Category Archives: forest history

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

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.