Unfortunately it is Worldwide, Man will never Learn

 

If our foresters would replant after harvesting the timber, this would be very helpful in so many ways. Trees can be a super renewable resource when adequate stewardship is performed.

V/R,
nwlivewire

 

Greed and Ignorance

 

As with a lot of things the correct answer would seem to be in the middle between the extremes. Clear cutting a forest is bad, anyone can see that. Soil erosion alone is a good enough reason to not do this.

Consider the other extreme? The old growth forest that so many people say must be protected at all cost and kept inviolate? An old growth forest is a sterile forest. Where light doesn't reach the ground there is relatively little life to be found. New young vibrant growth doesn't get a chance to start until one of the older trees dies and makes room or until a forest fire clears the land just as surely as clear cutting would. Years ago, there was a big hullabaloo about how few spotted owls were to be found in the old growth forests, nobody ever thought to ask why? It's because the old trees weren't providing sustenance for the small animals that owl eat so sensibly the owls went elsewhere. The US has some pretty horrific forest fires because we won't allow people to log off enough forest to make effective firebreaks! so we lose tens of miles at a time rather than some hundreds of acres. In the US I will admit that we are idiots in the conservation of our natural resources in both what we over protect as much as what we don't protect enough. Of course sometimes nature and random chance makes what man does look brilliant! I have read that when colonists came to North America they found when they arrived that 75% of the continents forests were on fire, natives? Natural causes? Who knows? It's what you get with old growth forests. We can do a lot better. We would do a lot better to manage our natural renewable resources than simply to say hands of, nobody touch. Then people like Al Gore who say hands off nobody touch the forest makes a lot of money leasing his land with timber on it to be clear cut. Such is life.

 

Unfortunately most of the deforestation here is done illegally by apparently well connected people (you almost never hear of anyone being caught let alone prosecuted) for profit. They are just raping the natural resources for their own illicit gains.

 

I agree. I used to have open Jungle as my backyard when I lived in Subic. Used to go for walks it was beautiful and peaceful (being careful of snakes, spiders and monkeys etc.) except during dry season when all the animals used to come down from the mountains in search of water and all the snakes followed them... Yikes!