Posted on 03/14/2002 1:57:26 AM PST by snopercod
ANGELS CAMP -- Mother Lode environmental groups Tuesday called for closer scrutiny of chemical pesticide usage by Sierra Pacific Industries after a report showed the logging giant applied more than 21/2 tons of herbicide last year on its Calaveras and Tuolumne county properties.
The Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center published results of a study that showed Sierra Pacific applied 5,139 pounds and more than 2,800 gallons of herbicides in the two counties during 2001. The company owns about 148,000 acres of land in the two counties.
The Twain Harte-based group said it obtained the herbicide information from agricultural commissioners in the two counties.
Ed Murphy, a Sierra Pacific inventory-systems manager, said the company does not keep a running tab on the amount of herbicides it applies in each county but that all pesticide use is reported to the respective county agricultural commissioners.
Sierra Pacific uses herbicides to eliminate vegetation that competes with newly planted seedlings for soil moisture and other nutrients. Company officials said herbicides are used after an area is logged and then once again after the seedlings begin to grow, usually within a year of the first application.
The Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center said Sierra Pacific used herbicides last year to treat 6,930 acres of vegetation -- an area they equated to "a strip of denuded forest one mile wide and just under 11 miles long."
Tom Nelson, Sierra Pacific's forest-policy director, called that description inaccurate and said the chemically treated portions of forest "are in pieces separated by lots of forest."
John Buckley, the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center's executive director, said the herbicide usage and subsequent loss of vegetation creates far greater potential for soil to wash into streams and rivers.
He also said the chemicals hurt wildlife, because they wipe out vegetation that serves as food and shelter.
Nelson, though, said the chemicals "selectively" eradicate certain species of brush and grass that compete with the seedlings.
"It doesn't mean you kill all the vegetation," Nelson said. "If the biggest threat to our trees is a broadleaf brush species, we apply a chemical that treats that. We don't harm the other vegetation."
Buckley and other environmentalists disagree. Warren Alford of the Sierra Club said he has walked Sierra Pacific property that was clear-cut several years ago, and although new trees are growing "there's nothing else. You have exposed red dirt and very little is growing. Some common animals are starting to reuse the area, but in terms of bird life or insect life, it's just not happening."
Buckley said the group's review of the chemicals showed Sierra Pacific used atrazine, imazapyr, hexazinone, triclopyr, glyphosate, 2,4-D, clopryalid and simazine -- three of which are no longer used by the U.S. Forest Service.
Matt Mathes, a Forest Service spokesman, said the agency stopped using some chemicals following an environmental impact study done in the late 1980s.
However, Mathes said if the chemicals are deemed safe by the state, then Sierra Pacific is "perfectly within their rights to do what they're doing. The state of California has unusually stringent rules about herbicide use when compared with other states."
Officials with Sierra Pacific, the nation's largest private timberland owner with more than 1.5 million acres, defended the company's use of herbicides, saying the chemicals are used according to the law.
Murphy said the company "carefully applies" the chemicals and uses wider buffers than the labels require.
He also said the herbicide use "has no significant effect on wildlife whatsoever," because there are vast areas of habitat available to wildlife, even with Sierra Pacific's logging operations in progress.
Murphy said although herbicides set vegetation back "just for a short period of time," within three years of the treatments "all the native biodiversity is returned and then some."
Because Sierra Pacific applies the chemicals to its own property, the public has little say about it.
But Buckley said two public resources are "undeniably affected" by herbicides and clear-cut logging -- wildlife and water resources.
"These are both state-controlled public benefits that the public does have both a legal and an ethical right to defend," Buckley said.
Buckley said his group hopes to see the public become more involved in changing state forestry-practice rules to better protect wildlife and water. Possible changes would include limiting the amount of clear-cutting and the amount of chemical treatments that could occur in any one watershed in a given time frame.
Buckley said if Sierra Pacific were clear-cutting only a small portion of its local holdings, his center wouldn't be as opposed to that method of harvesting.
