THE DEAD FOREST AND THE NEXT FOREST Published in the Mountain Gazette,
December 2007 and January 2008
“People will have to get used to the
Dead Forest Look.”
That prediction came from a
landscape architect, a quarter-century ago in the Denver offices of the
U.S.
Forest Service Region Two (basically the Rocky Mountains). The speaker,
Herb
Mittman, was working on a new “landscape management”
program for the Forest
Service, part of the 1976 Congressionally-mandated forest planning
process.
Today – about halfway through the
50-year planning period the Forest Service was working on (1980-2030)
– those
of us who live in the Rocky Mountains, from far northern Canada all the
way
down through northern New Mexico and Arizona, are in fact having to get
used to
the dead forest look. Over the past half decade, whole mountainsides
have
turned rusty with death – first, patches of trees with dead red
needles, then
the patches spreading and linking up until now, the rust color
dominates on
some slopes, whole mountainsides of dead trees that, as the needles
begin to
fall off, turn gray. The dead forest look.
That’s just the more obvious
situation – the already dead forests. We also have a lot of trees
in the
forests today that still look okay, but have the forces of epidemic
death
already at work in them. If you are out skiing or snowshoeing in or
near the
Dead Forest this winter, stop and look closely at the remaining green
pine or
spruce trees. If you see a mature tree that has a lot of little dollops
of
pitch spotted on its trunk, you are looking at a dying tree, even
though it is
still green. Underneath the bark, radiating away from each of those
little
popcornish kernels of sap, little maggoty grubs will be gnawing an
intricate
filigree of death in the tree’s living layer of cells. If it is
another winter
without a long, nasty cold spell – temperatures in the minus-30s
for days –
then come summer, each of those little maggots, having fed on the life
of the
tree, will turn into a flying beetle that will eat its way out through
the bark
and emerge to fly off to another mature lodgepole pine, or Engelmann
spruce if
that is its specialty, there to repeat the process at a logarithmic
progression.
And those pitchy riddled trunks are
just the obvious mark of the dance of death through the forests. If you
are out
skiing or snowshoeing among the winter-dormant aspen, the signature
tree of the
Southern Rockies forest, it will be harder to see the dead forest look
spreading there; it won’t even be so obvious once the trees are
back in leaf –
no vast slopes of red death. But foresters have noticed unusual patches
of
aspen mortality too over the past five years, in as much as ten percent
of the
aspen stands at lower elevations.
I spent a day out in some of those
patches of apparently dying aspens with Region Two forest pathologist
Roy Mask
and a crew of interns, doing an in-depth analysis (about two feet deep,
in
fact, to look at root death, among other things) of the stands. They
find there
all the usual suspects that are always nibbling away at aspens –
beetles,
borers, caterpillars, cankers, fungi, rots, gall flies, blights –
but none in
such massive infestations as the beetles that are running rampant in
the
conifers. The trees just seem to be giving up.
What is happening in the forests of
the Rockies is nothing unusual or “unnatural” in the
specific instance of
individual trees. In the great daisy chain of life, everything has
other things
eating on it, feeding off of it – more often than not, some
specialized insect
like the pine bark beetles or the spruce bark beetles or the spruce
budworms or
the aspen bark beetle or poplar borer. These eaters are always present
in the
forest, but are usually only killing their hosts in a small percentage
of trees
in a healthy forest.
Environmentalists – concerned about
the kind of radical surgery America’s forest managers sometimes
prescribe for
disease outbreaks (analogous in human terms to amputating limbs to cure
hangnails) – point out this “naturalness” and argue
that the best thing to do
is to let the infestations run their course. Naturally.
But most foresters don’t agree, and
I don’t either: this outbreak is not “natural” in the
usual order of life and
death in the forests. The little eaters are always present, yes, and
there have
been major outbreaks in specific forest stands, even over whole forests
in
natural drought cycles. But there has never in historical time been an
outbreak
that attacked the entire Rocky Mountain chain, the whole North American
cordillera like the current infestation. Other things are going on
today – and
all of them implicate us humans.
Foresters have identified three
probable causal factors for this massive outbreak: ·
The
easiest to call a
“natural” occurrence is a decade-long drought: the whole
western part of North
America has generally been in a drought situation over the past decade.
