> Most U.S. foresters, [Lohrengel] says, are trained to cut the best trees and leave the sick ones behind. The result is a forest with deteriorating genetic stock. But the Menominee are “doing the opposite, and making the forest healthier.”

> “We come in every 15 years, take out the weak trees, the sick trees, and the ones that are dying, but leave the healthy stock to grow some more and reproduce”

> In almost 170 years, the tribe has harvested nearly twice the forest’s former volume of timber, yet it still has 40 percent more standing wood than when they started. “And by leaving the best trees, the old and sick lumber they harvest is now better than the best from most everyone else”

Such an elegant solution!

What I heard was private tree farmers did just that. It's the public forestry service that logs out the best trees. It's that old "tragedy of the commons" problem.

Forestry service doesn't sound like tragedy of the commons, it sounds like tragedy of government.

The biggest tree cutters aren't the government.

The big cutters are paper companies. Corporate forests are planted in nice rows like corn, so it is easy to plant, easy to harvest. Reduced time, reduced labor.

And, these small private groups have larger labor overhead. Maybe tribes like this, or small family owned plots can do this.

But I wonder if they are really self-sustaining, or these groups have cash coming in from other endeavors, other jobs that help support them.

The subject wasn't plantation timber though, but the forestry service (allegedly) logging out the best trees from forests.

I read somewhere (I wish I could remember the primary source) that some large hunting ranches are taking this approach as well. Basically, if a buck looks like it would be a "trophy" animal (large antlers, etc.), they don't hunt it. Apparently this was something that started on a ranch where the owner's brother was an advocate for the practice, which they took to heart after he passed away young.

The claimed result was that in even relatively small periods of time (less than a decade), the number of "high quality" deer on their property skyrocketed due to the fittest bucks actually being able to compete and pass on their genes rather than being hunted immediately.

It's a much more long term and sustainable approach, unfortunately a lot of companies and individuals are incentivised to do short term gains, i.e. "cut out the good wood and leave the rest, screw whoever comes afterwards, and 30 - 50 years from now is not my problem".

But for the people that live there, it is their problem, they exist with people that were there 30-50 years ago, they know the local history going back hundreds of years.

Most of us live in a temporary and individualistic society. In my country, generally speaking, people get married, buy a house, have kids, live there for 30-40 years, then sell the house because it's too big and inaccessible for their aging bones, live in a rental or buy an apartment for the next 10-15 years, then sell that and spend the rest of their money on the retirement / care home. Some might pass on to their children. Usually the children don't inherit the house, because they can't afford to buy it or buy the other children out, or because they don't want to live in their parental house or town. Nothing remains from the previous generations except maybe some keepsakes.

The only example of generational stuff are some farms or companies, but even they don't last; farms from 100 years ago are not up to modern standards and cannot compete with industrial farms. I was staying at an airbnb on a farm like that, the only reason they still survived was because they lived in a protected nature area and they could benefit off of tourism, making and selling their own products in their own restaurant and local stores. Cottage industry, but they're the exception because it's a lot of work to make and sell products like that; you need an audience that's interested in locally produced goods like that, and it has to be priced competitively.

Many foresters will warn you that if you have an over grown lot, harvesters will come in and harvest the big ones, leaving you the crap trees.

Or at least the was the case in rural Wa ca 15 years ago.

I also read this, that was amazing thanks for sharing this. their genes rather than being hunted immediately. https://www.tellpopeyes.me/

I like it.

in general I think as a culture we could do with more tradition. And traditions based on modern problems. Rituals for programmers, doctors and office workers. They don't have to be inscutable, or given mystic power. Just a thing, done repeatedly, over a period of time, by many people. Which you are expected to keep doing, and which it is considered a shame to stop.

This reminds me of the difference between our definition of property, based on the Roman law vs. how it is/was perceived by hunter-gatherer societies.

Our (modern, not nec. "western" whatever that term means) definition boils down to:

usus, fructus, abusus (use, benefit/derive profit, destroy)

In other words, complete ownership means: this is mine, I can control when you have access to it, I can do whatever I want with it.

A contrasting definition would involve domination, in a sense that:

I have control over a certain resource and thus I need to take care of it.

A practical, classic historical example would be slavery. Owning a slave means exclusion from the society and thus turning them into property whose owner could deal with as they pleased. Native Americans (NWE, or Southern) practiced what we call capturing and treated their slaves more like pets, to the point where taking care of a "pet", "training" them could be a way of introducing them back into society.

This was not always the case, but it shows a huge, deeply embedded difference in how we perceive the world and the idea of property now.

Biodiversity. Nature loathes monocultures. I noticed it first hand this summer. Plots with varietals produce much richer compost. With much bigger blooms. NYC is essentially a tropic zone now. Things I couldn't imagine a generation ago, are now within cultivation: ghost peppers, white peaches, kiwi fruit, haas avacados, meyer lemons!

> Fred Pearce traveled to the Menominee Indian Reservation with the support of the American Hardwood Export Council.

Sustainable forestry is good and this is a nice story, but an advertorial nonetheless.

Previously in my career, I worked on forest growth simulations where we looked at dozens of different harvesting strategies, distributed over the timber stands of a property over the course of 100+ years. 20 harvest strategies x 1000s of stands x 100 annual plans is too big to brute force (the underlying tree growth model was not fast) but we used simulated annealing to optimize for multiple objectives - wildlife habitat, water quality, harvest cost, and timber volume.

We found a very interesting conclusion: there appears to be a combination of strategies that improves biological outcomes AND increases timber harvest volumes over the long term. The debate seems to always center on wilderness (no management) vs industrial timber farming (monoculture). But our models clearly showed a third path - it required a spatially-explicit, long-term plan with lots of labor-intensive interventions but it was absolutely possible to manage a forest for multiple purposes - timber, wildlife and human recreation - and do so without compromising any of the objectives. That these practices closely mirror the forest management of native people is not at all surprising.

There was a story on the news last night of a tree found in BC, Canada it's 5m ~17' across at the base and maybe 1,000 years old. They, Ahousaht First Nation, are calling it "The Wall".

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/the-wall-wes...

> Fire is another important tool, he says, burning undergrowth and logging leftovers at the start of the summer to remove material that could fuel major fires later in the season.

> The Menominee fire team spends as much time starting fires as stopping them, says Curtis Wayka, who runs the burning program.

I thought this was another interesting data point about the wildfire situation in North America. I’ve heard people say that the wildfires are less about global warming than they are about mismanaged forests where the policy is always to stop fires. Probably loss of property values and resource values plays a part in this thinking?

I wonder if implementing something like this could be helpful and if it’s actually politically and logistically feasible elsewhere.

In south america when doing aprpriate permaculture you usually also use fires to renew nutrients and have better soil afaik

Perhaps related:

Aristotle (Pol. 6.5.4 = 1321b31, 7.11.4 = 1331bl5) records ύλωροί "forest-keepers," but does not specify the area or their duties.

Sometimes I think about this.