{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"KZYX News","title":"PG&E clear cuts to have devastating economic impact","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":389,"description":"September 28th — PG&E’s plans to clear cut around power lines on private property are not limited to Mendocino County. This weekend, KZYX paid a visit to Harry Vaughn, a small landowner in Southern Humboldt, just outside Miranda, where crews have been marking trees for removal. Vaughn depends on the income he makes from farming mushrooms in the woods and from small-scale logging, “which is one reason I don’t really want the contractors to come in and destroy the value of my forest, where they would cut thousands of dollars of timber, and just leave it on the ground to rot,” he explained.\r\nVaughn manages his 240 acres of mixed canopy for fire, sudden oak death, and sustainable logging according to a non-industrial timber harvest plan. He also farms more than twenty varieties of mushrooms in frames made from tanoak saplings in a patch of scrupulously maintained dappled shade between a fuel break and a dirt road. He was careful to acknowledge that we were on Wailaki land before we made our way over to a mushroom that looked like a small turtle balanced on a log. It was a bellflower, or winter variety, shiitake. He calculated that he can make upwards of sixteen dollars a pound for mushrooms at market. “I can grow mushrooms and grow trees and harvest trees to provide income for me and jobs for my neighbors,” the local loggers he hires to work on the property. He also uses a local mill to process the wood into lumber.\r\nAcross the dirt road from the mushroom farm is a patch that’s been judiciously opened up to allow for different kinds of forest foods. But it’s still not nearly as opened up as the PG&E clear cuts in Mendocino County. “Once you remove the shade from the shaded fuel break, you end up with a brush field that’s more prone to fire, which is basically what PG&E is proposing to do, is create huge brush fields,” said Vaughn, who is a member of the local fire safe council and the prescribed burn association. Pausing at the sunny patch where trees had been...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/xZpAumwbhFUpJUYcwaQ1-q6snzOyqAm13l7cW6AWPCM/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9mMzkz/NjAwNjc2OWMyZmFk/YWY2YTdmYjI5M2Mz/YWMxNy5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}