Get with it Val, sometimes the only way to save ANYTHING is to fire up the chainsaws and make some money creating defensible space. My heart is not broken over this, in fact, if Atiyeh in fact was immolated, there's a certain bitter justice. Too bad it wasn't Andy Kerr.
Won't argue that Dave. In some circumstances the best way too.
But, I think the man wanted to preserve (yep, there's that sometimes nasty word) a particular portion of a system that was rapidly disappearing. THAT can't be done by logging it. Big trees like that will not grow back in your children's lifetime, their grandkids lifetimes, or even their grandkids grandkids lifetimes. Maybe take that section of forest he wanted to preserve and surround it with a bare dirt buffer 500' wide? Log that buffer and put in a lawn? Soccer fields maybe?
The sad fact of the matter is some folks want to see groves of trees and sections of forest that are relatively untouched by man since before the modern calendar started. Others see those forests as jobs and houses and paper pulp.
Jimy made a very valid point. If there's truly a shortage of lumber products in the US of A, why do I have pictures of barges loaded with logs and ready to go downriver to Japan? And that's just on the Columbia, not counting Coos Bay, places in AK, and Puget Sound. Would not all those logs make good wood products for the US of A, and maybe there would be a few more jobs here? Maybe we wouldn't have to import wood products from Canada?
I, for one, am really glad his predecessors in preserving big trees did such a good job with Redwood State and National Parks. Having spent multiple days there, being as how I lived in the area, I can tell everyone that's never seen one there is nothing, repeat nothing, like it in any area that's been logged. Having worked for a few years on 350,000+ acres of private timberlands I kinda know what I'm talking about there. And I've seen preserved areas in PA, WA, OR and AK, so I'd have to say the guy likely did the OR public a service in saving that particular patch of woods.
Could be they're all gone now? Yep. Could be whether man was involved or not, that section of woods could have gone up in any dry year. Odds of those trees standing through a fire event are a lot higher than them standing through a chainsaw event though.
I'll have to look up the Kerr dude. Don't know of him offhand.
Enjoy your evening up there.
