healthy forests = A) rain& sunshine B) dozers & helicopters

[nosmokes]

it's not really rocket surgery to begin with, since these ancient forests have thrived for milennia in what we now call the kalamath aand siskiyou area and heve had periodic burns throughout their existence. the fallacy foisted upon the public that entire area went up in smoke is also preposterous. the area in question is, like all the old growth in the northwest naturally "checkerboarded", with areas of savannah style grassland and patches of scrub growth and aboreal forests. likewise, when the biscuit fire came through it was in fact many mall fires, and the determinination was made that there was no way to ever get on top of it and control it, since a large amount of it was in a roadless area, (this is key) the decision was made to cut a boundary of i think aabout 400 miles it ended up being, with bulldozers and other heavy equipment and explosives and back fires and allow it burn itself out. but someone also knew that this would allow acreage previously off-limits to logging to be opened up for 'salvage' logging, which we pronounce clearcut, especially since a significant amount(if not most) of what on the map was eclared burned, was in fact on the ground merely charred or indeed perfectly green. this is important because it affects the price that logging industry wil pay the government for our trees. the good news is that the chicanery was so flagrant and obvious that even the timber companies shied away from it, knowing that lawsuits from an active environmentalist community are just waiting to be filed. whic iis alao, you can be sure, why these profs, who are squarely in the pockets of the timber industry, don't like the study that says that forest can regenerate itself much better w/o the big diesel machiines tearing it down, TYVM. sorry about the rant- joe
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original

Article sparks scholastic spat

OSU's reputation - After some forestry profs try to squelch research, the academic community debates ethics
Sunday, January 22, 2006

MICHAEL MILSTEIN
The Oregonian

Scholars at Oregon State University and elsewhere said they fear the attempt by a group of College of Forestry professors to have a graduate student's research withheld from a top scientific journal may mar the school's reputation.

"They've got faculty members over there concerned that their academic freedom is disappearing," said Daniel Edge, head of the university's Department of Fish and Wildlife. "It is damaging."

The research, centering on Southwest Oregon's Biscuit fire zone, concluded that logging forests blackened by wildfires slows recovery. A small group of professors in OSU's College of Forestry, including some who had argued that logging and replanting speed recovery, attempted to persuade the journal Science not to publish the research unless it answered their criticisms.

That attempt failed. The study was released in Friday's issue of Science, where all research is reviewed by independent scientists before it is published.

But the effort to halt the release, an extremely rare move in academic circles, has ignited concerns about whether OSU researchers whose work runs against conventions face pressure to keep quiet. The furor has been especially intense in the College of Forestry, in small part funded by logging taxes and among the top forestry schools in the country.
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complete articlehere

[montana500]

1. I saw this story earlier

pretty damn disturbing!