Forest Management

Here is the funny find of the day: the difference between
a cow and a goat is that while the cow grazes - feeds on grass -
the goat browses, ie eats the fruit of the tree, higher up. Found
this in reading up on forests and their development.

In lashing out about forest management being lacking in the California
fires, President Trump angered those in the current debate on climate
change. But at the heart of the matter, there is something dangerous
and troubling about forests on the West Coast. Where humans have
settled on land, they de-forested first ie taken out the plants and roots
so that none of it would come back. This is not the case in California,
where rich and poor own what are essentially lots of forests, and live
on them. With sometimes catastrophic results.

What is a forest, anyway? On the European continent, all forests are by now
human constructs, be they  productive, recreational, what not. Man has been
making decisions on what happens to land since the Neolithic, in part because
the receeding ice from the last Ice Age left the land largely barren.
This is where the great difference between Europe and America appears. In
Europe, mountain ridges run East-West, which keeps species apart. In America,
they run North-South. The seaside of Vancouver Island is a rain forest, like
the Amazon basin. And Vancouver residents wore face masks last summer
because of
interior fires.

So the Western part of our continent is still something of  frontier. Perhaps
we need to look at that, forget conserving in the name of creating, and admit
to ourselves that climate change will not be reversed in anyone's lifetime.

source:Wikipedia