Fall 2000 Volume 9, Number 3

GREENSPIRIT

TREES ARE THE ANSWER 

by Patrick Moore, Ph.D.

Chairman Sustainable Forestry Committee

Continued from the last issue

 It’s not as if humans have never caused the extinction of species; they have and the list is quite long. There are three main ways by which humans cause species extinction. First, and perhaps most effective, is simply killing them all, with spears, clubs, and rifles. The passenger pigeon, the dodo bird, the Carolinian parakeet, and back in time, the mammoths and mastodons, are all examples of species that were simply wiped out either for food or because they were pests.

Secondly, the vast clearance of native forests for agriculture. There may have been an orchid in that valley bottom that was found nowhere else. If all the forest is cleared away, burned, plowed, and planted with corn the orchid may disappear forever.

Third, and actually the major cause of species extinction by humans during the past 200 years is the introduction of exotic predators and diseases. In particular, when Europeans colonized Australia, New Zealand, and the other Pacific Islands, including Hawaii, they brought with them rats, cats, foxes, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens and cows, and all the other domestic animals and plants, including their diseases. This resulted in the extinction of hundreds of ground dwelling marsupials and flightless birds, as well as many other species.

We have long lists of species that have become extinct due to these three types of human activity but we do not know of a single species that has become extinct due to forestry.

The spotted owl is one of the many species that was never threatened with extinction due to forestry, and yet in the early 1990's, 30,000 loggers were thrown out of work in the US Pacific Northwest due to concern that logging in the National Forests would cause the owl’s extinction. Since that time, in just a few short years, it has been shown by actual field observations that there are more than twice as many spotted owls in the public forests of Washington state than were thought to be theoretically possible when those loggers lost their jobs. More importantly, it is now evident that spotted owls are capable of living and breeding in landscapes that are dominated by second growth forests. Over 1000 spotted owls have been documented on Simpson Timber's half million acre second growth redwood forests in northern California. And yet, in reporting on the settlement of the Headwaters redwood forests nearby, the New York Times described the spotted owl as a nearly extinct species" despite the fact that there are tens of thou-sands of them thriving in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

So the general public is being given the impression, by supposedly reputable sources such as the New York Times and National Geographic that forestry is a major cause of species extinction when there is actually no evidence to support that position.

There is a reason why forestry seldom, if ever, causes species to become extinct. 'We tend to think that forests need our help to recover after destruction, whether by fire or logging. Of course this is not the case. Forests have been recovering by themselves, with-out any assistance, from fires, volcanoes, landslides, floods and ice ages, ever since forests began over 350 million years ago.

Consider the fact that 10,000 years ago all of Canada and Russia were covered by a huge sheet of ice under which nothing lived, certainly not trees. Today, Canada and Russia account for 30 per-cent of all the forests on earth, grown back from bare rock. Go to Alaska where the glaciers are retreating due to the present worming trend, and you will see that from the moment the rocks are laid bare to the sun, it is only 80 years until a thriving new ecosystem is growing there, including young trees.

It follows from this that every species which lives in the forest must be capable of re-colonizing areas of land that are recovering from destruction. Indeed, forest renewal is the sum total of all the individual species returning to the site, each in their turn, as the for-est grows back. In ecology, this is known as dispersal, the ability to move from where you are and to inhabit new territory as it becomes available. In humans, we call this migration, but it is the same thing. Dispersal is an absolute requirement for natural selection and the survival of species. No species could exist if it were not capable of dispersal. Therefore, so long as the land is left alone after the forest is destroyed, the forest will recover and all the species that were in it will return.

Fire has always been the main cause of forest destruction, or disturbance, as ecologists like to call it in order to use a more neutral term. But fire is natural, we are told, and does not destroy the forest ecosystem like logging, which is unnatural. Nature never comes with logging trucks and takes the trees away. All kinds of rhetoric is used to give the impression that logging is somehow fundamentally different from other forms of forest disturbance. There is no truth to this. It is true that logging is different from fire, but fire is also very different from a volcano, which in turn is very different from an ice age. In fact, no two fires are ever the some. These are differences of degree, not kind. Forests are just as capable of recovering from destruction by logging as they are from any other form of disturbance. All that is necessary for renewal is that the disturbance is ended, that the fire is out, that the volcano stops erupting, that the ice retreats, or that the loggers go back down the road and allow the forest to begin growing back, which it will begin to do almost immediately.

