Do environmental groups and industry interests agree about the best way to 'thin' forests?
Thursday, September 17, 2020
By Kate Lucky
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NO
In recent years, the logging industry and environmental groups have tended to agree that thinning forests could be a helpful wildfire-prevention technique, but they disagree about how aggressive that thinning should be.
Environmental groups like Greenpeace believe traditional industrial logging practices exacerbate wildfires rather than mitigating them. Loggers, they argue, remove mature, resilient, commercially valuable shade trees, leaving behind a thinner canopy and piles of sticks. The logging industry contends that allowing timber companies to remove only small trees ("stewardship" rather than "extractive" work) is for now unprofitable, unsustainable and unrealistic.
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