Quote:
Originally Posted by Bushleague
With all due respect, this is no longer true. The logging industry claims that it is "simulating a forest fire" with these bigger cutblocks, SRD is onboard with reducing edge habitat due to it "hurting song bird populations". There may be other reasons, but that is the one that I was quoted when I asked why SRD is letting the mills make cutblocks that one can not even see across, and not just for salvage.
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Sorry, just to clarify, the non-salvage cutblock size has grown considerably in the last few years. The timber industry claims that this simulates the more natural condition which is created with by forest fires, checkerboarding and continuity are considered to have been "a flawed theory". SRD claims that the prevailance of "edge species" has hurt populations of non edge species, and the examples quoted to me were all songbirds. The flip side of the coin is that the timber industry is supposed to leave larger tracts of uncut timber. This might have worked if implemented at a point where large tracts of uncut timber still existed in abundance up here, but at this point they are few and far between in many areas unless one is counting cutblocks grown over with various states of immature forest as "uncut timber".
I work in the timber industry, and I know and deal with a large amount of forestry workers on a regular basis. And as an obsessive explorer of big timber I spend a lot of time looking at the end result. Basically, all I am seeing is the destruction of anything resembling mature forest, and all I am getting is a bunch of excuses from both sides involved. Some of the SRD people I've talked to straight up admit that attempts to implement limitations on the lumber industry's current logging practices have been shot down, apparently the mills hold more sway with those making the decisions than SRD does.