Real healthy forests

Russell Sadler

The Northwest timber industry and its industrial foresters have never forgiven Dr. Jerry Franklin for methodically dismantling their cherished orthodoxy. Until the 1980s, industrial foresters were taught that old growth forests were “dead, dying and decadent.” Old growth forests were “biological deserts” that had to be cut down before they burned down and replaced by “healthy, vigorous young forests.” Clear cutting was an acceptable means of logging because “it imitated fire” and the “wood was utilized, not wasted.”

In more than 30 years of painstaking, on-the-ground research --- much of it conducted in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest east of Eugene in the Blue River Ranger District of the Willamette National Forest -- Franklin, then working as a scientist for the U.S. Forest Service, began systematically demolishing the industrial foresters’ orthodoxy in the 1970s - 1980s, exposing it as a collection of myths to justify the liquidation of old growth forests.

Franklin, now at the College of Natural Resources at the University of Washington, demonstrated that reforested clearcuts are the “biological deserts” -- ecologically dumbed-down monocultures.

Franklin and a host of colleagues demonstrated that artificial tree plantations are not forests. Franklin showed that clearcutting destroyed the structure of rotting wood on the forest floor that gave birth to new biologically diverse forests instead of sterile tree plantations.

In the 80s and 90s, environmentalists were winning the battle for public opinion. Ecosystem management -- a practice that reduced logging and limited clearcutting -- became the federal land managers’ watchword replacing the cherished orthodoxy of the industrial forester.

By 2000, the industry had organized a major, carefully targeted public relations campaign to restore their outdated orthodoxy. Much of the campaign is deliberately “under-the-radar.” The industry “message” -- it is more honestly called propaganda -- is pitched by direct mail, tours of carefully chosen “tree farms” by school children and other arranged tour groups, and speeches to groups considered sympathetic or gullible enough to accept the industry’s resurrected party line.

With the Biscuit Burn in Southern Oregon in July 2002, the industry decided to drop their stealth effort and raise the visibility of their propaganda campaign. Billboards began appearing around the region showed a burned over forest on one side and a neat, tidy tree plantation on the other. “It’s a Choice,” read the simplistic legend.

This month, the industry campaign reached a new level. An op-ed piece was circulated to Oregon newspapers under the name of U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Oregon. Smith argues for his bill sweeping aside legal challenges to the industry plan to “rehabilitate” forests burned by the Biscuit Fire.

“Partly due to the magnitude of the Biscuit Fire, Congress acted nearly two years ago to fund and accelerate forest thinning in fire-prone areas,” Smith’s op-ed piece said. “In passing the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, Congress affirmed that we have both the obligation and the power to prevent catastrophic wildfires.” Smith wrote.

The problem, of course, is the subterfuge the Bush administration uses to fund forest rehabilitation. The Forest Service is instructed by the grossly misnamed “Healthy Forests Restoration Act” to sell enough green timber to finance the thinning and restoration work. Only logging older trees will produce that kind of revenue.

The U.S. Treasury banked billions of dollars during the last 50 years as the Forest Service joined private timber companies in liquidating old growth forests in compliance with the industrial foresters’ now discredited orthodoxy. Instead of treating this money like the liquidated capital assets they were, Congress squandered the money to pay the current operating costs of government -- often unrelated to the management of the National Forests. Now it is time to reinvest some money in forest management and Congress wants to liquidate more capital assets to pay the bill.

After more than 100 years of industrial foresters’ orthodox fire suppression, the National Forests in the Northwest are again endangered by the kind of catastrophic fires that burned in the region in the early 1900s. The undergrowth usually burned away by light, seasonal fires has accumulated to the levels where many fires have the potential to be the hot, stand-changing fires that do so much damage. Attention to this undergrowth is urgently needed on much federal land. But the Biscuit Fire was not one of those fires. Less than five percent of it burned hot enough to be what ecologists call a stand-changing fire. Most of the burn cleared the underbrush and did a minimum damage to the trees. The Biscuit Fire in the arid Siskiyou has more in common with the Yellowstone fires of the 1980s, not the Tillamook fires of 1930s and 40’s.

The question is whether the timber industry’s newly aggressive propaganda campaign will have sufficient credibility to overturn Franklin’s lifetime of work in ecosystem biology. In a country where a majority of people polled say they do not believe in evolution, the influence of science as an antidote to deliberately manufactured propaganda can no longer be relied on.

Books to Read:
The Hidden Forest: Biography of an Ecosystem by Jon Luoma, Holt 1999. Chronicles the work of Jerry Franklin and his colleagues at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest.

Conspiracy of Optimism by Paul Hirt, University of Nebraska Press 1994. The history of the management of the National Forests in the Douglas Fir Region since World War II.

Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares by Nancy Langston, University of Washington Press 1995. The history of the management of the arid intermountain National Forests in the Northwest.

Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire by Stephen J. Pyne, Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books 1997. The book that popularized the problem of 100 years of fire suppression in the National Forests.

By Russell Sadler July 24, 2005