Last February I posted a somewhat lengthy discussion of lodgepole pine bug and fire history that included several quotes from John Leiberg’s 1899 report titled “Cascade Range Forest Reserve from Township 28 South to Township 37 South, Inclusive, Together With the Ashland Forest Reserve and Forest Regions from Township 28 South to Township 41 South, Inclusive, and from Range 2 West to Range 14 East, Willamette Meridian, Inclusive”: https://forestpolicypub.com/2013/02/28/lodgepole-pine-ecology-1899-2013/

A more comprehensive selection of his observations in this report can be found here: http://www.orww.org/History/SW_Oregon/References/Leiberg_1899/

Several of these quotes were also posted as a Comment about a week ago, but WordPress won’t let me search those files or list more than 18 of my past comments for some reason, so I am reposting them here, based on current discussions of wet vs. dry forests, natural fire regimes, and wildfire severity patterns and history.

Leiberg was a Swedish immigrant who did much of his botanical field work from his base near Lake Pend Oreille, in Idaho Territory, including the 19th and 20th annual reports of the US Geological Survey, which encompassed most (or all) of the current Bitterroot National Forest. He was meticulous in his observations, including counting the tree rings of several tree species at small sawmills that had just entered the region (“virgin forests”), and using land surveys, photography and personal interviews to build detailed maps and tables for several different forested areas in the western US, mostly in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, and Minnesota.

I believe him to be one of the very best forest scientists of his era for these regions, but his work has been sadly neglected — likely beginning with the politics surrounding the formation of the National Forests in 1906 and the transfer of the Forest Reserves for the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture. It was to Pinchot’s advantage to ignore Leiberg’s work because it directly contradicted his assertions that the federal reserves were not being properly studied or managed. Leiberg died in Leaburg, Oregon (near Eugene) in 1913.

I would be very interested in the thoughts of other Commenters on this blog regarding the following quotes:

(p. 245) The duration of the forest type is indefinite.  While undoubtedly subject to evolutionary changes, its modifications or transitions to other types are so slow as to be quite imperceptible to us.  Not so with subtypes, They frequently change, sometimes two or three times in a generation.  Forest fires are fertile causes for inducing such rapid changes.  But even when left undisturbed a subtype rarely persists in any particular locality for more than 250 or 300 years.  Such at least is the rule on the eastern and immediate western slope of the Cascades and in the basins between the Cascades and the Rocky Mountains.  The only exception to this rule in the region named that is known to me occurs in pure yellow-pine and western-juniper growths. 

(p. 248) But the open character of the yellow-pine type of forest anywhere in the region examined is due to frequently repeated forest fires more than to any other cause.

(p. 249) The forest floor in the type is covered with a thin layer of humus consisting entirely of decaying pine needles, or it is entirely bare.  The latter condition is very prevalent east of the Cascades, where large areas are annually overrun by fire.  But even on the western side of the range, where the humus covering is most conspicuous, it is never more than a fraction of an inch in thickness, just enough to supply the requisite material for the spread of forest fires.

(p. 268) In other places fires have destroyed a certain percentage of the forest.  The damage may vary from 10 to 60 per cent or higher. The destruction has not been all in one place or body.  The fire has run through the forest for miles, burning a tree or group of trees here and there.

(p. 274) The age of the timber utilized in sawmill consumption varies from 100 to 350 years.  Most of the yellow pine falls below 175 years; the higher limit is reached chiefly in the sugar pine.  Most of the sugar pine in the region is of great and mature age.  Comparatively little red fir is sawn.  It varies in age from 100 to 500 years, and some of the very large individuals seen were doubtless even older.  The noble fir and white pine of mill-timber size varies in age from 100 to 350 years, most of it falling below 180 years.  The alpine hemlock of mill size runs from 80 to 250 years, 120 to 140 years representing the age of the bulk of the standard growth.  The white fir, with sufficient clear trunk development to come within the limit of these estimates, varies in age from 75 to 120 years.

(p. 277) The aspect of the forest, its composition, the absence of any large tracts of solid old-growth of the species less capable of resisting fire, and the occurrence of veteran trees of red fir, noble fir, white pine, alpine hemlock, etc., singly or in small groups scattered through stands of very different species, indicate without any doubt the prevalence of widespread fires throughout this region long before the coming of the white man.  But, on the other hand, the great diversity in the age of such stands as shown clearly their origin as reforestations after fires, proves that the fires during the Indian occupancy were not of such frequent occurrence nor of such magnitude as they have been since the advent of the white man.

(p. 277) The age of the burns chargeable to the era of Indian occupancy can not in most cases be traced back more than one hundred and fifty years. Between that time and the time of the white man’s ascendancy, or, between the years 1750 and 1855, small and circumscribed fires evidently were of frequent occurrence.  There were some large ones.  Thus, in T. 37 S., R. 5 E., occurs a growth of white fir nearly 75 per cent pure covering between 4,000 and 5,000 acres.  It is an even-aged stand 100 years old and is clearly a reforestation after a fire which destroyed an old growth of red fir one hundred and five or one hundred and ten years ago.  A similar tract occurs in T. 36 S., R. 5 E., only that here the reforestation is white pine instead of white fir.

(p. 277) The largest burns directly chargeable to the Indian occupancy are in Ts. 30 and 31 S., Rs. 8 and 9 E.  In addition to being the largest, they are likewise the most ancient.  The burns cover upward of 60,000 acres, all but 1,000 or 1,100 acres being in a solid block.  This tract appears to have been systematically burned by the Indians during the past three centuries [ca. 1600 to 1855].  Remains of three forests are distinctly traceable in the charred fragments of timber which here and there litter the ground.

(p. 278) Along the summits of the Cascades from Crater Lake to Mount Pitt are very many even-aged stands of alpine hemlock 200 to 300 years old.  These even-aged stands may represent reforestations after ancient fires dating back two hundred and fifty to four hundred years, but there is no certainty on this point.

(p. 278) It is not possible to state with any degree of certainty the Indian’s reasons for firing the forest.  Their object in burning the forest at high elevations on the Cascades may have been to provide a growth of grass near their favorite camping places, or to promote the growth of huckleberry brush and blackberry brambles, which often, after fires, cover the ground with a luxuriant and, to the Indian, very valuable and desirable growth.  The chief purpose of the fires at middle elevations and on the plains or levels probably was to keep down the underbrush in the forest and facilitate hunting.

(pp. 282-283)  There is little doubt that a very large proportion of the many rocky level tracts which occur east of the Cascades in the region under consideration are wholly due, as to the character of their present surface, to frequently repeated fires.  The pumice originally laid down at the bottoms of shallow lakes would be evenly spread out.  As the lakes were being gradually drained thick masses of marsh vegetation would preserve the pumice surface from wastage.  The marsh vegetation was finally supplanted by forest; then man came on the scene and with fire as an ally made some profound changes.  The entire series of phenomena here detailed, not omitting the part played by fire, are in full operation at the present time in the region bordering Klamath Marsh, and in various other localities, such as Sycan Marsh and tracts bordering the Klamath lakes.

(p. 288) These grassed-over places are, and have been, of commercial importance since the upper plateaus and summits of the Cascades began to be utilized as sheep pastures.  All of these pastures and meadows which owe their origins to fires are merely temporary affairs. If suffered to remain undisturbed by further fires they will return to forest cover.  Around Diamond and Crater lakes the grassy places are slowly giving way to stands of lodgepole pine as the primary reforestation.  On the lava plateaus flanking the crest of the range in Ts. 34 and 35 S., R. 5 E., grassy places created by fires before the advent of the white man have, in course of time, become covered with thick stands of lodgepole pine, now mature and giving way to stands of noble fir and alpine hemlock.

p. 290-291) The custom of the Indians of peeling the yellow pine at certain seasons of the year to obtain the cambium layer which they use for food, is in some localities a fruitful contributory cause toward destruction of the yellow pine by fire.  They do not carry the peeling process far enough to girdle the tree, but they remove a large enough piece of bark to make a gaping wound which never heals over and which furnishes an excellent entrance for fire.  Throughout the forests of the Klamath reservation trees barked in this manner are very common.  Along the eastern margin of Klamath marsh they are found by the thousands.

