By Sydney Lobe, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter Years ago, ecologist Dr. Karen Price walked through a forest ravaged by wildfire that had been logged and replanted. It was a uniform mass of pine trees, devoid of birds and wildlife — it was “ecologically boring,” she recalls. By contrast, the nearby eco reserve — which had also burned, but was left undisturbed — was a sound bath of bird calls and rustling leaves, and home to rare wildlife like goshawks. She notes that while this is just an anecdote, the juxtaposition was a more powerful illustration of the difference between a forest logged for “salvage lumber” and one left to regrow naturally than she’d seen in any graphs of young forests. Price, alongside other experts, is expressing concern that salvage logging…
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