Two Words Explain California’s Wildfire Woes: Spotted Owl

[DefiantMassRINO]

This article offers a corollary for other industries environmentalists are trying to destroy, like energy and fishing.

https://californiaglobe.com/articles/two-words-explain-californias-wildfire-woes-spotted-owl/
Two Words Explain California’s Wildfire Woes: Spotted Owl
The owl became a cause célèbre for people who had never seen one and never would
By Kevin Nelson, October 13, 2022 10:41 am

Some things in life are hard to understand and explain. The theory of relativity, for example, or the origins of black holes. Other things are easy to grasp, however.

Such as: California’s wildfire woes. In the past five years summer and fall firestorms have killed dozens of people, wiped out homes, businesses and entire communities, torched millions of acres of forestlands, caused billions in property losses, and swept away untold numbers of animals and wildlife.

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

In the 1980s California was a superstar timber producer. Nearly 150 sawmills churned out four billion board feet of lumber every year, leading the nation. Working-stiff loggers had money in their pockets, their families thrived, and little lumber towns tucked away in the north woods boomed.

Enter the spotted owl. A night-flying denizen of the deep woods, the owl became a cause célèbre for people who had never seen one and never would. When the government moved to protect it as a threatened species, it ushered in an ugly slugfest pitting environmentalists, California state officials and the U.S. Forest Service against loggers and the timber industry.

The fight was over protecting the owl’s habitat. After lawsuits, protests and even violence, the environmentalists won.

And, in the process, delivered a death blow to an entire way of life. Sawmills shut down, loggers lost their jobs, and those little backwoods lumber towns went from boom to 1930s Depression-era bust. ...

[roamer_1]

*FACTS*  good article.

But now, the thinking in the smart set appears to be changing. “Sometimes,” a director of the environmental group Save the Redwoods League told Little, “the best approach requires using a chainsaw.” Along with controlled burns, selective thinning of drought-ridden trees and underbrush in California’s densely packed forests may be the best way out of this crisis. Less woodsy material means less material to burn, rendering the fires that do occur less potent.

That’s the hope anyhow, but there’s a catch. California’s once-mighty timber industry has become a shell of what it once was. Over half the sawmills from the old days are gone. So, too, are scores of industry-related support businesses. The ranks of professional foresters have been decimated, and the same holds true for the loggers—the men who actually wield those chainsaws.

Additionally, the knowledge base is almost extinct. Fewer people know how to do the things that generations of logging families once took for granted, and those who still retain these skills are often old-timers whose time is running out.

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

Nearly two generations without sawyers, loggers, logging truck drivers, cat skinners, skidder operators, log loader operators, without road crews to build the roads (another whole industry of similar size), without lumber mills, without paper mills - All that will not come back at the snap of the fingers.

And it will not come back on a whim. It will take steady commitment toward attractive timber sales,  and toward the generations to come before the folks with the money will invest, and before the people with logging in their blood will believe it's back.

The damage this did to the West is incalculable.

[roamer_1]

And BTW, y'all are living in the proof that the dingbat bunny huggers and tree huggers were damn well WRONG.

[GtHawk]

Ironically more damage was done to the Spotted Owl and their environs, not to mention all the other critters and PEOPLE, by the demands of those worshipping Gaia than all of the loggers. Loggers who kept brush and dead trees under control while building logging roads that fire fighters used to gain access when there was a fire. Of course the green lunatics are more than happy to sacrifice untold numbers of raptors, pollinators and other animals at their altar of stupidity to push their agenda, after all when they do it it is for the right reasons.