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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

Everything has externalities though. Don't get me wrong I'm all for a forest going unlogged, but we will replace those resources with something else.

We still use lumber, if it isn't locally harvested we buy it from another part of the world, outsourcing those externalities and throwing in all the extra costs of shipping, labor overhead for the various middlemen, customs, etc.

My point isn't that we're screwed and should just chop down forests because we're damned if we do and damned if we don't. But saving one forest won't fix anything by itself and could very well make things worse if we don't do it by simply reducing the number of resources we consume. Paying someone else to own the externalities will never help.

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What if America decided to import a lot of Canadian lumber? It's geographically close and the size of the forests are mindbogglingly vast.

Could this happen in a way that benefits American construction interests but also Canadian lumber exporting interests?

If there's ever some dispute about it could it be mediated somehow?

What would the outcome of that possibly be?

> and the size of the forests are mindbogglingly vast.

The size of the forests isn't really relevant; compared to lumber demand, they're mostly insignificant. Humans have never had a problem wiping out local forests.

What matters is how much wood a forest can produce per year, not how much has accumulated over the course of the past.

There is plenty of timber in northern California and southern Oregon, these regions are actually temperate rain forests, that are harvested sustainably and aren't old growth forests. Every 30-50 years, (depending on species: redwood or doug fir) the same tracts of forest can be logged again and again.

Once you get further north the taigas are colder and slower growing and may take 200 years or longer to grow back.

The best thing for the USA is to use the resources which supports jobs in logging, wood processing, transportation, and have lower costs associated with transportation and fees from importation. I'm not against importing timber into very northern parts of the US but there is no reason to ONLY use canadian timber.

The boreal forest aka Taiga is quite a bit more at risk than the forests of Oregon. There may be an argument to be made that the wrong kind of firs have grown in the south of Oregon (they're much more susceptible to fire from heat) and that logging and replacement with the right type of firs could be a win economically and environmentally. Somebody with specific knowledge would need to fact check that idea though.

You're still going to miss externalities when you limit the factors you consider. Sure, lumber sellers in Canada could do well and the US could avoid cutting downt heir own trees, but can we really assume that deforedtstion in Canada would be without consequence?

Assuming that stripping resources from other parts of the world is how we got into this ecological mess in the first place.

> What if America decided to import a lot of Canadian lumber?

Isn't that already happening?

yep. in fact, it's the #1 import source

https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/USA/Yea...

How does Canada feel about the state of the lumber trade between America and Canada?

All very interesting and complex questions, I look forward to hearing your findings in 6 years at your PhD thesis defense :^)

Washington has absolutely tons of other lumber forest that isn't part of the Cedar River watershed, and it is still harvested today. We don't need to be logging in our drinking water watershed.

While I agree that we shouldn't be logging in Washington, is the answer really that we should just pay someone else to log in their watershed instead?

We need to not be logging, period. There's a huge difference in selectively felling trees locally and commercial logging. The problem is that we have collectively grown so accustomed to immediate gratification and the appearance of unlimited resources that we've completely disconnected from how the world really works.

If we really want to fix anything meaningful it's going to take people realizing that cheap energy from coal and oil, combined with paying someone else to deal with the immediate ecological damages caused, aren't sustainable approaches to living here.

I did not say we shouldn't be logging in Washington -- just not in drinking water reservoirs (which we don't). DNR managed logging / the Campbell Global Snoqualmie tree farm seem like mostly a success.

Do you know how much logging they actually do there? I haven't kept up with that project at all and can't find any recent data.

I know when they were first proposing the project the state was going to limit them to a couple hundred acre clear cuts and Campbell had their own limit at less than that. Unless that number increased dramatically, I'd say the project is a success mainly because they just aren't logging a meaningful amount of timber at all.

Someone actually just clear cut a few hundred acres down the street from me before the locals ran the investor out of town. It's terrible to see it cleared and it's basically just a massive, open, festering wound now but st the end of the data a few hundred acres of timber is a drop in the bucket relative to what we actually consume.

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