Playing the Long Game

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In the early 1990s, after the publication of the results from the coring of the Greenland Ice-sheet, I wrote to to express my support for inclusion of substantial tracts of inland montane forests in the Ancient Forest Protection Bill (Jontz 1992) being proposed at that time. Those cores made it clear that Earth’s climate was capable of very rapid shifts (Taylor 1999). That had serious implications for the genetic diversity of our western forests. Below is what I sent off to Congress.

I worked on air quality, water quality, soil nutrients, range management, wildlife habitat and forest dynamics with the U.S. EPA, and the U.S Forest Service in Nevada and Eastern Oregon for almost 35 years. Over that period, I developed a deep and abiding love for the island forests of the interior. With that had come a scientific interest in the development and status of the forest communities during the last few thousand years. It is from that perspective that I write this.

With climate modification a growing planetary concern, the interior western forests may offer us one of the best reservoirs of the genetic diversity necessary to cope with the changes which might result from such a catastrophic shift in the climate regime.

The Ponderosa Pine (Pinus Ponderosa) zone defines the boundary of almost all interior forests in the western United States. It is the most drought tolerant giant conifer forest in North America1. Paleobotanists examining the fossil record have found evidence that these forests have existed, in the past, in many different configurations. Plant associations which have no current analogs can be found in the fossil record:

Range shifts occurred that could not have been predicted … [these] apparently led to anomalous species associations” (Spaulding 1984).

The implication of these findings is of major importance for coping with changes in the variation of seasonal precipitation and temperature distribution which will result from modifications in our climate. We must assume from the fossil evidence that the gene pool of these forest types represents a large reservoir of unexpressed diversity. This diversity provides a crucial hedge against climate change, allowing the drought tolerant Ponderosa pine forests to adapt quickly to altered conditions.

In another vein, evidence of the massive failure of silvicultural theory on both public and private lands is all around us here in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon. Foresters who chose to “liquidate” the stands of old-growth Ponderosa pine in favor of what they promised would be fast growing stands of Douglas-fir and Grand Fir have helped eliminate much of this gene pool.

These overstocked fir stands are now showing strains from attacks by insects and disease. In certain areas, they also constitute a serious fire hazard. This attempt at forcing these moderate to low-elevation sites to produce as if they were industrial forest plantations has been very misguided and extremely damaging. It has also served to reveal the sorry state, with some exceptions, of public and private forestry in this part of the country.

Douglas-fir and Grand fir will always be a part of these forests, and at higher elevation, they can even dominate. But at the forest margin, these trees are a minor component. Because of this, many of these stands cannot be economically managed now or for the foreseeable future. They are much more valuable for their water, forage, recreation and soil stabilization potential than as poorly managed quasi-industrial forests.

To insure the renewed health of these forests, and to protect against the looming possibility that we are in the process of forcing the world’s climate into a new state, we must protect as much of the remaining Ponderosa pine forests as possible.

Franklin, Jerry F, and C. T Dyrness. 1988. Natural Vegetation of Oregon and Washington. Corvallis, Oregon: Oregon State University Press.

Jontz, Jim. 1992. H.R.842 – 102nd Congress (1991-1992): Ancient Forest Protection Act of 1991. https://www.congress.gov/bill/102nd-congress/house-bill/842.

Spaulding, W. Geoffrey. 1984. “The Last Glacial-Interglacial Climatic Cycle: Its Effects on Woodlands and Forests in the American West.” In Eight North American Forest Biology Workshop. Utah State University, Logan, UT: Dept. of Forest Resources, Utah State Univ. http://agris.fao.org/agris-search/search.do?recordID=US8641645.

Taylor, Kendrick C. 1999. “Rapid Climate Change.” American Scientist, July. http://www.geo.umass.edu/courses/geo458/Readings/Taylor99_AS.pdf.

1 The Ponderosa pine of western North America is one of the worlds largest forest trees, with individual specimens reaching 4 feet in diameter, and more than 150 feet tall (Franklin and Dyrness 1988).

Blind to the End Game

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It was quite a few years ago now, but an editorial in the Portland Oregonian came across as a tout-sheet for the conversion of cut-over timberlands to real estate holdings (Absence makes the heart grow fonder, Jan 2nd, 2010). It only served to drive home the words of philosopher George Santayana:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The entire premise was underlain by a set of faulty assumptions that contradict much of what the article was trying to sell.

Let’s start with some ecological reality that rarely sees the light of day. Eastern Oregon
has suffered dramatically from the absurd notion that industrial forestry of the type practiced in Western Oregon was ever marginally viable in the dry forests of the interior. These two ecologically distinct parts of the state were for decades treated as one and the same for the purposes of projecting timber harvest, when nothing could have been further from the truth.

