A forest tinged in red
.
A forest tinged in red
.
Natural progression....
Why haven’t we heard an EnviroNazi outcry about saving “Old-Growth Forests”???
We can allow beetles to destroy the trees, but never, ever, can we allow any loggers harvest them in any economically sustainable way.
sad.
reminds me of the 70s.
i’m native to the front range.
When I was in CO last summer, I saw some of this. The trees around Lake Dillon looked pretty bad. It’s sad that the beetle population has blossomed to the point of being out of control.
No, seriously: part of the reason they're so prevalent now is because of a lack of forestry management for many years. I keep telling people that trees are living things, explaining the life cycle, explaining the various diseases and pests that kill weakened and elderly trees already nearing the end of their life cycle, but year after year the environazi cry has been NO NO, DON'T TOUCH! Now the beetles have spread unchecked for years, adding to the already high risk of fire due to the buildup of normal deadfall at least tenfold. Same thing has been happening in Florida...though Governor Bush had badly infested areas logged off despite the environazi temper tantrums, in order to help contain the pests and (and this is a Republican) SAVE THE TREES. Which was exactly the opposite of what the environazis were doing.
If this is part of a natural cycle then it probably provides a useful function.
I don’t know the particulars of this Colorado situation.
But I can’t help but wondering if this isn’t a replay of the Southern
California situation.
I remember about five years ago when lots of old, dead, bug-infested trees
started going up in conflagrations east of Los Angeles and down near
San Diego.
IIRC, it was on either KKLA (99.5FM) or KRLA (870 AM) that a forestry
expert related how he’d served on a major study group and had said
“if we don’t start cutting down most of the dead/dying trees, we’re
going to have a major, disasterous fire”.
Of course, there was no action taken on his prediction...it was deep-sixed
by a “strange-bedfellows” coalition of environmentalist NUTBURGERS
and homeowners that feared that even sane clearing of dead trees might
drop the value of their homesteads.
When this forestry expert related his experience, he paused once and
gave one of the longest, most anguished “sigh”s I’ve ever heard on
talk radio.
But he was just too classy to say “I told ‘em so” given his prediction that
came to pass.
the pine beetle epidemic that has killed nearly half of the state’s lodgepole pine trees ....Ritter said the outbreak is part of a natural cycle
About 44 percent of the state’s 1.5 million acres of lodgepole pine are now infested by beetles, or about 660,000 acres.
the bulk of the thinning falls to the U.S. Forest Service, which plans to treat 18,000 acres of dead trees this year. Rocky Mountain Regional Forester Rick Cables said he wishes the agency could do more, but....
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What a travesty! Half the trees in the state are dead, and the Feds can only deal with a small fraction of it.
Years ago at a logging conference, i asked Alton Chase why the enviros won’t admit that the balance of nature theory is garbage...this was after the Yellowstone fires..
He stated that the enviros are blinded by dogma, and have deluded themselves into the belief that catostrophic fire is somehow natural and good for the animals.
This theory ignores the fact that we have interrupted the natural fire regime for the last 100 years. Unfortunately this misguided policy will not end until we get a truly major catostrpohy along the lines of the great 1910 fire that burned three million acres in 36 hours....only this time, it will kill thousands, and not hundreds......