Some 1.5 billion trees are planted in the U.S. every year, about 5 trees for every American.

Annually, U.S. forestland owners plant about 6 trees for every tree harvested.

About one-third of America's original forest - some 300 million acres - have been converted to other uses, principally agriculture.

There are 26 million more acres of forestland in the Northeast than there were in 1900.

Today, forests blanket about one-third of the U.S. land base and about half the U.S. East.

U.S. annual growth rates have exceeded harvest rates since the 1940's.

Timber harvesting is forbidden on 50% of all National Forest lands in the U.S.

National Forests account for 20% of the nation's forestlands and 19% of its timberlands.

National Forests hold 46% of the nation's softwood timber inventory but only provide 6% of the annual harvest.

Since 1986, the harvest of timber from America's national forests has declined 70%.

In the West, 34% of all forestland and 54% of all timberlands are in national forests.

National forests in the Pacific Coast and Intermountain West regions hold 68% of the nation's softwood timber inventory, but provide less than 28% of annual harvest.

Forest density has increased 40% in the U.S. over the last 50 years.

The Industry

A decade ago, the annual allowable harvest on the Siskiyou National Forest was 164 million board feet. Some larger trees were still being harvested then, as well as smaller ones [top]. Not anymore. Now the annual allowable harvest is just 24 million board feet, and the trees about the size of those you see in the bottom photo. Meanwhile, the Siskiyou is still growing the equivalent of 739 million board feet of biomass every year, meaning that 715 million feet are added to the fuel buildup every year. If the public doesn’t harvest it, nature will.

There is general agreement that, no matter how much salvage comes off the Biscuit, the Siskiyou won’t produce significant wood for a lifetime and longer. In a resigned tone of voice, Don Johnson concludes: “That fire has destroyed an immense amount of timber, and I don’t see how they can ethically cut on a sustained basis without a long hiatus.”

Those southern Oregon businesses, communities and workers that survived the Northwest Forest Plan’s failure (so far) feel they can survive the Biscuit, too. Dave Hill, the soon to retire executive director of the Southern Oregon Timber Industry Association, feels the industry is “at a fairly stable level infrastructure-wise, and I don’t see that changing much one way or another.”

But future Biscuits? Maybe not.

The industry has already transitioned from federal timber to other sources. Roseburg Forest Products, based at Dillard, just south of Roseburg, has gone from 75-85% dependence on Oregon federal forests to a like dependence on other sources. So has Rough and Ready Lumber Company, a third-generation Illinois Valley operation, which once bought 90% of its timber from the Siskiyou, but now buys mainly from private, state-owned and out of state sources.

Bob Ragon, who began his forestry career in the Forest Service in 1965, then went to the private sector and now runs local industry association Douglas Timber Operators based in Roseburg, explains how Douglas County and many other Oregon mills have been able to hang on in the wake of the Northwest Forest Plan. Of thirteen primary mills near Roseburg, only two corporate mills closed their doors. Furthermore, when the International Paper, the Medford Corporation, Champion International and Gilchrist Lumber Company shut down their Oregon operations, their timberlands were snapped up by smaller operations, many of which went deep into debt to acquire a future supply base.

Mr. Ragon points out that the reason for making such a risky investment in uncertain times is at least partly because the remaining mills are family owned and “committed to the community.” When asked about that commitment, Steve Swanson of the Swanson Group explains: “I’m a third generation saw miller; it’s what we do as a family; we’re committed to these communities. I grew up here. My parents lived here in Glendale, I went off to college and came back to Glendale, raised my family here, my son graduated from Glendale High School—we live in these communities. You can walk out in the mill and find third generation millers whose fathers and grandfathers worked for this company. These are sustainable, family wage jobs here.”

Mills in west-central Oregon have also been able to import raw logs from a jobsfriendly British Columbia, California and Washington state. A combination of effects from the Northwest Forest Plan plus Washington Department of Natural Resources harvest reductions under the administration of Jennifer Belcher combined to gut western Washington’s milling infrastructure, leaving a “surplus” for Oregon. But under new director Doug Sutherland, Washington DNR is harvesting more timber, allowing Oregon mills to import the surplus of roughly 600 million board feet a year in Washington raw logs, via barge, rail, and truck.

