Thought Snacks | Fire Mitigation Loopholes use to continue Logging Oldgrowth Forest
I'm going to start releasing some of my slightly longer video here in a new series I'm tentatively calling 'Thought Snacks', because that's what they are...not quite a full meal, but just enough to get those wheels turning and reflecting about the world we live in.
When it comes to impacts of climate change, wildfire is one of the hottest topics there is days - pun intended! A majority of our forests across Turtle Island have become prone to very violent, catastrophic fires, whether as a result of fire suppression that has allowed stands to become thick and overgrown, or excessive commercial logging that has replaced stand diversity with an even-aged secondgrowth forest.
As a means of addressing these issues, forest thinning has become popular, where trees are felled to increase spacing so that fire, when it does occur, doesn’t have the fuel connectivity to spread and escalate.
In many commercial thinning operations, companies are granted access to previously off-limits oldgrowth forests in order to thin them for ‘fire-proofing’, which in theory would consist of removing the smaller, immature trees to create the necessary spacing and reduce fuel load while leaving the older, more mature and naturally fire resistant trees that would have existed on those landscapes prior to colonization…but unfortunately that’s not often what happens.
This is expensive, skilled work and those little trees fetch very little market value, so instead this thinning is often done by ‘high grading’ these forests, which is a term that means they only take the biggest, most monetarily valuable old growth trees, and instead leave the smaller trees spaced out. This unfortunately does very little to increase the fire resilience and overall ecological function of these ecosystems, meaning that it’s no effective thinning for fire management.
Commercial operations hopping through loopholes and taking advantage of the situation by using either thinning or salvage as a justification to continue logging old growth forest for their own monetary gain, and doing so in a way that actually jeopardizes the health of these lands and our collective future amongst them is just unethical, irresponsible, and shouldn’t be allowed. We need proper thinning efforts done to restore the health, vitality and resilience of these ecosystems first and foremost to create a better, safer future for our communities.
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