Close to one half million living healthy trees to be cut down around San Francisco!!

[bhikkhu]

13. Lousy article

Its a bit of fiction that dead trees burn faster than live trees. We had that same argument here in Oregon during the beetle-kill problem, when many dead trees were left standing. There was a great deal of popular fear that the dead forests would burn like crazy at the first lightning strike. It was a good education in physics to learn that a dead tree burns much slower than live tree, and if there were fires (there weren't, really) in beetle-kill areas, they would have been easier to control.

One of the best ways to build soil quality is to mulch deadwood in place. There's been a good effort here as well to do that in logged areas, rather than "cleaning up" the forest moving dead wood into slash-piles which are then burned in fall. Which leaves a lot of bare ground, leading to erosion and soil degradation. If foresters mulched their leavings in place it would help restore the soil, preserve soil moisture, and lead to healthier regrowth.

That the whole tree-cutting effort targets eucalyptus - a non-native species with a list of problematic characteristics - leads me to support the plan in California, lacking any other substantial information.