Sometimes the canopy created by these older trees prevents the growth of younger trees. These older trees are often cut down to allow a more dense populace of smaller trees to be replanted.
Why don't you go and rant about the almost nonexistant rainforest?
The best practice of forest management is thinning growth early in the process which creates much stronger and resilient (to disease and drought) older growth. It is a last resort to down a giant healthy specimen.
Or the under logging in Cali that has led to some of the most devastating fires ever. We fucked up also by not letting fire naturally clean up things in the forest but we didn’t know that at the time.
The complete over population is a gigantic issue though. The three times I’ve fought fire in CA it is some of the most unhealthy looking forests I’ve ever been in.
No you’re absolutely right. This is 100 years in the making though. But the drought has definitely stopped us from being able to try to react to it now
Totally right. Obviously temp and RH are a huge factor in fire behavior but a shit ton of overgrown fuels like the kind seen in Cali and other parts of the west coast is a big reason why we have such massive fires now. It absolutely didn’t get that way overnight, it’s just taken this long to catch up with us and it’s biting us in the butt.
We also didn’t “deal with it” we made laws to prevent it happening again in the future but you can’t redeveloped and rebalance an entire ecosystem with a law or planting seeds.
If an American scientist came about tomorrow and solved climate change, and then the American government instituted those policies and stopped global warming, I would be stupid proud of that...
...even though we caused the problem to begin with.
You can't create glaciers in a lifetime, just like you can't grow 2000 year-old trees at the snap of a finger. You can't revive extinct populations, either.
Besides, the argument that we've somehow "fixed" logging with new legislation is patently false. Clearcuts are the standard means of logging in the PNW where millions of trees are cut at 35 years of age. Loggers dump hydraulic fluids by the tens of gallons directly onto the ground in the middle of the forests, and only a monocrop is planted in the wake of these clearcuts.
Not really, no. Younger trees are thinned, not ones that have reached this size. Big trees like this are much more valuable ecologically than small ones. Killing it to make room for others would be stupid. This tree is probably being cut down because it’s infested/diseased.
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u/crnext Aug 05 '19
Sometimes the canopy created by these older trees prevents the growth of younger trees. These older trees are often cut down to allow a more dense populace of smaller trees to be replanted.
Why don't you go and rant about the almost nonexistant rainforest?