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Exactly what 'management' do you mean? I ask because this is a frequent astroturf point timber companies use to claim that they need to have larger, cheaper tim
by idiotsecant 3y ago
Exactly what 'management' do you mean? I ask because this is a frequent astroturf point timber companies use to claim that they need to have larger, cheaper timber leases.
The forests were fine for a very, very, very long time before timber companies were around to help 'manage' them. Many species require forest fire as part of a larger biological cycle. Forest fires are OK. Let them burn. The problem is that we're trying to insert our human stuff into the forests, at which point all of a sudden they are something that requires 'managing'.
- davidbanham 3y agoI mean, depends on how you define OK. On a geological timescale, sure they’ll be just fine. On a timescale measured in decades to centuries, not necessarily. Fire is definitely part of many ecosystems. Fire every ten years in a sclerophyll forest? Great! Fire in a rainforest during a bad drought? It’s gone now. Might come back after the next ice age. Also, “forest” environments that have been clear felled and replaced with a monocrop at some point basically have to be managed thereafter. Any properly bad fire through there will leave the ground essentially sterile. Seed bank destroyed. Still black years later. Their natural resilience is gone and it’s our responsibility to manage the fire ecology while they rehabilitate in the same way we need to manage the flora back to something healthier. And then of course, anywhere we’ve built human stuff on the interface. We either defend it or we resign ourselves to the people who live there being homeless after the next fire. Leaving aside whether that’s right or wrong, it’s a very different social pact than the one we’ve operated under so far. Any change to that is going to be generational rather than short term.