Working in a forest that has been high-graded, grazed, and burned in the past is not a pleasant experience.  It is always in your mind how others before you took all the good stuff here, and left the mess with no regard to the future. 

Someone has to do it - restore some sense of productivity to this land.  Someone has to start to deal with the situation, though it may take decades to make observable progress.  A degraded forest will never be the same, will never produce the many benefits of a natural stand.  We must start somewhere to reverse the short term practice of taking and taking and taking and ...  and put something back so we have a future here.

To restore productivity to a forest, we must protect the good qualities that linger and encourage the development of what opportunities still exist.  We must now do just the opposite of what man has done here in the past. 

Things have changed, we must change our ways.  We now see clearly the need to care for our planet - our vast supplies of natural resources are all dwindling - even our renewable resources.  World population growth and the development of a global economy make every person and every acre of land important and connected.  Actions that ignore and/or degrade the future can no longer be tolerated.

In the forest, we must develop our good timber by removing the bad timber that has been passed by  and damaged in recent harvests.  We must rebuild the forest by cutting less than the annual growth, to restore a fully stocked stand of good timber.  We must encourage the natural diversity that belongs here, and protect it for the future.  A fully stocked stand of high quality trees will produce a sustainable harvest of valueable wood throughout the future, in addition to providing many other wonderful benefits.

Forest owners must take the right actions. Only the forest owner can make the proper decisions. Forest industries must understand and cooperate, even though they want the good wood to feed their mills today.  We all have to invest for a while, to reverse the trend of high-grade harvesting, to have a good future ahead of us.  Another decade of business as usual and much of our timber resource will be degraded to the point of hopelessness.

Rejuvination of a forest is possible today.  Demand for low grade wood now makes forest restoration a profitable business in many cases.  Its not as profitable, or as quick, or as easy as taking just the good timber.... but it will leave the forest better for the future.  It takes a cooperative effort between a dedicated forest owner, a future oriented forester, informed skilled loggers, and supportive timber markets for poor quality wood. 

Timber industry PR programs that do not address this as top priority are wasting everyone's time and money.  Put your money where it will do the most good, in the hands of forest owners to encourage them to manage in a future oriented way.                home