Manufacturers needed for sustainable forest management

Friday 6 Sep 2024

 
While celebrating recent rain, the smoke and fire season is not over yet. This is the backdrop of a crisis that has in part been exacerbated by the loss of wood manufacturing businesses in Montana. Our collective ability to accomplish our long-term conservation needs at an affordable price is at risk.

The loss of wood manufacturing compromises our ability to protect old growth, watersheds, and biological diversity in addition to hampering strategies to address large, severe wildfires. It complicates maintaining our forests as natural carbon capture and storage systems, while providing renewable, sustainably grown wood to provide materials for our buildings, bridges, packaging, jet fuel and more.

Change is difficult, on a personal level, but more so on a societal level. In the late 1980s and 1990s, there was a sea change in forest management. The emerging sciences of landscape ecology, conservation biology, disturbance ecology, along with the social demands for our outdoor recreation lifestyle, plus the desire to protect old growth forests, bull trout, wolves, grizzly bears, lynx, and cut-throat trout across our landscapes, drove the need for change.

We recognised the previous model of commodity wood production through forest management on an 80-year cycle and the exclusion of fire was inadequate.

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Source: The Missoula Current News



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