(p. 298) The southern and central portions are covered with stands of lodgepole pine, all reforestations after fires and representative of all ages of burns from one hundred fifty years ago [ca. 1750] up to the present time [1899].  There is no portion of these or the heavier stands of alpine hemlock and noble fir in the northern sections of the township that have not been visited by fire within the past forty-five years [since 1855].  Reforestations consist wholly of lodgepole pine as the first growth.  In some places on warm southern declivities brush growth comes in after fires.  In other localities a grass and sedge sward covers the ground.  It is clearly evident that many of the fires have been set for the purpose of promoting these grass growths and enlarging the possible sheep range.  It is also noticeable that wherever fires have been kept down for four or five years there is gradual return to forest and a disappearance of the grass.

(p. 305) This region [T. 29 S., R. 5 E.] was burned periodically during the Indian occupancy, as the many different ages represented in the lodgepole pine stands prove.  But when the white man came into the region the areas in this particular township was covered with a uniform stand of the species.  During the past forty or forty-five years [1855-1899] the timber has been burned in many locations and the subsequent reforestations have again been burned.  The region is too high in altitude to permit the growth of much brush.  After a fire one of three things happens: either lodgepole pine comes in as the first forest growth, or grasses and sedges form a thin, interrupted sward, or the ground remains bare of all vegetation.  It is impossible to predict beforehand which one of the three phases will appear.

(p. 395) The forest is of the alpine-hemlock type throughout [T. 35 S., R. 5 E.] .  Fires of modern origin have ravaged it extensively.  The great burns which cover the eastern areas of the adjoining township and wrought great havoc among what must have been heavy stands of noble fir.  The forests in the eastern areas have suffered no less, and there are scant signs of reforestation.  Most of the young growth now standing is overwhelmingly composed of lodgepole pine.  The bottom and eastern slopes of the South Fork Canyon have escaped fairly well and carry a forest in a state of tolerably good preservation.  Much of it has not experienced a fire for 300 or 400 years,  and in consequence it contains a vast amount of litter, consisting chiefly of the original lodgepole pine growth which followed a fire that occurred between three and four centuries ago [ca. 1500 to ca. 1600]. The lodgepole pine has had time to mature, die, and fall down, and a new forest 150 years old has taken its place since that time.

(p. 457) The Pokegama Lumber Company operates here, sending the logs to their mills at Klamathon, on the southern Pacific Railroad, by way of the Klamath River.  They cut pine exclusively, and cut all pine clean as they go, leaving great accumulations of debris behind them for future fires.  They take all trees far into the crown, trimming off the limbs and making the last cut on a basis of 7 to 8 inches in diameter at the small end.  In consequence they realize about 40 per cent higher yield than the customary cruisers’ estimates provide for.

In about 1955 or 1956 President Dwight D. Eisenhower came to Portland, Oregon for some reason or another. At that time I was attending Fernwood Grade School in NE Portland and our teacher walked us down to Sandy Blvd., where Eisenhower drove by in a convertible as he was traveling from the new airport to someplace downtown to meet with other politicians, waving to the crowd. Our teacher thought it was a great experience for us, but at that age the President was not as popular with us kids as Heck Harper, a local cowboy with a Saturday morning cartoon TV show, or Mr. Moon, who had a similar show and later got busted for being a pedophile. TV was a real fad among young Americans at that time, similar to how Twitter or iPhones are perceived today. However, some of my classmates soon began to wear “I Like Ike” pins on their shirts and most of the rest of us were kind of envious because we couldn’t afford such buttons, and because our parents didn’t have — and couldn’t give us — any.

Forty years later I finally read his “beware of the military-industrial complex” speech and came to realize it had a “Part 2”: “beware of government funded science” that really struck home with me, and explained a lot of what concerned me regarding scientific research and academic rewards at Oregon State University as I was completing my graduate research studies:

“In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

— Dwight Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961

I have been a friend and business associate of Wayne Giesy’s for more than 25 years. During that entire time he has discussed with me – and anyone else who will listen – his ideas for resolving the conflicts surrounding the management of our nation’s forests; and particularly those forests in the western US.

During the past 30 years conflicts between the timber industry and environmental activists regarding the management of our federal lands have become so well known they are commonly referred to as the “Forest Wars”: a conflict in which opponents have taken sides in regards as to whether our federal forests should be actively managed principally for economic benefit of local and national interests, or whether they should be allowed to “function naturally” for intrinsic values and not necessarily be subjected to harvesting at all. These conflicts are not peculiar to just the western US, but have also been taking place in other countries, too, such as Brazil, Venezuela, Australia, and Tasmania.

Wayne’s proposed solution, commonly known as the “Giesy Plan” for many years because of its principal authorship, is to divide the lands into two parts: one to be managed for multiple use – with an economic focus — along more traditional lines, and the other to be managed in accordance with environmental concerns. The former approach would be subject to existing state and federal laws and regulations regarding riparian areas, road construction, etc., and the latter would allow for whatever harvests were needed to maintain forest health, recreational uses, wildlife habitat, and other environmental concerns. These separate approaches would be taken for an 80-year period to fully test them out, and then reconsidered at that time based on existing results and perceptions.

This “Oregon Plan” has been discussed in many venues and with many individuals – industrial foresters, tree farmers, politicians, and environmentalists — over the past 30 years (Wayne is now in his mid-90’s), and modified accordingly as it was being considered. Most recently Wayne met with Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber in a one-to-one meeting and was encouraged by the Governor’s thinking on the federal forest management issue. They discussed how changing the current management paradigm in ways that better achieve balance across all interests might obtain support not just within Oregon, but also as applied across all federal forestlands nationwide.

Is this the solution to resolving past conflicts and moving forward with the management of common resources? A growing number of people and organizations on both sides of the table seem to think so.

http://www.orww.org/Awards/2013/SAF/Wayne_Giesy/Oregon_Plan/index.html

The Oregon Plan

Nick Napier, Dave Rainey, Wayne Giesy, and Bill Hagenstein at the Portland Wholesale Lumber Association’s 2010 annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. Wayne has promoted his idea for improved management of Oregon’s federal lands to forest industry, environmental organizations, and elected officials for the past 30 years, during which time it has become known as “the Giesy Plan.”

Sometime in 1983, after Wayne Giesy first began work as an employee of Ralph Hull, of Hull-Oakes Lumber Co. in Dawson, Oregon, Wayne approached Ralph with his concerns on increasing environmental actions to restrict logging activities on federal lands. At that time Wayne thought, in order to secure a stable supply of logs from BLM O&C Lands — where Hull-Oakes then obtained most of its raw materials — a deal should be made between the forest industry and the environmental organizations to divide the disputed lands into two portions: 1/2 for environmental purposes and 1/2 for public product needs (see: Giesy 2008a). After nearly a year considering this idea, Ralph gave Wayne the authorization and encouragement needed to present this idea to other forest industry leaders, with full backing of Hull-Oakes Lumber Co.

When Wayne first presented his idea to a number of forest industry leaders he was openly laughed at, and accused of “giving away the farm” by other members of these groups who couldn’t conceive of the environmental organizations having enough power or credibility to obtain such a major commitment of public resources. At that time local loggers and sawmill owners had access to perhaps 85% of the standing federal timber in Oregon; today that number is much closer to 15%, as the remainder has been dedicated to “critical habitat” for Threatened and Endangered Species, riparian “reserves,” Wilderness, roadless areas, and other designated “set asides.”

Wayne’s idea first became publicly known through an editorial written and published by long-time and well-respected Albany Democrat-Herald editor, Haso Herring, in May 2003. Although Herring’s editorial focused more on Wayne’s suggestions on how to deal with salvage from recent western Oregon Wildfires rather than a basic division of all federal lands, he used the name “Giesy Plan” to label Wayne’s thoughts: “The Giesy plan sounds visionary because it is based on common sense and assumes that obstacles can be overcome. That’s the way most Americans used to think. Would that more of us did so now.”

Today the name “Giesy Plan” is used more often to represent his original proposal, as it had been used for some time prior to the Herring editorial. Although its influence is generally not recognized or acknowledged in ongoing debates regarding the same problems that existed 30 years ago, current proposals strongly mirror Wayne’s original proposed suggestions and certainly have their basis in his unvarying advocacy. During the past two years, for example, there has been significant political discussion concerning the need to resolve the long-standing debate between forest industry and environmental groups in regards to the O&C Lands in western Oregon. Every one of these efforts has focused on a division of public forestlands between competing timber production, environmental preserves, and riparian reserves — as first suggested by Wayne in the early 1980’s, and as actively advocated by him ever since. Current examples follow:

In 2012 Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber formed an O&C Lands task force to address the problem of those forests to meet their federally mandated obligations. On February 6, 2013 the task force released a 96-page report that offered a series of options — each based upon Giesy’s principal suggestion that the lands be divided between the opposing factions and managed according to their individual perspectives. A series of graphs on page 46 of the report illustrated each of the proposed options, each one being based on Giesy’s basic argument to divide the land between resource production and forest preservation:

Also in 2012, Oregon Congressmen Peter DeFazio, Greg Walden, and Kurt Schrader developed a proposal, integrating the Kitzhaber report and based on the same concept developed by Giesy regarding the division of federal forestlands. The resulting proposed legislation, called the DeFazio-Schrader-Walden O&C Bill, was included by fellow Congressman Doc Hasting as part of the successful House Bill 1526. It has been generally supported by western Oregon members of the forest industry, but opposed by numerous environmental organizations, such as Oregon Wild, a long-time activist group based in Eugene, Oregon.