Different parts of the western U.S. and Canada have had relief at
different
times over that decade, but overall, it has been a dry time for North
American
forests, even in some of the more humid regions of the east. Subnormal
water
resources mean that trees have less pitch flowing in their cambium
– the
living, growing part of the tree, just below the bark. When trees have
plenty
of water to suck up as pitch, they are able to “pitch out”
a beetle assault
– literally wash the bugs out of the
tree and leave them too gummed up to fly on to another tree. But when
the water
resources are reduced, the ability of the trees to protect themselves
with
pitch is also reduced. ·
A
second factor contributing
to the outbreak of forest disease is warmer weather: all the years from
1998
through 2006 are among the 25 warmest years on record. This affects the
forests
in two ways: First, extreme cold is another friend of the trees and
enemy of
the insects. If the bugs have managed to penetrate the trees, a cold
spell with
temperatures in the minus 30s kills off most of the maggoty grubs
eating their
way from the larval state to the pupal state – especially if the
cold spell
comes early in the winter; the closer the larvae get to the pupal
state, the
less vulnerable they are to the cold. And the winters of the past
decade have
been warmer on average than over any comparable period of time for
recorded
history (a century or less in most places). A long serious cold spell
in late
November or early December could significantly diminish the infestation
in
western forests, but most of the North American Cordillera has not had
that
kind of weather for quite a while. People in western Colorado who are
unenthusiastic about population growth complain about the need for a
“cleansing
winter” – one long enough and cold enough to drive away a
lot of the new people
who think they have moved to paradise. That kind of a winter would also
be
cleansing for the forests, but it just isn’t happening. ·
The
final factor in this
“perfect storm” of causes definitely involves human
intervention, and that’s
the cumulative consequences of a century of fire suppression as an
unyielding
management policy – even after foresters began to realize it was
a bad policy
when implemented uncritically.
The first two of these factors, the
droughty conditions and warmer temperatures, can indeed be considered
“natural
climate fluctuations,” if you’ve had your head buried in
the sand for the last
four or five years. But the science community overwhelmingly imputes
human
causation to the correlation between a warmer drier climate and the
fact that
we have raised the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to the
highest
levels discernible over the past several hundred thousand years. Some
environmental organizations seem to want to have it both ways: they are
happy
to agree on the one hand the changing global climate is human-induced
– but on
the other hand, want us to accept as “natural” the insect
infestation that this
human-induced climate change has unleashed.
The sad irony in all this is the way
the Dead Forest marks the centennial decade of the United States Forest
Service
and its confident promise to the nation a century ago, to replace an
era of
mindless forest use and abuse with a new era of conservation that would
yield
“the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest
time.” The Forest
Service, in the balance, has done much good in the forests; just the
act of
conserving such a huge acreage of valuable forest land for more
“scientific”
management was a huge step toward a sane society.
But in retrospect, we can certainly
see a fatal measure of unconscious arrogance in the progressivism of
the early
20th century – and not just in forest policies,
although the decision
to eradicate wildfire from the forests certainly exemplifies that
unconscious
arrogance. We beat Mao to the idea that the 20th century was
to be a
Great Leap Forward; it was to be what American philosopher Charles
Beard called
an age of “science, technology and rationalized economy.”
But the exuberant
balls-out industrial growth, the cow-flop sprawl of sub-urban cities,
the
transportation and energy policies that unwittingly pumped up the
greenhouse
gases, the whole hog-butcher-for-the-world mentality, and the
overweening
belief that we could find a technological fix for everything we might
encounter
– all these things have worked together to give us the Dead
Forest at the
century mark.
At any rate, to the extent that we
view human impacts as outside the “natural” flow of things
– the current
massive plague of bugs and other tree-killers riding this tide of
human-induced
changes can hardly be considered “natural”. But if this is,
then, a manmade
problem that us responsible humans must address – what can we do
about it? And
are we doing it?
There are several ways to address
the problem of the still-green tree whose pitch-dotted trunk shows it
to be
full of the maggots that will emerge in the summer as beetles to
further spread
the infestation. To stop or slow the infestation, such trees need to be
cut and
removed from the forest, or burned in place, before the beetle hatch
happens.
Mature trees not yet infested can be sprayed with an insecticide. Et
cetera, et
cetera.
