Posted on 08/08/2006 11:52:38 AM PDT by george76
Is there research to develop a beetle-resistent pine or import one? I know we lost all our chestnuts decades ago but scientists using some of the few genetically resistant American trees left in the wild and foreign trees have come up with a resistant tree that is now being planted.
I'm about 40 miles away from the Smokey Mountains and less than a half mile from the Tennessee River. The Smokies got their name from all the water vapor that hangs over them for much of the year looking like smoke. This moist atmosphere means we have a lot less severe forest fires here than people in the far west do. It also means downed trees are replaced by new foliage quite rapidly and rot away more quickly than in the far west.
Death of a forest ( more large fires soon across the West )
This is a misleading headline. Fire is a part of the lifecycle in a forest. This was proven in the Yellowstone fire. Small fires, which burn the excess deadfall, are extinguished. This causes a build-up of detritus on the forest floor, increasing the severity of a big fire.
It's the fault of the enviro-whackjobs who want the forests untouched by human hands until Bambi gets roasted, then they want to stop natural selection.
You're right of course, that fire is part of the natural forest cycle, the point is that the process of logging, replanting and regrowth also mimics the same natural forest cycle, without the risk of uncontrolled fires destroying property.
Here's a fun fact to let you know how dry it is here. Earlier this year, the live trees in our forests had a moisture content of 6%. Kiln dried lumber is 15%.
We had a "dry" July here, about 3.5 inches of rain. A year's normal rainfall is about 36 inches.
Speaking of the Yellowstone/ Targee forest:
Because A) the forests consist of hundreds of thousands of acres, B) the eviral mentalists have spent the last two decades destroying all the access logging and fire roads, C) the logging regs make the operations too expensive, D) the dead trees (which could have been logged sensibly with limited clearcuts) aren't worth it.
Nature designed the lodgepole pine to have cones that open in high heat conditions. Those occur in wildfires, or in open sunbaked meadows created by fires or clearcuts. No meadows, no seedings. All mature trees, bark beetle heaven.
Yes and no. The problem in the Yellowstone region wasn't deadfall and detritus. There is very little of that in a mature lodgepole pine forest. The problem was the massive stands of dead trees killed by the bark beetles.
The buildup of these was due to severe fire control of small fires and the change in logging policy that stopped harvests in the surrounding National Forests, which would have created a forest of mixed maturity. Instead, the policies led to a forest that was uniformly mature. Thus, the bark beetle infestation swept through whole forests.
I believe that the best current science is the immediate removal of as many beetles as possible.
Just removing the dead trees helps with the future forest fire issue, but does not remove all of the beetles. The beetles are hungry, so they move on to live trees...which they kill and move on again. Thus the removal of infected trees which are not totally dead is often a wise choice.
Branches with beetles also have to be burned.
I do not know of a beetle resistent spruce pine tree. There maybe some ? More knowldegable people here might say that the pinon pine does better than the spruce pine, but then those two types grow in different envirnonments for many good reasons.
The American chestnuts that survived are being brought back, which is excellent news, but I am not an expert on them.
These idiots really believe the environment is supposed to be static, and any change is evil and had to be caused by man.
A forest should never change...
The global climate should never change...
The environment has been changing constantly for 5 billion years.
Get used to it.
The same dire predictions of fire were made for South-central US after sequential Ice Storms 5 or 6 years ago. The local people cut up the deadwood, hauled it out of the trees, and bulldozed it into neat piles instead. Amazing.
The private lands are managed by common sense and/or foresters who do a much better job.
We care about our lands. Your example is correct.
The public lands are controlled by lawyers and judges who do a terrible job with forestry.
I'm sure that somewhere there lurks a group dedicated to the salvation of the beetle species.
Many of them hide in the Sierra Club, Earthfirst, ELF, ALF, Peta...
You know... I'm a big supporter logging industry, and I've spent a great deal of time in both private and public working timber. The private forests are healthy and well managed, but not as open to the public. I can't speak to all states, but Washington State forests are also very well managed, and provide a lot of jobs to small independent loggers who are not the huge land owners Weyerhauser and Simpson are. Trees are sold by bid, while the land provides valuable recreational access to the public that the private tree farms don't have to give.
IIRC, Tom Brokaw was standing in front of the volcano promising America and the world that nothing would ever grow there again. What a twit.
I go there every year. To be truthful, the forests that have recovered were all replanted by Weyerhauser :~) The untouched part of the volcanic monument, left to recover as nature allowed, are largely still moonscape, or covered with scrub and alder.
Much of the federal lands in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana and Arizonia that I see have a big beetle, dead tree problem.
Some people and communities have built defensible spaces near their homes; many have not.
Even if people build a moat around their homes, it still leaves the healthy forest issue to be addressed.
Thank you for being a big supporter of the logging industry. I wish that the politicans would allow the foresters and other scientists the final say in these scientific decisions.
I know they have a big beetle problem in the southwest, I've seen it. In my post praising the benefits of our state-run forest, I don't intend to vouch for all the decisions made on ~federal~ lands, I do think they've fallen victim to some competing interests. To some degree, some of those lands aren't logged because it's not the most marketable timber. Contrary to what some here believe to be a big land grab, much of the land that ended up federal land was because no one wanted to buy it and do something else with it. Much of it is rugged, isolated or desert. If no one owns it, the federal govt does. And some aren't logged because of public debate that has sometimes not gone the way of smart decisions. Some in the public have been led to believe logging is a harm, when it is absolutely the most environmentally beneficial use of the land, if done right. Carry on :~)
What a stupid article. Forest fires have happened every year in the Western Mountains at least for the past 10,000 years (the last ice age).
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