changes the view for me. Using fewer resources, reusing the things that are already produced and making purchases that have as low an environmental impact as possible are all ways that I make a change.

The condition of the environment has taken billions of years to get to this point. Much of the current view has been changed by humans. Change will never stop but it can slow down.

Getting a client to save a tree instead of removing one has made the world a better place. Getting arborists to prune trees in ways that will extend the lives of the trees has also helped. Saying NO to a client when they want something done that is wrong is a way to help change the world. All of these things are very small actions. But, if they are added together, they'll make the world a better place for the next generations.