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Spotted Owl – Crazy about that?


This is an excellent article on the historical context of forestry, forest management and wildfires published by CALIFORNIA GLOBE

https://californiaglobe.com/articles/two-words-explain-californias-wildfire-woes-spotted-owl/

Some things in life are difficult to understand and explain. For example, the theory of relativity or the origin of black holes. However, other things are easy to grasp.

For example: The wildfire disaster in California. Over the past five years, firestorms in the summer and fall have killed dozens of people, wiped out homes, businesses and entire communities, burned millions of acres of forest, caused billions of dollars in property damage and wash away countless animals and wild animals.

The cause of all this wreckage is easy to determine. It’s as simple as two words: spotted owl.

During the 1980s, California was a superstar lumber producer. Nearly 150 sawmills produce 4 billion feet of wood planks a year, ranking first in the country. Hard-working loggers had money in their pockets, their families prospered, and small timber towns hidden in the northern woods boomed.

Enter the spotted owl. A night-flying owl in the deep woods, the owl has become a cause of addiction for those who have never seen and never will. When the government moved to protect it as a threatened species, it unleashed an ugly crisis on the environment, with California state and US Forest Service officials fighting loggers and the timber industry.

The fight to protect the habitat of owls. After lawsuits, protests and even violence, environmentalists won.

https://californiaglobe.com/articles/two-words-explain-californias-wildfire-woes-spotted-owl/

Kevin Nelson compiled a report that is both comprehensive and concise. Very good.

This is a very readable article and ends with a description of how California has drawn itself into a nasty corner and with little hope of getting out of it.

Also, the knowledge base is almost extinct. Fewer and fewer people know how to do what generations of loggers families have taken for granted, and those who retain these skills are often elderly people who have run out of time.

The irony here is that environmentalists, the state, and the USFS are now in need of the very industry they have been vilifying and fighting for. According to Dan Porter of The Nature Conservancy, the critical shortage of timber industry infrastructure and know-how is “one of the biggest barriers to scaling up ecological forest management”.

So let me make sure I have this permission:

You identify a “problem” and then destroy a lifestyle as a means of solving that perceived problem. But then your “solution” creates an even bigger mess, sending you back to the very people whose communities and livelihoods you dumped, asking them to help you with his latest creative ideas. But these small American towns have established themselves as an endangered species.

Meanwhile, has anyone seen a spotted owl recently?

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