Smal-Scale Logging & Slowing the Spread of EAB field day

Luke,

You might be interested in this …

http://draftanimalpower.com/showthread.php?t=2786

Well fellows a couple years ago I was writing about this on some board and it seemed dismissed as not much of a concern. Well it was a major concern then and even more widely understood or recognized now.

I would suspect our woods may end up looking like the woods in the countries where the invasive species came from….pitiful.

It can be summed up by the statement – bamboo ain’t wood.

China is now the number one importer of our logs so they obviously don’t have wood of their own to process and sell to us, so they buy ours cheap, process it sometimes on these huge processing ships, dump the waste in the oceans turn around and bring the goods back to our shores to sell.

I think some research should be done as to which silvicultural prescription leads to what invasive opportunities? Not sure who would pay for such research since the results would be somewhat obvious. All the invasive botanical’s are disturbance dependent, so that factor would be somewhat undeniable. Given that common sense understanding it would seem that the situation indicates a need for light disturbance harvesting techniques.
I’m sure you guys get where I’m going with that…..

It is just sad that some of the best minds and hearts will have to waste time trying to figure out how to save what forests we have left, when they could be concentrating on how to make the most of it as an intact ecosystem, but that may not be an option… at this point.

Globalization is certainly an evil agent leading the attack on the millions of years of local ecosystem development. Meanwhile the entire movement toward an exchange that has only benefited a few economically and harmed many in the long term is being touted as the right thing to do. This all coming forward while the word “protectionist” is used to dismiss any concerns that are informed by any local ecosystem steward. It seems appropriate that we protect our local systems of lesser life just as it would be to bare arms to protect the sanctity of our own homes.

Glad you guys are working on all these things, keep us in touch with what we can do to help. Keeping firewood being burnt right where it is harvested makes good sense, as an ingredient in a new decentralized supply system and local resource based economy.

Unfortunately the human race is usually to ignorant, apathetic or short sighted to take care of itself as a species, must less the entire eocsystem. It all starts with denying we are a part of that ecosystem, usually with some line about these concerns being to anthropocentric, another stupid shallow dismissive statement of denial like making protectionism to be a bad word….

Ok enough ranting, y’all have a nice day.

We’ll just go out and deal with simple problems like 7 foot snow drifts in the driveway…. we can work our way out of that situation, I really don’t know what we will do about the scary subjects of this post???

~

EAB & Asian Long-Horned Beetle arrived here in untreated pallets & crating stock from…. I know you already know the answer.

Chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease, white pine blister rust, the list goes on and on…

The bark beetle issues we have out here, its not just MPB, are all native insects and is a result of both climate and lack of disturbance to create different age class stands. Now that the population is large enough they’ll pretty much munch on anything if there is enough population pressure.

On the bright side, there will be some oppotunites fro horse loggers to work on fuel reduction and hazard trees. Reason being is lodgepole and pondo are very prolific when it comes to regen capacity. The regen starts coming up in a sea of toppled trees and the only way to effectively remove the deadfall without trashing most of the regen is with horse logging, preferably running a single.

In my mind, invasives are the single most important threat we have facing our native ecosystems. The native flora/fauna are just not adapted to cope with these exotics.