Forest Management in 3-D

Posted by jesikah maria ross

March 6, 2007

I've been eagerly awaiting Betony's next post on sustainable forestry. In the meantime, I thought I'd share a quote from a letter to the editor in High Country News a few issues back (it always takes me a while to get through my subscriptions!).

In the letter, a state forester from Montana and the Northern regional forester from the USFS who are co-leads of the Western Forestry Leadership Coalition say this: "Forest management and salvage logging must be driven by sustainability. We live in a three-dimensional world--economic, social, and economic. It's not a matter of balancing these, for balance implies they are separate. They are inextricable and interdependent. In this sense, salvage logging has never been a purely ecological undertaking, nor purely economic for that matter. And if one accounts for salvage via the maintained social fabric and improved habitat, air, and water, the dollar loss that can show on paper is all of a sudden a tremendous gain."

Do folks agree? Thoughts?

jesikah maria ross, Co-Director Saving The Sierra: Voices of Conservation In Action