The health of our forests in California impacts the biodiversity of our wildlife and plants, water quality and quantity, fisheries, air quality and climate change, fires, and economies including tourism. Unfortunately, in California several large companies are clearcuttting their forest holdings at a rate unprecedented in modern times.
We need to abandon archaic clearcutting practices in California and use resource selection harvest instead to ensure healthy resilient forests and forest ecosystems that provide timber products and critical CO2 sequestration, water quality and supply, native wildlife and plants, and recreation resources.
Thinning the forest can produce high amounts of lumber, while still leaving trees of various ages behind. Most species of wildlife depend upon a variety of habitat values that simply don’t exist in tree plantations. Large snags and large downed logs are the “apartment houses” of a forest, as wildlife use the standing dead trees or the fallen tree trunks for homes or temporary shelter. Tree farms also lack the fungi, lichens, ground covers, flowers, and diversity of natural forest areas. Thinned forests are less likely than tree plantations to have crown fires that escape fire suppression efforts and threaten other resources.