If you don’t think fire destroys the ecosystem, you should try counting the species left alive after a severe forest fire. A hot wild-fire in a dry pine forest not only kills every living thing above the ground, it also burns the soil, killing the roots and seeds, basically sterilizing the site and leaving it lifeless. Yet it is often only a few years after such a fire that the land is alive with grasses and flowers again. Everywhere in the world there are pioneer plants which produce seeds with fluff on them. They can carry for 100 miles on a light breeze, looking for a place to settle in the open sun and germinate. A recently burned forest is a perfect place for these seeds; the shade of the trees is gone allowing full sun to reach the ground, and the ash from the fire provides nutrients for new growth.

In Yellowstone National Park, fire burned over one million acres in 1988. Even after eight years, the most severely burned areas off the park have very little vegetation growing back. This is partly due to the very short summers at 8000 foot elevations, but also because extremely hot fires not only remove nitrogen from the soil but also vaporize the phosphorous, thus depleting the soil of two of the three most essential nutrients. While nitrogen is returned to the soil relatively quickly through the action of nitrogen fixing bacteria, phosphorous must be weathered from the minerals in the soil. This may take 50 or 100 years but eventually the soil will heal and a new forest will emerge.

In some areas of the Yellowstone fire the soil was wet at seep-age sites, and even though everything above the ground was killed, the seeds of the pine and other species survived in the soil. Here a new forest is growing back quickly and the new pines will produce seeds in 10 or 15 years. These seeds will gradually march across the landscape, reforesting the land where the seeds were burned.

In order to witness total destruction by nature, there is no better place to go than Mount St. Helens in Washington State. When this volcano blew up in 1980 it destroyed over 150,000 acres of forest, much of it old growth growing on the flanks of the mountain. Interestingly, the forest that was destroyed was in two distinct jurisdictions. Part of it was federal public lands, the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, controlled from Washington DC. Part of it was private timberlands owned by the Weyerhaeuser Corp. based in Tacoma, Washington.

The US government re-designated the portion of their land that was destroyed the Mount St. Helen,s National Volcanic Monument, "where nature will be permitted to recover, unaided by human beings, for the discovery of science." 18 years after the initial blast the Volcanic Monument still looks like a desert. The dead trees are still lying where they were blown over or had their tops blown off by the initial blast. A thick layer of volcanic ash then settled out, making a very sterile seed bed for seeds blowing in on the wind. Only a few hardy nitrogen-fixing plants, such as slide older, have been able to take root in the poor soil.

Weyerhaeuser took a completely different approach. First they salvage logged 85,000 three-bedroom homes worth of timber from their land in two years following the eruption. By bringing in heavy equipment and dragging the big logs around, they broke through the volcanic ash everywhere, exposing the fertile soil beneath it. This created a much more fertile seed bed for seeds blowing in on the wind, a classic case of site disturbance, or site preparation as it's called when we do it on purpose, increasing the fertility of the site. Something every former who plows their fields knows. Then they planted two-year-old Douglas fir seedlings that were advanced enough to get their roots down through the ash into the healthy soil beneath. Today these seedlings are over 20 feet tall and will produce a commercial crop of timber in the year 2026. The contrast between the National Volcanic Monument and Weyerhaeuser's land offers proof that a couple of interventions by people can make a dramatic difference to the way in which an ecosystem recovers after a natural disaster such as a volcano.

My grandfather, Albert Moore, clearcut large areas of coastal rainforest on northern Vancouver Island in the 1930's and '40s. He didn't know the word ecology, and the word biodiversity would not be invented for another 50 years. And you can be sure they weren't talking about the environment at the breakfast table on a dark, cold winter morning before they went out and worked hard six or seven days a week, to get the big timber down to the sea, sometimes taking half the soil with it due to the primitive logging methods of the day. Today these areas are covered in lush new for-est in which bears, wolves, cougar, deer, owls, eagles ravens, and hawks have found a home again. These species have dispersed back to the site as the environment become suitable for them again.

We have all been taught since we were children that you should not judge a book by its cover, in other words that beauty is only skin deep. Yet we are still easily tricked into thinking that if we like what we see with our eyes, it must be good, and if we don't like what we see with our eyes, it must be bad. We tend to link our visual impression of what is beautiful and what is ugly with our moral judgment of what is right and wrong. The Sierra Club says, "You don't need a professional forester to tell if a forest is mismanaged -if a forest appears to be mismanaged, it is mismanaged." They want you to believe that the ugly appearance of a recently harvested forest is synonymous with permanent destruction of the environment. And yet, the unsightly sea of stumps is not nuclear waste or a toxic discharge, it is 100 percent organic, and will soon grow back to a beautiful new forest again. All the same, the fact that recently harvested areas of forest appear ugly to our eyes makes for very effective images in the hands of anti-forestry activists.

