Forests, Fires and Logging - op-ed from the May 1, 1997 Oregonian
by Roy Keene
Out of the ashes of the seasonal fire frenzy, the
forest health "crisis" has re-emerged. Some politicians, scientists
and forest managers are insisting that more logging will fix what they
perceive as an unhealthy forest by mimicking the effects of fire.
Forest life spans and cycles continue for centuries,
while human lives are measured in decades. It seems a bit precocious for
managers and scientists to look at the forest through their narrow window
in time and announce that the forest is critically unhealthy because it
appears to be temporarily out of balance. Fire, insects, and pathogens
at various times and intensities are not a "crisis," but rather
vital parts of the normal forest life cycle of Western forests. In the
absence of fire (nature's "reset button"), insects and pathogens
often work together like "slow fire" to restart forest succession
or reduce the density of overstocked stands. The scale of their interaction
within the forest ecosystem is affected (but not necessarily controlled)
by climate changes, existing forest conditions, local weather patterns,
and ongoing human manipulation.
Natural fires, if allowed to burn in the uninhabited
realms of our national forests, will not cost taxpayers the hundreds of
millions of dollars a year that public logging currently does. In national
parks and wilderness areas, fires often burn themselves out without intervention
unless they threaten other ownerships or human lives. Fire, like logging,
may provide temporary employment, but, unlike logging, does
not build roads, remove all the trees from a site, compact soils, or permanently
reduce biological diversity. Fire did not eradicate the valuable Western
White Pine, logged to remnants and then fatally infected with blister rust
from imported and replanted seedlings. Fire has not, over time, methodically
decimated forest watersheds. If there is a forest health crisis, a good
part of it is due to excessive logging. The most "successful"
national forest management might be to retire the Forest Service from an
incredibly inefficient career of logging and re-establish our heritage
lands to their original status as reserves.
In 1871 in the Great Lakes region, a huge holocaust
fueled by excessive logging debris burned one million acres and killed
several thousand people. The 1910 fire complex that
burned 3,000,000 acres in the Northern Rockies occurred in less dense forest
conditions then unaffected by fire suppression.significant changes in fire
policy and logging practices, more logging could simply result in further
forest health deterioration. During Renaissance times, climates were cooler,
fires were less frequent, and the forest was, at times, probably as dense
as it is today. The assumption that logging will counteract a conflagration
by reducing forest density and restoring healthy forest equilibrium is
naive.
While the uncontrollable fires of 1910 were burning,
a controversy over the use of controlled fire smoldered in Northern California.
Lumber men and ranchers were trying to convince the Forest Service that
controlled burning would maintain healthy forest conditions in pine and
mixed-conifer forests by reducing density. Agency managers and scientists,
realizing that thinner forest stands would grow less trees and result in
lower harvest levels, shrewdly resisted the controlled burn proposal and
instituted the fire prevention and control program we have inherited today.
This program enjoys a virtually unlimited budget and, in return, offers
only limited capabilities for saving forests or lives from fire. It also
results in a more dense and what some might call an "unhealthy"
forest. It seems capricious to continue in this expensive and seemingly
futile management scheme while simultaneously attempting to mitigate its
impacts.
If taxpayers are to continue to subsidize federal
forestry, management "success" should be more than a measure
of how many fires we throw money and lives into or how many logs we extract.
To achieve success and public trust, the Forest Service should renew its
mission and begin to prudently restore and maintain America's national
forests. Restoration and ecosystem maintenance imply allowing fire, insects,
and pathogens to interact as part of the natural forest cycle. Congress
should empower a period of restoration by refocusing the Forest Service
budget on the number of acres cared for rather than timber volumes produced.
If there is a forest health crisis today, it is action based on the short-term,
self-serving forest values manifested by those who fail to see public forests
as a trust to be kept functional and intact for future generations of all
species, including humans.
Roy Keene is a private forestry consultant and the founder of the Public Forestry Foundation, a group of public interest foresters and scientists based in Eugene, Oregon.