Editor's Column

Guest Columns

Forest Facts

Nature is indifferent to human need—Few events in this century have more dramatically demonstrated nature’s indifference than the May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. The blast leveled 150,000 acres of forestland, including about 80,000 acres in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Among the dead: 57 people, 5,000 black-tail deer, 1,500 Roosevelt elk, 200 black bear and countless millions of small mammals, birds, salmon and steelhead. Here, a Weyerhaeuser forester surveys the damage on company lands about 10 miles north of the mountain.

The difference between “Zero Cut” and “Forest Restoration” is perhaps best illustrated in terms of nature’s three most intractable lessons: It is not possible to save or preserve a forest. The only constant in nature is change.

Nature is indifferent to human need. Some trees live a long time, but eventually they all die. Sometimes they die enmasse—as they do in big blowups— and sometimes they die one at a time leaving only the space in which they stood. No matter the manner of death, new trees eventually take their places.

By one estimate, the West’s forests have come and gone 16 times since the last Ice Age ended some 10,000 years ago. Photographs of trees that are older than America would seem to deny this truth, but the fact is forests live in turmoil. No two days are the same. No two minutes are the same: a leaf falls, a bud sprouts, a seed germinates and an old tree falls to earth. The rhythms of life and death play on.

The fact that big fires are once again big features on the western landscape demonstrates nature’s indifference. Old-time fire bosses used to brag about “running smoke out of the woods.” But today’s fire bosses say the old timers went overboard in their efforts to “exclude fire.” They look forward to a time when fire can “more nearly play its natural role.” What they are acknowledging in the language of fire fighters is the very positive role fire once played in western ecosystems.

In recent years, nature’s three lessons have converged on a fourth lesson: To get the things we want and need from forests we must first learn how to mimic natural disturbance patterns that have been powering forests since the last Ice Age ended. In western forests, the most common disturbances are fire, wind, insects and disease. Of these the most significant has been fire, though the three forces often work in concert.

	Big trouble—This ponderosa pine forest in eastern Oregon’s Wallowa-Whitman National Forest may look healthy, but it is big trouble. The white fir understory is diseased and is slowly killing a fine stand of mature ponderosa pine. Unless the fir is removed, the pine will eventually die. White fir should not be growing here in such abundance, but it is because of the long absence of wildfire. Reintroducing fire to such forests is very risky without first removing some of the dead and dying timber.
	Meadow restoration—This dying pine stand was once a New Mexico meadow, and the Forest Service is trying to turn it into a meadow again. Loggers felled the dead trees lying on the ground. Several more thinnings are needed in years to come before the meadow is restored. Finding commercial markets for wood removed from such thinnings has proven to be a daunting task. The Forest Service even tried giving this wood to firewood gatherers but there were no takers.
	Ample growing space—a coalition of environmental groups was involved with the Forest Service in this pilot thinning on northern Arizona’s Coconino National Forest. Stand density was reduced from 400 to 70 trees per acre, providing ample growing space for residual pine and a seedling crop that will begin to grow in a few years. Environmentalists who distrust harvesting have challenged such projects on the grounds that thinning so many trees disrupts squirrels—a staple in the diet of threatened goshawks. Some opponents say they would accept thinning if fewer trees were removed, but fire ecologists warn that the risk of catastrophic fire would remain high in forests where too few trees are removed.

 

 

"We must always consider the environment and people together, as though they are one, because the
human need to use natural resources is fundamental to our continued presence on earth."