Taken in the right light, clearcuts can actually looked quite pretty. Think, for just a moment, of the clearcut as a temporary meadow. It is temporary because it will not stay that way; it will grow back into a new forest a gain. But it is meadow-like for the timbering because the trees have been removed and now the sun can reach directly to the ground, fostering the growth of plants that could never grow in the shade of the trees. We never think of meadows and clearcuts in the same breath. After all, meadows are love-ly places which you can walk across easily in the open sun, find a dry smooth place, lay your picnic blanket down and have a love-ly afternoon. Clearcuts, on the other hand, are ugly places full of twisted, broken wood and stumps, and there is no nice smooth, dry place to put down a picnic blanket. These distinctions have nothing to do with biodiversity or science, they are purely matters of human aesthetics. Meadows are actually small deserts where it is too dry for trees to grow. That's why they are so smooth. Meadows are only capable of supporting drought-resistant grasses and herbs. Clearcuts, on the other hand, can support a wider variety of grasses and herbs, as well as woody shrubs and trees. Within ayear or two of harvesting, clearcuts will generally have for higher biodiversity than meadows. And within a decade or so they begin to look just as good too.

In the space of a few short years, a clearcut that is very ugly to look at can be transformed into a beautiful sea of blossoms growing from seeds that blow in on the wind after fire. Was the clearcut bad when it looked ugly? Is it good now that it looks beautiful? The fact is, it is ci serious mistake to judge the environmental health of the land simply by looking at it from an aesthetic perspective.

The way we think the land should look often has more to do with personal and social values than anything to do with biodiversity or science. We tend to idealize nature, as if there is some perfect state that is exactly right for a given area of land. There are actually thousands of different combinations of species at all different stages of 'forest growth that are perfectly natural and sustainable in their own right. There is nothing better about old trees than there is about young trees. Perhaps the ideal state is to have forests of all ages, young, medium, and old in the landscape. This will provide the highest diversity of habitats and therefore the opportunity for the largest number of species to live in that land-scape.

Deforestation is a difficult subject for the forest industry because it certainly looks deforested when all the trees are cut down in a given area. Unfortunately for the public's understanding of this term, cutting the trees down is not sufficient in itself to cause deforestation. What really matters is whether the forest is removed permanently, or reforested with new trees. But the unsightly nature of a recently harvested forest, even if it is going to grow back eventually, can easily give the impression of environmental destruction and deforestation.

On the other hand, a rural scene of farmlands and pasture looks pleasant to the eye and is neat and tidy compared to the jumble of woody debris in a clearcut. Yet it is the farm and posture land that truly represents deforestation. It has been cleared of forest long ago and the forest has been permanently replaced by food crops and fodder. More important, if we stopped plowing the farm-land for just 5 years in a row, seeds from the surrounding trees would blow in and the whole area would be blanketed in new tree seedlings. Within 80 years you would never know there had been a farm there. The entire area would be reforested again, just by leaving it alone. That's because deforestation is not an event, that just happens and then is over forever. Deforestation is actually an ongoing process of continuous human interference, preventing the forest from growing back, which it would if it was simply left alone. The most common form of interference with forest renewal is what we call agriculture. That's why deforestation is seldom caused by forestry, the whole intention of which is to cause reforestation. Deforestation is nearly always caused by friendly farmers growing our food, and by nice carpenters building our houses, towns, and cities. Deforestation is not an evil plot, it is something we do on purpose in order to feed and house the 6 billion and growing human population.

The scene of cattle grazing in a lush green posture is pleasant to the eye. Yet it wasn't that many years ago when McDonald's restaurants, bowing to heavy public pressure due to concern about

deforestation in Central and South America to grow cows for ham-burger, promised they would never buy another tropical cow. It was apparently fine, however, to continue buying cows grown in North America. Is this because we have a higher standard for deforestation in North America then they do in Latin America? No, it is a complete double standard. Deforestation is deforestation regardless of where it is practiced. The forest is completely removed and replaced with a monoculture pasture on which exotic animals that were not present in the original forest graze.

If you go to Australia, you'll find that most people think the worst deforestation is occurring in Malaysia and Indonesia, when in fact about 40 percent of Australia's native forest has been destroyed for agriculture. The same is true in United States; about 40 percent of the original forests have been converted to farming. We always like to think that the bad people are long way away and speak another language. We often fail to realize that we are doing exactly the same things we accuse them of doing.

