Requiem for a Forest   Gary A. Beluzo   Nov 06, 2005 17:01 PST  Monica: This is not a scientific post. This is an impression to a discovery behind my dad's house. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- My childhood forest was "murdered" this past week. It was not "harvested", for no mature trees were left standing as a seed source, and unlike an agricultural field, the logger approached the forest with an unrelenting blitzkrieg; it was not "mined" for that word should be reserved for rock, sand, and other nonliving resources. No, in a very real sense the forest was "murdered", every single living tree was taken- the oak forest was clearcut. Where once a complex living system flourished, now a greatly simplified landscape lays testament to the folly of human management.    This past weekend I personally witnessed bad forestry. Although several weeks ago the old widow that lives next door assured me that the forest was to be marked by an experienced forester and logged by a responsible company, the reality is that she never ventures out her door, she has never seen the forest behind her house, she has no real connection to the land. Neither did the forester that marked the property. Neither did the logger that ripped gaping holes in the forest floor pulling the dead logs from the cut. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------- I am already working on a poem "Requiem for a Forest" which will be set to music eventually. Whereas science is an appropriate medium for knowing a forest objectively, only music can convey the total impression that a forest makes on us. Thank you once again for bringing music to our ENTS rendezvous this year. Gary RE: ENTS Poetry and Prose Session   Monica Jakuc   Nov 07, 2005 10:15 PST  Dear Gary, My deepest condolences to you in your grief. In my view, this is a call-to-arms to all of us to remain vigilant and to continue to do everything we can to save our precious trees. I look forward to seeing and hearing your poem, with or without music. Maybe it can become part of the ENTS rendezvous events in october 2006. With sympathy, Monica On Gary's Pain   Robert Leverett   Nov 07, 2005 11:20 PST  Gary, We all hurt for you and we hurt for the damaged land of your youth. The situation that you've described causes me to think back to the time on our list when we entertained forestry topics as a main part of our discussion framework. We had the two maverick foresters, who for all their insensitivity were basically right about the abominable state of forest practices in Massachusetts and the impotence of the Bureau of Forestry. Guess nothing has changed. With exceptions of course, local loggers continue to be dopes at best and renegades/conartists at the worst, often scamming land owners who are perpetually ignorant of the current value of their trees and the potential of their land to yield forest products for many years - if managed carefully. We could rehash bad forest practices on the list, but it would serve little purpose. All of us in ENTS make up the choir. It is just unfortunate that the two maverick foresters who had such potential for making positive contributions couldn't quite grasp that simple fact.      Pictures of the butchery that you describe should be circulated via the web without property identification, but with a clear message: unsupervised logging operations are a disaster. The sad, sad case appears to be that there was a professional? private forester who was supposed to oversee the logging operations. It appears the forester couldn't be trusted either. And the weak, excuse-making professional forestry societies in Mass can be counted on to look the other way. They are worthless.     What makes me as sick as the rape of that property is that the really fine foresters like the late Karl Davies, Michele Wilson, Bruce Spencer, Russ Richardson, and Ehrhard Frost get tarnished by the misbehavior of their shortcutting associates. I'm sure that any one of the above would feel as sick as you did at seeing the death of that forest. Bob Re: On Gary's Pain   Fores-@aol.com   Nov 07, 2005 14:55 PST  Gary: The worst thing is that in addition to the environmental destruction of such a harvest as you described, the widow may well have only received about 10 to 25% of what her pillaged and plundered forest was really worth and the harvest guidelines were probably along the lines of..."you nice young men do what you think is right" Russ Richardson     Home