Simultaneous to Governor Kitzhaber’s efforts and those of Oregon’s bipartisan Congressional team, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden — initially working with fellow Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley — has been fashioning a separate solution to the western Oregon O&C Lands stalemate, generally referred to as “the Wyden Bill.” Senator Wyden’s efforts began in 2011 and are based on a “legislative framework” he developed that features as its basis: “The legislation will create wilderness and other permanent land use designations whose primary management focus will be to maintain and enhance conservation attributes. This acreage will be roughly equivalent to lands designated for sustainable harvest”; i.e., the same approximate 50/50 split first suggested by Giesy moere than 30 years ago, and actively promoted to the Senator, his staff, and many others ever since. Wyden’s proposal was publicly released on November 26, 2013, and was immediately opposed by most environmental organizations, such as Oregon Wild, and by the major western Oregon timber industries in a co-sponsored press release. On the following day the American Forest Resouce Council — which generally favored the DeFazio Bill — released a more critical response through their monthly AFRC Newsletter.

A more detailed look at the Giesy Plan — and the need for corrective management of federal lands in Oregon and in the remaining western States — illustrates the basic dependency of the Kitzhaber O&C Report, House Bill 1526, and the Wyden proposal on Wayne’s original concerns and recommendations:

Page 1	Page 2	Page 3	Page 4	Page 5	Page 6

Page 1. Proposes a division of US Forest Service lands in the 11 western states as: 40% for environmental concerns; 10% for riparian protection; and 50% “to produce products for the American public,” with certain conditions and restrictions. Ten “benefits” of adopting this idea are also listed, including: rural jobs, elimination of county payments, reduced imports, improved international balance of payments, reduced wildfire risk, enhanced wildlife habitat, and an elimination of  existing “negative activities” by both sides of the debate.

Page 2. Offers modifications to the original proposal, following consultations with both environmental and timber management proponents, with management divisions being made along watershed boundaries.

Page 3. A 2010 report using Oregon Department of Employment figures, showing 72,000 jobs lost in Oregon from 1989-2008 due to reduced forest management levels; and compared to 88,000 Oregon government jobs created during the same time period.

Page 4. A graphic comparison of the relative amounts of federal land contained in each of the eleven western states as compared to federal land holdings in the 37 eastern states (Hawaii and Alaska are not shown).

Page 5. Two graphs depicting the increasing trends of both total wildfire acres burned annually in the US, and for average size of each wildfire during the 1960-2006 time period: with sharp increases in both trends beginning in the early 1990s.

Page 6. A bar graph comparing Net Growth of US Forest Lands compared to Product Removals for the same lands during the 1952-2004 time period: 52 years in which forest growth has always exceeded harvests, and in which the greatest disparities between the two correlate strongly with the increased wildfire trends shown on Page 5.

This article was published in Today’s Sacramento Bee regarding Superior Court Judge Leslie Nichols’ order for Cal Fire and the State of California to pay $30 million to Sierra Pacific Industries for damages related to the 2007 Moonlight Fire. I’ve posted the first several paragraphs; the link to the complete article follows.

 Jerry Franklin is the widely acknowledged “Guru of Old-growth.” Norm Johnson is an eminent forest economist and political strategist. Both are career university professors. Neither one has much background in forest management, reforestation, forest history or fire history as evidenced by their lack of experience in these areas and by their public writings and statements in regards to these topics. Yet, Senator Ron Wyden has based his current proposal before Congress on the requirement that nearly 1/2 of the 2.6 million acres of forested BLM Lands in western Oregon would be managed under their prescription for “ecological forestry” and the remainder would be “preserved” in permanently designated Wilderness and other passively managed reserves.

A major shortcoming of this arrangement has been discussed on this blog before, and most succinctly in Sharon’s October 13 post from last year: https://forestpolicypub.com/2013/10/13/quid-pro-quo-without-the-quo-be-wary-of-trading-wilderness-for-management-acresg/

The crux of Sharon’s and her coauthors concerns was that there would be no problem setting aside more than a million acres of new Wilderness, but that the areas slated for active management would be subjected to lawsuits by the environmental community and be tied up in courtrooms. This concern was illustrated in my post from early last month:

https://forestpolicypub.com/2014/01/11/opb-franklin-johnson-ecological-forestry-includes-tree-sitters/

Both industry and environmentalists are strongly opposed to this proposal, yet Wyden keeps slogging along, wasting everyone’s time and money as if this is a reasonable (or even possible) solution to the problems besetting federal forest management in Oregon since the passage of the Clinton Plan for Northwest Forests more than 20 years ago. He has scheduled a hearing for February 6 to discuss his proposal in greater detail.

The Wyden Plan is DOA, and everyone seems to know that except the Senator. Further proof is provided by this post in yesterday’s Public Land News (Vol. 39, No. 3):

As Wyden readies O&C bill, enviros sue BLM timber pilot

Shortly after Senate Energy Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) announced a hearing for February 6 on his legislation to boost timber sales on O&C lands environmentalists showed him how hard his job will be.

They filed a lawsuit January 22 against a BLM sale that would serve as a prototype for the kinds of sales Wyden envisions on one million acres of O&C lands, i.e. limited environmental review.

The lawsuit argues that BLM must conduct far broader environmental reviews than it did for a White Castle Variable Retention Harvest Timber Sale in BLM’s Roseburg District.  And the lawsuit from Oregon Wild and Cascadia Wildlands asks the court to order BLM to prepare an expensive and time-consuming EIS to replace an environmental assessment (EA).

BLM in the sale approved a timber harvest practice called “variable retention regeneration harvest.”  But to Oregon Wild that constitutes a clearcut.  “No matter what you call it, a clearcut is still a clearcut,” said Sean Stevens, executive director of Oregon Wild.  “Clearcutting century-old forests that offer habitat for threatened wildlife on public lands in Oregon is not only immoral, in this case it’s illegal.”

On Nov. 26, 2013, Wyden published a draft O&C lands bill that would set aside about one million acres of O&C forest primarily for timber sales and about the same amount of land for conservation.  He would have BLM both manage the timber sale lands and the conservation lands.

The Wyden bill sort of parallels a House-passed bill (HR 1526) that would also emphasize timber sales on one million acres of O&C lands and protect another million acres.  But the House would have a trust appointed by the Oregon governor manage the timber lands and would transfer the conservation lands to the Forest Service.

On announcing the February 6 sale Wyden said he intends to go all out. “No bill or issue in Congress is more important to me than passing the O&C Lands Act into law and creating a long-term solution for rural Oregon,” he said.

Wyden says timber sales under his legislation (like BLM’s White Castle prototype) would follow the recommendations of two eminent forestry scholars, Drs. Norm Johnson and Jerry Franklin.  They say their strategy would stop well short of clearcutting to leave the foundation for regeneration of harvested timber tracts.

In joint testimony to the Senate Energy Committee on June 25, 2013, Johnson (a professor at Oregon State University) and Franklin (a professor at the University of Washington), said, “Functional early seral habitat potentially can be created using regeneration harvest prescriptions that retain biological legacies and use less intensive approaches to re-establishment of closed forest canopies.  Such approaches would produce more modest timber yields than the intensive management described above but could provide significant ecological benefits.”

Under direction from the Secretary of Interior BLM set up the White Castle sale as one of three pilot projects using the principles enunciated by Franklin and Johnson.  The Roseburg Demonstration Project anticipated that several timber sales would extend over 438 acres, with 285 acres subjected to the Franklin and Johnson principles.

In their lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court Eugene Division the environmentalists invoked the Franklin and Johnson management scheme in asking for an injunction against the timber sales.

