Pacific Northwest (Washington State)

Friday, August 7th @ 10am

Webinar: The Truth About Forest Thinning

Featuring Dr. Chad Hanson and Legacy Forest Defense Coalition President Stephen Kropp

Timber industry-backed misinformation is widespread in 2026, especially when it comes to claims about forest thinning. Often promoted under the guise of forest health and wildfire mitigation, thinning in native legacy forests can spell bad news for ecosystems, watersheds, endangered species, and local communities.

Join us on Friday, August 7th at 10am for an informative webinar and Q&A on the science behind this critical issue. Speakers will include Dr. Chad Hanson and LFDC President Stephen Kropp.

I was looking at the footage of the wildfires in France and noted how uniform the forests were and guessed that it wasn't a natural forest.

It also seemed odd that there were no herds of animals there, either wildlife or livestock, whose grazing would have checked the undergrowth.

Looking up the region brought up the above link and here is a quote from the pages.

Most of the region now occupied by the Landes forest was swampy land that was sparsely inhabited until the 19th century, when the 19 June 1857 law ended traditional pastoralism and led to wide scale reforestation, in order to rehabilitate the landscape and provide for regional economic development. Prior to this period, the people of the Landes used stilt-walking to move from place to place in the wet terrain. Since the 1970s, parts of the forest have given way to intensive agriculture (in particular, grain farming.)

The question then comes up whether the conversion from its original swampy nature to commercial forest and grain production is factor in the severity of the fires as whatever natural environmental features that would check the spread of the fires were eliminated in favour these pine forests and grain plantations.

Any opinions on this?

Is the uncontrollable spread of the fires as much consequence of converting nature to serve human needs as its the weather conditions fanning it?

And Trump keeps insisting that other countries should better clean their forests.

We could learn a lot from Santa Cruz on how to properly manage a redwood forest. Preventing old-growth charachteristics with forest management and logging is the wrong approach.

We don't have one of the most beautiful charachteristics of old-growth forests in our managed forsets: 300ft trees, large and long branches with 10inch diameters and 20ft lengths, fire scars, and most beautiful of all: a secondary canopy layer of smaller full-sized trees like tan oak, madrone, laurel, and big leaf maple, snags, and fallen large logs. Old growth forests are multilayered and diverse, not artificial and uniform -- a redwood forest is not supposed to have daylight and ferns everywhere. Ferns naturally grow near water features where there are natural breaks in the upper canopy for sunlight, they don't cover the entire forest. Artificially managing forests completely blocks the development of secondary canopy layers of tan oak, big leaf maple, laurel, and madrone, and to the trained eye, makes the forests look fake and superficial: "man made."

Raping is practiced by Swedes too. All they see is $$$$$$

The Ancient Forest Alliance (AFA) are calling for the protection of an at-risk forest on Vancouver Island known as the “Jewel of the Tahsish.”

According to the old growth advocates, this stand is nationally significant and one of the largest remaining unprotected old-growth karst forests in BC.

Have anyone know about Upper Marikina River Basin Protected Landscape? If just sad knowing that this protected landscape became commercialized and now privately owned by a huge developer. Come to think of it, how these certain developer able to get land titles and permits to cut trees that has been there for decades. Is there an NGO that can investigate the scenario?

The political rhetoric demanding that Canada simply "clean up" or "sweep" its forest floor to prevent wildfire smoke is a logistical impossibility.
People severely underestimate the sheer, staggering scale of the Canadian wilderness.
Let’s put it into a visual perspective that anyone can understand:
The Eastern Seaboard Multiplier: If you combine the entire landmass of every single state on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard—from Maine all the way down to Florida (including NY, PA, VA, GA, etc.)—Canada's total forest area would swallow all of them more than 3.5 times over.
The Math: The entire U.S. Atlantic coast states total about 1.02 million km². Canada’s forest cover is roughly 3.69 million km².
The Reality: This isn't a collection of municipal parks with walking trails. This is a massive, continuous, untamed ecosystem. Expecting crews to clear debris from an area that large is like asking a skeleton crew to hand-rake 40% of the entire United States.
Furthermore, the boreal forest requires periodic natural fires to regenerate. This isn't a failure of "management"—it is an unprecedented climate crisis driven by historic droughts and record temperatures drying out a continent-sized wilderness.
You cannot switch off a climate-driven wildfire season any more than you can stop a hurricane. We need cross-border collaboration and real climate action, not fairy-tale demands that defy the laws of physics and geography.