Posts Tagged: national forests
Cutting down a Christmas tree is sustainable family fun
Reprinted from the UCANR Green Blog
Every year, the day after Thanksgiving, Susie Kocher bundles up her children, gathers the extended family and hikes into the Lake Tahoe Basin forest to find a Christmas tree.
“It’s my favorite part of the season,” Kocher said. “Having the fresh, living thing in the house really symbolizes the holiday. You can’t do it with a fake tree.”
Kocher, a forester and the natural resources advisor for UC Cooperative Extension in the Central Sierra, lives and works in Lake Tahoe. The Lake Tahoe Basin Management District is one of nine national forests in California, all of them in the northern part of the state, where the U.S. Forest Service allows Christmas tree cutting with a $10 permit.
Though some people mourn the death of any tree, Kocher says careful selection and removal of Christmas trees is an enchanting family tradition that enriches forest health.
“We have a lot of small trees on public lands because of fire suppression,” Kocher said. “They’re all competing with one another and many will ultimately die. A smart harvest of Christmas trees can improve the forest by helping with thinning.”
People with permits to cut down Christmas trees in national forests must follow strict guidelines. The trees must be within 10 feet of another living tree, the base of the trunk cannot be more than six inches wide and it must be cut within six inches of the ground. Some national forests limit the harvest to certain tree species.
Despite committing to these guidelines when obtaining a permit, Kocher said she has seen some Christmas tree harvesters make ill-advised choices.
“Some are too lazy to find a good tree and will cut the top off a large tree,” Kocher said. “You can be driving around and see what looks like a poor old Dr. Suess tree, which is what grows from the ugly remnant left behind in the forest.”
Such irresponsible Christmas tree cutting has led some forests to discontinue Christmas tree harvesting for personal use.
Kelly Hooten, information specialist with the Sierra National Forest, said the organization stopped issuing Christmas tree cutting permits because people would tend to cut down only healthy, strong trees.
“It’s really the sickly, Charlie Brown trees that we would prefer to thin in our forest,” Hooten said.
The El Dorado National Forest does not allow Christmas tree cutting because there are more than 30 Christmas tree farms in the vicinity where visitors can choose and cut down their own trees.
“Allowing Christmas tree cutting in forests would hurt these farmers economically,” said Lynn Wunderlich, UCCE advisor in the Central Sierra office. Many Christmas tree farmers also provide food, crafts, activities and visits with Santa.
“Families can visit the farmer year after year as their children grow, so that’s part of the experience,” Wunderlich said.
There has been ongoing debate about whether a fake tree or real tree is more environmentally friendly, but for Kocher, there is no question.
“Fresh real trees are a renewable resource, fake trees are not,” she said. “It’s an agricultural product. You can contribute to a local farmers’ income or you can help thin the forest. Picking and bringing home a fresh tree, decorating it and smelling it defines the season for me. Without it, I don’t think it would feel like Christmas.”
Evidence of rodenticide poisoning of wildlife found in the Sierra
There is a new predator in the forest these days. It has arisen quietly over the years. Any wildlife feeling hungry when they come upon it in the Sierra is vulnerable. This predator is amazingly small for the scope of its damage; it can’t run fast or climb high.
University of California scientists originally became aware of this problem when Rick Sweitzer, associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley, and his wildlife research team retrieved a radio-collared fisher whose cause of death was unclear. Sweitzer and his team are researching are studying the fate Pacific fishers as part of the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project (SNAMP).
Necropsy (an autopsy for animals) of the fisher carcass by Mourad Gabriel of UC Davis and the Integral Ecology Research Center found rodenticide poisoning to be the cause. With these new findings, the livers from previous fisher mortalities in the SNAMP study were reexamined for evidence of rodenticide exposure. They discovered that more than 80 percent of dead fishers examined had been exposed to rodenticide. These toxicants can persist in animal tissues or the environment for potentially hundreds of days. At least five dead fishers found by researchers in SNAMP and a second fisher study in northern California have been confirmed to have died of rodenticide poisoning, the scientists reported in the science journal PlusOne.
Considering the hundreds of marijuana grow sites found every year on public lands, the scale of the damage to California’s natural resources may be unprecedented. Grow sites are also found containing massive amounts of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, all of which are being used without concern for run off or aquatic species nearby. Marijuana plants are removed from these plots when found, but these chemicals are often left behind.
Although this problem might seem overwhelming, there are efforts to address it. The non-profit Environmental Reclamation Team has cleaned up hundreds of grow sites since 2005. They remove and document all of the poisons found along with the miles of plastic irrigation line and piles of trash. More efforts like this are needed if we are to maintain rare animals like the Pacific fisher as well as all the other species who have the potential of coming in contact with these poisons.