The Ohio Division of Natural Resources (ODNR) “manages” Mohican Forest.
Management techniques include logging, thinning, and spraying. Management can be done in various ways for various reasons, but more often than not, the “management” is to grow timber for wood products that result in a small financial gain relative to the damage done to the forest.
Due to human over “management,” most of Ohio’s original forests were cleared for agriculture resulting in erosion and a decrease in fertility. In the Mohican area in the 1930’s, the personnel of the Civilian Conservation Corps, replanted plantations of pines in order to attempt to repair the damage humans caused.
If you read ODNR’s annual management plan for 2017, there are plans to cut and sell two plots of white pines: one 23 acres and the other 17 acres.
Even with the “strictest standards” followed in this “disturbance activity,” the results are soil compaction, destruction of the native plant species, loss of mature forest habitat for animals, and the introduction of invasive plants, due to soil disruption.
ODNR has proposed an addendum to the 5-year Management Plan that includes a rezoning of the forest, which allows “management” of previously untouchable tracts of mature forest. In order to ever regain old growth, a forest must have escaped destruction for a long enough period of time to allow natural biological and ecosystem functions to be the dominant influence.
Forests have always been capable of reproducing and maintaining themselves. They do not need the “management” of humans. We are what has caused so much of the destruction of mature forests’ ecosystems and loss of biodiversity.
Our true riches reside in these woods being left untouched for nature to manage on its own.
Please take the time to contact, by Sept. 30, ODNR with your comments/concerns about the current management plan and the addendum rezoning the forest.952-B Lima Ave. Findlay, Ohio 43840Forestry.comments@dnr.state.oh.us.
Theresa Clark
Loudonville, Ohio
