OK, another comment that should have been a diary…. the below was a comment I wrote today in a diary that got kinda long. So, to make up for the two hrs I should have been working, I figure if I do this more people might read it.
(And credit where do for the pic above; I think I grabbed it from Kos diary).
My comment was in response to Recontext, who was responding to Besame, the writer of the diary: Big Basin redwoods announce “New of my demise has been greatly exaggerated”. Recontext essentially said that the recent fires in CA were greatly damaging; I actually agreed, but had a few more thoughts.
My Comment:
I understand your concern, and your impressions are real. However, I have to object to your statement that “ecosystems have been destroyed”. Nope. They have been “perturbed”, by that I mean significantly disturbed. Forest ecosystems and the trees within them in the western US have evolved with fire. Much more recently, humans entered NA around 10,000 years ago and used fire as tool to manage landscapes for their benefit.
That was before we had our present climate — then, much of the PNW was drier and colder; it was still changing from the waning of the ice age. The forests outside of Seattle back then were more like high elevation forests east of the Cascades — lodgepole pine and Engleman spruce, instead of hemlock, Douglas-fir, and western red cedar.
Europeans entered the picture and pushed a trend of deforestation for agriculture or younger forests under first extraction and then timber management objectives, and fire exclusion. Decades ago we began trying to reintroduce fire on mainly public lands, much in the way the Native Americans did for thousands of years, but in a limited fashion.
So, today’s forests are products of all of these factors. Kind of amazing that the remnant old-growth redwood forests (and some old-growth coastal cedar/hemlock/Douglas-fir forests) have individual trees that are thousands of years old.
We are not destroying our forests, unless we utterly remove them and pave them over; we turn them in to tilled fields, orchards, or vineyards, but even in these cases, soils derived from forests could support them once more if we chose to allow it (such as in much of the Northeastern US).
There is no doubt we are significant drivers in radical change within forests. If we want the “free’” environmental services we have come to expect from them, we are going to have to listen to forest ecologists that do not have an economic incentive affecting their opinions. And then we would have to act effectively on them; in spite of Dump objecting to Dr. Fauci “dictating what we must do”, scientists do not, and can not do that; they have no power except to suggest courses of actions given an objective or objectives.
My vision for the future would be landscapes managed at the scale of million acre plus watersheds, where all ecosystems are managed to preserve ecosystem functioning, biological diversity, and the whole range of plant habitats in various stages of maturity (my objectives); this will maximize those environmental services that allow us humans to have productive healthy lives. It would not preclude development, or demand complete preservation; that would hardly be practical. In fact, some watersheds are large enough that keeping most development out of multiple millions of acres would be a good way to meet objectives.
Instead, what we hear are just more Trumpian fever dreams about leftists wanting to preserve rats and bugs over people; you know, I think I am actually remembering James Watt installed under Reagan; the current ass at Interior just lies about what he is doing or says nothing at all, while merrily selling off energy lease at fire sale prices and ignoring the public will on ecosystem management and the preservation of environmental quality — even though that is part of his job description.
Clinton actually took a stab at actual ecosystem management with his National Biological Survey; for a few months back then there was excitement among ecologists about actually getting things right, staring with an assessment of the state of the environment, including all the critters and plants in it. But then the Repub Congress shut it down. Why would we want to know about that crap? We just need to know where the resources are we can extract. End of story.
The Spotted Owl Plan in the PNW , another Clinton initiative, is still policy; but it likely will be thrown out eventually, not for lack of trying already; without it, pretty much all old growth forests within the range of the NSO in the PNW were predicted to have been logged by now (millions of acres). It also had the effect of waking people up to why they wanted to maintain OG forests everywhere, not just for the NSO, with some success.
It can be done (effective ecosystem management), but not if our main motivations are short term economic gain. The idea that environmental protection and maintenance of ecosystems is somehow in opposition to our needs and wants is simply wrong, and the current crop of Trumpies doing damage as public officials are either too stupid or don’t care, and are making things worse.
Example: Trump and his pressing problem of shower heads ??!!. Uhh, so, any recognition that fresh water resources are in short supply all over the US and the world, and the trend is in the wrong direction? No. The only problem is the water efficiency regulations cause him trouble washing his beautiful hair, doncha know. They serve no purpose; all that fresh water is flowing to the sea wasted — many people don’t know that.
In CA, more frequent and hotter wildfire will result in less predictable, and probably less long term, water yield form forested watersheds, because they will be in younger trees or non forest. One of those things that can be proven with facts.
Lighter more frequent fire retained most of the larger trees, the structure of the old-growth forest, and led to more capture of precipitation (if near the coast); the result: more even flow out of high quality water. That is not to say there were not widespread, hot fires in the past, the ones that do a reset by killing nearly all (but not all) trees over miles of landscapes; there were, but they tended to occur at wider temporal intervals, and in different areas, not chronically in overlapping areas.
So, you still have forests — younger, storing less carbon, lower quality timber, fire prone, full of invasive plants, missing some species, lacking wilderness quality, and producing “free” environmental services that we don’t like as much. Environmental services like water yield and carbon storage: yield that comes as floods and mudslides or droughts, warm water that kills salmon; forests that are trending down to be net sources of carbon instead of sinks, and storing a tiny fraction of the carbon than they once did. If we like those results, we are doing a great job.
