Dale Adreasen’s report on the recent meeting to discuss the future of biomass utilization in Siskiyou County should alarm citizens who believe the way to move forward is to collaborate with those seeking to preserve forests and protect the health of citizens. Instead of reaching out to those with environmental concerns, this group of county supervisors prefers to blame and demonize those with environmental concerns. If they really wanted to make biomass work here these folks would start by curbing their inflammatory rhetoric. Or maybe we should use all that hot air to make electricity!
In addition to using the session to play their tired old anti-environmental saw there were statements by other participants that are downright dangerous. Larry Alexander is reported to have emphasized “maximizing the biomass utilization opportunities in Siskiyou County.” Doing that would create more fire danger rather than less.
Removing too much forest canopy opens the forest to sunlight and reduces competition for moisture. This encourages brush sprouting and tree seedling survival. If the canopy is reduced below 60%, the result will be much greater fire risk 8 to 10 years down the pike. Unfortunately, the Forest Service – and Mr. Alexander’s group - usually insist on reducing canopy to 40% or less and calling this “fire risk reduction” In reality these practices create more fire risk over time. Furthermore “maximizing” biomass production would result in increased landslides and erosion leading to massive delivery of sediment to streams. Among other values, fisheries would suffer as a result.
Supervisor Marcia Armstrong would have us believe that the health destroying smoke experienced by Californians is the result of failure to log. This just repeats what Armstrong has heard from her timber industry backers. But – judging from the extensive fires of 2008 - at least half of that smoke is not from natural forest fires but from ill advised, dangerous and (at times) irresponsible burn-outs and back fires lit by overeager firefighters who do not understand how fire behaves in Northern California’s forested mountains. Furthermore, many of our largest fires “blew up” into firestorms in the flammable “slash” (small trees, branches and limbs) left behind by timber companies. Here’s a partial list of Siskiyou County fires that “blew up” in logging slash: Hog Fire (1977), Yellow and Glasgow fires (1987), Specimen Fire (1994).
Thank goodness for Priscila Franko who introduced a dose of reality to the La La Land our supervisors inhabit. The truth is that the cost of getting biomass out of the woods in most of western Siskiyou County is so high that biomass production just does not pencil out there. On the flatter and more forgiving forests of eastern Siskiyou County, on the other hand, biomass energy generation can be feasible and sustainable.
Biomass generation that makes good environmental and economic sense and which protects public health will be supported by the environmental community; biomass utilization according to the “vision” of our stuporvisors will neither pencil out nor secure that support.
http://shastainquirer.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteMuch of it I agree with. But, there are a couple of old environmentalist talking points that shouldn't go unchallenged.