We need to monetize the removal of brush and small-diameter trees for biofuels and building materials, so that we can reduce fuels in the forests without losing diversity or the large trees which are so important for the forest ecology.
Logging the large diameter trees and letting brush takeover or removing whole sections of the forest and allowing brush and saplings to fill in is stupid, it's destroying our forests and it's endangering our communities. Management is hugely important, and unfortunately, management involves removing trees or burning. But, it's how and where we remove trees, or whether we burn intentionally during safer times of the year in strategic ways or let corporations(i.e. PG&E) burn our forests and our forest communities down to the ground.
We need to learn how to make doing the right thing for the forests and protecting the safety of the people who live here profitable because as we all know the only way to make progress happen in this country is if corporations can make a profit from it. Other countries particularly in Europe have been generating heat and energy for communities and creating ecologically sustainable building materials out of small diameter stuff for a while now and profiting from it while simultaneously protecting their forests and building ecological diversity.
It sucks whenever something like this happens Conservatives always say that it's liberal's fault for not letting them log the forests more and logging is an important tool that can be used to help, but, it's how you log and where that makes all the difference in the world. Rebalancing the wrongs that we've committed to the forests over the past 150 years is much more nuanced than most people want to accept.
90% of logging operations are done with pure profit as the primary motivation. If companies could make more profit from logging practices the facilitated forest health and fire safety then logging could be the valuable tool that conservatives would like to believe that it is.
It's sad, Collins Pine which owns a mill and a huge amount of land near where I live is considered one of the more progressive timber companies. They had huge slash piles of trees and brush piled up bigger than a two-story house in an area that the Dixie fire went through. It is illegal for them to leave them behind after logging, but it was cheaper for them to pay the fines for violating the law than to get rid of the piles, so they left them. The laws need to change so the corporations don't choose between doing the right thing and making more profits, it should cost logging companies more in fines to fuck up the environment and fuck over forest communities, but as it stands the system is set up so that they can make more money if they are willing to screw over the forest and the folks who live here.
The slash piles that they left were the small diameter stuff that I've been talking about, that other countries are making things out of.