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HomeMy WebLinkAbout081722 FW_ A follow up to last week's Special Meeting on Forest Conservation on 8_8_22 ________________________________ From: Jessica Randall Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2022 3:05:53 PM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: Greg Brotherton; Kate Dean; Heidi Eisenhour; Malloree Weinheimer Subject: A follow up to last week's Special Meeting on Forest Conservation on 8/8/22 ________________________________ ALERT: BE CAUTIOUS This email originated outside the organization. Do not open attachments or click on links if you are not expecting them. ________________________________ Hello Commissioners and Malloree Weinheimer, This email is in response to the meeting on Aug. 8, 2022, with experienced Jefferson county forest management professionals discussing whether our county should take on the management of the 15,000 acres (or a portion thereof) of forests, but which are managed by DNR.* As you know, there are folks here who believe that we should preserve the forests because they sequester carbon, stabilize our weather, provide fresh water, cool streams for the reproduction of salmon (and support every other interdependent species), provide habitat for billions of creatures and organisms, prevent landslides, foster the underground mycelium network, and so on. But those things don’t easily have a dollar sign in front of them. In the meeting, the biggest line item on the preservation side was recreation. We can make some money there. I know humans are important... but we’re not the only show. And what I mean by that, is that we can't put our extravagant desires and mainly the profit of some individual corporations above what our world needs to survive. Deforestation is a key driver of anthropogenic climate change. The missing piece of this conversation was that the forests basically sustain us. They are the foundation of life here in the PNW. And forests are even more valuable now, as we can see, due to the fact that they are carbon sinks and act as the keel of our local ecology. The older forests are especially valuable, as they are the best at carbon sequestration, they harbor many essential species that tree plantations cannot, and the older trees have a greater chance of surviving wildfire. Some humans and some businesses will survive climate change more easily that others, because they have the financial resources to do so. But many people will not. Many small businesses will not. Many species will not. And small communities like ours will be under a huge burden to help these people and businesses and species. Look at the effects of sea acidification that are already affecting our area. The prognosis is that this will become much worse in the near future. We’ve created a taxation system that includes a (relatively small) portion of our funding for our public works coming from the harvesting of timber from these local forests. I believe that the real issue here is reworking that revenue stream so that we can eliminate the pressure to harvest timber. Destroying the one thing that sustains us and the entire ecosystem in which we live for a short-term monetary gain is not wise. We need to come up with the money from a different source. Other communities who don’t have forests do it, and so can we. We created this taxation system, we can change it. We didn’t create the forest ecosystem, and we should not be destroying it. thank you, Jessica Randall a resident of Jefferson County * Notably, DNR’s management style for harvesting trees is ONLY clearcutting and herbicide application. They don’t want to do anything else, because it isn’t as profitable. And perhaps another pressure in that direction may be that the companies with which they have formed relationships prefer this method of silviculture. I believe there are other options for harvesting sustainably, when harvesting needs to be done.