Timber industry: The last bastion of a healthy forest?
Photo and story by Alicia Knadler, Indian Valley Editor, Plumas County News, June 16, 2008 [here]
Photo: People who know the Wheeler and Moonlight fire areas can easily see that the catastrophic fires were either stopped or extremely reduced in their severity where the forest had been thinned according to treatments prescribed by the Quincy Library Group more than a decade ago.
It’s the timber industry that is the last bastion of a healthy forest, not the environmentalists or the Forest Service – this is what one hears from the residents and other people whose boots are on the ground out there amidst the devastation on the Plumas National Forest.
One such person is timber operator Randy Pew.
He has been sorely tested the past several years by the constant barrage of lawsuits that keep stopping work on the forest.
The most recent decision, made by San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Judge John T. Noonan, effectively shuts down the thinning needed to prevent more catastrophic fires, like the Wheeler and Moonlight wildfires of 2007.
The forests have become clogged with fuel for wildfires since the spotted owl icon brought logging almost to a screeching halt more than a decade ago.
And now, by the time loggers can get into a burned area to clean it up, it’s almost too late to get the job done safely, and it’s too late to harvest any real value out of the timber.
On the Storrie Fire, for example, timber operators finally got the go-ahead from the Forest Service in the third summer after the fire.
But workers had to quit toward the end of the summer, because the dead trees were falling apart by then and too dangerous to work under.
Will the same thing happen in the area of the Moonlight and Wheeler wildfire areas?
It seems so. … [more]