Forest Service and Collaboratives Garden Our Forests

- by George Wuerth­n­er, Sep­tem­ber 25, 2014, The Wildlife News

If the pub­lic real­ly under­stood the illog­ic behind For­est Ser­vice polices, includ­ing those endorsed by for­est col­lab­o­ra­tives, I am cer­tain there would be more oppo­si­tion to cur­rent For­est Ser­vice policies.

First, most FS tim­ber sales lose mon­ey. They are a net loss to tax­pay­ers. After the costs of road con­struc­tion, sale lay­out and envi­ron­men­tal analy­ses, wildlife sur­veys, (refor­e­stra­tion and oth­er mit­i­ga­tion if required) is com­plet­ed, most tim­ber sales are unprofitable.

Indeed, the FS fre­quent­ly uses a kind of account­ing chi­canery, often ignor­ing basic over­head costs like the mon­ey spent on trucks, gaso­line, office space, and the per­son­nel expens­es of oth­er experts like wildlife biol­o­gists, soil spe­cial­ists and hydrol­o­gists that may review a tim­ber sale dur­ing prepa­ra­tion that ought to be count­ed as a cost of any tim­ber program.

The FS will assert that ulti­mate­ly there are ben­e­fits like log­ging roads pro­vide access for recre­ation or that thin­ning will reduce wild­fire sever­i­ty. How­ev­er, as will be point­ed out lat­er, most of these claims are not real­ly ben­e­fits. We have thou­sands of miles of roads already, and adding more does not cre­ate a ben­e­fit. Reduc­ing wildfires–even if thin­ning did do this which is questionable–it can be argued that we should not be reduc­ing wild­fire severity.

The agency will also argue that because it can’t log the biggest trees, prof­itabil­i­ty of tim­ber sales is reduced. But again eco­log­i­cal­ly speak­ing those big trees are extreme­ly impor­tant to long term for­est ecosys­tem sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Besides many of the larg­er trees in more acces­si­ble ter­rain have already been high grad­ed and removed, fur­ther reduc­ing the prof­itabil­i­ty of any tim­ber sales..

Some pri­vate for­est advo­cates say the FS could increase its prof­its by log­ging more old growth, increas­ing the size of tim­ber sales, and/or by reduc­ing the envi­ron­men­tal analy­sis and reme­di­a­tion. Yet these costs should always be includ­ed in the prof­it and loss of a sale just as a busi­ness  must include the costs of rent, pow­er, employ­ee com­pen­sa­tion, and com­pli­ance with all zon­ing, envi­ron­men­tal and oth­er laws in the prof­it and loss of their operations.

Sec­ond, most eco­nom­ic analy­ses of tim­ber sales actu­al­ly ignore or min­i­mize the real costs asso­ci­at­ed with log­ging oper­a­tions. These include col­lat­er­al dam­age (thus costs) of log­ging like altered water flow inter­cept­ed by log­ging roads, sed­i­ment in streams from log­ging events, disturbance/displacement of sen­si­tive wildlife, soil com­paction, the spread of weeds, loss of scenery, habi­tat frag­men­ta­tion, and so forth.

Many of these costs are on-going and nev­er end. For instance, once weeds are intro­duced into an area, it is near­ly impos­si­ble to elim­i­nate them. And thus the cost of a log­ging sale that intro­duces weeds could be impos­si­ble to deter­mine but we know that it is far more than the val­ue of any wood derived from sell­ing fed­er­al timber.

Third, most nat­ur­al eco­log­i­cal process­es like wild­fire, bee­tles, etc. are crit­i­cal to the long term eco­log­i­cal health of forests. Yet the For­est Ser­vice typ­i­cal­ly attempts to reduce these fac­tors to the great­est degree possible—in essence short-cir­cuit­ing for­est ecosys­tem func­tion. In real­i­ty, they are typ­i­cal­ly not suc­cess­ful in these efforts—wildfires still burn a lot of acreage and thank­ful­ly we haven’t fig­ured out yet how to stop bee­tle out­breaks– but the fact that they waste bil­lions attempt­ing to purge nat­ur­al process­es is yet anoth­er indi­ca­tion of irra­tional for­est policy.

Rather than a sign of unhealthy forests as por­trayed by the pro-log­ging bias of the agency, these nat­ur­al process­es are impor­tant for recruit­ment of down wood into the ecosys­tem, cre­ate a diver­si­ty of wildlife habi­tat, and nat­u­ral­ly thin forests.  Stand replace­ment fires, for instance, have the sec­ond high­est bio­di­ver­si­ty found in for­est ecosys­tems. In real­i­ty a “healthy” for­est is one where wild­fire, bee­tles, and oth­er nat­ur­al process­es oper­ate. These agents are like preda­tor to ungu­late populations—they are impor­tant top down influences.

