00:00For generations, in the public imagination, a healthy forest was thought to be one untouched
00:07by mankind.
00:09As we're beginning to learn, that was never the case.
00:13Something that's really interesting is many people look at our forest and they see these
00:17dense green forests and they think that's a really healthy forest.
00:21And then you see this more open forest with spaced out trees and you think that's the
00:26unhealthy forest.
00:27And that may or may not be the case.
00:30Sometimes the unhealthy forest is the really dense forest and it is a result of our past
00:35forest management.
00:38So now you have a state like California with 99 million dead trees.
00:47And you have these giant combustion fires that have never happened before.
00:52And again, when the Indians burned, they burned the brush and much of our forest, particularly
00:57in the West, the floor was grassland, not brush.
01:02If we don't have loggers removing some of this wood, our forests will burn down.
01:07Nobody tried harder to make people understand that if they removed all management from these
01:12forests that we were going to have a terrible crisis on our hands.
01:17And everything that I've said for the last 30 years has come true.
01:23Of course we want to preserve old growth, but is that exactly what we should be doing?
01:29Or should we be going in and thinning out some of the lower-lying vegetation to make
01:34sure that the old growth that we think we preserve doesn't just get burnt to a crisp
01:40in a high-intensity fire?
01:43I mean, we're still struggling with those questions now.
01:47There's no question.
01:48We need to treat, mechanically and through prescribed fires, many more acres than we
01:53are today.
01:55By the late 70s and early 80s, there was a lot of distrust around our logging programs.
02:01And unfortunately, I think people are associating that with what we're trying to do now.
02:08We can do a better job of rebuilding some of the trust that we've lost with some of
02:12the members in our different communities.
02:15And I think that's the edge that we want to try and reach now in bringing people together.
02:21The biggest impediment is literally you have four or five decades behind the curve.
02:27So you're looking at remedial solutions that are not only have to be gigantic in size and
02:35scale, but they're going to be really expensive.
02:40We now know at least part of the solution.
02:43A re-engagement with the forests, using strategic mechanical clearing and prescribed burning
02:48on a larger scale.
02:50But big expenses require big political will.
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