The log yard superintendent at Douglas County Forest Products in Winchester, just north of Roseburg, told Evergreen his employer currently brings down 14 rail cars (three trucks worth each) every day from Washington, plus trucks when rail delivery is slow (often).

But that will change, says Ray Jones, resource vice president for Roseburg Forest Products. “There’s more and more milling capacity being added up there every day. If you isolate southern Oregon, and you look at all of the consumption of wood for the mills, and you look at the availability, there’s a net shortage of wood.”

And the “net,” so to speak, is tightening with each massive, un-salvaged wildfire. As for the prospect of Biscuit salvage logs this summer, Mr. Jones observes, “At the end of the day, any wood flow in the Northwest is important for us because it helps build our supply chain. All these ‘wood baskets,’ or log supply areas, overlap with each other. So Biscuit is important to us and to everyone in southwestern Oregon.”

But mill managers aren’t holding their breath. This from Linc Phillipi, who runs Rough and Ready Lumber with wife Jennifer, whose grandfather founded the Cave Junction company in 1922: “We’ll certainly look at the sales, but we’ll have to fit them into our schedule. We plan our year in the fall. Timing is a big issue. Helicopters get scarce in fire season. We have room, but it’s a little risky to bid on fire-killed wood.” As for the long term, Mr. Phillippi says the family will just have to be “creative.”

It is the same for the Swanson Group. “We can’t leave our plans up to salvage on the Biscuit,” declares Mr. Swanson. “We have wood scheduled to run our facility. If wood comes to market in a timely manner that has salvage value, then we will buy those sales and postpone other logging of green timber. But we’re not gonna shut down without it.”

The Sessions Report

While the Biscuit Fire and others were still burning, local officials were already looking to the future. Twenty-four-year Douglas County Commissioner Doug Robertson recalls: “We asked the Forest Service, what’s gonna happen, and their answer was, ‘we don’t know.’ What we were beginning to focus on was the nothing side, which in most people’s mind is a bad thing.”

“Frankly, it was a discussion with the Undersecretary of Agriculture [Mark Rey] that prompted us in that direction. If you talk about an emergency, with insects, brush, re-burn, and erosion, we’ve got it. When we made the pitch [for an emergency National Environmental Policy Act waiver] to the Forest Service, the response was ‘we don’t disagree there’s an emergency, but we’ll get killed in court because we don’t have any scientific data, it’s all anecdotal.’ So, we said we’d get the science.”

With that decision, the Douglas County Commissioners commissioned the Sessions Report, named for Oregon State University forest economist Dr. John Sessions, the report’s principal author.

The Board of Commissioners of Douglas County then approached Dean Hal Salwasser at the Oregon State University College of Forestry and University Distinguished Professor of Forest Engineering John Sessions about summarizing “the science.” At first, explains Mr. Robertson, “we wanted to do this report on the Tiller Fire [which began the same day as the Biscuit, burning 68,775 acres in Douglas County, costing $48 million], not the Biscuit, but Salwasser and Sessions said no, Tiller did not have sufficient data for the study.  The most readily available information was from the Biscuit Fire, and most of the information generated from the Biscuit will be transferable to the Tiller. It won’t cost as much and can be done more quickly.” The commissioners then gave the go-ahead.

Sessions team member Dr. Robert Buckman, the affable former U.S. Forest Service Deputy Chief of Research who “retired” to 18 more years of professorship and research at Oregon State, tells Evergreen that in his view, the Sessions Report was intended to ask: “What were the consequences of doing something; what were the consequences of doing nothing? One of the things we had to be very careful about is that everything we do here at the university has to be defensible and has to be reproducible. That was a requirement for everything we said. We had to be prepared to defend it, and we still are.”

The report (or more accurately, its authors) was roundly attacked by environmentalists and their political and academic allies. Dr. Buckman recalls, “You can imagine that when the report came out there was a lot of hostility [which] in my estimation came from the fact that we raised questions that people didn’t want raised.” “But nobody questions what the study says,” notes Mr. Robertson. “Nobody says, ‘Oh no, it’s not all going to come back in brush, no, there aren’t four point two billion feet’—there’s no question about that.”