And if you don't eat meat, you must eat vegetables in which case you will cause the creation of monoculture cabbage plantations and other such food crops where there once were forests. Now it's true that cabbages are prettier than stumps, unfortunate-ly true for the public's understanding of deforestation. Birds and insects are not welcome in areas of monoculture crops. If they wish to avoid being shot or poisoned they had best retreat into a forest nearby where they are more likely to be left alone.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against farming. We all have to eat. But it is interesting to note that the three things we can do to prevent further loss of the world's forests .have nothing to do with forestry. These three things are-

1. Population management. The more people there are in this world the more mouths there are to feed and the more for-est we must clear to feed them. This is a simple fact of arithmetic.

2. Intensive agricultural production. Over the lost 50 years in North America we have learned to grow five times as much food on the same area of land, due to advances in genetics, technology, and pest control. If we had not made these advances we would either have to clear away five times as much forest, which is not available anyway, or more likely we simply could not grow as much food. Again, it is a mat-ter of arithmetic. The more food we can grow on a given piece of land, the less forest will be lost to grow it.

3. Urban densification. There is actually only one significant cause of continuing forest loss in United States; 200 cities sprawling out over the landscape and permanently converting forest and farm to pavement. If we would design our cities for a higher density, more livable environment, we would not only save forests, we would also use less energy and materials.

The sight of large bales of freshly mown hay placed evenly across a farm field is attractive to our eye in the late afternoon sun. The light and form of the hay bales is pretty to us, we tend to judge landscapes by how good a postcard they would make. The bales of hay are actually just large lumps of dead cellulose laying on a deforested piece of land. There is a very little biodiversity in a hay-field, yet it will more often catch the eye than surrounding forestland where biodiversity is high.

The some is true of the sight of a field of flowers in bloom. The bold, beautiful colors of a monoculture tulip plantation, sprayed regularly with pesticides to keep the petals perfect for the florist's shop, are attractive to our eye. We hardly notice the gray-green monotone of the native forest nearby, containing tens of species of native trees, hundreds of species of native birds, insects, animals and plants.

We need to give the public a new pair of eyes with which to seethe landscape, to get beyond the immediate visual impression and to understand a little more about science, ecology, and biodiversity. This is perhaps the single most important task for the forest indus-try. The lesson is not a difficult one, but it is not intuitively obvious to people. They simply tend to judge the health of the environment with the same eyes they use to judge the aesthetics of the land. If a person strongly believes that forestry is bad because it is ugly, no amount of technical and scientific information will cause them to change their mind. First they must understand that the look of the land is not sufficient, in itself, to make judgments about ecology. A large parking lot is the ultimate in deforestation. The automobile is arguably the most destructive technology ever invented by the human species. Especially when you consider the block stuff that is usually found beneath them, asphalt. Why is it legal to take the toxic waste from oil refineries and spread it all over the earth, killing every living thing, so that cars and trucks may roam about freely? When crude oil is put into an oil refinery, by the hundreds of millions of barrels a day, we take the gasoline off the top to run the cars, then the diesel oil to run the trucks and trains. Near the bottom we extract the bunker C crude oil which is used to fire the boilers on big ships as they cross the sea. But in the very bottom, left over, is this black, gooey crud. If you took it to a licensed land-fill in a truck they would turn you away at the gate because it’s toxic, hazardous, and carcinogenic to boot. It is illegal to bury it, but perfectly legal to load it into huge fleets of trucks and dump it directly onto the earth in a thin layer, killing every living thing. This is the world's largest case of legalized toxic dumping, and we turn a blind eye to it because of our love affair with the automobile and our dependence on the transportation infrastructure it provides.

Think of a biodiversity on a scale from 0 to 100. You would have to admit that the parking lot is pretty close to 0. There might be a blade of grass poking through in the odd place. A form field or posture might rate 5 or 10, compared to the original forest that was cut down, burned and planted to make the farm. Forestry, the way it is practiced today throughout most of North America, is 96,98, 100, even 102. Because in some landscapes forest management results in a wider range of age classes and ecosystem types than would normally occur in the absence of human activity.

All this controversy, political pressure, and near-hysterical rhetoric over a few percent of biodiversity, with the camera lens focused squarely in on the most recent, ugliest, burnt-out clear-cut available, as if it's going to remain that way forever. The real extreme is the parking lot and other areas of deforestation, not the recently cut forest that is soon going to grow back into a beautiful new forest again.

We have to help take the blinkers off people’s eyes, and to give them a better appreciation of the full range of impacts caused by our various activities. When it comes to biodiversity conservation, there is no more sustainable primary industry than forestry.

 Continued in the next issue of Woodland Steward

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