Part I
In a recent 3-part series the Idaho Statesman asked the rhetorical question, “Are we wasting billions fighting wildfires?” Authors Heath Druzin and Rocky Barker answered their question with, “We can protect cabins, make the forests healthier and save money by allowing more fires to burn,” and parodying Smokey Bear’s famous dictum, “‘Only you’ can change how we deal with fire.”
The 3-part serial is [here, here, and here].
The authors quote yours truly:
Michael Dubrasich, a Lebanon, Ore., consulting forester, is critical of forest policy, too. The federal government is wasting timber and backing away from its historic role of protecting private property.
“The fires that start on unkempt federal land and spread to private property are irresponsible spillovers perpetrated upon American citizens by their own government,” Dubrasich said.
So that was nice. But by and large the authors made a case for Let It Burn, despite my wise words. For that reason, and in defense of our forests and forest-based communities, I offer this rebuttal.
Let It Burn is illegal, destructive of a multitude of forest and human values, is not cost-effective, and is the worst idea that ever came down the forest pike. Let me count the ways.
1. Let It Burn Is Illegal
This is the crux of the matter at hand. The USFS has adopted a policy and is undertaking actions (and an unknown number of future actions) in the form of unfought forest fires that have significant effects upon forests and natural resources and on surrounding properties, communities, habitats, watersheds, and airsheds.
Those significant effects must be evaluated through the NEPA process of drafting an Environmental Impact Statement, together with all the public involvement the EIS process entails. The public must have a suitable opportunity to evaluate and comment upon federal actions that impact the environment under NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act).
July 27, 2008 | 13 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
by Claudia Elliott, Editor and Publisher of the Southern Sierra Messenger
As fires rage throughout California—and many believe their severity could be reduced by active forest management—there is a hope of a cool breeze coming from the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals.
No, this is not an April Fool’s joke in July. The Ninth Circuit is known for a range of what many people would call “wacky” decisions, particularly concerning environmental issues, which is why a ruling by an 11-judge panel of the court last week has some folks in shock.
Bottom line: The panel ruled that it’s improper for federal judges to act as scientists when weighing in on disputed U.S. Forest Service timber projects.
In their ruling, the judges overturned a July 2007 decision by a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel that halted the Mission Brush timber sale in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest. The litigating environmental groups in the case contended that the Forest Service’s logging plan would harm the region’s ecosystem for species including small, migratory owls. The ruling also overturned a 2005 decision concerning a Forest Service project in Western Montana.
U.S. Agriculture Department Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, told the Associated Press that the ruling was “the most important decision involving a Forest Service environmental case in the last two decades,” saying it restores the ability of federal agencies, not meddling judges, to exercise discretion over timber sales.
“The judges established a much more limited framework for judicial review of Forest Service decisions – a framework that’s much more consistent with the standard use by other circuits,” Rey said last week. “The court says its role is not to act as a panel of scientists. They wanted to move back to a more appropriate role.”
It’s too early to know exactly what ramifications this ruling will have on Sequoia National Forest, Giant Sequoia National Monument, or other public lands throughout California. Environmental groups commenting so far have tried to minimize the importance of the ruling.
Personally, I value environmental review and I value community input in projects involving public lands. But too often, good projects developed with sound science and lots of effort are overturned by judges who have, as the Ninth Circuit panel determined, overstepped their bounds.
Perhaps this decision will level the playing field and return land use decisions to the public agencies who I will expect to follow the laws, rules, and regulations that apply–but hopefully without having a judge side with environmental organizations who want to apply impossible standards without any consideration of the risk we are taking in managing public lands in such a capricious manner.
The Southern Sierra Messenger is published every other Thursday at Springville, California; Mail subscriptions are available; Rates are $24 per year within Tulare County and $32 per year outside Tulare County; US addresses only. Send subscription order with payment to Community Media, PO Box 765, Springville, CA 93265 or call (559) 539-7514.
See also our previous post on this topic [here].
July 18, 2008 | 2 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests, Politics and politicians, Federal forest policy
The following excellent essay was published last Saturday in the Sacto Bee [here]. We re-post it in full:
By William Wade Keye, professional forester
A year after the Angora fire in South Lake Tahoe, the dead trees, debris and rubble are cleared from the devastated neighborhoods. New homes are sprouting from the earth to the tune of contractors’ blaring rock music, hammers and nail guns.
