Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Question about Forest Management

Oh, I wonder who managed the forests before there was "man"?

Seems they've been around a few years and "managed" to survive until we got here?

I forgot about that in my little rant.

So





The "don't burn in my backyard, or up the hill from me " folks have a lot of input in local government. And health issues associated with smoke too.

Cutting uneconomical tracts? Now, wouldn't that mean someone has to pay to have it done or lose.............money......... doing it?

That seems to be something someone in another post was mentioning too...................could we be thinking along the same lines at times?

It always seems to come back to money.

Developing forest land is different in each state. LCDC as much as it sucks, stops farm land and forest land, from falling victim to the scenario you described!
Land use development areas were set, good or bad during the 70's in Oregon!

Seems to work "mostly"

Until one can get a friend on whatever zoning/land use commission one needs to sway.

But without zoning commissions of some sort, most regular folks would be screwed at some time or another.

Agreed, but the swaying has to go through local and state boards. Therefore making it available, to the rich and large corporations, that have the $. Just like the rest of the world!

I've been the range specialist, or more properly "Range Conservationist." I was effectively a paralegal, and administrative judges made the resource decisions. Unfortunately it always seemed that the common sense thing to do was the first possibility discarded for one special interest or another.



Sadly, all true. People who "feel" this way or that are given voice through funding, lawyers get rich, and natural resources suffer.



I'm just a lowly Range Management major who only got to ply the "trade" for a brief time, but my observations tell me that it's all much like a dammed up river. A certain amount of water has to be allowed to flow. You can close the gates and impound ALL the water for a while, but all that water is going to go downstream eventually and nothing is going to stop it. It's my opinion that excessive fire suppression is proving to be a very bad thing.

Yep. I'm in agreement with that excessive fire suppression statement as another poster or three have mentioned.

It's not all that hard to find pics from the old days, before the "put them all out" programs started and see what the landscape mosaic looked like.

Not a range guy, I was on the aquatic end of things and experienced similar circumstances to yours. Not only the "common sense" thing being discarded, but actual proof of damaging methods and processes being left in place for reasons the "higher ups" know. That had a good deal to do with me leaving a favorite job and taking a job with less security which actually led to a way lower grade job with much more OT to make up for the salary shortfall.............and I got 4 months off a year!

Another fire was discovered late afternoon yesterday in the Trinity Alps wilderness about 18 miles south of me, well it really took off this afternoon, as they will, neighbors scanner indicates it is jumping retardant wet lines dropped throughout today. It's only about 4 miles inside the wilderness boundary, several hand crews are walking in to help the crews already there..but it may be too little too late...we'll see. I sure wish they would issue a temporary rule allowing the hand crews to use chainsaws, maybe even let a Chinook or Sikorsky Sky Crane fly in a little dozer. But common sense has no place in this...look how the Feds fought the guy who converted the 747 for retardant drops. At least CalFire had the sense to sign him up...the Feds tried to hire him two weeks ago, but he was locked in the Calif contract. I'll bet he was grinning when the Feds called him.

Something not brought up here which is important. North American forests have been intensely managed by humans since the Indians crossed the land bridge. Someone mentioned how the Miwok would torch at the end of hunting season. Yep, lots of tribes did that. They'd torch when migrating out of an area, partly for feed but also to deny the area to their enemies until later on. Some tribes would torch other tribes on raids, that was rare but did happen. Also, they'd torch in contested areas to break ambush cover.
They also recognized the effect of fire on food crops they desired, on hunting visibility, etc etc etc. In the West, this held sway until about 1800, when Lewis and Clark came along and it so happens, smallpox had come the other way from British traders. That killed a huge percentage of northwestern and coastal Indians, some say up to 90 percent. So -- THAT vacated what until that point was a hugely human-managed, human-artifact ecosystem. Everywhere you look there would be vegetative communities burnt, burnt and burnt again, and some, not burnt by humans because it wasn't worth the results. THOSE are places where long duration thick forests grew with long-cycle fire events.
But the takeaway is that North America's ecosystems were massively managed through induced, set fires, just about any place it made sense to Indians.
What happened in the West is, the 50 year gap after the Indian die offs and before substantial white settlement left an attractive environment (to humans, made by humans) that was mistakenly thought of as pristine.
Okay -- you notice it's been said it's about 50 years since forest management has been stupid, and it has taken that long for things to really turn into he//? Yay, now you understand the latency of the effects of induced fire, in that the landscape still showed the results of induced Indian fire when the white eyes finally built railroads and were able to settle the regions away from navigable water!!
But the situation remains a lot the same. As I said, the Indians burnt where it made sense, and it made sense in a lot of places. But they didn't burn (actually, MANAGE) where there was no payoff for them. Modern society has the same issue today. Where does it make sense to manage? What's the payoff? What is a rational approach?
Some here are saying, burn burn burn. No, we can't do that. Too much fuel. Too little time. But guess what? Just about every Indian reservation, where I've talked to a good number of tribal foresters, does everything. They burn. Too thick to burn? Log first, then burn. Burn first, then salvage log (messier, usually it's because of an unplanned "natural" fire). Where it pays to grow trees to log, they grow trees to log. But they also plan how to defend the places they don't want to lose by a bad burn.
People need to realize the landscapes we have here are human artifacts and have been for 10,000 years, the only difference is the methods used and the motives driving those methods.

