Ran across a post on Facebook this evening from forest protection legend Greg King, who was praising Arcata Community forest for its commercial logging of its city’s high use recreational areas. Back in the 90’s and early 2000’s myself and a now since departed forestry professor Dr. Rudy Becking took issue with this work being worthy of praise. The advocacy work we did together is described below in my reply to Greg. It’s what forest protection forestry looks and sounds like.
“HSU Forester Rudy Becking and I worked on core samples indicating that in the main area of Arcata Forest, especially areas close to HSU the projected growth rates of the trees were way slower than expected because of so much recreational disturbance.
Before Rudy passed away both him and I argued that those slower growth rates needed to be addressed by no longer logging in those areas until compaction issues were addressed because they couldn’t handle additional stress. But that was when logging receipts shifted from paying for the forest’s acquisition to going into the general fund for the city and logging an area only one time after purchase didn’t seem as lucrative as coming back and logging the same area again less than 20 years later.
There’s many areas I could show you of once dense thick forest that’s now too open and sparse and devoid of woody debris recruitment for decades to come. And when you combine that with too much soil compaction from recreation you wipe out natural regeneration and those two harms combined does a great deal of damage to the amphibian population and Rudy and I had data on their decline, which they ignored because their less thorough studies said their never really were many amphibians anyways, which is not true!
So when you say it’s a good example of forestry, I can tend to agree because it still actually looks like a forest and most modern forestry is so barbaric. But from an ecological perspective, natural regeneration of Madrone, fir, spruce and their related soil and plant communities continues to decline in an unmitigated way in Arcata forest.
