Friday Musings...The Big Four

Money doesn't grow on trees...

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Long-time Evergreen followers have read my numerous essays about The Big Four but several newer followers have asked me to explain them. I’m pleased to do it.

I played a significant behind-the-scenes role in the campaign runup leading to ratification of the  Healthy Forests Restoration Act in December 2003. Our group hired Frank Luntz to do polling and focus group work in several major cities from coast to coast.

I was privileged to observe several focus group sessions that Luntz assembled. Participants were shown photos of forests where logging had occurred and photos of burnt forests and asked what environmental qualities they wanted to see in our National Forests.

By the end of the third session, we could all see that participants were describing four similar benefits that I came to call The Big Four:

·       Clean air

·       Clean water

·       Abundant fish and wildlife habitat

·       A wealth of year-round outdoor recreation activity

For most of the last century, the U.S. Forest Service did a good job of securing these environmental qualities for Americans. But after the Clinton Administration added the northern spotted owl to its threatened species list, the forestry work necessary to protect air and water quality, fish and wildlife habitat and recreation assets fell into disarray.

Increasingly, the Forest Service found that it was unable to care for forests without being sued by environmental groups that disapproved of timber harvesting – especially clearcutting – but saw nothing wrong with the wildfires that were destroying our environmental assets.

Amid longer and longer wildfire seasons, the prospects for clean air in the West are not good. Wildfires are belching thousands of tons of greenhouse gases – carcinogenic smoke – into the air we breathe for at least nine months out of the year.

We are losing entire watersheds in stand-replacing fires. Estimates vary, but between 70 and 80 percent of the municipal water consumed in the West rises from forested watersheds: Rivers, streams and reservoirs that capture and hold spring runoff.

These same watersheds provide habitat for fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and game animals. Fast moving wildfires can outrun birds in flight. Fish can be boiled alive in shallow streams and animals don’t stand a chance in the face of two thousand-degree flames.

More than half of the nation’s 193-million-acre Federal Forest Estate is dying, dead or already burnt to a crisp – a direct result of lousy federal forest policy and little or no caring. Millions of acres of outdoor recreation opportunity are gone and won’t return for 100 to 200 years. Minus strong public support for a major reversal in forest policy, insects, diseases and wildfires will continue to destroy The Big Four.

There is strong support for reversing course in rural communities that have been ravaged by wildfires, but support falls off dramatically in urban and metropolitan areas where the public is more concerned about “saving forests” by leaving them to nature’s vagaries.

But as an old wildlife biologist friend said to me years ago,

“When we leave forests to nature, we get whatever nature serves up, which can be pretty devastating at times, but with forestry we have options and a degree of predictability not found in nature.

I am also reminded of something the late Alston Chase said to me about our environmental conundrum in a 1990 Evergreen Magazine interview.

Chase wrote three forestry-related books before his death in 2022: Playing God in Yellowstone,  In a Dark Wood and Harvard and the Unabomber. He held a PhD in Philosophy and taught at two midwestern universities before decamping the Montana’s Yellowstone Valley in 1975.

Here’s what he said when I asked him about environmentalism’s impact on forestry:

“Environmentalism increasingly reflects urban perspectives.

As people move to cities, they become infatuated with fantasies of land untouched by humans.

This demographic shift is revealed through ongoing debates about endangered species, grazing, water rights, private property, mining and logging.

It is partly a healthy trend. But this urbanization of environmental values also signals the loss of a rural way of life and the disappearance of hands- on experience with nature.

And so the irony. As popular concern for preservation increases, public understanding about how to achieve it declines.”