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 Yes we do, though we readily concede that commercial timber harvesting in National Forests will probably never again be what it once was. This said, we're very concerned about public's lack of understanding of the role harvesting can play in replicating natural disturbance patterns that were prevalent throughout the West before white settlement began. Minus such a harvest program, the West's National Forests are destined to burn in increasingly ferocious wildfires. We are thus major supporters of restoration forestry, which we view as the safest tool for reducing the risk of catastrophic fire in diseased forests. Using proven selection and group selection harvesting techniques, stand density would slowly be reduced, allowing forests to revert to a more natural range of conditions: species composition, stand and age class distribution and disturbance patterns and frequencies. Fire ecologists, whose research we respect, believe such a restoration process would take a hundred years or more.
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Do
you support timber harvesting in National Forests?