Preserving Our Forests Is Destroying Them

Good fires prevent bad fires!

We need to start a campaign for Michael Wilson for Secretary of the Interior. You are a national treasure. Thanks for your clarity, honesty, transparency and openness.

I have a forester friend that likes to say "People love their forests, they love them to death" Landowners here in Michigan don't understand that we are not dealing with a natural forest. Enjoyed the video!

This is my job in the Klamath Falls region. We go in and mark forest service lands, thinning out white fir and protecting the big old ponderosas. It's happening. I think regenerative forestry will be on the rise.

What I hate in my area of East Texas, and I'm sure it happens other places too, is that companies that clear-cut a forest and replant a single species. For example, there was a strip mining operation here some years back (not sure of the size, but a huge area) that eliminated a huge natural forest of mixed hardwood and pine, then they replaced the whole thing with cheap, fast growing pine eliminating forest diversity and many wildlife food sources. Then they put up banners and signs praising their eco-friendliness because they "planted trees".

I retired 20 years ago as a professional firefighter in the Portland, Oregon area. I remember someone like yourself, a professional Forester, taught us a class, which covers exactly what you were talking about right now. It has been 20 years now and nothing has changed! My point is, the people at the very top, do not want to allow mother nature to take its course, but it will eventually and massive conflagrations will occur.

Forestry major here, UMass '83. Forest management is a wonderful business until people get involved.

I work in a community forest as a forester in Washington State. What you say in this video is absolutely spot on. My job is to thin the forest and to do prescribed burning to help keep more shade tolerant species away from encroaching on what historically open stand like ponderosa and western larch stands. There are however some areas in the forest i manage where we can support stands with a higher density which i believe would be some of our north facing slopes at higher elevations, specifically for northern spotted owl. This channel is awesome and please keep making videos as i really enjoy them!

"Preserving Our Forests Is Destroying Them" Ive been saying this FOR YEARS. If the annual wildfires in National Parks dont allow people to see this, nothing ever will.

Smokey the Bear was the most successful add campaign on the planet, yet it caused the most destruction to our forests. Dang, I typed this before you said it.

Those pines only have a life span of a 130 years. When the forest is too thick, they compete with each other and start to weaken. This invites beetles which attracts more beetles. Log it, graze it, or watch it burn. 30 years ago, we bought a home on 3 acres, it was so heavily forested you could not see the sky. There were a hundred trees 135 years old and a thousand smaller trees in between. There are Ponderosa pines, Cedars, Sugar pines, White Fir, Douglas Fir, Tan Oak, Live Oak, Black Oak, White Oak, Madrone, Dogwood, among many other species of trees including fruit trees and berries that were planted by the gold miners as well as hundreds of wild flowers. I had to use a machete to cut my way through it. The pine bark beetle attacked all the large old pines so we had removed all but 10 Ponderosa pines and I plan to remove the rest of the pines in the fall because the beetles get in them make a weak spot and the wind breaks them off. The Douglas Firs, Cedars, do well but the White Firs are prone to beetle attacks and I remove them as I see them dripping sap. The forest gets healthier and the small trees do well after removing the over growth. Now we have a large open meadow where our dog loves to run as well as a great vegetable garden. The property is still full of beautiful and more healthy trees and the wild fruit trees produce apples and cherries where they did not before. We have good defensive space as well. It's been a lot of hard work but well worth it. We had some of the pines and cedars cut into lumber by a portable saw mill operator. That has been a a great asset for constructing outbuildings, fences and shelters at a fraction of the cost of what we would pay retail. Just a few trees made 6000 board feet of lumber. We still have dozens of large cedars and firs. The Oaks and Madrones make for great firewood and we have at least 5 years worth of split and dried in our firewood shed. People are fools not to clear out the undergrowth, over crowded, and ladders fuels in he forest.

I hate to give a "thumbs up" to such a depressing (but important) message. I know a landowner with several 5-700 acre holdings scattered around the PNW who believe they're creating "refuges" with their well meaning, but ultimately harmful and uninformed forest "management". I will share this as part of my efforts to get them to be better stewards of the beautiful lands they are so lucky to care for.

I agree with you. I’m retired from the National Park Service and now own and operate a forestry services company. It took us over a 100 years ago to get where we are today and it’s going take 200 to 300 years of active forest management and wildfires to get it back to where it should be if that’s even possible. USFS has really increased their timber sales and wildfire mitigation projects only to be met with lawsuits blocking them. Even if the lawsuits stopped tomorrow, so many mills have closed, the capacity to produce timber has greatly decreased and trying to find people to work is almost impossible. We have a long and very challenging road ahead of us,

This mismanagement just destroyed a third of the buildings on Jasper townsite in Jasper National Park here in Alberta. In addition to everything you outlined in the video, the lack of fire had allowed pine beetles to ravage the park’s forests unfettered for years. The beetles occur naturally there, but without occasional fires to keep them in check they destroy vast swaths of forest, leaving thousands of standing dead trees that no doubt contributed to that devastating but inevitable fire.

I´m a forester from Denmark, the absolute northern part of the temperate hardwood area of Europe. Naturally our forest worked, by a lot of small events - wind surge, small fires etc. Our neighbors to the north, Scandinavia is part of the boreal forest, and as such, naturally depending on wildfires for its renewing. These fires would have been big, covering large areas. In modern time, forest management - especially harvest, and removing dead wood - has suppressed / replaced wildfires. One has to accept, that humans too is an ecological factor. - We should take care to act accordingly.

In Norway our forests are choking themselves out. The landowners don't want to harvest or maintain the forests, they are either too old, work in the offshore industry or other jobs that makes it not worth their time. They inherited or bought their lands dirt cheap in the years following the oil boom, the person I get my firewood from bought his land in the 90s for 900k nok(roughly 1.6millon after inflation), today it's worth around 5-6 times that. Price of wood has not changed much since the 90s and that together with price increase means there is no way for anyone new to start either.

It went to clear cutting and replanting to selective cutting. Then along came the spotted owl and logging died off for decades. There is so much under brush and dead and dying fuel source for a fire that it is downright scary...at least in my neck of the woods

This is one of the most impressive videos describing the quandary of the western forests that I have ever seen. Very Well done! Concise and thorough and spot on. I'm a forester in the South East that conducts a good number of controlled burns every year with the primary objective of restoring and maintaining to the best of our ability the pre-history ecosystem that dominated our area. Your task is far more challenging, but such good communication will go a long way. Keep it up my brother!

just to bolster your very accurate hypothesis, I worked for outfitters in the 90's, as a packer/guide, in summer season I would pack,and relocate forest circus around, 120/140 mile round trips in the Bob Marshall Wilderness doing burn analysis as to why the Wilderness was sterile after a burn,, reason, so much fuel,,so much heat, sterilized the the ground, nothing will grow back. THE AMERICAN INDIANS HAD IT RIGHT ALL ALONG, as to forest management. GREAT VIDEO , brings back many great memories, LONG LIVE THE COWBOY

You are correct. I have a degree in forest management from Oregon State. The pines get starved for resources, especially during drought, and cannot pitch out the western pine bark beetles. I've had to cut down some massive ponderosas on my property, due to beetle kill. It sucks.