Better forest management sought after Rim fire

A logging machine moved across a Tuolumne County hillside last week, felling blackened trees at a rate of nearly 1,000 a day. Salvage logging has begun on the Rim fire, an early step in a restoration effort that will take many decades. But the task at hand goes far beyond the 250,000 acres of timber and brush that have burned in the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park. The Rim fire has renewed calls to better manage forests all over the Sierra Nevada so they can resist fire while providing timber, habitat, water and recreation. "Otherwise, the result will be more Rim fires," said Steve Brink, a vice president at the California Forestry Association in Sacramento. "And the sad thing is, they will be common up and down the Sierra." He spoke Thursday on a tour bus making its way out Cottonwood Road to a portion of the burn near Cherry Lake. It was chartered by the Tuolumne County Alliance for Resources and Environment, which long has promoted logging as a way to thin timber stands dense with fuel. The group often has clashed with environmentalists, but many of the latter agree in general on the need for salvage logging and replanting on much of the burn. The Tuolumne County Alliance for Resources and Environment got rare permission to get inside the still-closed fire area for the tour. The visitors saw large expanses where the flames wiped out nearly all of the vegetation, along with areas with low to moderate scarring and a prospect for faster recovery. They watched the logging machine at work on land that Sierra Pacific Industries owns within the national forest boundary. Salvage logging on private and public land will produce raw material for sawmills in volumes that have yet to be determined, but likely will be huge...more

You are not going to obtain better management as long as the current laws, and the judicial interpretation of those laws, remain in place.  

Congress has given the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to waive some 30+ environmental laws to speed construction of the border fence.  Congress should now grant similar authority to the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior for the purpose of thinning our forests.  Otherwise, save the picture above, for it is an image of our future.