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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Can you point to one of these suits and its outcomes? The USFS opens up every national forest in California to timber harvesting, every year, and has done so since I can remember. You only have to spend about 1 minute hiking a national forest in California to hear the saws and trucks.

Here, for example, are all the currently-available timber sales in the Plumas Nat'l Forest, which is currently extensively on fire.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsinternet/cs/resourcelis...

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Here is an opinion article for Montana of one such group. This is typical of most of these groups. They prevent logging by getting injunctions against any logging project on National Forest Land.

https://mtstandard.com/news/opinion/editorial/allow-the-fore...

Well OK, you said they had sued every logging plan without exception. That seems like an exaggeration. I'm looking at a USDA document right now that says 50 million board feet were harvested in California in the first 90 days of 2021, and last year totaled 2.5 billion board feet nationwide. Maybe that's not as much as you'd like, but it is still the case that timber is harvested in every forest, every year. The entire purpose of the USFS is to provide wood products to America. They aren't parks.

I was being hyperbolic to make a point, but you have at best proven that some suits do seem get overturned and some logging does happen. I will say that I think more logging, under regulation, should be allowed as the current 2.5b BF doesn’t seem to be enough considering the vast acreages that the federal government controls in the west. And given fire load of dead and down trees that I’ve seen over the years in our National Forests. To quote the article I posted.

“Frivolous lawsuits over the past 20-30 years have nearly eliminated logging from forest management, and our forests have suffered and much of the current wildfires around us are the results. What once were healthy, diverse ecosystems with early successional and mature forests are now too often monocultures of insect and disease-ridden dead and dying trees primed for catastrophic wildfire.”

https://sempervirens.org/about/story/

Santa Cruz mountains burned last year and it could have been less devastating to f there were more thinning allowed. Thinning != clearcutting. Often there are interests besides the environment that come into play. People live in these forests. Trees prevent landslides. It’s complicated.

Homeowners in that area are required to remove brush and fuel around their houses by insurance companies. Why do you think thinning (cutting down live trees) is needed?

The link you give doesn't talk about thinning, and is (unusually) mostly talking about old growth forest. Is an organization preserving old growth forest actually calling for cutting down live trees?

Compared with forest prior to our fire suppression policy (~1930), tree densities have increased from ~50/ac to >300. Many that are clearcut and then reseeded with Doug Fir approach 1000/ac. Historically, low intensity fire on a 4-17 year cycle would have cleared the understory of 80-90% of seedlings and brush, so we now have 4-5 generations of trees that we shouldn’t have.

This has given us dense forests with more vigorous, younger trees competing with mature trees for water and nutrients. Coupled with drought and higher temps from climate change, the mature trees become stressed and susceptible to beetle infestations and disease. The younger trees also serve as ladders for low intensity ground fires to become high intensity crown fires.

To answer your 2nd question: yes, Sempervirens, Save the Redwoods League, The Nature Conservancy have all partnered on projects to carry out ecological thinning to remove small diameter trees and promote a return to healthier forests that resemble the pre-1930s norm. It also happens that these practices maximize carbon sequestration.

It’s not a great example of an area that would benefit from thinning but it is an example. Fires in coastal zones in California are very different from those in the Sierras where thinning is more important. Parent asked for an example though and so the Santa Cruz mountains fires last year came to mind. Logging of any sort, even on your own property, is strictly prohibited. Most of the area was cleared a hundred years back, the old growth is in isolated areas like big basin. It’s important to understand that coastal California fires are less due to over abundance of fuel and more due to human encroachment. Certainly the Santa Cruz mountains were due for a big one given the abundance of fuel and increasingly dry climate. Like I said it’s very complicated. The sierras in contrast would undoubtedly benefit from logging/thinning. We have now the largest fire on record with the Dixie fire. Comparisons to the past miss the point. We can’t just go back to how things used to be with occasional fires taking out small areas, making the ecosystem more heterogeneous. Fires are bigger and hotter now, the fuel is more abundant and drier.

Great that you have all of the answers, do you have any sources to back up the need for thinning?

Not directly fire science related but it’s not the old growth that fuels fires. I just googled for this, there’s plenty more if you look. https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/55436

The OP Medium post links to numerous sources. I would direct you to Blue Forest's white paper from 2017 that kicked off their founding. It's extremely well written and cited[0].

The coastal redwood forest still needs lots of ecological thinning.

Here are some articles and papers you might find interesting from non-profit and governmental organizations:

San Vicente Redwoods [1]

- SV Redwoods is a collaboration between The Nature Conservancy, Save the Redwoods League, Sempervirens Fund, Peninsula Open Space Trust, and The Land Trust of Santa Cruz County

- One goal is to accelerate the return of the forest to old-growth, increase fire resiliency, and improve biodiversity and habitat.

Mill Creek Restoration Project in Redwood NP and CA Redwood SPs [2]

- A collaboration between Save the Redwoods League, Smith River Alliance, and Redwood National and State Parks.

-Video link[3] showcasing the forest restoration segment (starts at 4m00s and runs until 6m20s; it continues into road removal and salmonid benefits if you’re interested).

Thinning Stands Boosts Wildlife Diversity [4]

- Conducted in Redwood NP and Del Norte Redwood SP and supported by Save the Redwoods League.

- Found that small mammals and birds increased dramatically within five years of areas that were thinned vs. unthinned areas.

- “At a minimum, thinning results in vegetative developmental and ecological trajectories that are several decades, if not substantially longer, ahead of stands that were not thinned,” Slauson said. “The overall result is that restoratively thinned stands have begun to develop the understory vegetative complexity and productivity to support small vertebrate communities that much more closely resemble old-growth stands than stands that have not been thinned.”

Old Redwood Forest Restoration: Quantifying Forest Characteristics and Development of Initial Restoration Treatments [5]

- Funded by Save the Redwoods League.

- How do you move toward old-growth characteristics most efficiently? “With judicious thinning,” said Joe McBride, University of California, Berkeley, Forestry Ecology Professor. “You can look at old-growth stands as representing a process of natural thinning that took hundreds of years. You have a few survivors per acre that are now the big trees—they’ve outcompeted adjacent trees over time.”

- The results showed that at the better-watered sites (both in Humboldt), large, medium, and small redwoods were all randomly distributed. At the drier site (Armstrong), small and medium trees were clumped and large trees were randomly distributed. “One has the idea based on the fairy rings you see in redwood stands that the big trees are all clumped,” McBride said. “We found that not to be the case.”

[0] https://collaboration.worldbank.org/content/usergenerated/as...

[1]https://openspacetrust.org/blog/redwood-forest/

[2]https://smithriveralliance.org/millcreek/

[3]https://youtu.be/t_vWK7Kyix8?t=240

[4]https://www.savetheredwoods.org/grant/thinning-stands-boosts...

[5]https://www.savetheredwoods.org/grant/old-redwood-forest-res...

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