“Failing to thoroughly consider and objectively evaluate an adequate range of alternatives, including an alternative that would: meet timber objectives by thinning in dense young stands, meet early-seral objectives by embedding ‘gaps’ within thinning prescriptions, and be consistent with the management recommendations of Drs. Johnson and Franklin,” the lawsuit says.  “BLM further failed this duty by contriving an overly narrow ‘purpose and need’ for the project that predetermined the outcome and excluded consideration of alternative approaches.”

The House-passed O&C bill would also have BLM follow the Franklin and Johnson proposals.

And that did not go over well with the Obama administration, even though administration ally and Democrat Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) is the chief sponsor of the O&C provision in HR 1526.  Said the Office of Management and Budget of exemptions from environmental reviews in the bill in a Sept. 18, 2013, statement, “This would undermine appropriate management and stewardship of these lands, which belong to all Americans, would compromises habitat for threatened and endangered species, and would create legal uncertainty over management of these lands as well as increase litigation risk.”

The House bill also goes beyond the BLM-managed O&C lands to propose a Forest Service-wide timber program that would: direct each national forest to designate one or more forest reserves and, within 30 days of designation, determine annual timber volume requirements for the reserves; direct each forest to reach an annual timber sale volume from each reserve beginning in fiscal year 2014; limit an environmental assessment to a review only of a proposed project in a reserve, limit the assessment to less than 100 pages and require completion of the assessment within 180 days; and exempt from an environmental assessment projects that, among other things, “cover an area of 10,000 acres or less.”

No comments from me — this article is well written and presents the current — and long-term — problems and solutions clearly and succinctly. Kudos to Kate Prengaman.

Rep. Hastings calls for reforms to Endangered Species Act

Posted on January 26, 2014

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By Kate Prengaman / Yakima Herald-Republic
[email protected]

YAKIMA, Wash. — From spotted owls to salmon, the Pacific Northwest has been ground zero for the impacts — good and bad — of the Endangered Species Act for 40 years.

That’s the view of U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Pasco, who heads the House Committee on Natural Resources, which is considering significant changes to the landmark 1973 legislation.

“Very generally, those of us in the Northwest have been hit by impacts of the Endangered Species Act more than anybody,” Hastings said. “The economy that is based here is natural-resource based, with water, and with the timber industry, so whenever you have laws that impact natural resources, they are going to impact the economy.”

Hastings believes the law takes too much of an economic toll, leaves too much room for litigation by environmental groups and lacks an emphasis on getting species recovered and off the list. He called legislation to reform the act a priority for the year.

Proponents of the Endangered Species Act, ESA for short, say that it’s working well and that calls for reform are actually a move to weaken protections.

There are lots of proposed reforms floating around, including one sponsored by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., which would make adding a species to the list subject to state and congressional approval, automatic delisting after five years, and require the government to pay landowners who property lost value because of the ESA enforcement.

Hastings declined to comment directly on Paul’s proposal, saying that the group of representatives who are looking into reforms is still working on identifying the specific weaknesses in the law and the best potential solutions. He did say that limiting “closed-door settlements” with environmental groups was a priority.

Hastings’ push for reforms is supported by many industry organizations, including the Washington Farm Bureau. The public policy director for the bureau, Tom Davis, said that reducing lawsuits from environmental groups and requiring sound science would help landowners gain trust in the ESA process.

The ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said in a statement to the Yakima Herald-Republic that he doubts the proposed reforms will succeed.

“There’s the potential for balanced, reasonable compromises to modernize the Endangered Species Act based on the best available science, but unfortunately this majority does not seem interested in such an approach,” DeFazio said. “Instead, we will likely spend time debating legislation that will be cast as ‘common sense’ reforms, but will actually gut the law, and as a result will go nowhere in the Senate.”

Spotted owl, shuttered sawmills

Talking about the economic consequences of the law, Hastings invokes an example familiar to many Washington — the northern spotted owl. When the iconic bird was listed as threatened in 1991, controversial protections of old growth forest were made to protect its critical habitat, reducing the forest available for logging.

Many in the timber industry blame those protections for putting loggers out of work and closing mills along the eastern Cascades.

However, other factors were also at play. Much of the most profitable acres of old-growth had already been cut at that point, and many of the secondary stands had not grown enough to log.

Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity, disagrees with the argument that listed species are always bad news economically.

“Take the Northwest Forest Plan, which protected the last 10 percent of old-growth forest — that halted some economic activity, but the economies of Oregon and Washington have continued to grow,” Greenwald said.

Protecting endangered species, Greenwald said, actually means protecting their environments, which is important because people depend on clean water and healthy habitat just like other species.

Bridget Moran, who works for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) in Washington state, said that the agency works with foresters to figure out how timber harvest and spotted owl protections can coexist.

“We work with the national forests in Washington to help them get the harvest out and more often than not, we know how to work through owl issues,” Moran said.

The ESA works, she said, because the law gives the federal agencies a flexible set of tools to solve conservation problems working with landowners.

Do we need to limit lawsuits?

The national Center for Biological Diversity is one of the environmental groups Hastings likes to blame for turning the ESA into “a process where litigation becomes more paramount than saving species.”

The Natural Resource Committee said 570 ESA-related lawsuits from 2009 to 2012 cost the federal government more than $21 million in attorney fees, including $4.6 million in the Northwest.

Hastings says time and money could be better spent working on recovery efforts.

However, the fees paid to plaintiffs in those cases do not come out of the $175 million annual budget the federal Fish and Wildlife Service has for endangered species work; it comes from a separate fund tapped for all government lawsuits.

Greenwald disputes Hastings’ contention that environmental groups sue to get listings made for “political purposes” and financial gain. They sue to force the agencies to make decisions in a timely manner, he said, not to dictate the outcome.

Last summer, Dan Ashe, the director of the USFWS, told the House Natural Resources Committee that the number of species at risk is increasing, but limited funding and a backlog of species proposed for the list means his agency can miss its own deadlines.

“Any deadline settlement we enter into commits us only to undertake a process already required by the ESA by a certain date,” Ashe said in his testimony.

He added that these lawsuits don’t give away his agency’s authority to make decisions based on the best available science.

Ashe also said a recent nationwide settlement that included hundreds of species at once was in the best interest of the public and the agency, because it allowed the agency to set priorities and achievable deadlines, while also reducing the number of lawsuits it had to deal with.

Greenwald said the right of citizens to sue for enforcement of the ESA is critical to protecting the environment.

“Hastings makes it seem like a process problem, but really, he objects to species being protected,” Greenwald said.

One listing Hastings opposed recently was that of a rare plant found in the Hanford Reach. He calls it a “poster child” for problems with the current ESA. The White Bluffs bladderpod, a perennial plant with clusters of small yellow blooms, was listed as threatened in December, despite opposition from local farmers and the Franklin County Natural Resources Advisory Committee. They hired an independent scientist to analyze the plant’s DNA to see if it really was a unique sub-species.

“The law has to be better defined as to what good science is,” Hastings said. “DNA evidence showed that it’s the same as other bladderpods. … Why was the DNA evidence ignored? In criminal law it’s conclusive.”

Federal records show that the USFWS sent that DNA study to five other scientists for review, and they all said the study lacked sufficient data to conclude that the bladderpod was not unique.

Moran said she saw the bladderpod decision as a success story because of how the agency worked with local landowners to determine the plant’s key habitat.

The only critical habitat that was designated for the bladderpod is about 2,000 acres of federal land in the Hanford Reach National Monument.

Although 300 acres of privately owned farmland was considered for habitat protection but eventually not included, area farmers still worry that the plant’s listing could cause them problems. Excess irrigation water from adjacent farms can cause landslides on the bluffs where the bladderpod grows and the USFWS could potentially limit farming in a buffer zone to protect the habitat, although there are no proposals to do so at this time.

Kent McMullen, chairman of Franklin County’s resources committee said he was “very disappointed” in the agency’s decision because of the potential impact on the area’s farmers.

“I think the USFWS is walking a tightrope trying to avoid litigation from the Center for Biological Diversity and from private landowners,” McMullen said.

He supports reforms to the ESA that would prevent agencies from wasting money on species like the bladderpod, which in his opinion don’t really justify protection, and reduce costs to landowners. However, he said he’s not optimistic that such reforms will gain traction under the Obama administration.

Salmon, steelhead success stories

When Hastings talks about endangered species success stories, he also cites a local example — salmon and steelhead restoration.

The numbers of returning salmon are improving throughout the Columbia River system, Hastings said, and he believes the specific recovery plans, written in collaboration with locals, are key to that success.

