Posted on 09/25/2006 8:54:25 AM PDT by george76
Logging trucks are again rumbling through town after a nearly 15-year hiatus.
The Forest Service has reopened - or has plans to reopen - numerous drainages south of Eagle Ranch to logging...
There are currently two active sales south of Eagle, with another in the works, said Cary Green, the White River National Forest's timber management assistant for the Eagle area.
The 60-acre Beecher Gulch salvage timber sale, on Hardscrabble Mountain, sold in 2005, and about 500,000 board feet of timber is currently being harvested...
A typical 2,000-square foot, single-family home requires about 27,000 board feet of framing lumber, paneling and other wood products. The Beecher sale could generate enough lumber to construct about 18 homes.
Most of the logging being done on Forest Service land near Eagle involves the harvesting of dead timber - specifically trees that have succumbed to the mountain pine beetle or spruce bark beetle.
Long-lost lumber mills
Logging helps the Forest Service manage the land and resources, but the harvesting has to be done quickly after the trees die...
"You want to get it fairly quick, before it decays," Green said. "Then it's just firewood."
The diseased timber, harvested in time, can still be used for building lumber and two-by-fours...
Most timber sale activity near Eagle ended in the early 1990s... There was a sawmill in Eagle in the 1970s and 1980s in what is now the Bluffs subdivision and a mill in Dotsero until the early '90s.
But because there aren't lumber mills in Eagle anymore, most of the logs from the Eagle-area sales are being hauled down to Montrose to the biggest mill in the state, Green said. Other products go to Grand Junction and occasionally to Silt.
(Excerpt) Read more at vaildaily.com ...
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It is too bad.
The trees could go for homes, the air and water would be less polluted, jobs for small towns...
My wife and I drove over Vail Pass on our way to Grand Junction from Denver two weeks ago. The number of evergreen trees effected by this infestation is distressing ... they stand out because the trees take on a reddish hue, starting near the top and working down over a period of time. The number of trees that are dying is well over 50% in many areas.
It is going to get worse.
Those houses near Vail with all of those dead and dying trees are at risk.
I can not imagine that any fire department could have those homes. None have a reasonable defensive area.
One spark and they could loose hundreds of homes.
The eco nuts do not understand science.
They get emotional, do hateful things like bombs and arson.
have should have been " save "
The Tree SolutionAs Greenpeace expanded to become the world's largest international environmental organization, Moore's star steadily rose and he eventually became vice president of research. Then he did something even more unexpected than joining the organization in the first place. He packed up and quit... In the months before his departure, Moore had begun talking heresy. "The environmental movement had gone astray and lost its perspective on forests," Moore says. "Rather than cutting fewer trees and using less wood, we should be growing more trees and using more wood." Greenpeace branded him an eco-Judas. Now comes the biggest surprise of all. Recently published research suggests that Moore is right. Cutting down old trees could be the best way to thwart global warming.
by Jim Wilson
Environmental Extremists vs. Nature
Patrick Moore
Wall Street Journal | June 20, 2003
Greenpeace has just issued a report claiming that it is better to let our forests burn to the ground than to adopt programs that will reduce catastrophic wildfire.
As an ecologist, I can tell you that this approach ultimately leads to soil destruction, air and water pollution, and wildfires that can kill every living thing in our forests -- all in the name of "saving the forests."
Having dedicated my life to the environment, I am always concerned when the forces of nature meet face-to-face with the forces of politics. This is especially true when the forces of nature are coming in loud and clear:
Approximately 90 million acres of our nation's public forests are at risk of catastrophic wildfire right now. Every year we see millions of acres of forest burn when this could be prevented.
At the Western Governors' Association summit this week in Missoula, Montana, the topic will be forest health. Earlier this month, the House passed a bill that would hopefully improve forest officials' ability to properly manage the forests. The Senate is scheduled to begin hearings on this bill next week.
The only solution in these circumstances is removal of wood to reduce the fuel load. In some types of forests, it may be possible to manage fuel loads with prescribed fire.
In other forest types, especially where there are homes and other property at risk, mechanical thinning and harvesting are the best options.
Forest fire, is the worlds number 1 ONE contributor to air pollution. It adds many time more Co2 into the air than man made causes. And in many cases, such as fire in the boreal forest in Canada, it continues to release because of the continued thawing and refreezing of the perma frost which is rich in carbon.
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