My local weekly fishwrap's take on logging. Have fun with this one, guys

[TheMightyFavog]

http://www.webmediainc.com/54157PT/PeshtigoTimes.taf?function=detail&Layout1_uid2=13466

LOGGER APPRECIATION DAY

Large segments of the Marinette County and Wisconsin economies are dependent on our forests in one way or another. And loggers play a large role in keeping those forests healthy and productive.

While some misinformed persons in various misguided "conservation" organizations oppose harvest of trees, cutting old trees so new ones can grow is absolutely essential.

Deer prefer young forest to old. They particularly love aspen regeneration areas. Other woodland creatures also need the vitality of a new forest.

Trees, like people, become more susceptible to disease when they're old and tired. Overcrowding is also as bad for trees as it is for carrots and radishes. If you've ever tried to raise those things without thinning them, you'll know what I mean.

What this is leading up to is the March 23 Wisconsin Professional Logger Appreciation Day when loggers from all around the state, including Marinette County, converged on our state's capitol to publicize their huge contribution to the state's economic health.

Lumber may be our only truly renewable resource. In fact, it's so renewable that Marinette County has harvested about $2 million of timber annually for the last couple of years, but the harvest is still not quite keeping up with new growth.

In Wisconsin's state forests, harvest in the last decade or so has fallen to about 38 percent of the sustainable yield, and the record is even worse on Wisconsin's vast Nicolet and Chequemegon National Forests, where hassles from those anti-harvest people are part of the reason only 31 percent of the sustainable yield is harvested each year. As a result, State and National forests are not as vigorous and healthy as they could be, nor are the local economies.

These unconscionable sustainable harvest deficits cause the cost of forest products to rise, and in at least one case a shortage of raw material has resulted in closing of a mill and layoffs of workers in an already economically depressed area.

Think what harvesting timber when it's ready could do for the state and national budget deficits! Contrary to the hype put out by some groups, tree harvesting can and should be a money-generating venture for state and federal owners as much as for private land owners. If they're not, somebody is doing something very wrong.

And the products our harvested forests make possible are used by nearly every one of us, every day.

One cord of wood measures 4'x4'x8', or 80 cubic feet of solid wood, allowing for air space. An average single-family home contains 12,975 board feet of lumber (about a semi-trailer load), and up to 9,500 square feet of panel products. Pine saw logs in the county recently sold for $125 per 1,000 board feet. Economical? You bet!

In a recent Marinette County timber sale, mixed hardwood sold for $156 a cord and pulpwood sold for around $55 a cord. Just look what you can make with one cord of wood: 7.5 million toothpicks

942 books, a pound each

61,370 business size envelopes

460,000 personal checks

2,700 copies of an average 35-page daily newspaper

4,384,000 commemorative-size postage stamps

89,870 sheets of letterhead stationary

12 dining room tables, each with seating space for eight

[ewagner]

1. Riiiiigghhhtttt.

Ask the loggers how long the White Pine Era lasted.

It wasn't management, it was pure out-and-out rape....given their way, these guys would take every last tree without batting an eye....

NOTWITHSTANDING that alternatives for the consumption they list need to be found....

[htuttle]

2. "cutting old trees so new ones can grow is absolutely essential."

Golly, whatever did the Earth do before we got here to cut the trees? How did it function without our 'help'?

Seriously, a tree farm is not a forest. A forest is much, much more than a tree farm.

I have no problem with tree farms. If some farmer wants to plant pine trees instead of corn, more power to him, but it's not a forest by any means.

[Poor Richard Lex]

3. well there is something to responsible forest management

and that is what the article implies, but I am not sure that laws are that strict in the US, maybe it is a state law not federal.

taking a few trees per acre is much better than clearcutting.

hey whatever happenned to that girl who sat up in that seqioua for a year or so - Butterfly something was her name, I think - cant remember at the moment.

[Massacure]

4. New forests could only grow when the old ones died.

Humans are just speeding up the cycle. Loggers in WI are required to plant a tree anytime they cut down an old one. It makes logging in the state very sustainable.

[Broca]

6. I own about a 100 acres of woods here in WI but

have never heard of any law requiring Loggers to plant a tree anytime they cut down an old one. I had some select cut a few years back. I walk through many logged areas every year and have never saw a tree planted. It is possible that overall the number of trees planted equal the number cut, but remember that many may not mature. Tree planting tends to be monoculture crops such as red pine. These are not forests but tree farms; they lack the biodiversity of forests. It is like cornfield compared to a native grassland.

[Gregorian]

5. Somewhat true. But somewhat a crock of shit.

If it weren't raining, I'd go take a picture of all the clearcutting around here. Just see how many animals liver THERE. And not just that, but the disruption that occurs as they log not only that piece of forest, but the one next door. The animals are GONE.
Now I admit that trees are a renewable resource. A good one. But not for a population of six billion. Therein is the problem. I've logged. I've milled my own lumber. But I didn't clearcut half the fucking planet.

I want to mention something that noone has talked about yet. I believe that clearcutting is a source of global warming. I have extensive experience in forests. Under the canapy, the ground temperature can be 50 degrees when it's 100 outside. But even on a cool day, the ground can be blazing hot without the trees.

Clearcutting is the only economical way to log now. We are, and have been for a long time, supplying way too many users. It's the number of users. Logging isn't a crime. But it is, when you are trying to supply too many people. There aren't enough forests for the number of people who are crying out for wood.

I'm changing my sig line now. It's the population, stupid.

[htuttle]

8. My solution: ban all logging on public lands

Can you think of many other industries, other than mining, which has the same issues, where private companies are allowed to come into national forests, public land, and destroy and remove the resources? (not to mention that the public pays the cost of building and maintaining logging roads, too).

If logging could only be done on privately owned land, lumber would get MUCH more expensive. (since it takes so long to grow a 'crop'). Right now, they put the 'debt' of waiting 10-15 years for another crop on the general public.

However, that would mean we'd have to stop using new wood for stuff like toilet paper, newsprint, paper cups, etc, since it would be too expensive. Given that they cannot FIND enough uses for recycled paper right now (since new wood is artificially cheap because it's subsidized with public land), it would solve two problems at once.

Use new wood for long-term, durable purposes (and we'd have to pay it's true cost), and use recycled paper and wood for disposables. The 'magic of the market' would take care of this, if only these resources were no longer subsidized by the use and destruction of our public lands.

It would also allow national forests to function as mostly untouched biodiversity 'banks' (as I think they were intended to do), assuming they were large enough.

[Broca]

7. I should also point out that all the products listed

can be produced with industrial hemp including the
12 dining room tables, each with seating space for eight. This would be a boom to the farmers. But the timber barrons can afford more bribes and more lobbyists.