But there’s an awful lot of infested
trees in the
So basically, whether we judge the
infestation to be natural or unnatural, it comes to the same:
it’s going to “be
allowed to” run its course, like the environmentalists suggest,
and the main
mitigation effort is trying to figure out how to deal with the
potentially
holocaustic consequences of wildfire in vast stands of dead trees. The
Forest
Service has teamed up with state and county-level foresters, land
managers and
private property owners to take out dead and dying trees in “the
urban
interface” – the suburbs and exurbs that have crept out
into the edge of the
forests – in order to reduce the threat of property damage from
the big fires
that seem inevitable. They are also clearing out all the trees along
roads, to
turn them into firebreaks – and ultimately emergency escape
routes for the
evacuations that could result from those fires. Tree care companies in
the
mountain towns are harvesting a bonanza, spraying vulnerable “pet
trees” in the
urban interface, and charging as much as $80 per tree to remove the
casualties.
The Forest Service is trying to
salvage as much of the dead timber as possible for lumber, but they are
hampered
in at least the Southern Rockies by the fact that there is only one
remaining
large sawmill left in the whole region, in Montrose, Colorado –
almost a day’s
drive from the worst infestations. The cost of land in resort regions
makes its
purchase for industrial purposes like local sawmills prohibitive
– not to
mention zoning and noise regulations in the “second-home
zone”. There’s the
further fact that the beetles carry a fungus that permeates the first
couple
inches of wood with a bluish stain; it doesn’t hurt the strength
of the lumber,
but the “blue-stain boards” are unattractive to many buyers.
The Forest Service is also trying to
figure how to use “controlled burns” to reduce the
mega-fire danger. But given
the magnitude of the problem and the fact that the natural fire regime
for
lodgepole pines (the tree most impacted by the infestation) is intense
stand-replacing fires, controlling a burn in the Dead Forest is not
easy.
Meanwhile, the infestation will
eventually run its course; there will come a summer when most of the
pine and
spruce beetles boring out of their reddening trees will be unable to
find any
remaining mature trees alive within their range, and their specialized
appetites will be their undoing: wanting only to highgrade big old
mature
trees, the bugs will ignore all the young trees that are already
growing up
around the dead trees, and the plague will peter out even as the forest
returns. Bad fires will happen, or they won’t; if they do, the
new young trees
will perish with the old dead ones, but the fire itself will sow the
seeds of
the new forest in the lodgepole region, and either way, the devastation
will
end, and it will be time to move beyond the Dead Forest to the Next
Forest.
That’s actually the way some
foresters, public and private, are talking about it: The Next Forest,
capital
N, capital F. And that’s where we will see whether we’ve
learned anything about
living with forests or not, after the century in which the best
“science,
technology and rationalized economy” humankind could muster ended
in the Dead
Forest.
Part Two: The Next
Forest The Northern Colorado Bark
Beetle Cooperative is working toward the Next Forest, with our
investment
focused on building resilience and reducing the risk of loss to our
young trees
when large-scale fires move across the landscape. The Cooperative is
also
generating ideas and working on a sustainable community based forest
products
industry for Northern Colorado. Local communities have economies that
are tied
to surrounding forests. All efforts are community based to insure that
outcomes
are aligned with local community visions.
-- From the
“Northern Colorado Bark Beetle Cooperative” page,
U. S. Forest Service
Region Two website (fs.fed.us/r2)
That
is an interesting paragraph. The Forest Service website shovels a lot
of
conventional corporate coal, but that’s a diamond in the coal.
Read it again.
And I will begin to try to tell you why it scares me to death.
The
most interesting aspect of that paragraph is the departure with the
past
century implied in the emphasis on “community based” ideas
and economies
“aligned with local community visions.” This is interesting
to anyone who has
been involved in any discourse with the Forest Service throughout the 20th
century, a discourse always framed by the statement, often explicitly
uttered:
“This is a National Forest, not your local County Forest.”
Forest
Service founder Gifford Pinchot, for instance, would never have penned
that
paragraph. He envisioned an almost priestly elite force of forest
manager-scientists; Forest Service rangers historically have been
forbidden to
participate politically or economically in the communities they serve
in, and
those hoping to rise through the ranks in the Service have had to move
around
frequently. No “going native” and getting too interested in
local problems, at
the expense of the forest’s and nation’s needs.
