Yellow Pine Forests, 1950s Style.

Here is a photo of Yellow Pine from the 1950s, when hundreds of loggers and miners thinned the forests and made livings off of the land. Back when timber sales were the norm, loggers and Forest Service rangers lived in the same towns, ate at the same restaurants, and listened to one another concerning how best to manage healthy forests for maximum public benefit. Especially funding public schools through timber sales and mining claim tax revenues to the county and state.

It sure was nice to come across an old historic photo and see green trees, free of bark beetles, that hadn't been incinerated by megafires and failed forest "watch it all die off and burn" management policies that are being practiced by the US Forest Service and other federal agencies today.

 Today, it's very hard to find healthy trees in the Yellow Pine vicinity which aren't already infected or growing so close to other trees that they are starving for groundwater, sunlight and nutrients. The end result being a forest which will undoubtedly be devastated by the next megafire the Forest Service will be paid megamillions to sit idly by and NOT put out.

When I moved to Yellow Pine in 1983, this is the forest which I grew up in. One in which it was very hard to find dead trees.

Since the Forest Service has discovered the agency can make more money by lighting fires than putting them out, and by "sick and dying" forests than by actively managed and healthy forests....
And since the Forest Service wastes all its time and precious resources obliterating roads and locking the public out of the forests......

The new norm is a forest which will never look like this again....so long as the forest management policies come from Washington DC and sue happy environmental organizations that care more about getting rich via the Equal Access to Justice Act, than they do about having healthy forests.

Scott Amos
208.297.0634