Lumber to sustain the rhythm is being transported from Canada, Oregon and Washington. Dozens of structures are rising in a cacophony of recovery and new life.
It’s all taking place within the afternoon shadows cast by the thousands of dead trees that remain standing on adjacent national forest lands. Although seared and killed by high heat, inside their charred bark is unburned wood, light and bright.
Yet despite this volume of usable fiber, these cellulose skeletons will never be tapped to help build a single structure.
Rather, the trees killed by the fire will be left to rot, under assault by insects and fungi, as the U.S. Forest Service plans and plans, and then plans some more, about what to do in the aftermath of the last year’s disaster. It doesn’t want to get sued, having lost the will to fight against environmental activists and their attorneys.
Judicial decisions have broken the back of a once-proud federal agency, handing de facto control of the public’s forest to people who don’t like forestry. The wood to rebuild Tahoe is being imported from distant forests hundreds of miles away. This is called protecting the environment.
As an American citizen, I’m troubled that the Toyota Prius was engineered in Japan while Detroit was figuring out how to build a better Hummer. I also don’t understand why we, as Americans, can’t both expand our domestic energy supplies (including fossil fuels and nuclear power) and push for much greater efficiency, alternative sources and new technology.
As a forester, I don’t get the environmental benefit of burning forests down, letting them rot and then – perhaps – trying to clean them up at great expense to taxpayers. I don’t accept that we won’t look to quickly salvage and utilize dead public timber instead of sourcing our wood from living trees in someone else’s backyard, at great cost in terms of wasted energy, carbon emissions and true community. I can’t imagine why we don’t plant trees in denuded areas just as fast as we possibly can to prevent brush encroachment and deforestation.
These behaviors contribute to global warming. A wildfire such as the Angora fire emits massive amounts of greenhouse gases, followed by years of slow methane release. (Methane is 20 times more active as a global warming agent than CO2.) If, instead of allowing dead timber to decompose, we harvest and utilize it in long-lasting products and bioenergy, we can store carbon for long periods and also offset the burning of fossil fuels. Finally, by not reclaiming the site with a growing young forest, we fritter away decades of opportunity to capture and store high levels of atmospheric carbon. This is something that healthy forest ecosystems are remarkably good at doing.
All over the country there is a movement toward locally grown fruits and vegetables, organic foods and community gardens. People are demanding authenticity in terms of what they eat and where it comes from. It helps us make sense of our lives in an increasingly corporate and impersonal world.
In national forest policy, it should be Prius drivers and organic farmers who are leading the way, clamoring for local responsibility and economies of ecological authenticity. Taking wood from distant forests in order to rebuild in Tahoe should be simply unacceptable. Especially when it’s just sitting there, rotting on the stump.
Instead, we accept the grim counsel of the eco-clergy: better to do nothing than risk anything. Burn down the forest, let it go to brush, but just don’t touch it. Where our wood comes from is not important.
No wonder the Forest Service has given up on actively managing its lands, even to the extent of trying to keep them green.
Theodore Roosevelt, who set aside most of our vast system of national forests during his risk-taking years in the White House, is turning over in his grave. Roosevelt intended them to be used, not neglected. Conservation was not about minimizing risk, but about maximizing the social good.
Forestry, like sustainable agriculture, is a “can do” enterprise, as integral to the human experience as rebuilding homes after a terrible catastrophe. When we suppress something so wholesome and engaging, we kill off a bit of ourselves. We become poorer, more afraid, easier to corral into a world of diminished possibilities.
The post-wildfire blight and deforestation in Tahoe, and spreading throughout our national forests in the American West, is a Hummer we are driving, wasting resources and spewing greenhouse gases while new life – and fresh oxygen – is so abundantly available.
William Wade Keye is a California registered professional forester.
July 16, 2008 | 10 Comments | Topic: 2007 Fire Season, Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
This Spring W.I.S.E. initiated a Fire Tracking site [here]. We have been endeavoring to track the larger fires in the West. So far we have tracked over 110 fires, many still active.
The way W.I.S.E. Fire Tracking works is that each fire (that we choose to track) gets it’s own post. That post is updated periodically. We try to update on a daily basis while the fire is active, but some days the information is not available.
