When Tree Loggers and Tree Huggers Work Together ...
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... they saved their town:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/opinion/sunday/loggers-environmentalists-oregon.html
The tree huggers and the tree loggers figured out how to target the logging to help the environment, reduce wild fire risks, save jobs, and keep a local lumber mill open.
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@axtremus said in When Tree Loggers and Tree Huggers Work Together ...:
... they saved their town:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/opinion/sunday/loggers-environmentalists-oregon.html
The tree huggers and the tree loggers figured out how to target the logging to help the environment, reduce wild fire risks, save jobs, and keep a local lumber mill open.
Part of the article is right, part of it is wrong.
I laughed out loud at her large bodyguard crap. Pa Tuck's sawboss, Pepper, would have slapped that man silly, just for walking onto his logging site. I once saw Pepper hit a sawhand with the flat side of a double-bit axe, knocking him out cold as a wedge, because the sawhand had the stupidity to raise his voice at Pepper. There are some salty men, who work as loggers.
As far as the clear-cut stuff, good loggers have known that forever. The problem comes when the bean-counters get involved...With the price of harvesting equipment, it makes more short-term economic sense to clear-cut...But long-term, you get better timber if you select cut. I don't know about Pondersosa pine, but you can cut Loblolly about every ten years, if you intensively manage it.
Talking about big vs. small stuff...Small stuff has wider growth rings and is simply not as desirable. You lose more in the debarking process as a percentage and the final product is not as strong or stable after coming out of the kiln. But the big stuff...Our sawmills down here, generally handle smaller trees than the NW mills do. There are some pines down here the mills won't take, because they're too big. I know, I've got three or four of them.
Now about fire and undergrowth...All that is true. You need controlled burns or selective logging to keep the forest in the best shape. You can do the same thing with free range livestock, with some caveats about what and how many animals you let graze in the forest.