Bear grass is plentiful on the Siskiyou National Forest, as it is all across the West. The bear grass in the top photo is growing in a harvested and replanted cut that was moderately burned by the Biscuit fire. About 200 hundred yards away is the scene at the bottom: a partially burnt cutting unit that was sold and marked before the Biscuit burned. We’re not saying where these trees are, or who bought them, because this sale is now hung up in court. The problem? The Forest Service didn’t consider the effects of timber harvest on bear grass!

So what does the science in the 57-page Sessions Report say?

A large part of the intellectual guts of the Sessions Report comes from research done under the Forestry Intensified Research Program (FIR), jointly initiated by Oregon State University and the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station. Sessions Report Team member Dr. Mike Newton, an OSU Emeritus Professor of Forest Ecology, has been involved in the FIR program since its inception. FIR experimental monitoring (including in the old Silver Fire area) has gone on for 23 years, demonstrating that rapid conifer replanting after fire can enjoy over 90% success. Controlling competing vegetation can double growth rates, which, as Sessions testified before Congress, can “substantially reduce the time necessary to re-grow a conifer-dominated forest with large tree characteristics, which is precisely the forest conditions called for in the Northwest Forest Plan.” As Dr. Sessions points out to Evergreen, “The ‘science’ of conifer regeneration in southwest Oregon was developed on the back of a lot of researchers over a long time and Mike Newton certainly developed a good part of it.”

“The science is not ambiguous on this,” Dr. Salwasser adds. “There are some people in the ‘leave it alone to nature’ camp who think that the science isn’t clear. But the science is absolutely clear in southwest Oregon. If you don’t intervene after a major transformation like the Biscuit, it’s not going to come back as structurally complex conifers for a very long time.”

Furthermore, says Dr. Salwasser, there is a wild card. “These forests that Biscuit burned were established under the conditions of the latter Little Ice Age,” which ended in roughly 1850. And, whatever the cause of current warming trends, the “historic range of variation as a model for the future just got thrown in the garbage can by climate change. Climate change also changes competitive  advantages to among plant and animal species, changes water cycles, and so on.”

Regarding competitive advantage, the now retired Dr. Atzet warns: “Possession is nine tenths of the law in ecology, too. [Hardwoods and shrubs that sprout from unburned roots] have built up [carbohydrate] energy in their root systems because of fire exclusion. Fires took some of the carbohydrate reserves out when the understory burned, giving conifers some competitive help.” Fire-adapted species like knob cone pine will come back without help, too, but in many areas, “the seed sources are gone,” especially for once-prevalent Douglas fir.

The Sessions Report states “Aggressive forest regeneration could accelerate the return to large-conifer-dominant forest ecosystems by 50 years or more and hasten return of forests to old-growth characteristics and values.”

But even with aggressive action, the Sessions team explains that on “many sites, it will take 50 years or more to supplement the surviving large trees, even with prompt regeneration, and up to 100 years to approach prefire conditions [for big trees]. Without aggressive action, shrub fields are “the likely future vegetation in many, or even most cases where conifer forests occurred before the fire,” and “it could take more than 100 years to create future forests that are anything like the pre-fire forests.”  In short, the public has a choice to make.

With the Northwest Forest Plan, the public made a choice to “save” old trees and spotted owls, at the cost of thousands of jobs and massive social dislocations in rural Pacific Northwest timber communities. Now those trees in many areas are burnt, the owl habitat gone for a long time, raising both the question of whether the Northwest Forest Plan has accomplished its purposes in dry, fire-prone forests, whether Americans want these forests actively brought back after fire, and—if our grandkids will wish we had.

Dr. Salwasser points out: “So you’ve got this area of Late Successional Reserves in the NWFP that was designed to perpetuate late-successional forests, but now they’re not going to have late-successional forest because fire has transformed more habitat than logging. So it really calls into question the whole purpose of LSR’s in the Forest Plan.”