One of the 14 ESA-listed fish that travel the Columbia, the fall chinook that swim up the Snake River to spawn have grown from a run of about 800 fish in 1992 when they were listed as threatened, to 56,000 in 2013.

Stuart Ellis, a biologist with the Columbia River Inter Tribal Fish Commission, said that the Snake River chinook are one of the region’s best recoveries, thanks to the efforts of the Nez Perce tribe.

Ellis said that through ESA protections, declines have halted for all the threatened and endangered fish in the Columbia, but recovery is a complicated process and not all the species are doing as well as the Snake River chinook.

In the Yakima River, the only two listed species are steelhead and bull trout.

Alex Conley, one of the people responsible for the recovery plan process for mid-Columbia steelhead, agreed with Hastings about the value of thinking locally about how to help species.

“The cooperative approach for recovery planning for salmon and steelhead in Washington has been bringing scientists together to talk about recovery targets,” said Conley, director of the Yakima Basin Fish and Wildlife Recovery Board. “It gives you something to measure your progress again.”

Conley, who works with two different agencies for the basin’s two listed fish, because ocean-going fish fall under a different jurisdiction, said the level of local cooperation from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration led to a plan that has a lot of support and that people are excited about doing the work necessary to get the steelhead recovered and taken off the endangered species list.

If or when that happens, Hastings and Greenwald will both celebrate. But what the Endangered Species Act will look like by then remains up for debate.

During his most recent comment, greg nagle requested a discussion on O&C Lands, and particularly the Wyden proposal and the SW Oregon tree sitters, as an apparent way of avoiding further discussion on Eugene-based eco-terrorism. Naturally, the sitters are also Eugene-based. They are protesting a BLM timber sale in accordance with the recently-released Wyden Plan,  featuring “ecological forestry” — a forest management model devised by university professors  Jerry Franklin and Norm Johnson, failed parents of the earlier “New Forestry” model and 1/2 of the “Gang of Four” Spotted Owl and Clinton Plans for Northwest Forests proponents. Those plans, and their consequences, have been discussed elsewhere on this blog.

The American Forest Resource Council came out in opposition to the Wyden Plan in part because it: “mandates the use of forestry principles developed by Dr.’s Norm Johnson and Jerry Franklin — The Pilot Projects where these principles have been used were limited in size; treated very few acres; focused on restoration forestry and weren’t sustainable in drier forest types. They were also litigated by environmental groups, so there’s no reason to believe this won’t continue without legal certainty.”

http://www.orww.org/Awards/2013/SAF/Wayne_Giesy/Giesy_Plan/AFRC_Newsletter_20131127.pdf

The following re-post demonstrates the accuracy of the latter concern, as described by Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) and environmentalist’s regards (according to the Comments video links) of “Norm ‘n Jerry science.” The link to the original post is here:

http://earthfix.opb.org/land/article/tree-sitters-dont-buy-logging-designed-to-mimic-na/

The Comments are worth reading, too, and not just for watching the video links — particularly (to me) one that was just posted as I was writing this — and already one of my all-time favorite blog Comments:

Merryl Eng
• 24 minutes ago

I am Joshua Eng’s Mom. It does not look safe. for him to be sleeping & living in that. tree he needs to come home & get a job where he can his bills & not family who cannot afford it pay it for him

Tree Sitters Don’t Buy Logging Designed To Mimic Nature

Dec. 23, 2013 | OPB

CONTRIBUTED BY:

Amelia Templeton,

Tony Schick

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IMAGES:

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• Stationed on wooden platforms and rope lines 100 feet in the air, members of the group Cascadia Forest Defenders are protesting what they claim is a clear cut of native forest. The logging is part of a pilot project designed to mimic nature. credit: Amelia Templeton
• The White Castle timber sale near Roseburg, Ore., by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has pitted environmentalists against forestry professors in a new debate over the management of Pacific Northwest forests. credit: Amelia Templeton
• Ground camp: Josh Eng, right, prepares to climb up a fir tree with fellow protesters (from left) Brian Garcia, Shannon Wilson and Kate Armstrong. The group is protesting a plan to log at the site. credit: Amelia Templeton
• Kate Armstrong climbing up to tree camp. She and her fellow Cascadia Forest Defender protesters are concerned about a plan to log 120-year-old forests on O&C Lands. credit: Amelia Templeton

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Stationed on wooden platforms and rope lines 100 feet in the air, members of the group Cascadia Forest Defenders are protesting what they claim is a clear cut of native forest. The logging is part of a pilot project designed to mimic nature. | credit: Amelia Templeton | rollover image for more

MYRTLE CREEK, Ore. — Last year, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management sold the rights to log a small grove of Douglas firs to a private company called Roseburg Forest Products.

Roseburg bid more than $1 million for the trees, and planned to start logging this fall.

Then the tree sitters showed up.

Stationed on wooden platforms and rope lines 100 feet in the air, members of the group Cascadia Forest Defenders are protesting what they claim is a clear cut of native forest. But the scheduled logging is also part of a pilot project designed by Northwest forestry professors to mimic nature.
The professors’ plan has become politically popular and is a key component of bills proposing new management for Oregon’s O&C Lands — a checkerboard of parcels in Western Oregon named for the Oregon & California Railroad that once owned them. Those on both sides of the protest say it’s potentially the first battle in the next big debate over how to manage Northwest forests.

• Read: Wyden’s O&C Forest Bill Attempts To Balance Logging And Conservation

The site in question, known as the White Castle timber sale, lies about 19 miles east of Myrtle Creek, at the end of a narrow gravel road curving up a forested ridgeline and covered with ice, boulders and fallen trees. The forest here started growing 120 years ago after a fire burned through this area, west of Crater Lake. It’s native forest, never been cut before, but it’s not “old growth” forest.

“When I first got here, I was so excited that I spent a good week or two, just in the tree. It’s wonderful,” said Josh Eng, a 29-year-old with a pointy, black beard who has spent much of the past nine weeks living on one of the tiny platforms.

Josh Eng. Credit: Amelia Templeton.

Eng, taking his turn stationed in the tree, answers to the nickname Turtle when fellow protesters shout up to him from the ground camp. That camp includes a tent, a kerosene lamp, and a milk crate full of science fiction novels from the Eugene Public library.

“The books are extremely important because we have minimal entertainment out here except for ourselves,” protester Brian Garcia said.

To reach Turtle and the heart of the group’s tree camp requires buckling into a climbing harness and using sliding knots called prusiks to climb inchworm-style up 100 feet of rope.

The wooden platform at the top is just big enough to sleep on. Buckets of food and water hang from the branches nearby. It rocks gently like a boat as the top of the fir tree sways in the wind.

“Yes, always keep connected. Two points of safety,” Eng said. He remains clipped in, even while he sleeps.

Watch: Tree Sitter Josh Eng Climbs To A Platform

This high up, Eng figures he’ll be very difficult to arrest. So far, he says, nobody’s tried to remove him from the tree. Or, rather, no people have tried to remove him.

“I do have a squirrel that kind of comes around at night, and yells at me and throws things,” Eng said.

Eng’s arch nemesis in this conflict, apart from the squirrel, isn’t necessarily Roseburg Forest Products, or even the BLM. It’s a pair of forestry professors: Norm Johnson at Oregon State University and Jerry Franklin at the University of Washington. The two have a long track record in conservation.

Kate Armstrong, a 21-year-old University of Oregon student and part of the protest, said they see the pilot project as a clear cut under the guise of science.

“I think that it’s a shame that they would call themselves scientists and call themselves conservationists or environmentalists who care about the forest, but who would put their names on such a bogus project that is so obviously to me just playing into what the logging industry wants to have happen,” Armstrong said of Johnson and Franklin.

Norm Johnson. Credit: Amelia Templeton.

Johnson, who said he knew White Castle would be controversial the minute he set foot there, has visited the protesters and said he’s taking their comments to heart.

“I could see how disappointed they were in me,” Johnson said. “Yeah, that’s hard.”

Johnson said this timber sale isn’t your grandfather’s clear-cut. The pilot project is a demonstration of something called a “variable retention harvest.”

“The approach we’re taking is trying as best we can to emulate the development of a wild forest,” he said. “We’re not trying to replace it with a tree farm. ”

Several years ago, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar asked Johnson and Franklin to help the BLM develop timber harvests that would be profitable while serving an environmental purpose. The professors drew inspiration from a wealth of new research, published in the years after the Mount St. Helens eruption, on the importance of so-called early seral habitat that develops after natural disasters like eruptions, windstorms and large wildfires.

