http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050831/ap_on_re_us/roadless_forests

Three states are suing the US Government to challenge the Bush administration's repeal of the roadless rule, which i think is huge mistake. If they ae successful, you might as well kiss our western forests goodbye. What really pisses me off is that the Ca. state attoreny general has no clue what the hell he's talking about.



If he thinks the forests here are pristine, he needs to educate himself very, very badly. Humans have effectively doomed the western forests by letting them get overgrown. They are going to die because of disease and a lack of resources. Fire is going to continue to burn down large stands of trees that can recover from catostrophic, stad-replacing fires because they aren't adapted to do so. The repeal was the one hope for active management in stands badly in need of active management.

I really do hope these law suits get on the fast track to nowheresville in a hurry.

Howcome the forests did okay before we got here but since we're "letting them overgrow" they're going to die? Why didn't they do that long before we arrived?

So, you mean they aren't natural forests at all, but forests people have planted over there in the past? Such forests, unless very, very old, aren't generally considered as priceless as old natural forests. BobTheMasher basically already wrote the second part of what I'd have written as well.

Come to Canada, we got more forest than we know what to do with.

So does Sweden.

Overgrowth was one of the leading factors of the Southern California fires back in Oct. of 2003. Dead brush and tree was not cleared away for a long time. Foliage was dense. When the fires erupted, all that dead brush was just a seemingly endless supply of fuel.

I, too, can't stand some of the far out environmentalist policies of DON'T TOUCH A SINGLE TREE. They are not grounded in reality.

Fire: Mother Nature's way of taking a bath

I also found out the politicians of today really aren't different from the politicians of the ancient world(Rome and Greece). I can't remember which philosopher said it, but he essentially said politicians talk out their ***.

FIRE. (started by lightning if you didn't know)

People move into the forest, don't want their pretty little houses and possessions to burn down, so they suppress fire. Fire suppression leads to overcrowded forests. Overcrowded forests lead to two things: disease and catastrophic fires. Catastrophic fires lead to erosion, flooding, soil damage, habitat destruction, property damage, and ugly scenery.

We can't keep people from living in forests, but we can thin. Roads allow this to happen. I can see having some roadless areas in the wilderness, but only if they let fire take its course in the wilderness. Maybe the U.S. Forest Service would take a note from mother nature.

In a nutshell. Insects outbreaks will ravage them as well.

The Forest Service is finally starting to see the error of the decades of supression policy and they would like to do more to alieviate the problem, but they don't have the money to do it, hence the need for some logging, to pay for the managemnet. The other issues is lawsuits like this that stall any sort of progress for years.

And just to clarify, some forest types are just fine with an 80-100 year fire regime, but the key is letting fires burn down the stands of said forest types. The lodgepole pines of the Rockies, the Yellowstone area (the fire in 1988 was the best thing to happen there in years), Montana, etc. are such forest types. The areas in question here have a historical fire regime of 7-10 years. If it's been over 100 years since fire was allowed to do it's work on a large scale, and the forests are used to fore every 7-10 years, you do the math on the fuel loads.

If I remember my APES class correctly, the pests that kill trees kill more or less as many as they require for their survival regardless of how many there are in a specific area, whether they are overgrown or not. Course, its our fault that pests like that got here in the first place from somewhere else. I personally would like to strangle the idiot who brought kudzu over here.

Fire is, as said before, natures way of cleaning the area. The ashes act as fertilizer for the next generation of forests. And if I'm not mistaken a lot of the trees in forests that need's fire to control them have adapted by either 1. having seeds that require heat to break the outer shell to germinate or 2. have seeds under the soil below the fire so after its finished the ashes provide plenty of fertilizer.



I'm not going to argue against that, but I am curious as to where you found that. I don't think I heard anything like that in class, and I just had it last year.

I'm an enviromentalist.

I have yet to trust politicians.

So basically I'm neutral in this matter.

That's all I'm saying about this.

If you were an environmentalist you'd be on Avenger's side, since he's the one that wants to save the forests

They didn't. They got unhealthy and burned down in huge uncontroled fire and regrew. We don't like that. We want the forest to stay healthy and not burn down.

Actually, they did stand, but only because smaller fires kept them from burning down completely.

[QUOTE=Joseph T]If I remember my APES class correctly, the pests that kill trees kill more or less as many as they require for their survival regardless of how many there are in a specific area, whether they are overgrown or not. Course, its our fault that pests like that got here in the first place from somewhere else. I personally would like to strangle the idiot who brought kudzu over here.[/QUOTE]

Just getting at that when the forest is overgorwn, disease can spread more easily, which makes the trees more succeptable to insects. When there are a lot of stressed trees, the insect outbreaks tend to be worse.

[QUOTE=Joseph T]I'm not going to argue against that, but I am curious as to where you found that. I don't think I heard anything like that in class, and I just had it last year.[/QUOTE]

Maybe not quite than long. The US Government started managing forests around 1905, and fire supression was part of the policy from the start, especially once the Forest Service was created in 1914.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Actually, they did stand, but only because smaller fires kept them from burning down completely.[/QUOTE]

Yeah. Fire regimes of 7-10 years are fires that burn the underbrush. The larger trees aren't damaged too badly.

These aren't the same people who oppose and don't understand genetically modified foods? Mutant corn will kill us all.

YES. The fires started inland and nearly burned all the way to the coast. Cali is going to have bad mudslide problems for several years before all that vegetation grows back.


I'm in favour of developing forests if it will prevent another fire season like 2003's.

What is worse--- to let development in there to log trees to keep the forest thinned out, or to let the forest overgrow and have the whole damn thing burn down anyway?

Don't demean yourself too much with scoffing arguments like this. It might be true that the most stupid people are often the most loudest, but their party might still have some deeper point.

He did say "understand" in there.

Only a very tiny minority wouldn't understand even after studying. In most large scale public debates there are those who know what's actually going on and those who don't. Quite often if you really know what's going on, the issue is not anymore as simple as it might seem with the first glance. Like if we are to believe Avenger, the situation is bad because fires have been artificially suppressed for such a long time. This is no doubt a point that "the same people" Echoman was referring to wouldn't know. They just want to save every single tree that should already have burnt down a few times during the last century, but wasn't allowed to.

As it seems to me like Echoman does know something beyond the surface, I just wanted to point out it's no use then to attack using the tactics employed by those who don't know anything. It solves nothing.