Logging swaths of forest helps prevent crown fire jumping.
But like wind farms off Martha's Vinyard (where zero and the Kennedy's hang out) its not as pretty to look at..

Populations will be managed either by man or by nature. Makes no difference if the population is plant or animal. Man was given dominion over his environment so he could manage it, utilize its resources and sustain it. This discussion has been about forests. Man has developed many tools to manage forests which include logging, re-planting, insect control, controlled burns, thinning and other tools some of you can probably name. Nature manages by extremes and its tools are severe including disease, starvation, fire, erosion and other forms of devastation. Decades ago the powers to be decided to let nature take it's course by curtailing logging and creating wilderness areas among other things. Now we are seeing the results of manging by emotion rather than common sense.

Much of the west is ecologically designed to burn. Just like the Yellowstone fire, we suppress that and the under-load becomes enormous. A fire that under normal conditions might ground burn and not kill trees now gets into the tops and burns there.

100% correct.

Well said Mtn10mm.

I can look to my own property to see where 100 years of fire suppression has changed the forest. We started doing some thinning recently of Ponderosa pine and Grand Fir. Ponderosa in some parts of out property had over 1200 trees per acre. Way too many and they would burn like crazy, if they ever caught fire. 150-200 P-pines per acre is more like it for our area.

Right now, Ponderosa isn't worth logging for the bigger marketable-sized timber. $100 per 1000 for P-pine and its going to cost you about $200 to have a logger come in and cut/haul the marketable sized trees to the mill. So while we wait for the price to get better, we are going to thin the dog-hair thick stuff, open things up a bit and get some spacing where trees can actually grow. If we were to ever have a fire some spacing might save our bigger trees. Ponderosa have evolved to handled low burning grass fires.

I was cutting some thickets of Grand Fir last year and 50 year-old trees were 4-5" in diameter. The same age tree in an opened/thinned area was 18" in diameter.

Keep in mind this is private ground where access is very good. On National Forest ground, forest work could be almost impossible to do and financially not worth it.

Just as it is with wild game management, invasive species management, range management, any any other type of natural resource... Emotions and politics should have NO place in them.

Giving "everyone a voice", and falling slave to lawsuits has messed things up to the point we are today.

It's sickening actually.

I haven’t read through all of the replies but typically where the problem comes in is with groups that think that they’re “environmentalists” the truth is they’re almost always metropolitan types the same type that won’t eat meat because they love wildlife but have zero knowledge about wildlife or the outdoors other than what they think they know. They’ll sue frivolous or not to tie up the state and federal government from selling timber to private logging companies.

Here in Michigan we have a lot of state forest that is past prime for most wildlife and a healthy balanced forest but tied up in court battles the federal land is just about always worse.

They typically hate clear cutting. The things is back before white man settled America fires would rage and burn down huge chunks of forest which then opens it to sunlight and allows new growth forest. New growth forest supports FAR more biodiversity as thick brush and edge habitat creating shelter, low browse food, better snow and wind block ect. Eventually the new growth ages burns and regenerates as the life cycle of a balanced healthy forest. Since we can’t let forest fires just burn and wipe out towns. So absent clear cutting we’re left with old forest great for squirrels and a handful of critters but poor habitat for most and a fire magnet. Go try and burn down a young popular or alder stand (first succession) forest its to green to burn well unless caught in an already raging inferno. Compare that to an old late succession oak or pine stand full of dead trees, Partially dead trees and logs, that will burn like tinder.

I can’t understand there thinking. Somehow they don’t realize that clear cutting trees is a sustainable resource and that new ones grow back. It generates income, promotes biodiversity, replicates the natural environment, and reduces fires.

It really doesn't matter to me how they go it up north or out west. In middle Georgia I use fire as a management tool, it's cheap, easy and you can pick the time and place. I burn our place on a 3 year rotation schedule because I manage for wildlife first, cattle second and timber last. The forest service issues burn permits when the wind and humidity won't usually cause problems, but they don't want you to burn at night and that's the best time if you have a lot of fuel and don't want to damage your trees. Most timber companies around here don't burn because they plant fast growing pine trees instead of fire, bug and drought resistant pine trees. It won't be long before we'll have another major fire in south Georgia.

I have been a Forester for north of 50 years, and have worked in the timber/sawmill industry throughout North America. Our federal forests cannot be made fire proof, but can be managed economically over large landscapes to mitigate damaging fire behavior. However, it is not going to happen. Oh-as a result of the recent fires we might play around the edges on some federal lands, but the intensive forest management that was envisioned by Teddy and Gifford will likely not happen in our lifetime. When the Congress eliminates the “Equal Access to Justice Act”and takes the paydays away from the environmental litigants, you’ll know that once again we are becoming serious about forest management on our federal lands. CP.

Biomass is the only real way to get rid of small logs. Large timberlands, near home are decking the small logs, and chipping them. Opening the ground to sun light, and growing bitterbrush, and other browse!