"Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed -- chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides." -- John Muir
Portland, Oregon -- Fools, it appears, are breaking out all over. And even though they are being exposed, they are not backing down. It's been two and a half years since the President flew here and promised the people of the Pacific Northwest that they could have "Healthy Forests" along with safer communities and lots of timber sales. It's now pathetically clear that while it would have been a challenge to deliver all three (since the forests had already been dramatically overcut), the Administration has failed to deliver on any of its promises, and the forests of the Northwest (and other regions) are racing towards a crisis.
The Administration, Congress, and the timber industry keep pointing to the crisis -- and then doing things that make it worse. It reminds me of my one personal experience with a big wildfire -- the Cottonwood on the Tahoe National Forest. The fear was that the wildfire would ignite the log deck at the (now closed) Sierra Pacific mill in Loyalton and take out the entire town in the ensuing explosion. As I sat and watched helicopters and teams of firefighters desperately try to keep the blaze away from the log deck -- a fierce battle they finally won -- log truck after log truck came in off the Tahoe, loaded with logs, and drove straight into the SP mill to add new fuel to the potential catastrophe.
That was surreal. But so is the conduct of forest policy in Washington these days. Consider, for example, an interview recently given by Rich Fairbanks, the chief timber-sale planner on the Biscuit salvage project here in Oregon.
After explaining to the Eugene Weekly that his team of professionals originally said the correct level of logging was about 100 million board feet, he admitted that his superiors insisted that he come up with ten times as much timber to cut -- a billion board feet. Then, Fairbanks told his bosses that developing a sale that big would take so long that an entire logging season would be lost, and the burned trees would lose much of their value. They didn't care about that, either, he was told, "Rich, they don't care about volume. They don't care about the rot."
According to Fairbanks, the real message was
"'We don't give a shit about the local economy, much less restoration forestry. We're into this to get the Republicans re-elected'. It wasn't about volume; it wasn't about forest restoration; it wasn't about economics. It was about votes and the impression that the environmentalists were holding up the logging and being wasteful. They thought there was political advantage to be gained by ramping up the stakes on Biscuit. I think they were trying to get their voters out, and they thought this would help."
So a billion board-foot program that relied heavily on helicopter logging was drafted. In the end, though, even senior officials could find only 372 million board feet to cut.
And the idea that salvage logging means healthy forests has recently been further damaged by a study done by experts at Oregon State University on the Biscuit Salvage project. The study found that salvage logging killed so many new seedlings, and left so much debris behind, that it actually increased the danger of fire and slowed down forest recovery. Instead the study recommended,
"...the lowest fire risk strategy may be to leave dead trees standing as long as possible (where they are less available to surface flames), allowing for aerial decay and slow, episodic input to surface fuel loads over decades."
The major argument, if you can call it that, for continuing to try to log old growth and for the whole Bush approach to forests has been that the only way to come up with funding for genuine forest restoration and community-protection projects is to cut mature, fire-resistant trees. But, even as a bad argument, this works only if the government makes money on timber sales. It doesn't. A study by the World Wildlife Fund on the salvage logging on the Biscuit found that the federal government actually lost $14 million -- $14 million that could otherwise have been spent on protecting nearby communities from the risk of fire and on saving lives. (Helicopters are expensive.)
And the folly is becoming too much for the courts to ignore. On January 10, U.S District Court Judge Marsha Pechman issued an order that would stop 140 timber sales in the Northwest, representing about half the annual cut from the region. Pechman acted after the Forest Service repeatedly refused to study whether or not its sales would threaten endangered wildlife species.
But the timber industry, Bush administration, and Congress don't get it. The Dean of Oregon State University School of Forestry, Hal Salwasser, strongly criticized his own faculty's report casting doubts on the value of salvage logging, and it was later revealed that senior faculty members at the University had tried to suppress the study. This is less surprising when you realize that after the University issued an earlier, pro-helicopter salvage logging report called the Sessions report, and that the wife of Wes Lematta, the founder of Columbia Helicopters, gave $1 million to the OSU School of Forestry. Salvage logging may not be good for forests, jobs, community safety, or the taxpayers -- but it is very sweet for helicopter companies.
"Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools -- only Uncle Sam can do that." -- John Muir
Uncle Sam seems to have lost his gift for saving trees. However overwhelming the evidence, timber industry allies in Congress are still trying to flack for more salvage logging. Oregon Representative Greg Walden along with Senator Gordon Smith are carrying legislation that would significantly accelerate salvage logging after fires, and it would weaken public participation and oversight over forest-recovery projects. The media in the region has turned against the bill, but it doesn't seem to matter to Walden and Smith.
To quote John Fairbanks again:
"The Walden bill [Forest Emergency and Recovery and Research Act, HR 4200] is one of the most misguided pieces of legislation I've seen in a long time. It departs completely from the science. On the other hand, there's a countervailing trend: Because of Biscuit and a number of other fires, people are saying, "We need to learn to live with fire." They're gonna try to put through some laws, but I see a lot of people who are aware that the kinds of policies that Walden is proposing just don't work."
John Muir was right; any fool can destroy trees.