Timber Harvesting Should Not Be Sustainable 

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Great timing on the video, I was just talking with a forester recently about the volume I can sustainably remove of my white pine stands while maintaining the volume and improve the quality over time. I’ve watch most of your videos over the last couple weeks. Very informative, educational and helpful as I have taken a deep interest in managing my 300 acres for wildlife habitat (grouse) forest products and recreation.

Something that also is extremely important to use as a variable in the "sustainable equation" is biological/ecological values in the forest in question. For example if the forest is located in a sensitive area with a fragile ecological system, you can't harvest at all or you can only harvest small amounts. If you harvest "sustainable" but it results in big ecology shifts in a large area, it is not sustainable. So basically, sustainability and robustness must also take the nature values with ecology - which are different for each case of applications to timber harvest - into consideration in order to be properly sustainable/robust.

The question of managing forests for maximum sustained yield vs maximum sustained yield adjusted for resiliency to fire, drought, and beetles is currently a hot topic in the Sierras of California as the current state mandated post harvest stocking standards may be too high and create future forest conditions that increase the severity of fires and drought stress in the summer.

There’s a rule of humanity about as soon as a method becomes a measurement of success, it stops being a good measurement for that success as we will manipulate all the other variables around increasing that one and lose the larger picture. I forget what it’s called.

All the forest trimmings make the future soil and fungi growth system that helps keep the biggest trees alive better

It's not "Inventory". It's "Resource Base". This is a far more complex system than diameter or cords per acre. To put this into context. Mushroom spores literally seed clouds and cause precipitation. If you are managing a million acres (mind boggling), then you have the capacity to influence weather, crop yields, and ground water for miles. Sustainability is real. If people struggle to define it, that's because it's devilishly complex. But I believe if we grow to improve the resource base(diversity, mineral content in soils, water tables), then we will continue to have more to harvest.

I'd be curious about how selective cutting affects land resale value. i see lots of acreage trying to be sold around me for 5 to 6k per acre after it's been cleared out and offers no resource value for harvesting trees for firewood and non commercial sale use lumber milling.

Ok... apologies for being "that commenter", but I'm really digging your videos and your presentation. So I'd like to reinforce what I think are very good ideas: "Sustainable" in timber industry terminology appears to revolve around making sure value can always be extracted from a forest year after year. What I understand as your issue with that term and how it is achieved is that it leads to an approach which is not really optimal for two reasons: 1. It relies on linear--izing non-linear forest growth processes so that you'll always have errors in the basis for what is calculated to be harvestable 2. the calculations determining sustainable harvest ignore aspects of forest growth that have a real impact on cost/distribution of reward on an annual basis And instead you propose what is actually desirable to have is a "robust" strategy which I'll define as having the following characteristics: 1. "Robustness" is "sustainable" in the common understanding of the word "sustainable", but is being differentiated from what the industry accepts to be "sustainable" 2. A "robust" strategy is one that eliminates or minimizes the errors introduced by using linear models to approximate systems that are inherently non-linear (this should be particularly appealing for small-scale timber investors) 3. A "robust" solution like the one proposed appears to have the property of minimizing annual fluctuations of cost/profit, where you are producing a consistent amount of a particular product (100 year old lumber) and avoiding the varying cost of harvesting older trees one year and a higher volume of younger trees the next Again, I love your videos and only offer this as a defense of what I think is already excellent content

I totally agree, very well done. Trees are the worlds most renewable resource.

I'm really enjoying your videos and you are actually inspiring me to get into this line of work. I'm an arborist from the UK and I have Permanent Resident status in Canada. Do you have any suggestions for educational routes to take?

Grass clippings are good for mulch on garden beds. The clippings provide nitrogen, hold in moisture, build up the soil, and block weeds.

Sustainability: when you’re skeptical that old wood will look good stained.

Random question: Does the forest soil get slowly depleted after decades and centuries of harvests? Like when you burn wood you get left with a bit of minerals in the form of ash, which were removed from the soil where the tree grew. Obviously the mineral removal from logging must be extremely slow and hard to measure, but do you think this will become an issue in the far far future?

Seems like the answer to 'What is sustainability?" would simply be MSY (maximum sustainable yield). I wonder why this term isn't standard and common in forestry vs, say, fisheries?

Located in eastern foothills of the Adirondacks western Clinton County/eastern Franklin County

Older trees depending on species are more valuable and better growth rates then smaller younger trees, the older trees force the other trees to reach for sky and sit around getting fat and short over the years

Uhh you are wrong about "The Problem". A lot of hardwood species (the oaks in particular) grow faster after reaching "old growth" status. Harvard foresters have found out that their old growth white oaks are growing faster at 40" +DBH's than when they were 20" DBH. This is probably true for most tree species but since there is less than 1 percent of old growth forests in the USA left it is hard to determine. The solution to your video is encourage property owners to hold off from harvesting until forests grow bigger through tax break incentives. This will diminish log supply, increase timber prices and help stand diversity and sustainability.

You seem to be confusing sustainability with a fixed target for harvest. Just because the answer to most questions is "it depends" doesn't mean that it's a failure. Your robust concept qualifies as sustainable, and I like it, it's less subject to variation and "it depends".

Here is something to think about. If you had that1,000,000 acres and harvested 20% of volume on 1/10 of it each year, then you would be harvesting about 2% of the total volume. If you could somehow harvest only the most mature trees without harming the other trees, {Good luck on that} you would only need to harvest about 10% of the trees on each track of forest to get 20% of the volume. {well maybe} If you could somehow manage to harvest them without damaging the other trees, the average age of the trees at harvest would be somewhere around 100 years old. Of course this would depend upon the growth curve of those trees. Now good luck on harvesting those trees without damaging the other trees. Anyway, something to think about.

As you said you are not over thinking it, you are just thinking it all the way through. Not thinking this sustainability thing through, has led to tons of houses being insulated with styrofoam which is made from a finite resource in order to become independent of the very same resource. Leaving us with a mountain of trash for the decades to come. I also wonder how "robust" outsourcing you food production to some fake meat factory is over just eating the cow.

Boo! The avoidance end is type conversion by shift to mono culture.

You always leave a bug and insect magnet trees in your forest, so they eat the few dying trees and hardly bother much with the living healthy trees,

Autocorrect ... and not sit ...

Yeah…not agreeing with you.