• Read: Does Mount St. Helens Have Lessons for an Oregon Logging Experiment?

In the variable retention harvest Johnson and Franklin developed, the largest, oldest trees on a site don’t get cut down. About a third of the standing and fallen wood is left untouched, while the rest gets logged. The site is largely allowed to recover naturally, with foresters replanting a minimal amount of species like fir, cedar, and hemlock. After a few years, a meadow of grasses and bushes and berries will start to grow in place of the forest.

“There are many creatures that like to live in openings. Say mountain bluebirds, or salamanders,” Johnson said.

This moment just after the destruction of a forest, when young trees compete with bushes and grasses for sun is called an early seral ecosystem. It can last for 30 years or more, until the conifers grow tall enough to block the light. Studies show as much of 35 percent of the landscape in the western Cascades used to be early seral habitat, but that’s now fallen to as little as 2 percent.

“The diverse early seral stage is actually rarer than old growth right now,” Johnson said. “We are very short of it.”

Johnson and Franklin’s idea: mimic nature, and create a few more rural jobs in the process, has proved popular with politicians. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has introduced a bill that would use Johnson’s technique to significantly increase the amount of timber cut on public lands in Western Oregon.

“We worked with the best scientists in the Northwest to make these harvests as ecologically friendly as we possibly could,” Wyden said in a recent press conference.

Near White Castle timber sale on O&C Lands east of Roseburg, Ore. Credit: Amelia Templeton.

Johnson calls the harvest rate set in Wyden’s bill modest, allowing logging on 2 or 3 percent of the 2.6 million acres of the BLM’s O&C lands in the first decade. He says logged areas would be given roughly 100 years to grow back into forest.

“I would be less comfortable with it if the harvest rate was much higher,” Johnson said.

But the Cascadia Forest Defenders are not alone in criticizing the idea.

“Jobs, logs and early seral forest can all be attained without wrecking more mature forests,” Doug Heiken of Oregon Wild wrote in comments submitted to the BLM. “There is 20+ years of young stand thinning to do and significant new reasons NOT to conduct (regeneration) harvest in mature forests.”

Trees older than 80 years contain clearer wood of a higher value, though, said Scott Folk, Vice President of Resources at Roseburg Forest Products, which can be used in a wider variety of higher grade products.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management says moving forward with the logging pilot project is critical. And it is in the process of closing road access to the ridgeline to try to force the tree sitters to move on.

“We want to be respectful of the protesters, and respectful of their right to protest the sale,” said Steve Lydic, Field Manager with the BLM in Roseburg. “But there comes a time when the timber sale purchaser also has the right to harvest wood they have purchased.”

Back on the ridge east of Roseburg, tree sitter Josh Eng says the fact that logging here could become a blueprint for other harvests on public lands makes him all the more determined to stop it.

“This is a very beautiful place. And it would be a real heartbreaking thing to see it go the way of a variable retention harvest,” Eng said.

© 2013 OPB

Here is a link I just received to a wonderful repeat photography project using Osborne photographs on our National Parks: http://www.nps.gov/fire/wildland-fire/learning-center/panoramic-lookout-photographs.cfm

This website was completed as part of a Masters degree from Quinnipiac University by Tina Boehle, whom some of you might know from her work as information officer on the Sour Biscuit Fire — which became part of the Biscuit — with a Type II incident management team. She is currently a Communication and Education Specialist, Division of Fire and Aviation, with the National Park Service in Boise, Idaho.

This is one of the particular methods (and datasets) that Larry, John Marker, others, and I are proposing to use in our study of the 2013 Biscuit Complex and Rim Fires, and, in this instance, particularly within Yosemite and the Stanislaus NF: https://forestpolicypub.com/2013/12/07/douglas-complex-rim-fire-paired-wildfire-economics-study-proposal/

This is an excellent tool for studying wildfire events and results over time. For those of you with an interest in this method that is not restricted to National Parks — but is restricted to western Oregon — here is a related repeat photography project I have been working on from time-to-time over the past few years that also uses Osborne photographs as a beginning dataset: http://www.orww.org/Osbornes_Project/

Greg Nagle came across this essay by Robert Leo Heilman that he asked me to post here. Heilman has been called one of the best writers in Oregon, and the following prose demonstrates why. He lives in Myrtle Creek, Oregon, just about an hour south from me on I-5, but I have never met him before (that I know of), and when I called on the phone to get his permission to post this, it was probably the first time we ever talked. Greg and I disagree with a few of Heilman’s assertions, but I think we are in agreement as to the quality of his work and his ability to capture the essence of much of treeplanting in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. Heilman agreed to the post, but with the request that I provide a link to his own blog, which contains this writing and several more of similar quality and insight: http://robertheilman.wordpress.com/

THE MAIN THING

The main thing is to have a big breakfast. It’s not any easy thing to do at 4 AM, but it is essential because lunch won’t come for another seven or eight hours and there’s four or more hours of grueling work to do before you can sit down and open up your lunch box.

The kids on the crew, 18 year-olds fresh out of high school, sleep in the extra half-hour and don’t eat until the morning store stop on the way out to the unit. They wolf down a Perky Pie, a candy bar and a can of soda in the crummy, good for a one hour caffeine and sugar rush. They go through the brush like a gut-shot cat for awhile and then drag ass for the rest of the morning.

But if you’re a grizzled old timer, in your mid-twenties, you know how to pace yourself for the long haul. You’re exhausted, of course, and your calves, hips, arms and lower back are stiff and sore. But you’re used to that.

You’re always tired and hurting. The only time you feel normal is when you’re on the slopes, when the stiffness and fatigue are melted off by the work. It gets worse every morning until by Saturday it takes hours to feel comfortable on a day off. Sunday morning you wake up at 4 o’clock wide awake and ready to stomp through downtown Tokyo breathing fire and scattering tanks with your tail.

Your stomach is queasy but you force the good food into it anyway, a big stack of pancakes with peanut butter and syrup, four eggs, bacon and a pint of coffee. There is a point when your belly refuses to take any more. Saliva floods your mouth and you force back the retching, put the forkfull of food down on the plate and light another cigarette.

It’s dark outside and it’s raining, of course. They aren’t called the Cascades for nothing. It’s December and the solstice sun won’t rise until eight, three hours and a hundred miles from home, somewhere along a logging road upriver.

Rain coat and rain pants, hardhat, rubber work gloves, cotton liner gloves and a stiff pair of caulk boots stuffed with newspaper crowd around the woodburner. All the gear is streaked with mud except the boots which are caked with an inch-thick mud sole covering the steel spikes. The liner gloves hang stiff and brown, the curving fingers frozen, like a dismembered manikin’s hand making an elegant but meaningless gesture.

Mornings are slow. It’s hard to move quickly when your stomach is bloated, your body is stiff and, despite the coffee, your mind is still fatigue-foggy. You have to move though or miss your ride and lose your job. You try an experimental belch which doesn’t bring up too much half-chewed food with it and relieves the pressure.

The laxative effect of the coffee would send you to the toilet but your ride to town is due soon, so you save it for later. Better to shit on company time anyway, squatting out in the brush. It gives you a pleasant break, a few minutes of hard to come by privacy, and it pisses Jimboy, the foreman, off, since, being a college boy and therefore trained to worry about what people think of him, he could never bring himself to actually complain about it.

Lester the Rat taught him that lesson the first week of the season. Les had just planted a seedling and straightened up and turned his back on the slope to empty his bladder. The foreman glanced back to see him standing there with his back turned and staring idly across to the opposite slope.

“Hey, Gaines, get back to work! Let’s go!”

The Rat turned to face him and shook the last golden drops off. He smiled pleasantly, showing a mouth full of crooked snoose-stained teeth. “Sure thing Jim.” he said mildly, “You bet.” None of the professors up at the university had ever mentioned anything like that and Jimboy blushed delicately while all up and down the line the crew snickered.

Jimboy makes more money than you do and doesn’t work as hard, which is bad enough. But he’s also afraid. It’s his first winter on the slopes and he’s not used to riding herd on a gang of brush apes. He also wants to make a good impression on his boss, the head forester, so he tries to push his eleven man crew into ever greater production. He sees himself as a leader of men, a rugged scientist overseeing the great work of industrial progress.

Everyone tries to get his goat so that, with any luck, he’ll amuse us some day by breaking out in tears like Tommyboy, the last foreman, did. “You guys are just animals.” Tommyboy had sobbed, setting off a delighted chorus of wolf howls and coyote yelps. It was the highpoint of the planting season and a considerable source of pride for the whole crew.

