Keeping forests healthy by destroying them

A comments thread at Calpundit, brought me to this Rolling Stone article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

"The White House has masked its attacks with euphemisms that would have embarrassed George Orwell. George W. Bush's "Healthy Forests" initiative promotes destructive logging of old-growth forests. His "Clear Skies" program, which repealed key provisions of the Clean Air Act, allows more emissions. The administration uses misleading code words such as streamlining or reforming instead of weakening, and thinning instead of logging. "

This is some really shady stuff that hasn't really been on any mainstream press radar yet (at least as far as I can tell). What I do know from my education and my experience measuring the ecological systems of northern hardwood forests, is that they are complicated. Logging is not always bad, especially as a replacement for traditional natural disturbances such as fire. But even then, some forest systems (such as those comprised of jack pine for instance) require the actual fire to keep the balance of species. Selective thinning should also involve burning of slash once logged. Clearcutting should never be implemented.

This whole debate about logging becomes really political. It reminds me of some work I did in the Illinois River Valley in Central Illinois a few years ago. Some forest stands on the bluffs were shifting from an oak-hickory composition to a sugar maple monoculture because of a lack of regular forest fires. Sugar maples have very broad leave that shade out the understory, including the traditional oak-hickory seedlings, and as a result, much of the soil of the bluffs erodes contributing to landslides and toxic siltation of surrounding streams. We worked on controlled burns and selective thinning of the maples. The results were dramatic. Huge amounts of dormant understory plants thrived within months.

Then the local Sierra Club chapter showed up, took pictures of us improving an existing ecosystem, and "exposed" us as "loggers" even though our work never went into wood or paper production, nor were any trees fit for production, or even enough to put into production. Up until that point, I had only seen and heard the bad anti-environmentalists, but now I know that it's fucked up on both sides.

So take the article by RFK, Jr. with a grain of salt, please. But take George Bush's environmental record for what it is: piss poor.