Redwood Reader

21. Logging Plan Greeted Coolly
The state proposes higher fees, less red tape. The timber industry opposes the hike while environmentalists see a rollback in protections. http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-me-forest29may29,1,5504215.story?coll=la-news-environment By Bettina Boxall Times Staff Writer May 29, 2004
This article Saturday was about the new forestry regulations being considered in the budget and will be before the Legislature next week. It lowers protections and raises fees on an over regulated industry because the basic principle of sustainability is not recognized. No where does the issue attempt to fix the basic problem of environmental degradation. The industry is crying foul n increasing fees, landowners are looking for less regulation so they can take larger profits. The State expects about $10 million in fees- to allow easier business as usual. They could do better selling carbon credits on state land. If they were real smart they would broker with anyone who cared to participate via 100 year conservation easements specifically with small and medium private landowners to not cut large trees so the glomalin soil layer and surface water zone can be restored.
The big danger with less regulation is the continued creation of sediment and fine dust by land clearing and glomalin destruction. Select cutting with a very light footprint must be the maximum for prevention of stream damage. Fines from blowing dust are as big a problem as more visible damage. The problems of rivers and fish and wildfire all merge on this single concept of plant glue keeping soil n place and storing water in the ground. Legislators need to realize that we have an obligation as global citizens to protect the earth, as Americans to improve natural resources, and as Californians determined to leave a thriving natural community that creates stable jobs through good stewardship.
Good land management practices are required to maximize the investment from planting to thinning. Limbing to prevent fire ladders and lopping to prevent fuel load would be preferred in the pre-commercial thinning stage. This alone will create some small diameter wood from the large acreages of cut over land naturally seeded or planted. Most landowners of young Douglas fir may get a commercial thinning just as the canopy closes. Once the stand characteristics are set, no cutting should be needed after the canopy closes. If the land is storing five tons an acre at a dollar a ton a year, that would be a decent income from land that can still be used for many other purposes, including increasing wildlife habitat, fixing the hydrological cycle, and recreation.
Special care must be taken care of the soil floor of the forest, and this might be a good place to look at changes because this is the problem. A lot of time, research, changes in practices and energy have not stopped sedimentation after logging because the nature of the aggregates dissolving is/was unknown. You must keep the fungi in the soil alive and protect them from rain and ultraviolet. Lands without canopy and disturbed floors should be exempted from payments until the canopy closes back in 35 years or so, and should be subjected to covering the exposed areas with landscape material. Large amounts of forest land too steep for logging can be improved and kept as paying operations without cutting them.
The forest floor is releasing large amounts of stored carbon dioxide whenever the ground is turned up. This has been quantified in agricultural systems but not for forests. IN agriculture, the carbon is built up only a few years before it is plowed and CO2 from destroyed glomalin is measured. Forests and glomalin both have much longer life spans than that and we can be sure much of the global warming issue has been caused by destroying this substance around the world, and is in addition to the amount released by the vegetation itself.
California, always the nations leader in futuristic planning, could do well to examine these issues. First, we provide rural people income to steward their land in the American tradition. We earn non-budgetary money with long term security for land holding agencies, schools, preserves, parks, everybody. We create a vast amount of wildlife habitat. We get a handle on sediment. We raise the moisture level of the forest in a general way, provide more surface water and put water in the creeks in late summer. In the end we will have restored the salmon runs, where it all began. We can target timber harvest regulations tailored to those who opt out, maybe only certain or dedicated landforms could opt out. This would certainly decide who or what was sustainable. Remember, large amounts of small diameter will be created shaping young woodlands into working reserves fire treated and spaced for maximum glomalin production.
When a tree reaches maturity, its life in the forest as an adult begins. Its role feeding the fungi and helping create the environment for his type to survive is an essential role to all that lives in that forest. Its role producing hydrocarbon aerosols has just begun. This is the age we now call “second growth” and have expected our timber industry to be moving toward. No one ever had a plan to grow BIG trees. They are essential to any real economic picture of a healthy forest system.
The state will have no problem recruiting easements from private and agency landholders. Someone put on a tie and go sell the states carbon storage potential in a way that creates jobs that last forever and restores industries crushed by ignorance.