Category Archives: montane forest

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

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.

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.