Posted: 9/6/2015
Trigger
Just read this recommendable summary article about how the federal government has screwed up forest management on federal lands for several decades Devastating Fires Show Forest Management Reforms Are Badly Needed. This is by far not the first article on this subject that I have read.
The Federal Government Built Up A Tinderbox
That the orthodox doctrine of total fire suppression and the prohibition of logging in federal forests have created a formidable tinderbox over the decades has been known for at least several years if not longer. And the federal government, which owns way too much land, has failed to act.
“In 1990, the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the northern spotted owl as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. Largely in response to this listing, the Forest Service implemented a new “ecosystem management” policy, which resulted in a further reduction in timber harvests. Then, shortly before he left office President Clinton introduced a rule that severely restricted the use of existing roads and construction of new roads on 49 million acres of National Forest, limiting the ability of the Forest Service to thin the dense thickets of trees that resulted from almost a century of fire suppression – or even remove dead trees.”
“The net result of these changes was a dramatic decline in the amount of timber removed from federal lands. As Figure 7 shows, between 1960 and 1990, an average of 10.3 billion board feet of timber were removed each year from Forest Service land. Removals declined precipitously between 1991 and 2000. From 2000 to 2013, an average of just 2.1 billion board feet of timber were removed from Forest Service land. That represents a near 80 percent decline in removals. Similarly, from 1990 to 2002, timber sales on BLM land fell 74 percent as a direct result of these policy changes and has remained at these suppressed levels since then.f”
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