Letters: There must be a clear plan for replanting fire-damaged forest

There is a lot of truth in what everyone has to say on the cut-or-not-to-cut agenda.

The biggest issue that I have is that there is no longer a recovery process in place to harvest all of the trees that have died due to the fires. What has happened in the past decade is that some feel that everything should at some point decompose and go back into the ground. As these dead trees dry out, they become fuel and can make the next fire burn even hotter, possibly sterilizing the soil. Even 15 years ago the fire-killed trees were recovered and inmate crews would go out and plant new ones to help Mother Nature along. There are some pine cones that will open up in a fire, but there are others that will just burn completely. This is just one of the problems.

What happens to the stands of trees that are infested with beetles or parasites? Thirty years ago the trees would have been sprayed, and if that didn't take care of the problem, they would have been cut and and burned right where they were, and healthy trees in close proximity would have been harvested to make sure that anything close to the affected trees would not become a food source just in case anything was missed. Things have changed over those 30 years, and we have to have biologists that we pay big bucks to study that problem and see just how fast it might spread. Case in point, the Biscuit fire. The fire was only a few acres when it was discovered, they let it burn because the people at the top didn't want to possibly spread Orford Cedar root rot over 5 acres. What we got in return was a devastating forest fire that took over 650,000 acres of the most beautiful forests.

I believe that until there is a clear plan of replanting destroyed forests there will continue to be global problems. The only way that we can save our world is to lead by example and have a thought process that is not all one way or the other.

Brenda Johnston

Crescent City