I suspect George Wuerthner, the writer of a Nov. 27 column (“Merkley’s thinking is wrong on thinning”) in the East Oregonian besmirching Sen. Jeff Merkley’s efforts to reduce the affects of fire through thinning and selective logging, is sorry the Capital Press published a front page article on Nov. 26 citing results refuting his contentions.

The Nature Conservancy, an environmental organization, set aside 4,713 acres in their Sycan Marsh forest area as a controlled study area to address thinning and controlled burning. They had a plot where nothing was done, the control plot. There was a plot where the area was thinned. Another area was subjected to controlled burning, and another plot was subjected to both thinning and controlled burning.

They did this knowing the area historically experienced frequent forest fires. Little did they realize that within a few years the Bootleg Fire would burn through all of their plots. It will be a couple of years before all the empirical data can be gathered and analyzed. But, preliminary observations appear to show the plot treated by both thinning and controlled burning faired the best. The control plot appears decimated.

It remains to be determined, but fires that burn this hot often leave behind soils depleted of nutrients with slow recovery.

There were other suppositions in this column that lacked supporting evidence to be creditable. The statement that the dead trees should be left standing because they were storing carbon is only temporary. The day these trees died the process of decomposition began with the final product being carbon dioxide and water, the carbon cycle of nature.

If he was really interested in the sequestration of carbon in these dead trees, he would have them milled into lumber and the lumber used in the building of buildings that would last 100 years.

Carlisle Harrison

Hermiston