This post is timber industry misinformation, not valid natural science. The truth is catastrophic wildfire is a weather driven event, not a fuels driven event... Fuel treatments only protect vegetation in low to moderate intensity fires. In high intensity catastrophic wildfires (high winds & drought) no amount of spacing between co-dominants can prevent the forest canopy from burning and in some cases removal of co-dominants will increase wind speed which massively increases tree mortality rather than decreasing it where a more dense canopy slows wind speed.
The Nature Conservancy doesn't show an ecologically managed forest in their graphics, they show a a timber industry managed forest which exposes the forest floor to a huge increase in the growth of weeds and flashy fine fuels in the first two decades after the forest is damage with logging. The images of so-called Fire-suppressed forests are also dishonest because after a fire the trees are still mostly standing and the main trunks and main branches don't burn and that carbon stays locked up as precipitation and large woody debris that replenishes soil fertility. All that is lost if the forest is salvage logged.
This entire post promotes Nature Con's timber industry science, which is why the board of directors was taken over by the industry in the early 2000's. Truth is tall tree forests have thrived on this planet for 382 million years and at no time during that evolution were trees hauled off the landscape to a sawmill, which the timber industry wants you to think is the only way we can save the forest.
I have mountains of references to prove these points if you're interested in doing more than making our global deforestation crisis worse?
It's preposterous to think that trucking small-diameter branches, bushes, etc. to arid locations and burying them there is somehow ecologically advantageous.
It assumes that deserts have nothing going on ecologically, so it's fine to dig them up. This is the same misguided thinking that has led the oil and gas industry to lay waste to so much of the Western U.S. landscape, not to mention the Middle East.
If you can't imagine seven generations in the future, please just think a step or two ahead.
This post is timber industry misinformation, not valid natural science. The truth is catastrophic wildfire is a weather driven event, not a fuels driven event... Fuel treatments only protect vegetation in low to moderate intensity fires. In high intensity catastrophic wildfires (high winds & drought) no amount of spacing between co-dominants can prevent the forest canopy from burning and in some cases removal of co-dominants will increase wind speed which massively increases tree mortality rather than decreasing it where a more dense canopy slows wind speed.
The Nature Conservancy doesn't show an ecologically managed forest in their graphics, they show a a timber industry managed forest which exposes the forest floor to a huge increase in the growth of weeds and flashy fine fuels in the first two decades after the forest is damage with logging. The images of so-called Fire-suppressed forests are also dishonest because after a fire the trees are still mostly standing and the main trunks and main branches don't burn and that carbon stays locked up as precipitation and large woody debris that replenishes soil fertility. All that is lost if the forest is salvage logged.
This entire post promotes Nature Con's timber industry science, which is why the board of directors was taken over by the industry in the early 2000's. Truth is tall tree forests have thrived on this planet for 382 million years and at no time during that evolution were trees hauled off the landscape to a sawmill, which the timber industry wants you to think is the only way we can save the forest.
I have mountains of references to prove these points if you're interested in doing more than making our global deforestation crisis worse?
It's preposterous to think that trucking small-diameter branches, bushes, etc. to arid locations and burying them there is somehow ecologically advantageous.
It assumes that deserts have nothing going on ecologically, so it's fine to dig them up. This is the same misguided thinking that has led the oil and gas industry to lay waste to so much of the Western U.S. landscape, not to mention the Middle East.
If you can't imagine seven generations in the future, please just think a step or two ahead.