That’s something even new Oregonians understand intuitively. You can see it with your eyes if you bother to look. The editorial board, as one egregious example, makes no mention of the stark differences in climate and precipitation that drive forest growth. It’s a fact that industrial forestry may not even work on the West side. Chris Maser, Jim Trappe and their co-workers hypothesized long ago that continuously cropped forestlands are prone to failure because they eliminate the carryover components – the elements necessary for the re-generation of forest stands.

We certainly have enough evidence to state conclusively that it doesn’t work at all in the dry montane forests of the interior West. That’s an important story that The Oregonian has never even bothered to cover, yet that narrative challenge needs to be taken up by everyone in the state who claims care about the future of its forests.

What it means is this: none of the management plans for cutting hundreds of millions of board feet per year in Eastern Oregon were remotely sustainable. Public and private foresters, who logged the fire-resistant old-growth Ponderosa pines and replaced them with what they thought would be fast growing fir, were badly fooled. The resulting stands of sapling-choked forest have been magnets for insects, disease and fire.

Increased susceptibility to these agents has been couched in the gobbledygook of forest health. The reality is much simpler. These “problems” are a manifestation of the natural
thinning processes inherent in heavily over-stocked and, in this case, poorly managed stands. It’s what these forests undergo in re-establishing themselves. The mature trees that are the result of this thinning action from these agents, and that are the best adapted to resist them once they’ve fully developed, were cut down and hauled away. Sustainable timber harvesting would have identified these relationships as part of the information gathering process. Either willfully, or because of blind ignorance, that didn’t happen. That isn’t much of a business model, certainly not one with any staying power.

The yield increases never occurred and everyone now admits that Ponderosa is best suited to drier sites. The cost of managing stands to grow pine back should have been paid up front as part of the price of the timber that was sold off at what were bargain-basement prices. It has instead fallen to taxpayers, or in the case of private forests, remedied by selling off the land, what’s left of the trees, or both.

The public, having never been given a realistic price for its timber, is now asked to foot the bill for, at minimum, a hundred years of management, and that’s very optimistic. Short-rotation cropping has proved to be an abject failure. Moreover the seed-stock necessary to generate the best possible forest on a given site – from the cones on the trees that were originally there – have been carted off to the mills. There is no getting back those millennia of evolutionary benefits. The research that describes all of this is well documented.

As for the timber market, it became part of a much broader collapse that has little to do with environmentalism, and everything to do with technology in the 1980s, and then greed and gullibility from the 1990s right into the housing collapse of the 2000s.

The ecological part, the removal of the older forest trees, wasn’t even the biggest factor in the loss of jobs during those decades. That prize goes to increased automation and to the development of an unsustainable housing market built to feed bogus investment schemes, not to meet the needs of real people. The 1980’s saw the cutting of 40% of all the trees that had ever been logged on National Forests but mill jobs continued to disappear thanks to machinery. Then in the 1990s, Wall Street decided to create investments that derived their value from thousands of bundled home loan payments. That fed multi-million dollar bonuses for the suits and made a lot of IRAs look good, but it wasn’t sustainable either.

The skids were greased for the collapse in the last days of the 1990s, when regulation of these derivatives was prohibited in a 200-page amendment slipped into an appropriations bill by Phil Gramm. The resulting frenzy of greed-driven speculation drove home prices to levels never seen till then. As one example, Californians were getting loans for thirteen times their annual income when good real estate professionals use a value of 3 times income to decide whether a buyer can afford a property. That ended and the housing market there collapsed eventually leading to a four and a half year supply unsold. With it went the demand for lumber.

As a long-time reader of the Oregonian, I was just as disappointed by the historical lobotomy the paper seems to have undergone. The forests of the interior West have been subjected to wave after wave of collapse and consolidation. The history of logging in this part of the world is filled with this sort of boom and bust cycle. It’s why we need a diverse economy.

The newspaper’s lack of acquaintance with that boom and bust history is not even the most egregious problem with the editorial. That prize goes to the absurd notion that the public would ever have been given a say on private holdings. Forestland owners are doing what rational actors usually do with their investments, they’re maximizing them. That may mean liquidating the timber when the price is right, and if it can best be done by growing a crop of houses that will be the plan.

Imbuing the environmental movement with god-like powers – while giving the derivatives-crazed notions of Wall Street and the financial shenanigans of it’s acolytes in the timber industry and the larger world of hedge investing a pass – is willful deceit and a failure of journalistic competence. Real-estate investment trusts are just the final chapter in the gradual removal of the public from any say about the health of the forests lands the state was endowed with, both on the wet side and the dry side. That’s what happened, that’s the system that was built. That’s the one any reliable news source would discuss.

Blind to the End Game

Power Line Peril

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I’ve written about the way this works (or doesn’t!) in a previous post. It’s about chaos, which isn’t really chaotic at all. It may have gotten that moniker as a way to deal with systems that can fly away from where you thought they were headed. It’s about natural and man-made systems with trajectories that can catapult to a very different place.