If a fire you are interested in is not on the main page (it only holds 15 posts), then there are a few ways you can find it. First, try typing the name of the fire in the search applet in the upper righthand sidebar. Second, you can click on the “state” category if you know what state the fire is in. Third, if you know what month the fire started, you can look in the archives under that month.
For each fire we are attempting to post daily stats for acreage, personnel, percent containment, and suppression costs to date. That way each post becomes a historical record for that fire. You can see how the fire grew day by day, along with the changes in the other stats. That’s something InciWeb doesn’t do.
W.I.S.E. Fire Tracking is in blog form, designed for feedback. People on the scene, or anywhere else for that matter, can contribute information, photos, or ask questions. It’s a two-way communication, something else InciWeb does not do.
W.I.S.E. Fire Tracking is free. It costs the taxpayers nothing. That’s definitely not the case with InciWeb. Your donations are sincerely appreciated, in any case.
Unlike other fire sites, W.I.S.E. Fire Tracking is not designed by and for firefighters. Our expertise and concern is about forests and other landscape types, and so we can provide indepth analysis regarding the effects of a particular fire on multiple forest values and resources. By collecting and posting the daily record for each fire, we are establishing the basic information needed to analyze fire effects.
InciWeb, the government fire reporting site, has been up and down this year. Right now it is functional again. If the InciWebbers show they can report fires consistently and without server glitches, we may pick and choose which fires we track more selectively. Our intention was never to compete with InciWeb or supplant them. We only provided a comprehensive fire reporting service because we thought such was needed during their long absence.
Due to the workload involved with W.I.S.E. Fire Tracking, the other subsites at W.I.S.E. have been neglected. Sorry about that. Hopefully in a week or two the fire season will calm down a bit and the other subsites will get more attention.
In that regard, if you feel like reviewing a new book or paper of exceptional quality and cutting-edge, new paradigm thinking in the environmental sciences, please do so. We are always happy to post contributions from the experts.
For those select few among you to whom we have promised specific projects, please bear with us. We have not forgotten. The list is still right here on the W.I.S.E. bulletin board. Your project is circled in red. We will get to it when we can and eventually for sure.
Please take some time to explore W.I.S.E. Fire Tracking. There is a wealth of information being collected there. Sometimes you may need to read between the lines because the whole truth is only hinted at. Your analysis of specific fires is also welcome, as are your photos, maps, and on-the-ground observations.
July 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: The 2008 Fire Season, Saving Forests
Statement of Rep. Bob Goodlatte, Ranking Member, House Committee on Agriculture
RE: H.R. 5541, the Forest Land Assistance, Management, and Enhancement Act (FLAME Act)
July 9, 2008
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my disappointment with the bill before us today, H.R. 5541 the Forest Land Assistance, Management, and Enhancement Act or the FLAME Act. Mr. Speaker, I believe that the authors of this bill are well intentioned and truly want to solve the wildfire funding problem, but, sadly, the FLAME Act does not provide the comprehensive solution needed to adequately resolve this problem.
With the unhealthy conditions in our forests, extreme drought, and the increasing influx of people building in fire-prone areas, the size and severity of wildfires has dramatically increased. In the 90’s, an average of 3.2 million acres burned each year. Since 2000, that annual average has doubled to 7.1 million acres. The cost of fighting these wildfires has skyrocketed, from averages of $400 million annually in the 90’s to roughly $1.4 billion in 2007. This year an area roughly the size of Connecticut has already burned, at cost of over $665 million to date.
This is not just a western issue. In my home state of Virginia, more acres have burned already this year than in any single entire year since 1963 at a cost of millions of dollars.
As firefighting costs have increased, the overall USDA Forest Service and Department of the Interior budgets have not. So, the Forest Service and DOI are footing the bill for these large, unpredictable emergency wildfires within the confines of a flat budget. For the Forest Service, this has meant a 77 percent increase in fire expenditures, a 23 percent decrease in funds to manage the national forests, and a 38 percent decrease in funds to help states and private owners manage their forests. Whether you’re a wilderness advocate, a hunter, a mountain biker, or a logger, everyone will be impacted if we don’t solve this problem.
