mastication

Mechanical treatment includes wood chipping, mastication and removal of trees, branches, leaves, biomass and other material from the forest, which has built up in recent decades and can feed flames.

The group’s goal is to get the park to do more thinning, mastication and biomass removal, which they hope will reduce the risk of sequoias dying in both prescribed burns and wildfires.

Its goal is to get the park to do more thinning, mastication and biomass removal in addition to prescribed burns, she said.

Forest Service spokesman Stanley Bercovitz said Yosemite has a good track record of letting fires do their natural work on the landscape, as well as a history of prescribed burns and mastication with heavy machinery.

The "Saturn's ring" region — that's what we Cookies call the space in between our edges and our centers — should be distinctly chewy, a clenched tightness that elicits some mastication.