Here in the Western U.S., and across the country, there are calls for a greatly expanded network of high-voltage power lines. Those plans carry significant environmental and ecological costs. The threat from fire alone can quickly rework plant communities and just as quickly eliminate human ones. Soil erosion, damage to watersheds and water-tables, and the loss of wildlife habitat are all included in those costs.

We’re likely talking cart before the horse or, in this case, anticipating a push from the top-down before we have any feeling for pull from the bottom-up. The rapid proliferation of distributed energy sources – residential solar installations feeding into battery storage including the batteries in electric vehicles – is starting to give us just that feeling. Those emerging resources are being integrated into the electric ecosystem using digital controls, something new under the sun for the grid. Smart meters and smart inverters can use that digital intelligence in real time. That brings demand management into play so that utilities can partner with their customers to save energy on an as needed basis.

But that’s not where many utilities are headed. The legacy of rural electrification gave many a guaranteed fee they could tack onto the cost of infrastructure and the financing. All of that goes onto their customers’ electric bills – your electric bills. The big players in that arena have been at the forefront of calls for more power lines, big power lines. They will get much more money for that multi-billion dollar infrastructure than a digital build-out of the local and regional transmission grids to tap the emergence of distributed energy resources. They’ve been incentivized to chase those big dollars for more than eighty years, a business model that remains largely unchanged.

But high-voltage power lines are where the chaotic rubber hits the road. In contrast to DC power lines, AC lines are prone to failure and they will remain so. They are best described as non-linear dynamical systems. Any instability can result in blackouts. The larger the system, the more likely those are to occur.

That behavior informs many ecological systems, and the power grid is just such an ecosystem. In my time with the U.S. Forest Service, we used non-linear descriptions to model population dynamics which are also unpredictable. It was understood that without complete knowledge about the state of the system at a precisely defined time (an impossibility), any instability means the trajectory can’t be predicted. Fast-acting controls can help mitigate the resulting fluctuations, but only within well-defined limits. Push past those, and transitions to different states (including complete failure) are the rule.

The world of engineering has recently started to wrestle with this difficult fact. The seminal research only dates to 1982, when it was found that the swing equations used by power system modelers were analogous to those used in the analysis of planetary dynamics. The original work on such systems was initiated by the great French mathematician, Henri Poincaré in the late 1800s. He won an international prize competition by telling the world that solving the equations for gravitational attraction between three planetary objects didn’t have a single solution, and that some of them were beyond calculation. That was a breakthrough that led to a very different way of thinking about systems with feedback.

An AC power grid is just such a system. In a nutshell: even a simple 3-generator system was shown to transition from stable to unstable:

…in response to simulated faults on the line: tweak the operating parameters of the large generator just slightly, and a previously stable grid would run away…

This reality precisely describes the disastrous turn of events in Texas brought on by the cold spell and snowfall of February, 2021. As uninsulated nuclear plants, gas plants, pipelines, and to a lesser extent wind turbines randomly failed, the resulting instabilities pulsed through the Texas grid managed by Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Power would be restored at various intervals and at different locations, only to fail a short time later. The grid was so unstable that it came perilously close to catastrophic collapse. That’s the really important takeaway from the rolling loss of power sources during the blackout, yet it’s barely made the news.

The idea of the electric grid as a non-linear system subject to such behavior has started to take root. A detailed examination of the implications for grid planning was published in Spectrum, the journal of the IEEE, in 2004.

This missive has been met with the same sort of resistance other disciplines have faced when informed that their equations are too sensitive to initial conditions to be absolutely predictive. The answer as mentioned above is emerging and picking up speed though it’s going to take a bit of effort: rework local and regional grids with distributed generation and digital control surfaces to make the grid more stable. Doing that will allow portions of the grid to quickly disconnect themselves when disruptions happen, as they will.

Australia is moving there very quickly, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab has validated that distributed generation can be used to re-energize the grid piece by piece. At the heart of this approach is a model more akin to the bottom-up Internet than top-down control of all the emerging sources. That makes little sense once tens of thousands of such sources are producing and storing electric energy.

We can grow our own and bring utilities to the table as partners, those who are willing to change those obsolete business models. I believe that’s what should happen for the good of all those ecosystems, including the human ones!

ERCOT as it’s known, does not seem to give reliable counsel. Their preferred business model of unregulated laissez-faire economics has been disastrous. They are now being sued by the largest co-op in Texas. In its bankruptcy proceeding, Brazos Electric claims that the disastrous fluctuations in the power grid resulted in per-megawatt charges that went stratospheric during the brutal cold period.

Super Freakout

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Working for the Forest Service, I was often back and forth with leadership teams in Washington, D.C. One of those conversations revolved around a review by Elizabeth Kolbert, in the New Yorker, of Super Freakonomics published in 2009. The review starts with a parable about the projected growth curve for horseshit at the turn of the last century. Once automobiles came around, that problem dissipated – along with the rank odor of New York as the 1800s came to a stinking end.