Wildfires are not only consuming more forestland, they are consuming the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior themselves.
The FLAME Act falls short of protecting the Agencies’ budgets from this continued erosion. H.R. 5541 does not change the current budget practice of funding firefighting based on the average expenses over the previous decade. Without this change, we will continue to see more and more of the Agencies’ budgets go toward fire and less towards taking care of our nation’s forests.
In addition to this shortfall, the FLAME Act lacks a comprehensive set of solutions to the problem. Fixes to the wildfire budgeting system must be accompanied by strong cost containment and accountability standards while also ensuring fire fighter safety, incentives to encourage communities to step up to the plate and reduce wildfire risks, and more tools to prevent or minimize damage due to catastrophic wildfires, particularly in our federal forests.
H.R. 5648, the Emergency Wildland Fire Response Act of 2008 which Chairman Peterson and I introduced along with a bipartisan group of our colleagues, provides this comprehensive solution. Unfortunately, negotiations for a more comprehensive solution were cut short.
I’m pleased to see that the authors of the FLAME Act have incorporated aspects of H.R. 5648 that encourage communities to step up to the plate and become “fire-ready” and encourage the Agencies to contain costs in their firefighting efforts.
Unfortunately, even with these improvements, the FLAME Act ignores the underlying problem causing the increases in firefighting costs– the unhealthy condition of our federal forests. We will continue to see skyrocketing firefighting costs and more damage to our forests, watersheds, and communities unless we take steps to reduce fire risk in our federal forests. We must provide the Agencies additional tools to get our federal forests in a healthy, more fire resilient condition.
My alternative bill, H.R. 5648 provides a new contracting tool for the Forest Service to partner with states to address these unhealthy conditions in federal forests. This authority has been tested in Colorado and Utah where it’s proven to be very effective. Unfortunately, HR 5541 contains no such tools.
Mr. Speaker, as California and other states are dealing with massive wildfires even as we speak, we shouldn’t squander our time with legislation that is only half the solution. H.R. 5541 is akin to using the watering can to fight a wildfire: it might have some short-term benefit of slowing down the flames, but ultimately, it won’t stop the fire.
That being said, I will vote for this bill because it does move the ball forward. I’m hopeful that we can improve it as we move forward and ask my colleagues to join me in this effort.
July 10, 2008 | 2 Comments | Topic: The 2008 Fire Season, Saving Forests, Politics and politicians, Federal forest policy
When I began SOS Forests in Sept. 2005, this is one of the first photos I posted:
It is not a particularly artistic shot, but it is illustrative of the mystery of the older cohort. The picture is of the East Fork of the Hood River about 6 or 7 miles south of the community of Mt. Hood. The forest pictured is typical of the slopes in the upper watershed.
If you look carefully, you will notice there are two distinct cohorts. The older trees are ponderosa pines ranging from 150 to 350+ years old. They are taller and their tops are often broken. Up close they are much bigger in diameter than the younger cohort trees, which are mostly Douglas-fir, grand fir, and western larch. The younger trees range from 25 to 100 years old.
That presents a mystery: why was this forest dominated by ponderosa pine for 200+ years with very few of the other species present? Is it because the other species wouldn’t grow there due to climate or soils?
No, the soils and climate are just the same as they were. The other species grow just fine there. In fact, they out-compete the ponderosa pine in the younger cohort. After a stand-replacing fire, all the species germinate, but the pines are soon overtopped by the others. They get spindly and die in dense thickets.
But for some mysterious reason, there are few if any Douglas-fir, grand fir, and western larch in the older cohort. The older trees are almost pure ponderosa pine. Look carefully and you will see that. If you can’t see it, take my word for it; that’s the situation. The ponderosa dominate the older cohort, but not the younger one.
July 8, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Saving Forests
For many veteran readers of SOS Forests, this post is going to seem repetitious. But we have many new readers and so please bear with me.
Old-growth are old trees. Generally speaking, true old-growth trees are those that germinated prior to Euro-American contact with the aboriginal (Native American) populations in a region. In Oregon true old-growth trees are 175+ years old.
In most regions, including all of Oregon, true old-growth trees arose in an age of frequent, regular, seasonal anthropogenic fire. Indian burning maintained prairies and savannas. Hence true old-growth trees were open-grown in open, park-like stands.