I
don’t of course imagine that the U. S. Forest Service is going to
close its
offices and turn the National Forests over to us peasants, on the basis
of a
visionary paragraph that probably came from closer to the bottom of the
Forest
Service food chain than the top. But for this paragraph to have
appeared at
all, on the Forest Service website, suggests that a change might be
ripening
that began to blossom in the 1970s: an acknowledgement (initially
grudging)
that many, maybe most of the communities in and around the National
Forests
have grown up to the point of understanding their forests well enough
to maybe
live intelligently with them, with a little help from the experts,
rather than
having to stand by while decisions were being made for and about their
forests
from above by experts elsewhere.
I
am so impressed by that paragraph, in fact, that I am not even going to
go to
the Forest Service and give them a chance to start hedging and
harrumphing
about it; it’s there and I am going to take it at face value, and
run with it –
and let the Forest Service play defense about it if it insists. A
century of
top-down management brought us to the Dead Forest; now it’s damn
well time to
start thinking differently about forests and people, and this is a
different
way of thinking for the Forest Service.
But
then when I start thinking about the
implications of this paragraph – it scares me to death. Despair
starts to seep
in around the edges when I start to think of everything we have to
think of
today. I begin to doubt that what god or nature might call “the
consciousness
project” – that’s us – has a positive future.
The more conscious we get about
what’s going on, the more impossible things look.
We
cannot, for example, think of the Next Forest as just a discrete
forest, an
ecological community of plants and animals dominated by trees. We have
to think
of all the things that environ or surround that forest and affect its
chances
for success, and ours. And then we have to try to imagine a
“local community
vision” that somehow encompasses it all… whew. Consider
these things, in
thinking about the Next Forest:
First
and most obviously “here” is the global climate, which may
be changing
temporarily or may be changing for a coming geological age, and may be
changing
a little or a lot. Whether or not it is our fault is probably
irrelevant at
this point, since the change is already underway and the best we can do
from
here on out is do or not do the things that will make the changes more
or less
extreme. This is already affecting the forests of the world beyond our
ability
to prevent it; it is a problem in adaptation.
As
things stand now, climate change is probably going to cost us the
aspens at low
elevations in the Southern Rockies. They have been contesting that
range with
the sage and grasses for a long time, but the warming trend gives the
field to
the plants that like it hotter and drier. The pine forests will grow
back in
the montane region – and maybe extend their range a little higher
on the sunny
sides of the mountains. But if the winters remain warm and summer
warmth
continues to dry out their soils, will the beetles ever allow the
pines,
especially the lodgepole, to mature? Maybe they’ll be replaced,
in their lower
reaches, by the more drought-tolerant pinion pine and juniper. And the
spruce-fir subalpine forest – will it ride the warmth a little
higher into the
alpine tundra? Or will the increasing violence of extreme weather
events make
the spruce and fir yield its exposed upper reaches – and also
cause more
blowdowns in it that will bring on its pests?
All
we can say for sure is that climate change is going to cause changes in
our
relationship with the Next Forest – in ways we can’t know
till we see what is
actually happening in the forests.
But
there is another “environmental change” imminent that is
probably going to have
an even greater impact on our relationship with the Next Forest –
and with
everything else too – and we are still in serious denial about
this one. This
change is going to happen in the economic and political environment
surrounding
our forests and communities, and is the coming “drought” in
cheap fossil
energy.
This
is not the straw man that’s put out there: “We’re
running out of oil.” We know
there is a lot of fossil energy left, in the form of oil, natural gas,
coal,
tar sands, oil shale, et cetera, and a lot of “renewable”
energy too. But none
of it is cheap, in the sense that petroleum and natural gas have been
easy and
cheap this past century, with hundreds of energy units produced for
each unit
of energy invested in production. For the future, we are going to be
depending
on energy resources that, at best, yield fewer than ten units of energy
for
every unit invested. Much of it, like oil shale, will yield less than
five
units, and some of the renewables like ethanol and hydrogen are just
“energy
carriers,” converting a unit of one kind of energy (biomass) into
a unit of a
more usable kind of energy (liquid fuel) with no energy gain at all.
The prices
of energy will rise accordingly.