The book’s take-home is that we just have to think about things differently and all of this stuff about the environment will take care of itself. In other words, we get more of the standard economic mantra from the same folks who brought us the collapse of 2007-2008. That new-world thinking about packaging junk loans into investments, led to old-world gifting: a $17+ trillion dollar bailout as the Fed green-washed Wall Street’s derivative sins in free money.

The horseshit-gone-away parable may be one to take to heart. The ad-hoc engineering so easily floated by the economists whose book she reviews, is much less so. We have a basic problem as humans, at least when thinking through solutions to difficult problems such as climate change. We like very straight lines and find it inconceivable that any man-made or natural system would violate that comfortable principle.

To get a feeling for what’s really going on, try figuring out when the trajectories in the image below will transition from one wing to the other.

Here’s the takeaway from that exercise: for many of us, it’s difficult if not impossible to accept two simple but profound truths:

Image from Wikimedia Commons.
  1. There are completely deterministic systems which are inherently unpredictable because their initial conditions can never be precisely stated and any imprecision – any at all – can put them on a completely different trajectory.
  2. The corollary is that when that path takes it onto an adjacent trajectory, it might just transition very quickly into orbiting around a very different part of the system far removed from the one it left.

So, this isn’t about straight lines. Nonlinear systems with feedback can and do behave exactly as described above. The climate is such a system. The worry is not about global warming. That might simply be a prelude. Warm the world enough to melt the Greenland ice cap – flushing all that fresh water into the North Atlantic – and you have a much bigger problem. That’s about as nonlinear as you can get on the planet and it’s happened many times in the past.

The thermohaline circulation which currently moderates the earth’s climate (we’re in an interglacial cycle within a larger glacial epoch at this point) will shut down. Without that circulation to distribute the heat that gathers at the equator, the climate will transition to another much colder state. If that happens, there’s no short-term return path to the one we’re on now. The bad news is that we have no way of predicting where we are on the current trajectory, how much we’ve done to perturb it, and whether we’ll slip onto one of those funky orbits, one that has us visiting some other system state.

Tweaking the world with giant straws to suck up the bad gases, one of the super-freaky suggestions in the book, reeks of the sort of cuteness that got us mortgage-stuffed derivatives as “investments” – and the lost jobs and sinking retirement funds that came with them.

Any system that requires a measurement unit like the Sverdrup (a million cubic meters of flow past a given point every second!) and that circulates on the order of once every thousand years (!!) is not something we should rationally be messing with. Frankly, I’d rather let the book’s authors play on Wall Street.

The (Forest) Vision Thing

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Logging has always been heavily subsidized in the interior Northwest. That was politically driven and it led us  down the path to overstocked forests. The timber was given away, often below market value let alone at the cost of replacement. That cost is a function of what it takes to grow the next stand. That was never factored in because doing that would have made the timber unsaleable. So the management needed to grow replacement forests has always lagged far behind the desire to keep pushing timber out to the mills.

The natural result is overstocked, and in many cases heavily overstocked, stands that are coming in at hundreds and some times thousands of stems per hectare. That leads to drought-prone soils, and nutrient shortfalls. Fire is the primary means of redress and in lieu of that, insects, so fires suppression hasn’t helped the situation at all.

Speaking of which, insects and those interior forests are so tightly bound they should be considered one biological entity, not two. Spruce budworm, Tussock moth and the Western and Mountain pine beetle are not pests in any sense of the term. Spruce budworm works at the intra-stand level, opening up overstocked forest stands over an 8-10 year period. Tussock moth simply knocks down stands that have encroached onto sites on which they are not suited. It re-sculpts those stands in about three years, probably an adaptation to what we know has been the regular cycling of global temperature over the last 400,000 years. It works at the stand scale. The pine beetle, the most important insect in the Western Hemisphere, will take down all the lodgepole pine for as far as the eye can see, re-setting the clock on those forests. That’s happened in the Canadian Rockies and interior British Columbia over the last 20 years and in many parts of the interior Western US.

Vostok ice-core record, courtesy of AntacticGlaciers.org.

Lodgepole pine only live to be 70-80 years old at which time something has to take them down. We started seriously suppressing fire maybe 100 years ago? I don’t believe the current timeline for lodgepole die-off from the pine beetle is a coincidence.  Moreover if we are experiencing the effects of climate change, that could be one more signal for the beetle to bring it on.

Not enough of that science informed the reaction to those outbreaks, unfortunately. I worked for Forest Service Research  for 26 years and we were the red-haired step-child of the National Forest System. We would write up reports that detailed those relationships only to have many of them ignored. I have an endless supply of stories about that. The key point is this: the only funding available for forest management was from the Knutson-Vandenberg Act – mitigation money for cutting trees. That perverse incentive did exactly what you might imagine, it yoked intelligent management to unprofitable logging, stifling the former and monetizing the latter.