“The real story is that 50 million acres have burned across the West over the last ten years, and the Forest Service is presiding over this mass deforestation and not doing anything about it.” Bob Ragon Douglas Timber Operators

Others also note the irony: “It’s funny, we talk about wilderness and roadless areas as areas we all want to protect,” observes Linc Phillippi. “That’s fine, but the way they’re protecting it is now you have a half million acres of burned forest out there. What the heck you gonna do with all that’s burned dead now? So what are we trying to protect? How are we going to get them back?”

With a hard edge to her voice, Sue Kupillas comments: “If we’ve got the habitat of the old conifer trees, which is what I thought we were aiming for through the Northwest Forest Plan, then everything follows.”

The zealous environmentalist opposition to restoration amazes Commissioner Robertson. “Sixty-five years ago, the Tillamook State Forest looked just like the Biscuit. This November, there will be a ballot measure in Oregon to set aside half of it as wilderness! The same people trying to prevent anything meaningful from happening on the Biscuit will be voting for it…and they just burned up 180,000 acres of wilderness down here! It’s just nuts.”

The Northwest Forest Plan

The Sessions Report singles out the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) “and associated laws, regulations and current agency policies” for failing to “adequately address the natural dynamics of fire-prone ecosystems or the consequences of large, intense disturbances on desired future conditions of the forests.”

Implemented by former President Bill Clinton, the NWFP was the creature of environmentalist litigation over the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet that led to Endangered Species Act listings for both. It was a jackpot for environmentalists...as Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund’s Andy Stahl crowed at a 1988 environmental law conference: “Thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Pacific Northwest, for if it hadn’t, we’d have to genetically engineer it.”

The wide range of the owl, its rarity and its preference for big trees combined to create a perfect land-management storm in the Northwest. In 1991, Dr. Atzet, who was then the Siskiyou’s lead ecologist, warned Evergreen readers: “When we take the forester’s right and ability to replicate natural processes we are headed for trouble.” Thirteen-plus years, hundreds of thousands of acres of wildfire, thousands of jobs, and billions of dollars worth of trouble later, how right he is.

However, the NWFP was never intended to be a disaster. The plan designated Late Successional Reserves (LSRs), streamside buffer zones, and Adaptive Management Areas (AMAs).... the concepts of “new forestry” and Shasta Costa writ large. Other lands were left as multiple-use “matrix” lands. Old-growth stands occurring in the “matrix” between reserves were available for the cutting of timber except for 80-acre patches around existing owl nests.

Dr. Salwasser explains that the purpose of LSR’s “is to perpetuate a network of connected late successional cores so that the plants and animals typical [of LSRs] can move about across the landscape over time. [Then] you can have places that blow down in a windstorm or burn, and you’ll have enough redundancy in the system that you don’t lose the functional integrity of a late successional forest.”

But when considering fires, Dr. Salwasser recalls, planners were thinking in terms of “hundreds to thousands of acres. They didn’t say tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of acres, they said ‘hundreds to thousands’—so the question is, what happens when you get a couple hundred thousand acres of fire, and parts of Biscuit were an uncharacteristic transformation of the landscape?”

Ray Jones: “The Northwest Forest Plan was never implemented. [It] will work if it’s given a chance to work. [But] many groups do not want to see another tree cut, and one of the first things that comes out of [environmentalist] mouths is fire suppression over the past 100 years. They don’t talk about the lack of management over the past 15 years. What was dead 15 years ago is standing dead or down, there’s been no thinning, you’ve got all that 15 years of growth on the forest, increased density, drought stress, more mortality, it’s not hard to understand why our forests are a tinderbox today. The question is how do we get out of it?”

Forest Service Chief Emeritus Jack Ward Thomas, who directed the team that crafted NWFP, doesn’t agree that it contributed much to the scale of the Biscuit Fire: “The Biscuit Fire didn’t occur because of the plan - there would not have been enough action in the ten years to have changed much. The idea of if we had logged it there would have been no fire is B.S. The NWFP really hasn’t been effect long enough to have made much ecological difference.”