Fourth, when con­front­ed with the loss­es asso­ci­at­ed with log­ging, the FS sug­gests that tim­ber sales and log­ging sup­ports the eco­nom­ic vital­i­ty of rur­al com­mu­ni­ties. How­ev­er, even if one agreed that it is desir­able for tax­pay­ers to pro­vide wel­fare to rur­al com­mu­ni­ties in the form of log­ging oper­a­tions, this ignores the fact that cor­po­rate stock­hold­ers and com­pa­ny own­ers skim off a lot of that sub­sidy before it ever gets to mill work­ers and woods work­ers. Indeed, some eco­nom­ic analy­ses show it would be bet­ter to sim­ply give checks to employ­ees to not log than incur the costs of a tim­ber sale. Bet­ter yet pay peo­ple to fix all the things that are ignored or giv­en lit­tle atten­tion like wildlife sur­veys, decom­mis­sion­ing of roads, main­te­nance of camp­grounds and so forth.

Cur­rent poli­cies like “for­est restora­tion” are actu­al­ly degrad­ing for­est ecosys­tem. Foresters can­not tell which trees, for instance, have a genet­ic propen­si­ty to with­stand drought or tol­er­ance for cold or abil­i­ty to with­stand fires and bee­tles.  Ran­dom removal of trees reduces the genet­ic resilience of the for­est ecosys­tem. Log­ging removes bio­mass.  Reduc­ing tree den­si­ties through log­ging short-cir­cuits fires, bee­tles and oth­er nat­ur­al process­es that cre­ate unique for­est types like snag forests and are impor­tant for recruit­ment of dead trees.

Here’s where you find the poli­cies are total­ly illog­i­cal. First, the FS attempts to elim­i­nate nat­ur­al thin­ning agents like wild­fire and bee­tles. Then the For­est Ser­vice claims forests are too “dense” and require “thin­ning” trees (more appro­pri­ate­ly termed kill trees) to reduce den­si­ty.  A reduc­tion in den­si­ty, it is argued will reduce the nat­ur­al eco­log­i­cal process­es like bee­tles and fires. Mean­while it spends tax dol­lars try­ing to elim­i­nate the nat­ur­al thin­ning agents.

To use an old cliché, it adds insult to injury by allow­ing tim­ber com­pa­nies to haul trees off site rob­bing the for­est of crit­i­cal nutri­ents and struc­tur­al components.

This is anal­o­gous to the poli­cies of fish and wildlife agen­cies that “con­trol” wolves and moun­tain lions, then argue that elk and deer herds are too big, thus must be “thinned” by hunters.  Of course, research has more than ade­quate­ly demon­strat­ed that hunters kill dif­fer­ent ani­mals than native preda­tors do, typ­i­cal­ly select­ing the health­i­est herd mem­bers includ­ing the biggest males and most pro­duc­tive age class of females, while native preda­tors tend to take the young, old, and injured.  Thus just as hunt­ing poli­cies as cur­rent­ly employed are degrad­ing our wildlife pop­u­la­tion, cur­rent for­est poli­cies are hav­ing a sim­i­lar neg­a­tive effect on our for­est ecosystems.

For­est ecosys­tems are per­fect­ly capa­ble of respond­ing to these nat­ur­al eco­log­i­cal process­es which are ulti­mate­ly dri­ven by cli­mat­ic con­di­tions. Large wild­fires, for instance, bring for­est types in bal­ance with avail­able water, nutri­ents, and tem­per­a­tures much more effec­tive­ly than any log­ging schemes.

What I see hap­pen­ing is the gar­den­ing of our forests. The For­est Ser­vice, like a gar­den­er who has allot­ted space for var­i­ous crops with rows of car­rots, corn and pota­toes, tries to gar­den our forests. They decide that a par­tic­u­lar land­scape should be dom­i­nat­ed by pon­derosa pine or Dou­glas fir, or that place will be aspen or mead­ows, or this place is for spot­ted owls and that place for elk win­ter range, and so on. The prob­lem is that wild for­est ecosys­tems are dynam­ic and do not neat­ly fit into box­es or categories.

The prob­lem is that even if we want­ed to “gar­den” our wild forests, we are thus far, thank­ful­ly, inca­pable of doing this. All we do is wreak hav­oc on for­est ecosys­tems.  Every pro­pos­al to “fix” the forests cre­ates new prob­lems we nev­er envi­sioned. In try­ing to gar­den our forests, we degrade them.


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