The result, given the excessive drive for that pot-of-gold at the end of the rainbow, was a much darker reality – coal in that rainbow stocking if you like. This story, for example, needs airing. The failure of industrial forestry on the Oregon Coast led to an on-going disaster. That narrative is complicated enough that nobody ever seems ready to write about it. Given the difficult questions it asks about the state of industrial forestry, that’s not surprising, but badly needed.

Jack Ward Thomas and Conservation

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The best move I ever made was coming to Oregon from Las Vegas, Nevada, and then signing on to work with Jack Thomas for Forest Service Research. A gruff Texan, his talk was laced with hilarious sayings and down home stories that are the birthright of everyone from the Lone Star state. I’d often be falling out of my chair laughing, but there was always  message behind that talk and it’s what separated him from others.

Jack was a real scientist, a big thinker, his beliefs deeply rooted in the older discipline of conservation, the one adopted by Gifford Pinchot who was one of Jack’s heroes. An orgy of greed in the late 19th century had strip-mined millions of acres of forestlands. The hustlers had cut prime timberlands, often obtaining deeds through theft and blackmail. They left with cash in hand while the boom-and-bust cycle of resource extraction bled the land dry.

Pinchot, a professional forester, was tasked by Teddy Roosevelt with starting the Forest Service as a way of rebuilding that devastated landscape and nurturing what remained. That meant conserving resources so that they could be sustainably managed. From that period arose the National Forest System. Even more than our National Parks, those lands are the gift we gave ourselves and that we leave our children.

Jack really carried that conservation ethic inside him, a belief that we could and should maintain healthy plant and animal populations even as we made use of the resources of the natural world. Society has increasingly come around to that view with the current emphasis on sustainability. Along with his good friend and mentor Bill Brown, he lived those beliefs. Together, they spent weeks trailing pack strings into Hells Canyon, a place both loved dearly. His time in the wilderness gave Jack a clear understanding of the natural world and that’s what he brought to his job, one that eventually took him to Washington D.C. as the Forest Service Chief. For all of us who worked with him, it was hardly a surprise.

In the 1980s, political demands had superseded common sense, with the agency pushed and prodded into a completely unsustainable harvest regime, one that was destroying ecosystems. The spotted owl was the designated red flag, a creature so dependent on intact forest ecosystems, that its demise was a clear signal we had to pull back or lose it all. Like the canary in the coal mine, the bird was only a messenger warning of the dangers that lay ahead.

Just as in Pinchot’s era, it was time to redefine our priorities. What better man than Jack to take that task on? A professional approach to everything he did and a belief in science serving the public good were his hallmark. He was the right man at the right time to bring us back to the conservation ethic. Future generations owe him a debt of gratitude.

His management style was a rare thing. He invited challenges and contrasting viewpoints. He was sure that he could only arrive at the truth once he felt the passion of the arguments his scientist and staff brought to the table. All of it laid the path for top-notch science, real knowledge about real things.

He eventually found his way back to the West he loved, and the Boone and Crockett chair in Wildlife Management at the University of Montana. There he could himself mentor the next generation of professionals, something he really enjoyed. Wildlife management is all the better for his work and his life, and we’re all the better for having known him.

It was the best move I ever made, moving to Oregon. I met my wife and I got to work for and with Jack Thomas. I couldn’t have asked for more.

What’s a forest – and its genes – worth?

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A friend recently wrote up a plea that our state do a better job at managing its school fund. I couldn’t disagree with his logic since the state is mandated to maximize that fund which depends on timber receipts from the state forests. This part of his argument, however, caught my eye. He wrote that
 
“[t]he state itself is a poor manager of commercial timberland”
 
I dug up his email address and wrote him back to expand on that notion. The bad news is that the commercial interests have been even poorer managers of timberland. The story hasn’t gained much traction in the press but that management failure is no secret to the scientific community. The details need an honest airing in a pubic arena as well. Lurking at the center of this management disaster are a set of assumptions that have collapsed completely, bringing into question the model used by the timber industry to manage forest lands. What was once a minor irritant in Christmas tree plantations, the so-called Swiss needle cast – it isn’t Swiss but they first took note of it on imported specimens – has collapsed the growth curve for industrial forestlands in the Coast Range, those with mono-cultured stands of Douglas fir. Now that’s a very broad statement, but the evidence for that collapse is itself very broadly distributed, as can be seen from this map:
 
Swiss Needle Cast Cooperative - 2013 Aerial Survey

Swiss Needle Cast Cooperative 2013 Aerial Survey

That image was taken from the OSU Dept of Forestry’s Swiss Needle Cast Cooperative website. The industry funded cooperative was formed when the outbreak started to cause a serious dent in revenue forecasts. It’s from the 2013 survey of the disease. The outbreak has grown worse over time as can clearly be seen from the mapped history of those surveys. A more detailed synopsis of the cause for the epidemic can be found on that same website:

Disease is most damaging close to the coast, and severe disease has been associated with several climate and topographic variables, including spring leaf wetness from precipitation and fog, mild temperatures in the winter and spring, and low-elevation valleys.  It is believed that the current epidemic is attributable to a variety of factors, particularly the increase in Douglas-fir plantation acreage in coastal areas that were previously dominated by spruce, hemlock and alder and have environmental and site conditions conducive to disease development.  Much of the current research is focused on understanding the impacts of soil and foliage nutrition on swiss needle cast disease development and severity, assessing disease growth impacts, and modeling and mapping the current and projected distribution of disease. (my emphasis)

…which is undoubtedly why ‘…spruce, hemlock and alder…‘ grew there in the first place1. This pattern, let’s call it ecosystemic over-reach, has been repeated on the East side of the state as well. That’s a long story itself, but it also needs airing. You can find some of it here in a paper I wrote 20 years ago.

To my mind these two case-studies are symptomatic of a near-complete failure of industrial forestry, something that will, I believe, become even more evident over the timescale at which forest stands develop, on the order of hundreds of years. The evidence continues to mount as time passes.

What follows is my personal indictment of the timber industry.

It was a mistake to ever work on a margin that had Douglas fir replacing mixed stands. Those stands appeared to ecologically uninformed eyes, something that’s inexcusable for an industry who’s business should be all about ecology,  to be too slow-growing to deliver the expected profit. Convinced they could force those forest lands into new modes of production, they instead birthed a slow-growing disaster born of arrogance and short-term thinking. The idea that stands could be worked at that margin for increased yield by planting those mono-cultures is the core of the problem, and a clear reflection of a terrible business model, one that neglected crucial information. That information was readily available to them, but it came from sources outside their narrow blinkered view of the forest world. Those blinkers are derived directly from that arrogance. That was all too obvious from my first days in Oregon in the late 1970s.

Having worked with biologists in my prior life with the early EPA in Las Vegas, I was quick to comment on a policy that had all but eliminated almost every vestige of the older forest. That forest wasn’t just a show-piece I wrote, it contained the very genetic resources necessary to deal with any future problems – problems of exactly the magnitude presented by Swiss needle cast it turns out. Those were my comments to the Siuslaw NF, asking that those genetic resources be preserved. That’s just an outsider feeding unwanted white noise into the system after all. How about the insiders?

Years ago, one of the Forest Service’s stellar research sivliculturalists wrote up a brilliant synthesis about his research work: Nitrogen, Corn and Forest Genetics. He hammered home in no uncertain terms the fallacies behind an agricultural strategy for forest lands and foretold the failure of that strategy, pointing out the near-template like fit of the best adapted seeds to the landscape from which they were gathered.

None of it cut any ice. The political agents of the timber industry were deeply embedded in every advisory board the state had, something I learned first hand as background for my initial foray into the state as a contractor representative. They also had the Oregon Congressional delegation, which had been catering to the industry since the earliest days, safely in tow. That insured that any such scientific mumbo-jumbo would be ignored. The industry would simply engineer a new forest, ecology aside. The Forest Service decided to cut just about all of those older forests, that arrogance spreading like a stain across the policy landscape, one which had been carefully prepared to receive it. Private timber land owners did cutover all of their forestlands, leaving them with an empty gene pool from which to rejuvenate those hard hit stands.

Here’s my personal economic mantra: greed is short-term self-interest, morality long-term self-interest. The stark difference between those two emotional polar-opposites, is a simple function of the time and depth we’re willing to invest our planning horizon with. That’s something many economists have somehow lost in both their qualitative and quantitative analyses. It’s something they need to recover if we expect to stick it out for a while, a while that would include that moral future. It’s one that, I might add, would actually have room for all the genetic resources our forests have to offer, the ones we have so casually discarded in our quest for short-term profit.

1 In the 2002 publication Forest and Stream Management in the Oregon Coast Range, the authors have this to say

Douglas-fir, which is the foundation of timber management throughout most of the Coast Range, will become a less important timber species in moist areas of the western slopes as Swiss needle cast (Phaeocryptopus gaumannii) drastically reduces growth rates in these areas… Hemlock, on the other hand, is resistant to the disease and has relatively good growth rates in these areas.

Sitka Spruce

Sitka spruce in an uncut Oregon coastal forest

Swimming against the current

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A few years back, after listening to noontime chatter from the local Oregon PBS affiliate and a political scientist they keep on retainer, I emailed him this note. He’s quite good at what he does, but everything gets filtered through a political lens, naturally enough. It is after all, who he is.

The one I caught that day got under my skin. Judge James Redden has been a force here in the Northwest. The money made from the dams has built a juggernaut of an economic engine, mirrored by a powerful political machine that protects it. That engine was called to account by Redden for its management of the Columbia River System, management that had largely written off natural fish runs for the sake of power generation and the multi-millions of dollars it makes.

