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Forests Mismanaged by Government and Private Industry What good is a tree? Aside from being pretty, fun to camp under, a subject of poems, a place to eat our granola, a component of the ecology, a factor in reducing global warming, and our children’s heritage, there’s one other important thing. You can build houses with it. Houses are good things, and there’s a worldwide growing demand for wood to build them. However, it should be obvious that with trees, like any resource, you shouldn’t use them all at once and you shouldn’t use your best for just anything. In the 19th century, this country was open for exploration and rapacious exploitation, and that may have been appropriate. But The Organic Administration Act of 1897, under which most national forests were created, showed a change in thinking. It states, “No national forest shall be established, except to improve and protect the forest within the boundaries, or for the purpose of securing favorable conditions of water flows, and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States...” The national forests are managed by the United States Forest Service, and its stated mission is “Caring for the Land and Serving People.” I’d like them to live up to that. The USFS is heroic in terms of wildfire prevention and suppression, thinning, disease control, and habitat maintenance.. In fact Scott, my Both Sides Now partner, fights fires and has probably risked his life multiple times. However, the USFS job of managing the national forests as a timber resource is a problem. It has hardly been well managed. According to the USFS, up to WWII there were abundant supplies of private timber, so very little national forest logging took place. After the war, there was a housing boom, and this led to widespread clearcutting. So public timber built our post-war houses. In the 1970’s came lawsuits and environmental protection measures. The USFS got wiser. Today’s national forest timber sales have dropped back to pre-1950 levels and clearcutting has been reduced by 80 percent over the last 10 years. The USFS has only about 48 out of 140 million forested acres available for harvest, and they say only 1/2 of 1% of those are harvested in any one year. Still, I think the national forests are starting to look like postage-stamp “tree museums” on the US map. And the maps don’t show the clearcuts. As to “old growth,” (large trees in the mature stages of their life cycle), I understand that in the US only 6% of the original forest remains. Forest products companies keep the public focus on environmentalism and lost jobs. They issue soothing words to make it sound like they’re doing a fine job. They’re not. If, as forest products companies tell us, trees are “America’s renewable natural resource,” then why don’t we leave the old growth alone? It has been over 50 years since the post-war housing boom. By now we should have stands of crop trees that look like sugar cane fields. I don’t believe we have this issue with our local timber industry, but Pacific Lumber (PALCO) in Humboldt county never met an old growth tree it didn’t want to cut. PALCO has a bland, “hurray for us” web page, with a section entitled: PALCO: A Responsible Employer, Neighbor, and Steward of the Forest.” Do you like that? They claim that the Headwaters controversy is just a misunderstanding. There’s only 3000 acres of Headwaters forest, not 60,000, as environmentalists claim. I say, anyway you cut it (ha ha) it’s still old growth timber. Now if you must have clear, redwood heartwood for your house, consider going to Mendocino Specialty Lumber Company, which offers reclaimed redwood. That’s 100% old growth wood harvested prior to 1930. Maybe there’s promise with Cranefield International in Vancouver, which is developing hardwood projects in emerging countries like Chile. Cranefield claims to keep one-third of the land untouched, use sustainable low-impact harvesting methods on another third, and plans multi-species plantation programs on previously-harvested or degraded forest land. Surely, in 1998 you don’t need to cut down the precious and the irreplaceable. This isn’t about the spotted owl, displaced loggers, ecosystems, or recreation, although they all factor in. It’s about keeping the good stuff and growing more of the resources our children need. Otherwise, what are you going to say when your great-grandchild asks “What was a forest?” Barry Schoenborn is a technical writer, and a ten-year resident of Nevada County. You can write to him at barry@wvswrite.com. The opinions of columnists are not necessarily those of The Union.
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