This
“changing energy climate” is going to change everything,
including the way we
relate to forests. Virtually every aspect of modern life is rooted
somehow in
cheap fossil energy, mostly in cheap petroleum. The food we eat, from
the
fertilizers and pumped water that grow it to the fleets of trucks and
trains
and planes that deliver it, is basically a petroleum product. More and more of the building products in our
homes – again all brought in by truck and train from somewhere
else – are wood
composites glued together with petroleum products or petroleum-based
plastics.
Transportation costs alone – once they climb into the $10-20 per
gallon range –
will force the “local community” to become a lot more local
in terms of food
production, building materials and energy resources.
But
that brings up a third “environmental challenge” the local
community of the
Next Forest faces today: that is the extent to which the political and
economic
climate of the 20th century essentially did away with the
local
community as a functioning political economy capable of producing and
distributing anything useful to its own residents. We chuckled about
the
centralized planning of the Soviet Union and its “Five Year
Plans,” but we
essentially engaged in the same degree, if not quite the same kind, of
centralization of all economic and political activity around the
great-state
ideology of corporate capitalism and its urban industrialism. With
“economy of
scale” and “standardization” as our marching cries,
we essentially turned over
all production of everything to increasingly centralized entities.
Local
communities that were once semi-self-sufficient in the production of
food,
building materials and energy resources are today just terminals for
the
shipping out of raw resources (cattle, coal, petroleum, ores, et
cetera) and
the shipping in of processed and manufactured goods and services (beef,
electricity, gasoline, manufactured products, et cetera). Or in the
case of the
resort town – the shipping in of people with money in their
pockets to consume
our scenic and recreational resources in
situ.
What
we call the “local economy” today in most communities
outside of the
metropolitan areas consists mostly of retailers who display and sell
the goods
produced elsewhere; the local knowledge for food and energy production
is
barely still alive and is not generally known. Aside from the one big
sawmill
in Montrose, Colorado, a few remnant “ranch mills” here and
there, and some
local suppliers of firewood and fence poles, there is no
“community based
forest products industry” sustainable or otherwise, and there
aren’t many
people left who would know how to put one together.
The
education facilities – what we used to call “rural
schools” before the term
became pejorative – where an intelligent society might have kept
such knowledge
alive have, for the past century been turned over to preparing the
local kids
to leave their community, for more lucrative careers in the centralized
political economy of corporate capitalism. The rural people of America
taxed
themselves to prepare their own children for export, along with their
cows,
coal, et cetera.
So
– put all that environmental context together, and it looks like
the Next
Forest as described on the Forest Service website – all that
local community
based stuff – will be emerging in an environment that is
politically and
economically unfriendly as well as physically unknowable, with the
likelihood
of bad weather on all fronts. Conditions could hardly be worse. Welcome
to the
21st century. And now it’s time to form a “local
community vision”
for our 21st century relationship with that New Forest.
Is
this is a test? Is the Forest Service saying – okay! You
didn’t like the way we
were doing it; you think you guys can do it better? Go for it!
Having
probably pissed off most of my friends in the Forest Service by now,
I’m going
to go ahead and piss off most of my environmentalist friends by
suggesting that
we ecofreaks have become part of the Dead Forest problem too, and will
probably
have to change our thinking for the Next Forest.
Thanks
to a cultural environment and education indoctrination that taught us
nothing
practical about how to survive in the world since benevolent
corporations would
be supplying our every need or desire, we thought that what we mostly
wanted
from the National Forests was for them to stand around forever looking
pretty.
And
after the Forest Service had, in its unconscious technocratic
arrogance,
corrupted its own forest science after the 1950s in order to get out
the
Congressionally-mandated cut so every American could afford a sub-urban
house,
the environmental reaction set in and the preservationists finally got
their
say, and to a remarkable extent, their way. The advent of the
Environmental
Impact Study made it possible for just about any public lands timber
cut to be
held up or stopped, and a lot of trees were kept from untimely deaths
for
utilitarian purposes in order to stand around looking pretty until they
died a
natural death, or suffered death by fire, which is probably the same
thing.
But
it is as possible to allow a type of uncritical ideological arrogance
to run
amok in stopping forest management activities as it is to have
uncritical
ideological arrogance running amok on the management side. And a few
decades of
mismanagement is not cured by a few decades of no management; put the
two
together, and you get the Dead Forest. Dan Kemmis, founder of the
Center for
the Rocky Mountain West and one of the more aware western leaders in
moving
toward the Next Forest, analyzed this situation at length in his book, This Sovereign Land: A New Vision for
Governing the West.