First some background and a few definitions. Anadromous fish populations go up rivers to breed, and out to the ocean to feed. Catadromous fish populations reverse that pattern. They go out to the ocean to breed and up the rivers to feed. Why that happens touches on a crucial point. It may sound counter-intuitive, but the temperate ocean and its up-welling nutrient flows, driven by currents and heat gradients, provides a much richer food base for migrating fish than the tropical ocean does.

Not surprisingly, tropical rivers are by contrast much richer than those in the temperate zone. That’s especially true here on the Northwest coast of North America. Those rivers usually emerge from mountain headwaters and streams that are quite barren. They have, after all, only recently come in from the cold. We’ve had friends who, after visiting the Oregon Coast, were sad to report how dirty the ocean was. They had to be reassured that the brown soup they’d seen was the stuff of legend – the legend of Pacific salmon that is.

Archivist for the State of Oregon
Indian dip netting salmon at Celilo Falls (Historical archives – state of Oregon)

Anadromy catapults the physics of the thing into pure magic. The fish are open living systems. They’re able to take and make enough energy to run against the tidal wash from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They are “pockets of self-organization” delivering the riches of those ocean waters to streams badly in need of a little love.

Ecological science has gradually come to pervade mainstream thought and Redden’s opinions reflect that. That, and a little balance. The native peoples of this part of the world were never asked how they felt about losing their very identity, the ocean gift that was celebrated, eaten, bartered, stored, worshiped… a promise made good year after year. There was certainly no cost-benefit analysis done to find out how many billions of dollars would be lost forever to that native trade and from the loss of that nutrient re-distribution dynamism. Redress is the operative term here.

Econ 101
Indian women drying fish at Celilo Falls (Historical archives – state of Oregon)

There are not many guarantees in this life, but the salmon and their anadromous brethren are certainly one of them. That alone makes them damn near invaluable.

Forest for the ages

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I worked in air quality, water quality, range, wildlife and forestry with the U.S. EPA, and the U.S Forest Service. I did that in Nevada and eastern Oregon for over 30 years. Over that period, it was natural to develop an abiding love for the island forests and woodlands of the interior. and a deep interest in their development since the last glaciation. There can be few places more welcoming on a blistering summer day than under the sun-filtered canopy of an old-growth Ponderosa pine forest, and nothing more sublimely elegant.

Old-growth Ponderosa pine
Old-growth Ponderosa pine: USFS Region 5 / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)

How did they get here and how are they doing? They’ve been around a long time, and there should be more big ones than there are. That’s too bad since the plate-like bark, half a foot thick and often outlined in a mosaic pattern of fire-hardened scars – is nearly impervious to any but the largest blazes. Properly managed, these old-growth forests are the best hedge we have against wildfire in this widespread ecosystem. Even in death, the searing heat they’ve experienced over their 300-500 year life-span can seal the trunks off from rot for the next 80-100 years. They are then resurrected as crucial habitat for all the cavity nesting animals. Those creatures can, in turn, play an important role in kick-starting the next forest stand.

I’ve come to feel that, with climate modification a growing planetary concern, the interior western forests offer a crucial reservoir of genetic diversity. If there’s any hope of coping with the changes which might result from a catastrophic shift in the climate regime, it resides in the gene pool of communities like these dryland forests.

The Lost Forest Research Natural Area, Central Oregon
The Lost Forest can be found… miles from the drying shadow of the Cascade Range.

Ponderosa Pine (Pinus Ponderosa) defines the margin of many interior forests in the western United States. It’s the most drought tolerant giant conifer in North America. Paleobotanists examining the fossil record have found evidence that, in the recent past, forests of Ponderosa have existed in many different configurations. Plant associations which have no current analogs can be found in that record, an indication that “Range shifts occurred that could not have been predicted ...” and that these shifts “…apparently led to anomalous species associations“

The implications of this research are of major importance. They offer up some hope of coping with the changes in the variation of seasonal precipitation and temperature which will result from broad-scale climate modifications.

That’s because, from the fossil evidence mentioned above, we now know that the genes of these forest types represent a large reservoir of unexpressed diversity. This diversity provides a crucial hedge against climate change. It allows drought tolerant Ponderosa pine forests to adapt quickly to altered conditions. That’s happened many times in the past, that’s what this evidence tells us.

Unfortunately, this diversity has gone unacknowledged resulting in the failure of silvicultural theory on both public and private lands in the West. Foresters chose to “liquidate” stands of old-growth Ponderosa Pine in favor of what they promised would be faster growing stands of other conifers. The idea was to make more money off these new forests. But this attempt at forcing moderate to low-elevation sites to produce as if they were industrial forest plantations has failed. Insects, well-adapted to that same variation in climatic forcing, re-worked overstocked stands of drought-intolerant species, just as if there had been a change in the climate.

