00:01If you look at the turn of the century, active land management has gone through
00:05growing pains, so to speak. We'll say logging, for example, it was a get-it-all
00:10and get-out type of situation. The timber wars, the pace and scale of clear-cut
00:15logging was being ramped up to unsustainable levels. Some scientists
00:20realized, well, you're driving certain species that inhabit these old-growth
00:24forests. You're driving them to extinction. 30 years ago, I was the bad person.
00:29I was the woman defending the loggers, and the loggers were the tree killers.
00:34It became, you know, like another culture war. It pitted environmentalists that loved the
00:41forest versus the timber industry. You have sort of entrenched positions by the
00:46environmental movement. Environmentalists hated clear-cuts, and they could show a
00:51picture of a clear-cut and say, is this what you want for your forest? That's how
00:55they got the forest management stocked. Environmentalists used every tool at their
01:01disposal to try to stop the logging industry, including a law called the
01:06Endangered Species Act. This put a stop to logging on federal land inhabited by
01:11imperiled species, and eliminated the mechanical thinning of millions of acres of
01:16overpopulated forests. And then it moved into a situation where to protect those
01:21things, everything became protected. You know, put your arms around it all, and that
01:25was what we needed to what we assumed was a natural state. Are there things that we
01:29made mistakes? Yes. We know now that those plantations were probably planted too
01:35close together. While profitable, this old logging technique created forests of
01:40uniform age and species. Exactly what fire needs to spread.
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