Following elimination and/or removal of Indian populations, the anthropogenic fires stopped. Thickets of young trees, so-called second growth, arose under the open canopies of the park-like stands. What resulted are multi-cohort forests.
Multi-cohort forests have 5 to 10 true old-growth trees per acre and the rest are second growth, sometimes numbering as many as 500+ trees per acre. The increased tree density makes those forests susceptible to catastrophic stand-replacing fires.
Previously, when the Indians were burning, fires would stay low to the ground and not kill many trees. In contrast, our modern fires kill all the trees, old and young alike.
It has been recognized that to save and preserve old-growth we must thin out the second growth, younger cohort trees. That was the gist of the important testimony given by Drs. Norm Johnson and Jerry Franklin last December [here].
No longer do forest scientists view entire stands as old-growth. That was the old paradigm. Today the general understanding is that only a few trees in most “old-growth” stands are actually old. The concept (forest condition) is called multi-cohortedness.
Read more
July 8, 2008 | 7 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
Guest post by Bob Zybach
To the Editor of the Eugene Register Guard:
I enjoyed the July 5 article on the centennial celebration of the Siuslaw National Forest. For many years I was a friend and neighbor of Rex Wakefield, who was Supervisor of the Siuslaw in the 1950s, when timber harvests were intensified to meet national housing demands. Rex was also a great forester, and pioneered many of the site preparation and Douglas-fir plantation methods that were widely used by federal land managers and industrial foresters in subsequent decades.
About 20 years ago I was commissioned to write a detailed land-ownership history of the Siuslaw, and relied upon Rex for much personal recollection, as well as important historical records he had retained from his years as a Supervisor. One of the most interesting records was a history of the Forest written in 1940 by one of Rex’s predecessors, Dahl Kirkpatrick. This report was later updated during WW II, but I was fortunate to be able to read the original type-written document.
A very common — and important — misconception about the history of the Siuslaw NF is similar to what you report in your paper, that of the “two billion” feet of timber sold from the Forest between 1960 and 1990 “much of it [was] old growth giants that today are a rare find.” That is simply not true. Almost all of the timber sold from the Siuslaw during its entire existence has been second-growth, not old-growth.
In 1940 Dahl Kirkpatrick noted that only 35,000 acres or so of the 600,000 total acreage in the Siuslaw was old-growth. That is about the same figure as exists today. People often think the trees are much older because they are so large and grow so fast, as Phyllis Steeves is quoted as saying in your article.
The reason the Siuslaw has never contained very much old-growth during its 100-year history is because of the “Great” Yaquina, Coos, and Nestucca Fires of 1849-1868 which killed most of the trees over the landscape during those years. Trees logged between 1960 and 1990 were almost entirely large second-growth, between 90 and 140 years of age, not old-growth.
The Great Fires of the 1800s were similar to the Big Sur, San Diego, Biscuit, and B&B wildfires of today in that they killed almost everything in their path and were hundreds of thousands of acres in size. Kay King, also quoted in your article, is entirely correct when she worries about all of the huge fuel build-up of the past 20 years, which she terms “biomass for fires.” If this biomass isn’t reduced by regular burning — such as practiced by local Indians before 1849, by grazing, by logging, or by some other means, the Siuslaw NF is destined to be the site of another “Great Fire” sometime soon, in the foreseeable future. That is its history, and also the nature of untended forestlands.
July 7, 2008 | 5 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests
The Forest Landscape Restoration Act of 2008, S. 2593, will be the subject of a hearing Thursday, July 10, before the US Senate Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands [here].
Just in case you don’t know what S. 2593 is all about, click the Category “Forest Landscape Restoration Act of 2008″ in the right hand sidebar. You will see that the Western Institute for Study of the Environment analyzed this bill and wrote a lengthy set of suggested amendments.
We sent those in to our US Senators and to the Subcommittee but never heard boo from any of them. Now they will be holding a hearing sans our input. How the US Senate can hold hearings when they are terminally deaf is beyond me.
Now, I don’t expect the US Senate to respond to every piece of mail they get, but a collaboration of the top forest scientists in Oregon put together our suggested amendments and we sent them in four months ago. I did expect our Oregon Senators to respond, since S. 2593 concerns Oregon. That bill is a thousand times better than the piece of crap bill Ron Wyden put forth last month [here].
