hi, joe. a few counterpoints to some of your observations. >Currently more forest area is lost to natural
causes than logging.< well, truly this is how it should be, so long as the 'natural' causes are not anomalously numerous due to 'unnatural' i.e. human-made environmental imbalances. >Trees are renewable and the lumber industry now replants more trees than it takes.< how many of these replanted trees survive to maturity? is there independent data on this? the industry should be planting, at a minimum, three trees for each that it cuts for a reasonable assurance of achieving a net balance of 1-to-1. >Granted a mature forest supports a >different ecology than a second growth but for instance studies have >shown that there is more food for bears in a clearcut zone than there is >in a mature forest.< i don't see the relevance of this. you could make the same argument for garbage dumps. does that mean we should be sending all these huge barges full of waste to the canadian wilderness? who conducted these studies? and who funded them? >Clear cutting is still bad for what it >does to soil retention on slopes but consider that a mature forest WILL >burn eventually one hot dry summer during an electrical storm and all >the lumber will have gone to waste and a lot of CO2 and particulate >would have gone into the air.< forest fires have been sending co2 into the atmosphere for millenia, but that isn't what has precipitated global warming. furhtermore, in the case of north america, fire has been one of the primary evolutionary forces. the ecosystem of this continent has a sort of co-dependency with fire; sort of like a purging/renewal mechanism. in fact, there are certain conifers which need the high tempatures of a wildfire for their cones to open and release the seeds. >I have also been told that trees >contibute relatively little oxygen to our atmosphere compared to the >majority which comes from algae in the sea. Is this true?< i don't know about this, but i've kind of always assumed that a plant's 'oxygen cycle' and 'co2 cycle' pretty much cancel each other out. but there's no denying that trees sequester large quantities of carbon (breaking down co2 to do so, no?). i love wood, so i don't think i'd want to see the lumber industry just disappear. but logging is hardly practiced in an ecological or environmentally friendly way, even in our countries with our. . .ahem. . .lofty environmental standards. the cases of truly thoughtful, careful, minimally disruptive logging on this continent are precious few. they can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand, and probably don't even account for 1% of the total logging activity. >What is really >needed is to put the brakes on the pervasive need for expansion that our >capitalist system requires in order to sustain itself.< couldn't agree with you more. -chris _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