KAMIKAZES

There’s a flash of headlights and the crunch of gravel in the driveway. Mighty Mouth awaits in his battered old Ford. You pull up your suspenders and start slapping your pockets: tobacco pouch and rolling papers, matches, bandanna, wad of toilet paper, pocket watch, jack knife, store stop money– all there. You put on a baseball cap and a plaid woolen overshirt and gather up your gear: caulks, extra socks, rubber gloves, cotton liners, hard hat, rain gear, coffee thermos and feed bucket and step out into the rain.

There’s nothing to talk about on the half hour drive down the creek and downriver to the mill. You know each other too well by now, riding and working together twelve to fourteen hours a day– two moonlit rides and a picnic lunch every day– for three winters. The Mouth holds a beer bottle between his thighs into which he spits his chew as he drives.

You roll a cigarette and listen to the radio and peer out through the windshield watching for the twin reflection of deer eyes ahead. The road is narrow and winding, the roadside brush thick, and you never know just when a deer will step out or leap, windshield high, in front of you. Every day, somewhere on the drive, you see at least one fresh deer carcass on the road. Headlights dazzle the deer and usually they stand there frozen in their tracks before leaping aside at the last moment. Sometimes they leap towards the headlights though, always a suicidal move for the deer, but, like a kamikaze pilot, they can kill too.

CRUMMY TIME

The mercury arc lamps light up the mill with a weird, hellish orange glow. Steam rises from the boilers and there’s a sour rotting smell everywhere. The huge metal buildings bristle with an improbable looking tangle of chains and belts and pipes. There’s a constant whistling, clanging and screaming of saws and machinery coming from them. Bug-eyed forklifts and log loaders crawl around the half-lit yards, mechanical insects scurrying to keep up.

Through the huge open doorways you can see the mill hands at work in their tee shirts, sorting out an unending river of lumber and veneer into neat stacks. The mill workers sweat like desperate dwarves. They make more money than you and stay dry but you feel pity and contempt for them. The poor bastards stand in one spot all night, moving to the computerized lightning rhythm of conveyors instead of their own human speed. The cavernous interior of the mill sheds seem as cramped as closets compared to the open mountain slopes.

You work for the mill but not in the mill, on a company reforestation crew. Most of the company land is planted by contract crews, but the mill runs a crew that plants land that the contractors won’t touch– too steep or too ravaged, too old or too brushy for them.

Acres away, beyond the log pond, past the five story tall walls of stacked logs, next to the hangar sized heavy equipment repair shop, is a small refrigerated trailer full of seedling trees in waxed boxes. Each box contains 600 trees in bundles of fifty.

Mudflap and Sluggo are helping Jimboy load tree boxes into the back of a four wheel drive crew-cab pickup. They are young, straight out of high school, and eager to get a promised job in the mill come spring– if they “work hard and show up every day”, of course. So, they help load trees and ride with the foreman every morning.

You transfer your gear over to a mud covered Chevy Suburban crummy. If you’ve ever ridden in one you know why they’re called crummies. The rig is a mess, both outside and inside. The seats are torn, the headliner is gone, the ceiling often drips from the condensed breath of it’s packed occupants. But you have a great fondness for the ugly thing. It is an oasis of comfort compared to the slopes.

We spend a large part of our lives roaring up and down river powered by its monster 454 V-8. Of course, none of this travel, or crummy time, as it’s called, is paid time. Only the forty hours per week on the slopes earns us money. The other 10-20 hours of crummy tedium is not the company’s concern. Together with the half hour lunch, also unpaid, we spend 11-13 hours a day together for our eight hours’ pay. All winter long we see each other more than we see our wives and children. We know each other intimately after so many cramped hours. We bicker and tease each other half-heartedly, like an old bitter couple, out of habit more than need.

ARITHMETIC

The ten of us plant about 7,000 seedling trees every day, or about 700 “‘binos” apiece, enough to cover a little over an acre of logged off mountainside each. It gets depressing when you start adding it up: 700 per day= 3,500 per week= 14,000 per month= 56,000 trees in a season for one man planting one tree at a time.

Maybe you’ve seen the TV commercials put out by “The Tree Growing Company”: Helicopter panoramas of snow capped mountains, silvery lakes and rivers, close ups of cute critters frolicking, 30 year old stands of second growth all green and even as a manicured lawn and a square-jawed handsome woodsman tenderly planting a seedling. The commercials make reforestation seem heart warming, wholesome and benevolent, like watching a Disney flick where a scroungy mutt plays the role of a wild coyote.

Get out a calculator and start figuring it: 700 trees in eight hours= 87.5 trees per hour, or 1.458 trees per minute– a tree punched in every 41 seconds. How much tenderness can a man give a small green seedling in 41 seconds?

Planting is done with an improbable looking tool called a hoedag. Imagine a heavy metal plate 14 inches long and four inches wide, maybe five pounds of steel, mounted on a single-bit axe handle. Two or three sideways hacking strokes scalp a foot square patch of ground, three or four stabs with the tip and the blade is buried up to the haft. (Six blows 700 times= 4,200 per day. At 5 lbs. @ that comes to 21,000 pounds of lifting per diem and many planters put in 900-1200 trees per day.)

You pump up and down on the handle, breaking up the soil, open the hole, dangle the roots down there and pull the hoedag out. The dirt pulls the roots down to the bottom of the hole, maybe 10 or 12 inches deep. You give it a little tug to pull the root collar even with the ground and tamp the soil around it with your foot.

The next tree goes in eight feet away from the last one and eight feet from the next man in line’s tree. Two steps and you’re there. It’s a sort of rigorous dance, all day long– scalp, stab, stuff stomp and split; scalp, stab, stuff, stomp and split– every 41 seconds or less, 700 or more times a day.

700 trees eight feet apart comes to a line of seedlings 5,600 feet long– a mile and some change. Of course, the ground is never level. You march up and down mountains all day– straight up and straight down, since, although nature never made a straight line, forestry professors and their students are quite fond of them. So, you climb a quarter mile straight down and then back up, eat lunch and do it again.

The ground itself is never really clear, even on the most carefully charred reforestation unit. Stumps, old logs, boulders and brush have to be gone over or through or around with almost every slash hampered step. Two watertight tree bags, about the size and shape of brown paper grocery bags, hang on your hips rubbing them raw under the weight of the 30-40 pounds of muddy seedlings stuffed inside them.

Generally, what’s left of the topsoil isn’t deep enough to sink a ‘dag in so you punch through whatever subsoil, rocks or roots lie hidden by the veneer of dirt.

It’s best not to think about it all. The proper attitude is to consider yourself as eternally damned, with no tomorrow or yesterday– just the unavoidable present to endure. Besides, you tell yourself,it’s not so bad once you get used to it.

OUTLAWS

Tree planting is done by outcasts and outlaws– winos and wetbacks, hill billys and hippies for the most part. It is brutal, mind-numbing, underpaid stoop labor. Down there in Hades, Sisyphus thinks about the tree planters and thanks his lucky star every day because he’s got such a soft gig.

Being at the bottom of the Northwest social order and the top of the local ass-busting order gives you an exaggerated pride in what you do. You invade a small grocery store like a biker gang, taking the uneasy stares of lesser beings as your natural due. It’s easy to mistake fear for higher forms of respect and as a planter you might as well. In a once rugged society gone docile, you have inherited a vanishing tradition of ornery individualism. The ghosts of drunken bullwhackers, miners, rowdy cowpunchers and bomb tossing wobblies count on you to keep alive the 120 proof spirit of irreverence towards civilization that built the west.

A good foreman, one who rises from the crew by virtue of out-working everybody else, understands this and uses it like a Marine DI to build his crew and drive them to gladly work harder than necessary. A foreman who is uncomfortable with the underlying violence of his crew becomes their target. It is rare for a crew to actually beat up a foreman, but it has happened. There are many ways to get around a weak foreman, most of which involve either goldbricking or baiting. After all, why work hard for someone you don’t respect and why bother to conceal contempt?

BAG-UP

The long, smelly ride ends on a torn up moonscape of gravel where last summer’s logging ended. No one stirs. You look out the foggy windows of the crummy through a grey mist of Oregon dew at the unit. You wonder what shape it’s in, how steep, how brushy, how rocky, red sticky clay or yellow doughy clay, freshly cut or decades old, a partial replanting or a first attempt. The answers lie hidden behind a curtain of rain and you’re not eager to find out.

