Does Salvaging Scorched Trees Hurt the Environment?
Removing trees killed by fires might not be as damaging to forests as previously thought.
When a forest burns, the aftermath is a post-apocalyptic landscape of smoldering black trunks. The forest’s managers, whether they work for the U.S. Forest Service or for private companies, sometimes send in heavy machinery to harvest the dead trees in a process called salvage logging, to turn them into boards or other products. The idea is that since the trees are already toast, the responsible thing is to get a little more value out of them before they start to rot,