The message is clear: at the forest margin, trees other than Ponderosa pine are a minor component, so Ponderosa is what should be there. But since they are slow-growing many of these stands cannot be economically cropped now or in the future. Selective cutting, with its much lower rate-of-return, should be the only way we remove trees from these forests. The fact is, these pine forests are much more valuable for their water, forage, recreation and soil stabilization potential than as poorly managed quasi-industrial croplands.

We need to to insure the health of these forests. In their genes they carry a message from a long-distant past, one that may help us find our way in a very uncertain future.

US Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station

1.  Spaulding, W. G. The last glacial-interglacial climatic cycle: its effects on woodlands and forests in the American West. in Eight North American Forest Biology Workshop (Dept. of Forest Resources, Utah State Univ., 1984).

Running on climate time

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I recently had a chance to watch a video recorded as part of the series on Adapting to Climate Change a course for land managers developed by the US Forest Service and it was excellent. It brought to mind an article I wrote years ago, in 1994 to be exact though it wasn’t published till 1997 in the Fall issue of the late great Wild Earth.

It was inspired by the work that was done coring the Greenland ice sheet, a real eye opener for me. During the last glaciation the planet would regularly transition from an average temperature that’s a few degrees warmer than now to a few degrees cooler in as little as 10, and maybe fewer, years. You can get a hint of these gyrations from the chart shown below:

Temperature proxy from ice cores
Temperature proxy from ice cores for the last 140,000 years (Wikipedia).

That’s an almost incomprehensible shift in the planet’s energy budget and it would have had a dramatic effect on the climate and the vegetation everywhere. This has huge implications for everything we think we know about forest, grassland, and desert ecosystems in the West. Yet those implications have, to this day, barely been discussed.

Here’s one of them: the gene pool of our western conifers has to contain the necessary diversity to deal with rapid climate change and we need to incorporate that into our thinking. That’s not an excuse for doing nothing. The potential social impact alone is enormous. It’s simply a statement of fact.

Take Ponderosa pine as one example. In the Southwest it has such a tightly bound relationship with Abert’s squirrel, that the only thing that critter sleeps in is pine-needle beds, and just about the only thing it eats are Ponderosa pine seeds. When I mentioned this years ago to a British geneticist, he said that probably represented at least 10 million years of co-evolution. If Ponderosa’s been a part of the Western ecosystem that long, the species has surely been through dozens and dozens of episodes of rapid climate change. It’s still around (and it’s also fast on its metaphorical feet as evidence has shown) so it has the diversity to make it thorough those rapid shifts.

At the same time as the results were coming in from the ice-sheet cores, we were just coming out of a spruce budworm outbreak in the Blue Mountains of Oregon. The forests were making a remarkable recovery after that episode. But the reaction to the 8+ year outbreak was very revealing. It seemed to induce a form of ecological insanity in otherwise intelligent people. The budworm was imbued with demonic powers, a satanic force out to do us in. This wasn’t science as I thought I new it. The only people who made any sense at the time were entomologists such as Boyd Wickman. He and the others in his research unit kept saying that outbreaks have a way of ending quite quickly, and that the forest can recover just as quickly when it does. Their voices were subdued and rational, and just about completely drowned out by calls to log everything in sight.

I’m a mathematician by training and it smacked of the sort of pejorative language that discipline was riven with before “negative” and “imaginary” numbers were put on a solid footing. It’s also the same sort of language I heard used about one of the most versatile hardwood species in the world, red alder, when I first moved to the NW in the late 70s. “Professional” foresters called it a weed and insisted it had to be poisoned out of existence. Later I found out that it had such a tightly-bound relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria that it might as well be a legume. It’s so valuable for rehabilitating logged over lands that it gets star billing in this amazing book, one of only two species (Neem is the other) that has more than a single page entry. That told me all I wanted to know. Forestry, at least at that time (1978), was certainly not a science and it seemed to me barely an art.

So I wrote the article in reaction to the coring of the ice-sheet, and the evidence I could see on my own at the end of the budworm outbreak. It started as a letter to a good friend, then later I expanded it as a piece for Wild Earth.

My own opinion is that the budworm and its host species are so tightly intertwined that they’re really not separable parts of the ecosystem. You take one, you get the other. That’s even truer for the mountain pine beetle and Lodgepole pine. The 17+ million hectare pine beetle outbreak, that draped itself like a multi-colored cloak across the mountain forests of Alberta and British Columbia in Canada, is a very dramatic example of the phenomenon I outlined in my article: a false climate signal brought on by years of fire suppression that leads to an eventual re-balancing of the system. In the case of Lodgepole, that’s probably exacerbated by real climate change driving the ecosystem the other way, further northward in the Canadian Rockies.

These ideas now seem to be gaining currency and that’s long overdue.