When this writer was a boy (in the late ‘40s), the winter hills and mountains of Cascadia Floristic Region were grey, with black stripes where logging railroads once ran. In 1952, our Farm’s area held small stump farms where trees stand today. Red alder dominated low mountain slopes devastated like WWII battlefields. Teaching high school biology in southwestern Washington in the ’60s, the Willapa Hills were then turning light green from the initial planting of 2-year-old seedlings. Before then, scattered lone “seed trees” randomly regenerated forests. Our History Farm exhibits native indigenous and pioneer farming practices: fruit, hay, vegetable, and tree farms. We honor those before who fed and sheltered our ancestors, many whose properties are now part of the Pilchuck Tree Farm, a Green Tag Forest since 1999. Pilchuck Learning Center’s focus is State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) lands that could recreate biodiversity. It is nice to see green hills rather than grey; many shades of green across 20% of the Cascades’ public-owned western slopes would be nicer! Imagine:

1. As DNR trees reach 50 years of age, harvest them, and reseed the land with our 900 native species.
2. Forever abandoning the burning, poisoning, and trampling with machinery (erosion) that now occurs.
3. If not renaming Puget Sound to Salish Sound, revert part of it to what it was when the Salish ruled; and
4. Halt Cascadia’s native plant species’ extinctions.

Search the web for “change in state forest management practices” and one finds 30 states addressing the issue of biodiversity and cessation of states operating as if they were private tree farms.  Missing are Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and both U.S. and Canada.

https://endthednrmandate.org/ 
https://www.nwpb.org/…/the-fight-for-legacy-forests…/

Prior to the establishing of tree farms after World War II, the accepted method for reseeding forests was the use of:

lone seed trees
cloned Super Dougs
2 year-old seedlings

Comments, content, questions appreciated; email bb@plc215.org

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