I am going to be in northern Idaho and western Montana for another week, trying to unravel the local ecology (I’m on a mission to find a nice stand of white pine, if any still exists), meet with local Forest Service employees, and take a few field trips to try and get a handle on the tricky issue of thinning to reduce fuel.
This is a controversial subject that will take more than a couple posts to dispose of. It’s a story about silviculture (controlling the establishment, growth, composition, health, and quality of forests to meet diverse needs and values).
Don’t despair, I’ll break up my posts on the subject with some ruminations about politics and white pine. And some more pictures of Zella.
Most everyone approaches forest management with some biases derived from their personal values and experience, so I’ll start my discussion of northern Rockies silviculture by disclosing my formative experiences with the Forest Service’s timber program. I worked for more than 10 years as a lobbyist, litigator, grassroots organizer and general rabble-rouser to stop the Forest Service’s old growth logging program in western Oregon. A major target of these efforts was the Willamette National Forest.
The 1.7 million Willamette National Forest—which occupies most of the central portion of the Oregon Cascades—used to be the flagship timber forest of the national forest system. It is outstanding timber growing country, characterized by Douglas fir and western hemlock, which typically grow in centuries-old stands that often exceed 150,000 board feet an acre (enough to build about 15 new homes). Throughout most of the 1980s, the Willamette National Forest’s annual timber target was an extraordinary 1 billion board feet. The Forest Supervisor at the time famously kept a sign on his desk that read: “A billion board feet or bust.” At the time, this one national forest in Oregon accounted for 12% of all the dimension lumber consumed in the entire United States.
Logging on the Willamette in almost all cases meant clearcutting stands older than the United States. The largest stump I’ve ever found on the Willamette National Forest was 11’ 9” in diameter. The oldest stump I’ve found belonged to a tree that was 1,098 years old when it was cut down in the 1980s.
(The author at the Berry Patch timber sale, last old-growth timber sale logged on the Willamette National Forest.)
Historically, anywhere from 50-80% of the Oregon Coast and Cascade Range was covered in an emerald blanket of classic old growth forest, with overstory trees between 200-850 years old. After decades of overcutting, around 10% of the original old growth forest cover remains. Old growth clearcutting, to put the matter in ecological terms, had reduced old growth cover far below the historic range of variability and had replaced wildfire as the dominant disturbance agent on the landscape. Populations of old-growth dependent forest species like the spotted owl crashed, leading to court injunctions which reduced the Willamette National Forests logging program from a billion board feet in 1987 to about zero in 1992.
The first thing that Bill Clinton and Al Gore did when they took office in 1993 was to assign a team of scientists to write the Northwest Forest Plan, a compromise plan that placed about two-thirds of the remaining old growth in the region in late-successional reserves that are off-limits to clearcutting and left a third available for harvest. On the Willamette NF, about 150,000 acres of classic old-growth habitat was still on the chopping block.
Which was too much for me and others, who waged low-intensity war on the Willamette for six years after the Northwest Forest Plan went into effect. After six years of protests, administrative appeals of timber sales, lawsuits, bad press, and intervention by the local Congressional delegation, the Willamette stopped planning old growth timber sales. Today, the Willamette has a very modest timber target of approximately 50mmbf a year, about half of which comes from thinning of 20-50 year old tree plantations that are a legacy of past clearcutting. The other half comes from innovating thinning operations in older second growth timber.
I toured one of the latter projects during a brief trip back to Oregon along with FS silviculturists, a Congressional staffer and a couple of folks who profess to oppose the projects for reasons that remain somewhat murky to me. The project in question—The Oakridge Wildand Urban Interfacing Thinning Project—would thin a stand of fire-regenerated 100-year old Douglas fir in a half-mile arc east of the small town of Oakridge.
To make a very long story very short, I was quite struck by the following dynamic: The Forest Service and activists’ roles on the Willamette have reversed themselves in the last eight years. On the dozens of occasions I went into the field with Willamette National Forest staff in the ‘90s to complain about old growth clearcuts, my colleagues and I typically offered long and detailed explanations as to why old-growth clearcuts were indefensible from an ecological perspective.
In those days the Forest Service didn’t have much of a response to criticisms offered on the basis of science, law, public opinion or anything else. All they had to say for themselves was: “Well, the Northwest Forest Plan tells us to plan timber sales in old growth so that’s what we did.”
Those were frustrating conversations.
Out in the field looking at this thinning show, the local FS silviculturist and the district ranger described the ecological rationale for the project at length and made a convincing case. The activists, for their part, had no particular rebuttal to offer, other than to remind everyone that it was, afterall, a logging show, and, presumably, a bad idea on that basis alone.
Driving east on I-80 to Idaho I took a call from a friend, who writes for a Eugene, OR newspaper. She said she’d gotten calls from the 2 or 3 activist types in Eugene who think the Oakridge thinning project was a bad idea.
“Let me put it into some historical perspective for you,” I said. “It’s a tale of at least three generations of activists. The first wave was folks like my boss Andy who gut shot the Willamette with the owl injunctions. Then came along people like me, we bayoneted the wounded. Now you got a couple of dingbats who want to molest the corpses.”
She laughed. “Now that’s a quote!” She paused for a moment.
“It’s not much of a story, though, is it?” I asked.
“No, not really.”
If a tree falls in the woods but no one hears it… Or if a tree falls in the woods and the public actually understands and supports it… More later.
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