[RedMonqey]

I do native plant habitat restoration. I can tell you for a fact that biodiversity and productivity cannot be optimized without harvesting.

I understand completely. I live on our family farm and every twenty years or so we harvest the woodland part of our property. Not clear cutting, we take out the largest trees before they die and rot. It opens up the floor and allows new growth to sprout, some plants are crowded out because the sunlight is blocked by the more mature trees of a single species. Cutting allows for diversity. It good for the deer and other animals and allows younger trees to grow and helps prevents fires from accelerating. It also helps with the farm budget.

[Carry_Okie]

Your activities also produce a more productive soil, particularly if the amount of light and disturbance permits the periodic introduction and maintenance of perennial grasses and forbs. Without periodic disturbance, those forb seeds can lose viability and therewith locally adapted alleles are then lost, a big problem in our area.

Alienation of people from wildlife and land management in order to "protect Nature" has to be one of the most destructive urban myths in history. It is an idea destined to imprison the people from lands no longer capable of supporting them, and at the mercy of a corporate fascist umbilical system that threatens their existence, never mind their freedom. Worse, it deprives the land of the people who know how to care for it.

Believe it or not, but my recent translation work in Genesis 4 indicates that this is precisely the original teaching of the Cain and Abel parable. Instead of a murder story, Abel as a people is "killed" one at a time, more likely by assimilation than by violence. The result is that the land around Cain's farm goes bad, and takes Cain soil down with it. Once that soil loses viability, Cain as agro-urban Settler (which is what his name means) can no longer stay, a fugitive and a wanderer he shall be. Compared to the nomad, it is the farmer who is ephemeral. It's taken me over a year to untangle it, but the findings have been fascinating, and might even have been prompted by the beginnings of desertification of the Near East some 6-8,000 years ago.