Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story.
Bob Love is a hunter, naturalist, writer and logger in Columbia Falls, Montana. His company is Confluence Timber Company.
Bob Love: “Our public forests in the past were corporatized, and now you could say we’re trying to communitize our forests. We need to invest in our forests where we leave the best trees and, where it’s appropriate, take the inferior ones. For the cost of a single B-2 bomber, we could put thousands of people to work restoring the health of our forests.
“In this country, we still have the opportunity to practice wild forestry, to keep our forests wild and still work in them. My vision is to keep these forests as reservoirs of wildness.
“If we’re practicing appropriate forestry, 200 or 300 years into the future, we’ll have big old trees to work with again. Instead of ripping these old trees into two-by-fours and framing lumber and burying them behind drywall, we’ll use them in exposed structures where the wood would be honored.”
Copyright © 2000 HCN and Steve Thompson
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline ‘We still have the opportunity to practice wild forestry’.
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