‘Time for the Cows and Chainsaws’
As we’ve said here many times, cutting trees is good. It’s good for forests – the whole seeing the forest, not just the trees thing – and it’s good for wildlife. And hunting. That’s just one example of sound – SOUND – management, and across the country the landscape is in dire need of it.
We recently ran across this article from an Arizona paper that sums up many of our feelings on the matter, even though it’s not about upland birds. Hopefully yours too. Excerpts:
> Andy Groseta said ranchers and others have spent years talking and negotiating with environmental groups about how best to manage the forests and grasslands. But Groseta, a Cottonwood rancher and the incoming president of the Arizona Cattle Growers Association, said he believes the time for all that is done.
> “They have had the past 10 years to collaborate,” he said. “It’s time for the cows and the chainsaws.”
> “We’re in a situation today [AZ wildfires] because some of the actions of these organizations [green groups] over the years have gotten us to this point,” he said. “Are we going to sit and watch one of our most valued features of the state continue to explode, or are we going to do something about it?”
> Sierra Club lobbyist Sandy Bahr said it’s wrong to conclude that talks and negotiations lead nowhere. “There is a lot of problem-solving going on and a lot of people working together, focusing on thinning, restoring natural processes like fire and looking to have healthy forests,” she said.
> Groseta brushed [aside Bahr’s examples] as largely meaningless. “We’re talking about a few thousand acres,” he said. “A half-million burned up in four to six weeks.”
> “When you do not thin your trees, do not harvest trees, do not harvest grass, you have tremendous fuel loads that build,” he said. “It’s pretty simple: Trees continue to grow, grass grows every day of the year whether it rains or shines. They need to be harvested.”
> More negotiations, he said, won’t help. “We’ve talked and we’ve studied and we’ve talked and we’ve studied, and here we are,” Groseta said. “We need action.”
> The ranchers have been embroiled in litigation with environmental groups for years. And, as often as not, the ranchers lose.
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The bizarre thing is, it’s not just about environmentalists. Cutting trees and otherwise managing natural areas – instead of merely letting them be – seems to be favored by hunters too. Like deer hunters who think food plots are the answer, instead of nature’s food plots, as it were.
Category: AZ, Forest Management, Habitat Conservation
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As much as I advocate proprer management, and clear cutting, I’d be wary of siding with the cattle ranchers. They are using the forest fire excuse as a wy to get what they want; more grazing lands. Cutting will create pasture for their free ranging herds. Until the cattle are removed, the pasture will not regenerate to early successional forest. Whwn the ranches are on our side for the right reason I’ll give them more support.