What’s
going to be hard for environmentalists to face up to is the intensity
of management we are going to
have to bring to the Next Forest if the next generations of humans and
the Next
Forest are going to survive together, because of two things. One is the
nature
and magnitude of the environmental changes, already discussed, that
we’ve
brought on the forests and ourselves. We’ve been able to stop a
lot of
“harvesting” in the National Forests in the Rockies –
to the extent that the
forest products industries in the Southern Rockies have virtually
disappeared –
because cheap fuel has enabled us to ship lumber in from the Northwest,
the Southeast
and Canada. Transportation costs in the not-distant future will make
that,
first, prohibitive, and probably eventually impossible. If we are going
to have
building materials at all, we are going to have to go back to producing
them
relatively locally.
And
the other reason why we are going to have to manage the forests
intensively is
because we refuse to “manage ourselves.” If upwards of 90
percent of us would
simply disappear, then we could return to the presumed golden age of
“letting
nature take its course” with us as part of it. But there
aren’t many volunteers
for disappearing; we’ve got some good wars and famines going that
are knocking
our swarm down a little, but we keep trying to end or prevent those;
and every
time we get a good disease going, we declare war on it and keep it from
helping
nature take its course. We refuse to manage ourselves.
So
basically, if we let nature take its slow adaptive course in the
forests, but
continue to refuse to let nature take its course with us, then we will
begin to
devastate the forests again when we can no longer get cheap goods from
Canada.
If we are going to truly try to realize the goal of “having (most
of) our
forest and eating (some of) it too,” then we are going to have a
practice a new
kind of really intensive management.
But
it doesn’t have to be “intensive management” in the
sense of the “devastation
by management” some of the National Forests experienced through
the industrial
“timber beast” era; it could be, should be more comparable
to the kind of
“intensive management” a gardener brings to a garden. A
relatively new term
that’s often used in such instances is “adaptive
management.” This is a new way
of saying things like “trial and error” and “seat of
the pants”: acknowledging
the complexity of ecosystems, we try something, see how it works, then
change
what we’re doing as soon as we start to see all the unforeseen
consequences and
implications of what we tried. This requires all of us ideologues to
evolve a
little, transcend our own ideologies and enlarge our souls accordingly.
Become
gardeners, in short, gardeners of all growing things within our ken,
knowing
what’s there, what’s ready, and how to get it out without
harming what’s there
but not ready. It is the only alternative to full-out locustlike,
first-come-first-served, neoindustrial corporate devastation. And if we
choose
it, not all of it will be new; some of it has been happening on the
margins of
the industrial corporate culture forever, recessive genes in the social
body.
For example – I spent
several seasons running
the saw for a little sawmill in the valley of the North Fork of the
Gunnison
River, surrounded by the Gunnison National Forest. Our mill depended on
what
the Forest Service called “clean-up sales” – small
cuts in blowdown areas, or
places where bugs were becoming a presence, or places starting to look
nastily
fire-prone, with just enough surrounding healthy trees to make it a
passable
deal for a mill. Arguably – and I would so argue – the
forests were better off
for the timber cuts that supplied our mill. There were two other small
mills in
the valley doing the same thing.
But
to find the areas where small cuts would improve the health of the
forest
required Forest Service people to spend a lot of time out getting to
know their
forest, which wasn’t always the case, given budget issues, loss
of timber funds
from stalled sales, the cuts of the Reagan Revolution, and other
factors. As a
result, there weren’t always enough small sales to keep the three
small mills
operating – although economics and political pressure decreed
that there were
always large sales, clearcuts or “seed cuts” in the healthy
timber, for the big
mills then operating in the Montrose-to-Delta strip.
But
one has to think – if there were still three small mills in every
valley in the
Southern Rockies, and enough foresters to find and map clean-up sales
for all
of them – would the Forest Service have been able to get enough
infected timber
out of the forests to have kept ahead of the beetles? Maybe, maybe not
– global
warming is really big, and is going to change the forests, bugs or not,
and
that’s what we’ve got to learn to adapt to. It’s
environment. Nonetheless,
there is an intensity of management at a small scale that could have
made a
better transition to the Next Forest with less of the traumatic Dead
Forest.
