Managing forests as carbon sinks, counting carbon, and calculating your carbon footprint is less than worthless. Saving forests because they maintain the planet"s water cycle has a lot of merit. In the first place the 4 main carbon reservoirs, plants, soils, atmosphere, and ocean surfaces contain approximately 4000 gigatons of carbon. These carbon reservoirs exchange about 450 gigatons of carbon annually. Human carbon emissions into the atmosphere amount to about 6.5 to 8.5 gigatons of carbon annually or about .5% to 1.5% of the 450 gigatons of carbon which is held in the atmosphere by natural, non-anthropogenic causes.

Correction: "750 gigatons of carbon which is held in the atmosphere by natural, non-anthropogenic causes."

There is science, and there is political science. The Metolius Basin project is a show piece designed to keep a very scenic stand of Ponderosa "yellow belly" Pine intact and healthy, thus pleasing the inholder development residents and cabin owners. There has been ongoing thinning, piling, and burning of young pine on both sides of the highway, a major route into Sisters and Bend from the West. The thinning has been done by two convict crews from the Oregon penal system. The USFS burns the piles and does some small acreage broadcast underburning in favorable weather. And then they still lose their fires, one recently because they had no one staffing the fire from dusk to after dawn, and the fire made a significant run in the night.

The whole of this particular public stand management effort is due to high value homes in the forest in the thousands, and the high esteem this significant real estate is held by the voting public. The last session of the Legislature took all the development zoning away from Jefferson county, because the urban Democrats have a super majority in the Legislature and a Governor to sign the bill. A man with more than a million dollars invested in meeting zoning and planning requirements had his whole invested wrested from him by the Legislature to protect his property, and the rest of the Basin from any more development. Those that have theirs prevailed to keep it that way. In the near future, all the visible forest from the highway will be thinned and underburned from the Cascade crest to the juniper and sage high desert. The USFS version of the Potemkin Village. A false front forest. But, it does attract the likes of the New York Times for a more or less favorable story about forest management, albeit no mention is made of the thousands of other forest management projects that have been stayed, abandoned, forgotten, back burnered, due to thousands of appeals and law suits filed by the NGOs of environmental interest groups, mostly financed by tax averse trust funds, foundations, and EAJA monies paid to their in house law firms, now charging $500 an hour for lawyer's time and the Federal Courts paying like a rigged slot machine. That many projects were postponed or dismissed, only to later burn as wildland fire , is not lost on this writer, even though the Times failed to mention it.

False front forestry by the USFS for public relations purposes, and this Metolius Basin project is that in spades, is no solution. The Times failed to mention that the entirety of the surrounding public forests and tens of thousands of co-mingled private lands have been burned in conflagrations over the last two decades, and the little green island being thinned is the paltry surviving acreage from those fires. Most of the forest, private and public, has been logged selectively several times, and thick ingrowth is a problem. Having convict crews to thin, buck and pile the wood for later burning has produced this Potemkin False Front Forest, but a demonstration area is not a whole forest, and here, the whole forest is in dire need of fiber removal, on a great and grand scale. My money is on it burning due to adjacent Wilderness and the propensity of the USFS to let fires burn in Wilderness, and the even greater propensity for those fires to leave the Wilderness and rush over non-wilderness public and private lands, and on a couple of occasions, right into the big housing development at Black Butte.

I remember long ago, when that area had a red highway of macadamized red lava rock, green tree tops and orange old growth ponderosa pine boles. Now the highway is black, the trees black towards the Pass and over, and the only green is buck brush growing on the ground under burned trees. And it all has happened since the public land logging ended.

The Times did not say where those small logs would end up. Are they for a biomass plant, a wood stove pellet plant, or a stud mill or core veneer mill? And how far can you haul logs and claim sustainability? How much diesel do you have to burn to make woods products now that timber offerings are so few and so far between, and mills even fewer, and farther away from the timber? I see that glass as less than half full, jaded as I have become by the ongoing and endless court fights on every action managers take to keep forests healthy. The public says it prefers a burned forest to one that has logging, so why not burn the whole of it, sooner than later, and have a perfect forest?

When the exurban nitwits move out to the suburban-forest and range interface, they're apparently too dumb to tell the difference between a multiple use sustained yield forest and an urban park. Maybe they'll wise up when they get the bill for maintaining millions of park acres without using fire. Meanwhile they will continue to be CAVE BANANA NIMBYs(Citizens Against Virtually Everything, Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody, Never In My Back Yard) hypocritically masquerading as know it all but badly misinformed greenie weenies.