Keene and DellaSala on Shotcash Timber Sale

Op-ed in the Eugene Register-Guard. Several points are worthy of discussion, such as this one:

“The BLM Shotcash timber sale violates the spirit of the 1937 O&C Sustained Yield Act….”

The spirit of the O&C Act was — and still is — sustained yield. That is, the sustained yield. BLM isn’t coming close to that level of harvest. Some would say that is a violation of the spirit of the act.

3 thoughts on “Keene and DellaSala on Shotcash Timber Sale”

  1. An interesting op-ed.

    The author’s say the BLM receipts are 24-42% of their timber expenditures. How is it that industry can manage their lands (and timber sales) at a profit? Might the federal government be top-heavy in administration? Might their “need” for analysis-paralysis be terribly excessive/expensive? I once calculated that a local national forest required 6-7 times as many employees per thousand board feet of timber produced as a local private landowner required. Maybe the federal government needs to hire some people with some business savvy rather than career bureaucrats!

    Something else to consider: The most recent Oregon Forest Resources Institute’s Oregon Forest Facts: 2019-20 Edition has some very interesting data regarding Oregon’s federal forests. Of their annual growth, the federal government harvests only 8% while another 36% is lost to mortality. The remaining 56% is added to the live, green growing stock. [I might add that that mortality seems to be increasing with each edition of this Forest Facts booklet.]

    Despite the fact that the federal government controls 60% of Oregon’s forests, it produces a paltry 13% of the state’s timber harvest.

    A question no one seems to want to address: Can the forest’s carrying capacity sustain that much live, green growing stock added to the forest every year? At some point, the forest simply can not sustain all that growing stock without being stressed due to drought, over-crowding, etc. and contributing to the West’s growing wildfire problem. [I suspect the forest’s carrying capacity has already been exceeded in many of the forests all across the American West.]

    Just maybe the BLM is taking some of this into account with the Shotcash Timber Sale.

    Reply
    • “Despite the fact that the federal government controls 60% of Oregon’s forests, it produces a paltry 13% of the state’s timber harvest.”

      How about this one Dick?

      Despite the fact that industrial private timber corporations control 20% of Oregon’s forests, they produce zero Wilderness.

      Reply
      • Sure, but timber corporation produce jobs. Overall, the forest sector included about 59,000 jobs in Oregon in 2013, according to the Oregon Employment Department.

        Reply

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