Wyden’s bill, the Oregon Forest Restoration and Old Growth Protection Act,
(no number that we are aware of) is dead in the water from the get-go. It has numerous poison pills. It will never be passed, and if passed will screw up forest management in Oregon even worse than it already is.
The Forest Landscape Restoration Act of 2008, on the other hand, holds considerable promise, especially if the amendments we suggested are adopted.
Unfortunately, the US Senate has ignored our input, as I said. We did not jam sacks of hundred dollar bills in any Senator’s freezer. We did not provide them with free trips to fabulous resorts with hookers and coke and all the accoutrement they expect. It’s not that we didn’t want to; we simply cannot afford it on our limited incomes.
You would think that Gordon Smith might be interested, since he is running again. You would think Ron Wyden might be interested, since he has put forth a weak and stupid forestry bill of his own. If so, you would think wrong.
So the hearing will happen in our absence, much palavering will be done, and then the bill will be buried in the mud of the Potomac, and that’s it for that.
But we tried. You can’t say we didn’t try. It’s not our fault that our government is of, by, and for the criminal elite. Maybe if we elect a Maoist Shining Path Communist revolutionary (there is one running), then things will change. A new class of criminals will take over. That will be better, right?
July 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Saving Forests, Politics and politicians, Federal forest policy
As California suffers under a fire bust of historic proportion, the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court has decided that thinning forests to prevent catastrophic fire storms in constitutional after all.
In a landmark turn of the worm, yesterday the 9th Court overturned itself and denied a motion by enviro-litigious plaintiffs the Lands Council and the Wild West Institute that would have enjoined the Mission Brush Project, a selective logging of 3,829 acres of forest in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest.
The Court en banc (Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge, Pamela Ann Rymer, Andrew J. Kleinfeld, Michael Daly Hawkins, Barry G. Silverman, M. Margaret McKeown, Raymond C. Fisher, Marsha S. Berzon, Richard R. Clifton, Milan D. Smith, Jr., and N. Randy Smith) reversed an earlier decision by a three-judge panel of the same court.
The opinion written by Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr. contained some pithy remarks. The entire Decision is [here]. We extract some of the more important statements:
We took this case en banc to clarify some of our environmental jurisprudence with respect to our review of the actions of the United States Forest Service. …
Boundary County, City of Bonners Ferry, City of Moyie Springs, Everhart Logging, Inc., and Regehr Logging, Inc. (collectively, Intervenors) intervened on behalf of the Forest Service. The district court denied Lands Council’s motion for a preliminary injunction. A three-judge panel of this court reversed the district court’s decision and remanded for entry of a preliminary injunction in Lands Council v. McNair, 494 F.3d 771 (9th Cir. 2007). We vacate that decision and affirm the district court. …
The Mission Brush Area (or Project Area) encompasses approximately 31,350 acres and is located in the northeastern portion of the Bonners Ferry Ranger District. Approximately 16,550 acres of the Project Area are National Forest System lands, which are home to a variety of species (or their habitats), including the northern gray wolf, Canada lynx, grizzly bear, black-backed woodpecker, flammulated owl, fisher, western toad, pileated woodpecker, and the white-tailed deer. The Project Area is also home to old-growth trees.
The current structure and composition of the forest in the Project Area differs significantly from the forest’s historic composition. While the Project Area previously consisted of relatively open ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir stands, today it is crowded with stands of shade-tolerant, younger Douglas-firs and other mid-to late-successional species. The suppression of naturally occurring fires, past logging practices, and disease are primarily responsible for this shift in forest composition.
The increased density of trees has proven deleterious to the old-growth trees and the Project Area’s ecology. First, old-growth trees need relatively open conditions to survive and maintain their growth rates. Second, the increased density is causing a decline in the health and vigor of all trees because they must compete for moisture, sunlight, and nutrients, and the densely clustered trees are less tolerant of insects and disease. Third, dense, dry forests are at risk for large, stand-replacing fires, due to the build-up of fuels. Lastly, wildlife species that prefer a relatively open forest composition with more old-growth trees have suffered a decline in habitat.
July 3, 2008 | 8 Comments | Topic: Saving Forests, Federal forest policy
