Forest Logs

Tobias Schultz said in an interview on KHUM 8/7/12:  For one PALCO actually cut down about 385 thousand old growth trees, so that was trees that are over two hundred years old.  That was actually more then three quarters of all of the old growth trees that were in the forest in 1986 ...  You’re talking about cutting down almost a half a million old growth trees in 21 years ...  The impacts to the young growth forest I talked about included the complete disturbance of 66 thousand acres of forest under PALCO...

 The impacts also include disturbed habitat for sixteen species which included everyone’s favorite the Northern Spotted Owl, Marbled Murrelet, Pacific Fisher, Sonoma Tree-Vole, you got all kinds of salmon species that were even impacted because what was going on in the rivers... PALCO, when it started in 1986 doing this widespread clearcutting actually caused all kinds of damage into the rivers and the reason why that was happening is because when they would do these clear cuts it would essentially free up all the soil and sediment up on top of these watersheds and as soon as you got a big rainstorm it would just wash it all down into the rivers.  So,  you actually had a few instances where rivers were completely buried in sediments because of the forestry PALCO was doing...

PALCO was causing all kinds of impacts too.  What this lead to was that PALCO actually eliminated about twenty-seven millions tons of carbon dioxide storage in the forest in this twenty-one year period...

...a really important piece of context,  is that PALCO was literally mining the forest.  So there literally is not as much wood in the forest today as there was in 1986 when Hurwitz took over PALCO.