"But because they're applying clear-cuts or a variation of clear-cuts across the vast majority of their logging sites," Buckley said, "the use of herbicides just compounds the problems for both watershed and wildlife resources."
Sierra Pacific's Nelson said the company has monitored streams near clear-cut logging operations in Arnold for the past two years and has yet to find any detectable level of any herbicides resulting from those operations.
Still, Robert Stack, who heads the Jumping Frog Research Institute, said he's concerned the herbicides could end up contaminating mountain water supplies, which feed much of the rest of the state.
"The real question we have to ask ourselves is, is this what we want for our water supplies?" Stack asked.
"If we contaminate our drinking-water supplies at the source because we're starting to grow trees like we grow corn, that's a big difference and a big change. And we will start to see chemicals in the bottled-up water behind our reservoirs."
* To reach Lode Bureau Chief Francis P. Garland, phone 736-9554 or e-mail garland@goldrush.com
And shouldn't the title of the article have been:
Environmental Group Opposes Fuel Management Efforts in the Forest
CSERC defends 2,000,000 acres of the central region of the Sierra Nevada against a wide range of environmental threats from logging, roads, new development, dams and diversions, pesticides, loss of wildlife habitat, and the destruction of wild places.
I notice that "forest fire" is not one of the threats to wildlife that they care to defend against.
The enviroweenes are turning our national forests into an ecological disaster area in the name of the ecology. It was in Angels camp that you see a great bumper sticker. Sierra Club go home. It is funny because the Sierra Club offices are in San Francisco not in the Sierras. Trust me, it is not Mother Lode groups forcing this agenda on the Mother Lode. Note that the Lode voted Republican and the cities vote Demoncrat.
Manzenita (sp?) is pretty. The twisted, red branches are lovely in floral arrangements. My husband flunked his 10th grade Biology leaf collection 47 years ago by identifying manzenita as "mountain brush". (He had just moved to California from Detroit and was taking a 'shortcut' in the leaf identification process that the teacher failed to appreciate!)
I lived in the Mother Lode country (San Andreas) as a four year old and have never forgotten the experience. I'm glad to learn that they are voting Republican there. It doesn't surprise me.
Other than those nonessential asides -- everything you say is true! LOL
Total Area: 6,446,880,000 sq. ft. (that's right, 6 billion)
Total Liquid Measure of Material Used: 358,400 fl. oz.
Total Dry Weight of Material Used: 82,224 oz.
Now if my calculations are correct, the application rates of these herbicides (which include Roundup, Millennium Ultra, Weed-Be-Gone, Preen that are the trade names of some listed) come to:
.0000555 fluid oz./1,000 sq. ft. and .000127 oz./1000 sq. ft.
Anyone who does any of their own lawn care applies anywhere from 100,000 to 1,000,000 times that to their own home lawn. I'm no mathemtician, but I think my numbers are correct. And that's not a lot of herbicide. Just a way of making number lie without lying about the numbers.
Amazing! They must be really wealthy to have bought that much land. Why I'll bet they spend millions fixing old drainage problems, thinning overgrown stands, constructing animal habitat, monitoring animal and pest populations, researching salmonid habitat...
They don't?
Simpson does.
from logging, roads, new development, dams and diversions, pesticides, loss of wildlife habitat, and the destruction of wild places.
So what they'll do is drive out the loggers, let it burn, watch it over run with weeds and wail about a dying forest because nobody has the money to fix it. A few will build their mansions along the edges and get to think that they are hot $#!t until it blows up. Wonderful.
Tough choice. If I were a forest, I wouldn't want the protection, thanks.
Is that all? ;-)
Dr. Bruce Krumland is designing the most sophisticated stream management data integration software in history at UC Berkeley, and Simpson is paying for it. It's costing millions.
expect a phone call to see if you would like to oversee the woods on federal grounds for proper forest management
No thanks. I think he ought to sell off the Federal Lands to firms that want the business of managing it properly. MAYBE I would go for leases, but that's iffy. I would rather brainstorm how to market privatization contracts with the firms interested in doing the work. That would be cool!
Typical enviro-hypocrite.
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