Brian Brademeyer posted a blog post
Hell Canyon Reforestation
The Hell Canyon Ranger District is requesting public comments on the Hell Canyon Reforestation Project, proposing to hand-plant 500,000 pine seedlings in the Jasper Fire Area burned in 2000, including 250,000 plastic tubes to protect half the seedlings from livestock and big game grazers and browsers. A smaller amount of reforestation is proposed in the Sheldon Fire Area. (see map below). Planting pine trees on the Black Hills is a completely unnecessary activity, given the prolific natural regeneration of thousands of pine seedlings per acre (like "carrying coals to Newcastle" in the British idiom). The Forest Service appears unwilling to allow this process to occur naturally over several decades (all the areas to be planted are within 1/2 mile of existing natural seed sources), so as not to disrupt the timber quota based on "forested acres" for even a small portion of the Black Hills National Forest. Rather than expending time and staff resources to hand-plant these pine seedlings, including wrapping them in protective plastic tubing (which will remain essentially forever in the ecosystem) to minimize grazing damage, the BHNF should instead burn these areas again in 2015 and again in 2030, to keep some large areas in the grass-forb stage to aid recovery of big game herds being depressed by over-hunting. Every timber sale decision on the Black Hills has been justified, in part, by the need to recreate such grass-forb areas for big game and early-successional species, yet here the BHNF is intentionally eliminating this habitat that natural processes have freely provided. The Forest Service must abandon its pine-promotion policies on the Black Hills, and learn to live with the time-scales of natural regeneration processes, including stand-replacing wildfires. This project should be scrapped as completely unnecessary. This Project is being categorically excluded from detailed environmental analysis. Public comments are requested by December 15, 2012. Additional information on the Project and how to comment can be found at the Hell Canyon Reforestation Project website of the Black Hills National Forest. See More
