Save The Earth — Hug A Logger

In the green scheme of things, says Investor's Business Daily (IBD), trees are a good thing and deforestation is bad. We must plant as many trees as we can to suck up all that CO2, the pollutant that sustains all plant and therefore all animal life on earth. Old-growth forests must be protected from those nasty loggers.

Trouble is, according to Thomas Bonnicksen, professor emeritus of forest science at Texas A&M University, forests left in "pristine" condition have too many trees and too many dead ones, both of which provide fuel for the devastating forest fires that ravaged California last year.

Consider:

• A recent study by Bonnicksen shows that four large California wildfires produced 38 million tons of greenhouse gases through fire and subsequent decay of dead trees
  
  
• 10 million tons came from the fires themselves, and 28 million tons came from the post-fire decay.
  
  
• This is equivalent to the emissions from 7 million cars for an entire year.
  
  
• The four fires studied involved forests averaging 350 trees per acre where 50 an acre is considered normal. Some California forests have more than 1,000 trees per acre, with young trees growing under big trees, serving as ladder fuel and dead trees and woody debris on the ground.

Bonnicksen advocates thinning the forests so they're less like time bombs waiting to explode. Harvested trees can be turned into long-lasting wood products that store carbon, he notes, adding that it's important to remove trees destroyed by fires and insects so that they don't decay and send more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Reducing the number and severity of wildfires may be the single most important short-term action we can take to lower greenhouse gas emissions and really fight global warming, says Bonnicksen.

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Save The Earth — Hug A Logger

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"If capitalism had never existed, any honest humanitarian should have been struggling to invent it. But when you see men struggling to evade its existence, to misrepresent its nature, and to destroy its last remnants - you may be sure that whatever their motives, love for man is not one of them." - Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Coyote Blog


Americans Indians support oil drilling in ANWR.

Or they could do more controlled burns, or even not stop smaller forest fires..

It's not as though there are only two options.

The problem I have with planting trees is that they seem only want to plant one kind of tree and the forsests in the natural state contained many different kinds of trees not just pine seedlings.

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An informed voter scares the Goverment lackeys.

An American first and always a Conservative.

Absolutely correct....

Continued clear cut logging has proven disastrous, new methods have been developed in Oregon that show a lot of promise....

Of course the industry and it's apologists fight any sort of change.
It's a knee jerk reaction. They fear change because profit is the highest goal they can imagine....

Sad, really. It's such a limited way of thinking.

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"If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you." -- Billy Wilder

"Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied." -- Otto Von Bismark

I don't care. I'll be dead before it has any effect on me. My grandkids will suffer. oh well.

Such high regard for your progeny.

Someone drain the shallow end of the gene pool quick.

Please?