However, Dr. Thomas is critical of the plan’s implementation. In a June 2003 analysis for the Forest Service, “Sustainability of the Northwest Forest Plan — Dr. Atzet, whom Dr. Salwasser says “calls ‘em as he sees ‘em,” explains the thinking of those involved in creating NWFP: “We felt our greatest strength in the NWFP was we had a closed circle, we had the LSRs, but you could work in the matrix anyway you wanted, yet for the majority of species, the whole thing would work.”

“If everybody lives in a high rise in Portland, who’s going to do the farming, ranching, logging and milling needed to feed, clothe and shelter our growing population?” Steve Swanson President, Swanson Group

“The real killer was that Option 9 came, a lot of specialists didn’t feel they had an 80% chance of species viability on [species about which little was known] So they imposed the “survey and manage” fine filter [site-specific] over the NWFP coarse filter [landscape-scale] and pretty much screwed it. If we didn’t know anything about a species, we were screwed.  They mixed up lack of information with risk.”

“Survey and Manage” required site surveys for about 400 rare and little-known (not necessarily endangered) species. As an example of the concept, Dr. Atzet overlays the NWFP template on the Siuslaw National Forest: “90% of the area is now in LSRs, riparian reserves, key watersheds – when you think about it, how is there less than an 80% chance that you have viability when 90% is set aside?” Region-wide, the NWFP sets aside 84% of public land. The other 16% were supposed to be in “matrix” lands, but the Survey and Manage protocols made management impossible.

“Everybody knew when the NWFP came out, and it wasn’t really Option 9 at all, but where we had to survey for all these things with no survey protocols, that it was a train wreck,” says Dr. Atzet. “We knew it wasn’t gonna work. So, for all the work we did trying to establish a credible coarse filter, to put S&M on the end of that was crazy.”

As an example of crazy, the Forest Service states that after spending “hundreds of millions” surveying for S&M species, “no new sites have been found for over 100 of these species.”

After a long battle of litigation, settlement, regulatory rewrite, counter litigation, in January of 2004, USFS and BLM placed most of nearly 300 current S&M species under a Special Status Species Program that identifies “species that could be at risk and provide[s] for management to reduce the risk of the species being listed under the Endangered Species Act.”

In April, the Western Environmental Law Center sued to stop the changes. On June 16, Earth First! spin-off Center for Biological Diversity, along with Oregon Natural Resources Council, sued to list the Siskiyou Mountains salamander and 105 other former S&M species as endangered species.

And Then What?

With the passage of time, the window of opportunity for implementing the sort of selffinancing, timely fire restoration options that the Sessions Report presents has mostly passed on the Siskiyou. Restoration costs money, lots of money, and many of the trees that could have been salvaged to pay for the work are now bug-ridden junk.

The Forest Service’s Biscuit Fire proposal is a mere shadow of what the Sessions Report shows is possible, even falling short of what the agency proposed and accomplished (with  no measurable impacts to soil or water resources) following the Silver Fire. Even so, environmentalists are fighting the Forest Service tooth and nail. Those 80,000 acres of owl habitat won’t be coming back in anyone’s lifetime, possibly never.

Two lessons have been learned according to Dr. Salwasser: “[Biscuit] already taught us what happens when you don’t take action to keep forests resilient to fire. The second lesson it’s going to teach us in the next year or two is the futility of trying to do anything on federal forest lands following large events like the Biscuit given existing laws and policy.”

It may seem that the money and effort put into the Biscuit fire and salvage were just a symbolic run through the motions that accomplished little. But what the Sessions Report proposes, creation of areas in which different restoration treatments could be tested over time, using burned areas as living, learning laboratories, is an idea that makes great sense—not only in southern Oregon, but anywhere wildfires burn. But will it ever happen? Anywhere?

The Gordian knot

While environmentalists once enjoyed the support of the public in their campaign to “save” public lands, public opinion has reversed since 1988. There is now wide public support for restoring the West’s diseased and dying national forests. There is equally strong support in southern Oregon for salvaging what can still be salvaged from the Biscuit.

Josephine County commissioner Haugen showed Evergreen a petition headed “We the undersigned believe that salvage logging should be done in the area burned by the ‘Biscuit Fire’ on the Siskiyou National Forest and that salvage logging should be done quickly while there is still enough economic value left in the timber to help our local economy.” Approximately 300 residents of the Illinois Valley, which according to USDA has a poverty rate of 30.2%, signed it.