I’m
also remembering that elsewhere on the Gunnison National Forest, an old
forest
on the Taylor River District, Tom Eberhardt, was designing small
random-looking, fuzzy-edged cuts
in lodgepole pine that mimicked what he perceived to be the
“mosaic” pattern in
some healthy lodgepole stands prone to lightning strikes – what
would occur
when lightning caused fires from year to year that would run up a
hillside,
then get rained out on the downside of the hill: the result was a lot
of small
stands of different ages, so the bugs might find one stand that suited
their
taste but wouldn’t get a whole mountainside. Working the same
district was
another Gunnison National Forest forester, Jerry Chonka, who has become
one of
the Forest Service’s most experienced controlled-burn experts
nationally; he
also works on “mechanical thinning” methods for the urban
interface that
imitate the healthier actions of fire. Is it entirely coincidence that
the
beetles have not yet come over the Divide into the Gunnison watershed
yet?
Well, maybe next year they will be there too. But it will be
interesting to see
how Eberhardt’s and Chonka’s efforts work out.
That’s
what I’m thinking of when I suggest we need management at the
intensity of
“gardening” for our National Forests – forest workers
who spend a long time
getting to know their place, and working on ways to take care of it.
Wilderness
lovers and naturomantics won’t like that idea. And it’s not
part of the
technocratic heritage of the Forest Service either. Gifford Pinchot was
proud
of his European training in forestry, but failed to import one of the
cornerstones of the European system: the local community forester, who
grew up
with the forest and the community, and spent his life there, and gave a
replacement (often his son) a long on-the-job training so he would know
it as
well. Pinchot opted for the scientist-manager, and didn’t want
his boys getting
too intimate with their places. It needs to be different for the Next
Forest.
But
how will we run a local community based forest products industry
without
petroleum? No diesel for the mills, the dozers, the skidders and
trucks? Well,
think back – America was built, through the 17th and 18th
centuries, entirely with water-powered sawmills; aren’t we smart
enough to
recover that technology? That’s a serious question, when you look
at the extent
to which we moderns have lost all the grandfather-and-grandmother
knowledge of
how to do anything truly useful Assuredly we wouldn’t be able to
crank out the
same volume of lumber with non-fossil energy – which means some
of us will have
to have settle for smaller houses – but some of us won’t
want to be paying to
heat a midlife manor anyway.
Once
I start thinking of this stuff, all kinds of things come to mind
– I remember a
late-20th century sawmill I saw in Washington that used
computers to
maximize the lumber output from small logs. So imagine a water-powered
sawmill
with a solar-powered computer analyzing and setting up the logs,
partially
compensating from the loss in volume with maximum efficiency. It
won’t cut any
million feet a year, but it will be sustainable, and maybe we’ll
have think
more about straw or adobe walls and leave the wood for the roof.
And
out in the woods, getting the timber? We don’t want big roads
there anyway,
right? So I’m remembering a Montana study, thirty or forty years
ago, that
compared a rubber-tire skidder, a farm tractor and a horse team for
selective
logging in lodgepole pine (bringing out the buggy trees). Guess which
method
won, in the board-foot-output for energy-input comparison. Of course,
it’s
easier to operate a tractor or skidder than a horse – you have to
show respect
for the horse and treat it right. It’s also slower – but
that might be okay
since the sawyers will be using the old crosscut saw rather than a
chainsaw.
Can we go back to that kind of thing?
Everything
will have to slow down a little. Well, hot damn.
I
don’t know, finally, what to say. To look at the challenges
presented by the
visejaws of global climate change on the one hand, a huge energy
transition on
the other, in the unfriendly environment of a great-state political
economy
created by, for and of the corporate capitalists, it looks
overwhelming. But go
wander in the woods, look at the young green of the Next Forest
starting up
among the remains of the Dead Forest, and little things do look
possible…. Out
there, the age of science, technology and rationalized economy is over
as a
top-down centralized megastrategy – but when those priorities are
mixed with
some common sense and traditional knowledge, down on the ground where
we and
the trees live, they might work better. Some of it might even be fun.
So
welcome to the Next Forest, one of those terrifying futures you might
actually
come to love. Thanks to
Roy Mask and his colleagues at the Forest
Service Region Two Forest Science Center in Gunnison, and to forester
Carey
Green on the White River National Forest in Minturn, for specific help
with
this analysis.
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