Close to one half million living healthy trees to be cut down around San Francisco!! [View all]

[truedelphi]

Close to one half million trees are to be cut down in areas in and around San Francisco.

A healthy living forest has a most natural management system that allows for the dampness of winter rains and then the fog and other moisture available all year long to be held inside the rotting vegetation. Left undisturbed, such a forest system is the reason why a well managed forest usually does not burn down.

Trimming away dead wood and culling the forest so that sick trees are removed
is a good way to manage a forest. This is truly the way to help Mother Nature.

But this latest totally crazy plan will call for cutting tens of thousands of trees, and then - Get THIS! - leave them to dry out and become dangerous fire fodder right where they have been cut.

Full article is here:
http://treespiritproject.com/sfbayclearcut/
From the above URL:

IN BRIEF The plan to cut down over 450,000 healthy trees is an environmental disaster and creates multiple safety hazards. It will not achieve its stated objective of fire danger mitigation because:

1) the hillsides will be made MORE likely to catch fire when living trees are cut down into dead, drying wood LEFT ON THE GROUND as logs and wood chips, and not removed from the hills.

2) fast-growing, flammable plants like thistle, broom and poison oak will flourish post-clearcuts, dry out in summer/autumn, becoming their own fire hazard;

3) thousands of gallons of toxic herbicides Monsanto Roundup™ and Dow Garlon™ herbicide will be applied twice/year in perpetuity, leaching into soil, groundwater, mammals, birds, plants, and humans;

4) hundreds of acres of 2-foot-deep piles of wood chips (20% of the 2,000+ acres of “treatment” area) will be left on the ground. Forests will be turned into ground fuels, capable even of spontaneous combustion.

5) no replanting of any kind is planned, “native” or otherwise. (Not that saplings could replace large, mature trees anyway.) This is large-scale deforestation, not habitat restoration.