OK, I won't worry about it. I'm reading "Stranger in a Strange Land" at the moment. My wife Ruth is reading "Dune." We'll swap when we finish if we still have time from the library - renewals are nice. I watch TV episodes from Hulu. But, I get tired of the ads every few minutes. I'm sure glad I read. My boys don't read much. Maybe it's because they are still in school and a book reminds them of work at school.
I discovered two huge oak trees that have fallen over the back fence recently. I drove the truck down there with all the chainsaw stuff, while Ruth walked the dog to said location. I got the fence cleared of tree limbs. But, we have a pile of branches that need to be burned. We have many burn piles waiting to go when we get permission from Cal Fire. There have been no permissive burn days this whole month. No rain all month and none in sight. It looks like another drought in the future.
We have our mobile home(double-wide trailer) down near the creek at 2500 ft. elevation. We could move it to a much better view at the top of our hill at 3000ft elevation. It's clear of trees up there and would sure be good for solar panels. But, the temperature in the Summer gets as high as 116F (that's the highest it's ever been since I've been watching it) and the pine trees, along with being at the lowest point around, makes a 10F difference. This is major when the heat is on. We don't have any AC. We do have a portable swamp cooler that can get us another 15F if it's humid. We could buy an air conditioner, but we've held off all these years. The tree could fall. But, I've been watching the trees and can recognize if I need to cut one down. There's not much danger that the tree would surprise us - but it's possible.
So, you clear all the trees and spend lots of money being safe. I think you'd reconsider if you checked out the local wisdom. There are more facts to process than always meets the eye.
Bugs do spend time in trees. So do birds - who eat the bugs. There are pine beetles that will attack a Bull Pine and bore holes thru the bark until the tree dies off because the flow of xylem and phloem gets broken. You see the pine needles in the tree branches turn red and if you look at the trunk of the tree, you can see the holes the beetles have left behind. It's part of keeping an eye on the forest. I cut those trees and usually the beetles move to a nearby pine. This will last for a few seasons until there are no more pine trees in the area. As long as the beetles don't infest all the pines, it's OK. They do get eaten by birds. It's all about eat stuff until you get eaten by others. So, bugs do eat plant leaves in the garden and serve as food for lady bugs, or praying mantises. Slugs and snails get eaten by various birds, too. If you had no bugs, you'd have no birds. You'd have lots of mosquitoes if there were no bats.
It's all natural. If you clear-cut the trees, you are doing something that upsets nature. I like asphalt roads. But, the deer get run over when they appear. We are dangerous to the forest because we want to change it to fit our requirements. Urban life supplies comforts like Starbucks and McDonalds to the millions living there. I try not to judge how people live. But, I do prefer to be away from the masses.
Comments
I discovered two huge oak trees that have fallen over the back fence recently. I drove the truck down there with all the chainsaw stuff, while Ruth walked the dog to said location. I got the fence cleared of tree limbs. But, we have a pile of branches that need to be burned. We have many burn piles waiting to go when we get permission from Cal Fire. There have been no permissive burn days this whole month. No rain all month and none in sight. It looks like another drought in the future.
It's clear of trees up there and would sure be good for solar panels. But, the temperature in the Summer gets as high as 116F (that's the highest it's ever been since I've been watching it)
and the pine trees, along with being at the lowest point around, makes a 10F difference. This is major when the heat is on. We don't have any AC. We do have a portable swamp cooler that can get us
another 15F if it's humid. We could buy an air conditioner, but we've held off all these years. The tree could fall. But, I've been watching the trees and can recognize if I need to cut one down.
There's not much danger that the tree would surprise us - but it's possible.
So, you clear all the trees and spend lots of money being safe. I think you'd reconsider if you checked out the local wisdom. There are more facts to process than always meets the eye.
It's all natural. If you clear-cut the trees, you are doing something that upsets nature. I like asphalt roads. But, the deer get run over when they appear. We are dangerous to the forest because we want to change it to fit our requirements. Urban life supplies comforts like Starbucks and McDonalds to the millions living there. I try not to judge how people live. But, I do prefer to be away from the masses.