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Comment by s5fs | Hacker News Reader

I grew up on the Oregon coast and many of my classmate's fathers were loggers. In the early 90s we saw the struggling timber industry nearly decimated due to environmental laws aimed to protect the spotted owl.

Tens of thousands of jobs were lost, mostly in rural communities, and attempts to help retrain these workers were a failure. Some of these communities were able to rebuild their economy around eco-tourism but most have fallen into poverty and are still struggling.

As you can imagine, many people negatively affected by these laws feel strongly against them. The idea that a politician several states away can pass laws preventing you from using your land the way you intend simply doesn't sit well with many people.

Spotted owl numbers are continuing to decline, but now the blame is being placed on a different type of owl pushing out the spotted owl.

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In the last 150 years over 97% of old-growth redwoods have been cut down. We are now arguing over the last (less than) 3% of redwoods.

That's about 0.6 of the original coverage % per year. Assuming the historical rate, if not restricted, that's five years to clear out the remaining old growth redwood.

Modern logging methods become ever more efficient, which means that without legal restrictions we could log out all old-growth redwoods in less than five years.

What rural communities are coming up against is not fundamentally a legal restriction, but a resource limit. It just so happens that this resource restriction is being reflected in legal restrictions before we loose all of our old-growth forests.

No matter what happens those jobs are going to disappear. They are either going to go away in our lifetimes, and there will be old growth redwoods, or they will go away a few years later and there will be no old growth redwoods.

That's the reality.

If we want to keep those jobs alive and still keep redwoods then we have one option: outlaw power tools while limiting the number of loggers.

Lebanon used to have vast forests of cedars, but they were all cut down in ancient times.

I guess there aren't too many logging jobs now in the middle eastern deserts.

Once you cut the old growth down, what regrows is not the same landscape. I know most loggers don't care about this, but many of us do.

https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-cavernous-world-u...

The timber industry was decimated by improvements in productivity, automation, international changes in taxes, tariffs, lumber supply and demand, and, most importantly - because it logged in an unsustainable fashion.

But blaming a bunch of hippie environmentalists is, of course, easier, then taking responsibility for its mistakes.

And what if we'd have let them cut down every patch of old growth forest?

How many more years of logging jobs would those communities have gotten, before the jobs would dry up because the trees are all gone? 10? 20? And then who would the loggers blame, when there's just no old growth forest left?

> many people negatively affected by these laws feel strongly against them

I wonder why?

> Spotted owl numbers are continuing to decline

Meanwhile, the logging industry remains dead.

> Meanwhile, the logging industry remains dead.

Hardly. Logging is a huge industry up-and-down the west coast, just like it is in the southeast. It's just not a free-for-all.

Commercial fishing underwent the same process, but nobody is saying commercial fishing is dead. There's still resentment. The labor market shrank. But AFAICT the fishing industry isn't in denial about the fact that regulation, including quotas, was needed. Especially after some of the fisheries bounced back.

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