permaculture

["Kirby Fry" <peace@totalaccess.net>]

Hi Mike,

 

I just returned from a gathering where Starhawk (activist / writer) spoke and their was quite an entourage of eco-activists including a bunch of folks involved with tree sitting out west.  "Salvage cuts" of burned or high fire-risk forests are apparently increasing.  It's suspected arson is possibly being used to make the salvage cuts necessary.

 

So apparently clearing and / or thinning is being used as a tool to reduce risk of wildfire - no trees means no fuel for fire, though, according to a research article I read, it's the secondary growth of cleared forests that is more prone to wildfire than the primal forests.  More so in the dryer interior than the woodlands of Maine or our Gulf Coast.

 

I think timber products should primarily come from those regions where trees grow quickly and are in a more humid climate less prone to devastating wild-fire.

 

Our dryer forests (east of the Sierra Nevadas and west of the Appalachians) need to be reestablished in a way that minimizes their chances of burning and yet yields some degree of sustainable timber products.  These forests probably need to be tended to much the way German foresters tend to the Black Forest.

 

The kind of restoration work I could get behind would accommodate the human element as well.  The human / wilderness interface zone is a key area for combining permaculture with the restoration of native flora and fauna.  Just think, if our human / wilderness interface zone was a fire resistant permaculture that transitioned into primitive forest.

 

>>  The Native Americans lived in a robust landscape that was anything but endangered, so they could easily burn it off as far as the eye could see  <<

 

Their sense of manifest destiny.  What I'd like to ask the ancestors is how often did the land naturally catch a'fire.  A study up around the Great Lakes where lightning strikes were high and naturally started fires were suspected of being common and frequent actually showed that lightning strikes only resulted in a region being burned every one to three hundred years.

 

>>  They clear-cut this area with total abandon, and in this particular climate it grows back fast  <<

 

Right, similar to here in Texas with our white and yellow pine clear-cuts.  The ground doesn't stay bare for long and as you mentioned, a 30 year rest is pretty good for an "ag crop."  Doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant, however, and expect the most for and from these resources which really belong to all of us despite our private land ethic.

 

There are also a few tricks to clear cutting which can speed up the regenerative process and prevent erosion.  F'rinstance, leaving bands of trees on contour and cross wind for reseeding, windrowing slash on contour and not burning it, and protecting steep drainages by not logging them.  All of these methods, of course, cost extra time and money, and reduce profit.

 

>>  A few years back when the environmentalists came to Maine they had a fit-- all clear-cutting was bad in their minds  <<

 

And the pendulum swings.  This kind of polarization really seems to get in the way of a holistic solution.  The environmentalists don't trust the timber barrens when they say, "We're going to salvage these trees for the over all health of the forest," and the barons don't credit the environmentalists with having a credible opinion or grasp of the situation.  So both sides end up working from positions of extreme distrust and disrespect.

 

>>  So if you develop a pristine landscape, are you going to let a transforming species like beaver (or in Africa, elephants) take the place of man and turn it into something else?  <<

 

Wherever possible, certainly.  Look at what we can do to mobilize for war, look at what we did during the depression when the CCC was hard at work to reclaim the dust bowl.  The Russians and their antelope are another good example.  Rick, elephants might be a little much for us red-necks here in Texas. ;^>  We might like taking some pot-shots at bison, though!

 

I'd like to know where the money is for private initiatives to restore burned and high fire-risk forests.

 

 

Kirby Fry

 

For the real scoop on environmental and social justice issues check out the archives of Democracy Now!  http://www.webactive.com/webactive/pacifica/demnow/archive.html