Reply #56: What horseshit [View All]

[jpak]

First of all, most of Maine's timber harvest is for pulpwood and structural wood products - not fuel.

Secondly, Maine's timberlands have undergone a rapid turnover in ownership in the last 2 decades. Paper companies sold off large tracts of timberland that had been harvested on a relatively sustainable basis for the better part of a century (before the term sustainable forestry was coined) and many of the state's paper mills have closed. The new owners of these lands in many cases practiced liquidation forestry, where timber was cut off and the land quickly resold. Plum Creek is a prime example of these rapacious land owners that employ these practices. Contrast this to the practices of the Pingree family which has sustainably harvested timber on their family lands for more than 150 years.

Thirdly, the Maine Forest Service recently concluded that modern silvicultural practices can stabilize and restore the state's timber inventory in by the middle of the next century.

Fourthly, most (80-90%) of the wood burned in Maine's biomass power plants (which supply 25% of the state's electricity) is wood waste (sawdust and slabs from local sawmills and woods products industry).

Fifthly, cherry picking forestry data is laughable nonsense. It takes 300 years for a disturbed forest tract in Maine to attain old-growth CLIMAX status. That does not mean that it takes 300 years for that forest to recovery and replace the volume of wood harvested. 20-40 years is the normal rotation cycle and that is dependant on the scale of the cut and the landowner's objectives.

Lastly, my family has sustainably and selectively cut our forest land for more than 50 years. It is not an even-aged monoculture hellhole and neither are our neighbor's lands. And the wood cut on our land has sustainably provided all the heat and hot water for my parent's home since 1979.

Nice fucking try.