Haugen also gave Evergreen a copy of a 2003 survey of 406 Josephine County residents conducted by the Eugene, ORbased Oregon Survey Research Laboratory, asking:

“Is it acceptable to harvest damaged trees inside the burned areas, taking into account sound forestry practices?” 85.5% said yes. “Should salvage logging of damaged trees be allowed if it would reduce future fire hazards and improve forest health?” 89.7% responded yes.

Polling and focus group data gathered by Project Protect, a national grass roots group based in Oregon, reveals widespread support for forest restoration, particularly the Bush Administration’s Healthy Forests Restoration Act, which garnered significant bi-partisan support in both the House and Senate. In the organization’s most recent national poll, 74% of those asked said they support a more effective and timely process for protecting forests from catastrophic wildfires and a stunning 82% said they favored thinning and brush removal programs aimed at reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire. This after a long winter: a time of year in which wildfires generally fall off the public’s radar screen.

Even environmentalists now realize the American public doesn’t support huge wildfires and then leaving it all to rot. World Wildlife Fund’s latest point-and-click letter to Congress opposing Biscuit restoration contains a Freudian slip of sorts, acknowledging, “Nearly everyone looks at a burned forest as a catastrophe.”

And who is at fault for the long series of catastrophes that have swept the West? Rough and Ready’s Mr. Phillippi boils it down to a single sentence: “You can blame the agencies, you can blame environmentalists, but ultimately it’s Congress that sets the laws under which these lands are managed.”

Yet, despite growing public discontent, it took fatalities in California to spur final passage of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act. Steve Swanson remarks, “Politicians are going to follow the path of least resistance. And regular people are busy working, running a business. They’re not going to spend the summer in a camp.”

In a recent telephone interview, Dr. Thomas compared public lands policy to the fabled Gordian knot. In mythology, whoever could unravel the impossible mess of the Knot would become King of Gordia. For years, people came by and picked at it around the edges, accomplishing nothing. There it sat, intractable, insoluble—just like today’s federal policy mess.

Then one day, Alexander the Great showed up in Gordia, looked at the Knot for a bit, whipped out his sword and chopped the Knot clean in two.

America doesn’t need a king. What America needs are leaders—with enough  backbone to pick up the sword, face up to the knot—and take one hell of a swing.

Postscript:
On July 6 the Ashland-based Siskiyou Project sent a threatening letter to Paul Beck, forester for the family-owned Herbert Lumber Company based at Riddle, just south of Roseburg.“ As a potential bidder, we feel it is important for you to know that if your company is involved, directly or indirectly, with the proposed timber sales in the Biscuit fire area, that citizens and organizations will educate the public, media and your customers of your involvement in one of the most controversial public lands logging projects in U.S. history.”

“We had not planned to bid on the Siskiyou salvage sales,” company manager Lynn Herbert said after reading the letter.. “Now I think we will.”

On July 9, the Forest Service issued its Record of Decision on Biscuit Fire salvage and rehabilitation. Predictably, environmentalist Don Smith announced that his group, the Siskiyou Regional Education Project, would appeal and “possibly” sue. In an interview with the Medford Mail Tribune, Mr. Smith complained that, “This is an unnecessary conflict. If the Forest Service had taken a more moderate stance, we could have avoided all this.”

At press time, just two days after the Forest Service issued its Record of Decision, the Biscuit salvage plan landed in federal court. But this time it was the industry that sued first. The Portland-based American Forest Resource Council was joined by Rough & Ready Lumber Company, the Swanson Group, South Coast Lumber Co., Jim Nolan, an O’Brien resident whose home lies within a mile of the Biscuit fire line, Jim Frick, a Cave Junction realtor, Oak Flat LLC, a company that lost timber in the fire and Indian Hill LLC, another landowner that owns property adjacent to the fire. Declared AFRC president Tom Partin, “If we’re really serious about habitat restoration, we need to get busy and that is what this lawsuit is about.” Stay tuned.