Post by @nerdyaboutnature

Most industrial logging operations implement some form of clearcut management that aim to replicate ‘wildfires’, and as a result, diverse, complex forests are replaced with racially simplified secondgrowth forests that create all sorts of problems from increased erosion, landslides, threatening water sources, biodiversity and carbon loss, drier microclimates, and increased severity of wildfire. On their own, these are highly problematic ways to manage a forest, but when we consider the scale and frequency that it occurs on, it becomes even crazier. It’s reasonable to say that 85% of the forests across the whole of North America have been cut down in a manner that aims to replicate high intensity fires.  Speaking to volume - that is a ridiculously huge percentage of forests across the continent that have all been lost and made more at-risk to the fires they claim to ‘replicate’. Then there’s frequency. Ancient forests can be thousands of years old yet we replace them with trees that we cut down on 30 to 70 year rotations, with many forests now on their third or fourth rotation. So within the last 400 years, over 85% of the continent's original forest ecosystems have been destroyed to the equivalent of being burnt to the ground in a high intensity fire, in some places four times over, yet we're calling all of this totally natural. The recent catastrophic fires burn on average less than 0.008% of our forests - can you imagine if we lived in a world where 85% of the continent burned to the ground several times over in just a couple hundred years?!  That doesn’t sound sustainable, it sounds like the apocalypse. It’s time we do things differently to do them better, by transitioning to closed-canopy selective-harvest ecologically-appropriate models and community forests managed for and by the people who depend on them, so that we can not only continue to harvest wood and create jobs, but do so in a way that creates healthier, diverse, fire and climate resistant ecosystems alongside our healthy and thriving communities. #forest #wildfire #logging #clearcut #oldgrowth #fire #management #forestry #dobetter #diversity #climate #climatechange #nature #science #ecology