 |
| IT IS WINTER ON WISCONSIN'S ROADS! |
The trip to Madison on Thursday morning started out badly, driving in an unexpected white-out much of the distance between Ashland and Hurley on US 2, and also for quite a distance south on US 51. I would have turned back and stayed home if I wouldn't have had to drive as far back as to forge on and hopefully get out of the mess. South of Wausau there wasn't much snow and the roads were pretty good. Madison was as cold and windy as Bayfield. The road conditions were O.K. on our return last night.
The deer rut is beginning I am sure, as we saw does moving several times on Thursday, even in the blizzard. For the next several weeks it will be very important to watch for deer on the roads. Even though the deer herd is obviously way down in numbers, it seems there is always one ready to jump in front of your vehicle during the rut.
The Urban Forestry Council meeting was very interesting, and the usual show-and-tell by DNR staff welcome enough, but the current big topics are the use of recycled wood from urban trees for consumer products, and a new initiative, a statewide (ultimately national as well) Urban Tree Inventory Assessment.
Recycling urban trees when they die from insects, disease, or other factors is certainly a worthy goal. Turning them into lumber, veneer, construction beams, furniture, etc. is certainly a higher use than making wood chips or firewood from them, and gaining all those products far better than sending trees to the landfill. Currently there is a lot of interest in this subject by the general public, the wood products industry, engineers and craftsmen, and it has become rather fashionable to utilize recycled urban trees. This is all to the good in my estimation, as long the trend is driven by market forces and not by intrusive and uneconomic government programs.
A majority of Wisconsin communities, certainly all the larger cities, now have computerized inventories of street and park trees. There is valuable information in these inventories which should be categorized and shared for common use. Such things as tree species and varieties, growth rates, mortality, insect and disease information, and esthetic qualities all are important to good urban forestry. Many of these factors are also part of traditional forest management on public and private lands, and the premise is that this systematic inventorying of information should logically be extended to urban areas. This makes sense and essentially I agree with it,
However, as always, the devil is in the details. Getting all public urban tree inventories, existing and future, into a common data base is a relatively straightforward task which would not be too expensive and time consuming to do. But the plan is to extend the inventory onto private property (evidently with the owner's permission, or at least via municipal legislation), and that is where the devil lies. This is proposed to be a completely blind study, with no one but the investigative agency knowing the process or the end data. The neighbors are not to know what is going on while the inventorying of a neighboring property is taking place. The sample plots are relatively large for an urban setting, one-sixth of an acre. When asked how many plots were being proposed, the answer was, "we haven't determined that as yet." When asked what the ultimate cost would be, the answer was the same.
I personally am extremely dubious of an ill-defined, secretive, open-ended, hidden-cost government program of any kind, no matter how benign it may seem. The random collection of raw data on private property without a well defined public purpose seems uneconomic at best, and smacks of totalitarianism at the worst. At this point I am opposed to the extended program, which is fostered by the US Forest Service and therefore will ultimately be national in scope.
But, as has recently been said about voters and Obamacare, maybe I am just too dumb to understand the proposal.
No comments:
Post a Comment