Category Archives: Forest pathology

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).

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