Yes there are people who still log this way !

People that do things that stuipd pi$$ me off…. I hope they have to live with this in thier back yard. I shure wouldn’t want to. How can people be that DUMB???? I know it is all about the money to them but get real.

Josh

Well there will always be rule breakers and lazy sots that don’t care about the impact of their activities on the natural world. This is why the common values of water quality allow the government to reach out into the private forests to insure that folks are using Best Management Practices in Virginia. It is said to be voluntary application of BMP’s here, but there is a law behind it where the local state forester can enforce BMP’s and fine the loggers for such damaging impact, which include shutting the entire operation down and monitoring the clean up process.

It is also interesting to know that the strongest resistance to BMP’s being mandatory was/is from the conventional forest products industry. This is a right to work state and the basis for logger training is lowering workmen’s comp rates and insurance, not protection of the environment.

There are problems associated with this behavior. Firstly there are only so many public foresters to monitor all logging operations. This is why Va. implemented a mandatory logger notification system where within three days of the beginning of operations that the logging job must be reported to the state forester or be subject to fines. The public foresters will issue a NORA or notice of required action. I was asked once years ago at meeting we made
presentation about modern animal powered forestry how many NORA’s had we had, and I didn’t even know what it was…because of course we had never had one.

So, in Virginia there is a small non-profit group called Virginia Forest Watch that acts like a neighborhood crime watch that reports logging jobs to the public forester so they can be inspected for adherence to BMP’s. This group has volunteers that ride around in the rural parts of the state making sure that logging jobs are on the list of the public forester. It is interesting how many jobs they find that are are not reported. I don’t have recent data on that, but was surprised by how many they found in the beginning of this group.

I am not in the habit of bashing conventional ground level practitioners, since for the most part their work speaks for itself and the private forest landowners tend to make their choices from what they frequently see from the roadside or in the community somewhere. A big ugly clear cut on a mountainside is a landscape scale billboard for what most people don’t want. I just don’t have or choose to spend time to talk down conventional practices.

I would say that for the most part these guys don’t try to make a mess they just can’t help it given the size of their machinery and the requirement to work everyday in order to make the payments of that capital intensive harvesting equipment. I would also say that I know many responsible conventional harvesters that use many modern ways of lowering impact, such as temporary bridges, mats at the landings, geo-textile cloth under their haul roads, lots of rock and such and one really sensitive issue is putting a mud trail out into the paved road…that is a tell tell sign of a logging job that the above mentioned VAFW looks for from the ground.
The biggest problem with conventional harvesting is the silviculture first and the extraction impact as a manifestation of disregard for the environment.

I think the purpose of these u-tube postings are to show off the capacity of these machines to go anywhere and through anything. I would also say that if they are going to pay for those big machines they will have to pull better logs than the stick they had behind that machine…. Of course riding the machine other than in the cab is probably not an OSHA approved personnel
transport method….

The whole point of modern mechanized harvesting is often presented to lower the accident rate of loggers or increase operator safety by “getting them off the ground”. Well they have succeeded in that many conventional loggers are completely out of touch with the earth….

My only excuse is ignorance.

I’d like to know if you also would have worked that way in your own forest? A question that has kept bugging me for years……..
I didn’t know much about alternatives either; when I was a teenager and I saw the mess left behind, I always crinched and wondered; everybody kept telling me though: no problems, that’s the way it’s done and the green will be back in a couple of years…..:confused:
I read a number of books on how the oldtimers logged, even then I couldn’t grasp the difference;
suppose through the years as information kept trickling in, it just confirmed my previous outlook; nowadays I still don’t know much about logging, but the little info I have meanwhile sure points me in a completely different direction than using heavy equipment in a forest 😎

ps.: ever realised how soft, elastic the soil is when you walk in between the trees?