A growing area of high-hazard clearcuts and plantations are fueling forest fires | Hacker News Reader

A growing area of high-hazard clearcuts and plantations are fueling forest fires

focusonvictoria.ca

45 pointsluu10 comments

There's a recent episode on Skeptoid.com on clearcutting.

Dunning, B. "All About Clearcutting." Skeptoid Podcast. Skeptoid Media, 20 Jul 2021. Web. 15 Aug 2021. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4789

I would like to try to understand why this is the case. Is it correct to say: Clearcut means the next planted trees are all the same generation, so the trees are of similar height and their crowns are next to each other. Fire can easier ignite a large area when a burning crown of a tree sparks the next one.

Clear-cutting is much maligned, and unfairly so.

People often have a romantic notion that you can selectively cut a forest and just cherry-pick out the high-value trees, and that if you were to do this, it results in a healthier forest. That is a fantasy for the scale of logging that we rely on for industrial production of wood products.

Typically, the way that forest is managed is that you clear-cut it in strips or blocks, in a manner almost reminiscent of medieval crop rotation. This keeps sections of differently-aged forest adjacent to one another, which has a whole host of benefits for wildlife habitat, tree species diversity, soil quality, fire prevention, etc.

The paper companies and large landowners have been doing this for fifty, seventy-five years now, and they've pretty much worked out the techniques to be able to maintain their forests in sustainable ways.

> That is a fantasy for the scale of logging that we rely on for industrial production of wood products.

Approximately 10,000 square kilometers [1] are managed this way in Sweden. Still a small minority but definitely not exactly small scale. It also seems to be the majority in my region for some reason. I've only seen them clear-cut for diseased trees.

I think there's one thing that the crop rotation method still isn't that great for and that's erosion.

1. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skogsbruk#Typer_av_skogsbruk

Maybe my question wasn't formulated precise enough. I just wanted to understand, why "clearcut logging, followed by replanting, creates fuel conditions that make fires easier to ignite and harder to control. These effects persist for decades."

Part of this is from dumb EU policy, which classifies woodchips as 'renewable energy':

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/4/18216045/ren...

Thus fueling demand for these sort of plantations.

The EU is discussing large investments in green and sustainable. But they do not need to invest, they just need to change rules and laws. But unfortunately spending money makes politicians much more likable. This will not end well

I think are using the term "Plantation" as a loaded word here to unconsciously invoke the negative ideas of slavery and oppression to get their point across. I've never heard of a tree farm called a plantation before.

Or just speaking English [1].

> A plantation is a large-scale estate, generally centered on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops. The crops that are grown include cotton, coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar cane, opium, sisal, oil seeds, oil palms, fruits, rubber trees and forest trees. Protectionist policies and natural comparative advantage have sometimes contributed to determining where plantations are located.

> A tree plantation, forest plantation, plantation forest or timber plantation is a forest planted for high volume production of wood, usually by planting one type of tree as a monoculture forest.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantation#Tree_plantations

Maybe in your region plantation has those negative connotations. In other regions a plantation is an area of land planted with a particular plant. Why must every word treated as racist ?

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