That’s to maximize the opportunity for graft, and to reinforce bureaucratic rice bowls. It is, in every sense of the phrase, the American way.
tl,dr - “Once a government commits to a project, they are committing to an open checkbook. That check will be written in a system where nearly everyone involved will be compensated more the longer the project takes and the more expensive it becomes.”
This depends again. On what’s really being done.
If it’s just a nice to have to make money and it doesn’t really matter if the trees are removed or not, then this rule seems silly.
However, if this is a selective thinning of the forest to manage it in a healthy way. Prevent disease spread, reduce fire danger, promote specific growth, remove deadwood, etc. Then, this requirement makes perfect sense. None of those can be accomplished by someone who isn’t capable or doesn’t intend to actually remove the timber.
Not removing and thing the forest at all may actually be a worse conservation outcome. In that it could allow a more natural and devastating outcome that destroys the forest, and has additional surrounding impacts. Would still be totally natural, think a ragging forest fire caused by lightning and too much deadwood spreading beyond the confines of the forest to surrounding towns. Probably not the happy goal of conservation, but totally possible.
Without digging into all the details, there’s no way to know which of these scenarios is going on here. Depending on the answer, everything changes.
Should the state forestry agency make exceptions to its published rules based upon how it evaluates the motive of the applicant??
Not to derail but there are plenty of people who would say that that would be a better outcome.
I don’t know that they’re right but as you say forest fires are a natural phenomenon which forests usually cope with just fine and to some extent rely on.
After all your point is that man has to step in to remove all the stuff that fire would remove in order to avoid the fires.
Avoiding fires tends to be more about us than the trees. As you say the ‘surrounding impacts’.
As in, we’ve already meddled with the system so much, we now have to keep meddling in order to keep anything going. Spinning plates comes to mind.
All correct. I’m not really trying to judge if the desired goal here is good or bad or whatever. Just saying that the rules are not simply “wrong” on their own. That it really depends on what the goals are. Given the goals, these rules may be completely correct. We don’t (without digging) know if the rules here are consistent with the goals or not. They could be.
If the desired goal is a good idea or not, is a different question.
In the case of that fire, other things show up too. For instance, have fires in the past been put out before they could do the rejuvenation as smaller fires.
You’re totally correct, we may have already meddled enough to require more meddling to clean up the earlier stuff, or alternatively accept a larger impact of no longer meddling.
The reverse. The published rules should match the goals it wants to achieve.
If the goal is to remove trees, the rules should match that goal.
If the goal is just to raise revenue, the rules should match that goal.
From the summary, we don’t know what the goal was. It’s hard to call the rules wrong, without knowing the goals. The could be fine or they could be wrong.
I doubt if any regulatory agency in the USA knowingly establishes goals which are morally wrong.
And I’m speaking as a small “l” libertarian who would happily eliminate perhaps 70-80 percent of regulations.
The regulators may be dimwitted, heedless of collateral effects, or oblivious as to whether the regulations are producing the desired result. But they’re not -evil-.
After harvesting the area will most likely be replanted with rapid-growing mono-culture trees, resulting is a far less healthy forest, one that will be far more susceptible to disease. (Out west most of the seedlings for replanting come from operations that clone existing trees rather than relying on the collection of seeds.)
Certainly true if the permit is for clear cutting. A tree farm is NOT a forest. But it is frustratingly unclear that this is the case from the article. Just as possible that this is a selective harvesting of trees selected by the managers of the state forest. The fact that an exact number of trees is specified makes me think that is the case. And as I pointed out above, in a case like that, the worst ecological damage is usually from the roads that the loggers put in to take the trees out: logging roads are laid out in a way to get in and get out, not to minimize erosion.
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