The foreman steps out and with a few mutterings the crummies empty. Ten men jostle for their equipment in the back of the crummies. The hoedags and tree bags are in a jumbled pile. Most planters aren’t particular about which bag they use, provided it doesn’t leak muddy water down their legs all day, but each man has a favorite ‘dag which is rightfully his. A greenhorn soon learns not to grab the wrong one when it’s owner comes around cursing and threatening.

It’s an odd but understandable relationship between a planter and his main tool. You develop a fondness for it over time. You get used to the feel of it, the weight and balance and grip of it in your hand. Some guys would rather hand over their wives.

The hoedag is a climbing tool, like a mountaineer’s ice axe, on the steeper ground. It clears the way through heavy brush like a machete. You can lean on it like a cane to help straighten your sore back and it is the weapon of choice when self-defense (or a threat) is needed. It allows you to open up stumps and logs in search of the dark gold pitch which will start a fire in a cold downpour and to dig a quick fire trail if your break fire runs off up the hill.

The foreman hands out the big waxed cardboard boxes full of seedling trees. The boxes are ripped open with a hoedag blade and the planters carry double handfuls of trees, wired up in bundles of fifty, over to the handiest puddle to wet down their roots. Dry roots will kill a tree before it can get into the ground, so the idea isn’t purely a matter of adding extra weight to make the job harder– though that’s the inevitable result.

300-400 trees get stuffed into the double bags, depending on their size and the length of the morning’s run. If the nursery hasn’t washed the roots properly before bundling and packing, the mud, added water and trees can make for a load that is literally staggering.

No one puts on their bags until the boxes are burnt. It is an essential ritual and depriving a crew of their morning fire is, by ancient custom, held to be justifiable grounds for mutiny by crummy lawyers everywhere. Some argue that homicide in such a case would be ruled self-defense, but so far no one’s ever tested it.

The waxed cardboard burns wonderfully bright and warm. A column of flame fifteen feet high lights up the road and everyone gathers around to take a little warmth and a lot of courage. Steam clouds rise from your raingear as you rotate before the fire like a planet drawing heat from its sun. It feels great and you need it, because once the flames turn to ashes you’re going over the side.

“OK. Everybody get loaded and space-out.” The Mouth calls out. You strap on your bag, tilt your tin hat and grab your ‘dag. You shuffle over to the edge of the road and line up eight feet from the man on each side.

IN THE HOLE

The redoubtable Mighty Mouth, the third fastest planter, plants in the lead spot and the men behind him work in order from the fourth to the eighth fastest men. It is a shameful thing to plant slower than the guy behind you. If he’s impatient, or out to score some brownie points with the boss, he’ll jump your line and you plant in his position, sinking lower in the Bull-of-the-woods standings. Slow planters get fired and competition is demanded by the foreman.

There are many tricks to appearing to be faster than you really are–stashing trees, widening your spacing, pushing the man behind you into the rougher parts while you widen or narrow your line to stay in the gravy–but all of these will get you in trouble one way or another, if not with the boss then, worse still, with the crew.

The two fastest planters, the tail men, float behind the crew, planting two to ten lines apiece, straightening out the tree line for the next pass. They tie a bit of blue plastic surveyor’s tape to brush and sticks to mark the way for the lead man when he brings the crew back up from the bottom.

The notion is to cover the ground with an eight foot by eight foot grid of trees. If mountains were graph paper this would be easy, but instead, each slope has its own peculiar contours and obstacles which throw the line off. Each pass, if it follows a ragged line, will be more irregular than the last pass, harder to find and follow. It is difficult enough to coordinate a crew strung out over a hillside, each planter working at a different rate, going around obstacles such as stumps, boulders, cliffs and heavy brush, without compounding it by leaving a ragged unmarked line behind for the next pass.

CUMULATIVE IMPACT

It’s best not to look at the clearcut itself. You stay busy with whatever is immediately in front of you because, like all industrial processes, there is beauty in the details and ugliness in the larger view. Oil film on a rain puddle has an iridescent sheen that is lovely in a way that the junkyard it’s part of is not.

Forests are beautiful on every level, whether seen from a distance or standing beneath the trees or studying a small patch of ground. Clearcuts contain many wonderful tiny things– jasper, agate, petrified wood, sun bleached bits of wood, bone and antler, wildflowers. But the sum of these finely wrought details adds up to a grim landscape, charred, eroded, and sterile.

Although tree planting is part of something called reforestation, clearcutting is never called deforestation, at least not by its practitioners. The semantics of forestry don’t allow that. The mountain slope is a “unit”, the forest a “timber stand”, logging is “harvest” and repeated logging “rotation”.

On the work sheets which foresters use is a pair of numbers which track the layers of canopy, the covering of branches and leaves which the living trees have spread out above the soil. The top layer is called the overstory, beneath which is a second layer, the understory. An old growth forest, for example, may have an overstory averaging 180 feet high and an understory at 75 feet. Clearcuts are designated by the phrase “Overstory: Zero”.

In the language (and therefore the thinking) of industrial silviculture a clearcut is a forest. The system does not recognize any depletion at all. The company is fond of talking about trees as a renewable resource and the official line is that timber harvest, followed by reforestation results in a net gain. “Old growth forests are dying, unproductive forests– biological deserts full of diseased and decaying trees. By harvesting and replanting we turn them into vigorous, productive stands. We will never run out of trees.” the company forester will tell you. But ask if he’s willing to trade company-owned old growth forest for a reforestation unit of the same acreage and the answer is always “No, of course not.”

You listen and tell yourself that it’s the company who treats the land shabbily. You see your frenzied work as a life-giving dance in the ashes of a plundered world. You think of the future and the green legacy you leave behind you. But you know that your work also makes the plunder seem rational and is, at it’s core, just another part of the destruction.

More than the physical exhaustion, this effort to not see the world around you tires you. It takes a lot of effort not to notice, not to care. You can go crazy from lack of sleep because you must dream in order to sort out everything you see and hear and feel during the day. But you can also get sick from not being truly awake, not seeing, feeling and touching the real world.

When the world around you is painful and ugly, that pain and ugliness seeps into you, no matter how hard you try to keep it out. It builds up like a slowly accumulating poison. Sometimes the poison turns to venom and you strike out, at work or at home, as quick as any rattlesnake, but without the honest rattler’s humane fair warning.

So you bitch and bicker with the guys on the crew, argue with the foreman and snap at your wife and kids. You do violent work in a world where the evidence of violence is all around you. You see it in the scorched earth and the muddy streams. You feel it when you step out from the living forest into the barren clearcut. It rings in your ears with the clink of steel on rock. It jars your arm with every stab of your hoedag.

THE LONG MARCH

“War is hell.” General William Tecumseh Sherman said, because, unlike a Pentagon spokeman, he was in the midst of it and could not conceive of something so abstract as “collateral damage”.

“Planting sucks.” we say, because unlike the mill owner who signs our paychecks, we slog through the mud and bend our backs on mountain slopes, instead of reading progress reports on reforestation units. Like infantry we know only weariness and hopelessness in the face of insanity.

“The millions of trees that the timber industry plants every year are enough to plant a strip four miles wide from here to New York.” the foreman tells us.

Our hearts sink at the thought of that much clearcutting but Madman Phil, the poet, sees a vision. “Forward men!” he cries, “Shoulder to shoulder we march on New York. The American Tree Planter! Ever onward!”

Someone starts it and then the whole crew is humming The Battle Hymn of the Republic while, in our minds, we cross the Cascades, the Snake River Valley, the Rockies, the Great Plains and onward, ever onward, a teaming, faceless coolie army led by Walt Whitman, Sasquatch and Mao Tse Tung, a barbarian horde leaving a swath of green behind us “from sea to shining sea”.

“Oh God!” Jimboy moans, “You guys are crazy.”

History: Left Bank #4, Gotta Earn A Living, Hillsboro OR, 1993: Northwest Passages, A Literary Anthology of the Pacific Northwest from Coyote Tales to Roadside Attraction, Sasquatch Books, Seattle WA 1994 (extract); Overstory:Zero, Real Life in Timber Country, Sasquatch Books, Seattle WA 1995; Oregon State Library, Talking Book and Braille Services, Salem, OR  (audio book edition) 1996; Earth Island Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1, San Francisco, CA  (excerpt) 1997; Earth First! Journal, Eugene, OR, February 1997 (excerpt);The Anchor Essay Annual, The Best of 1997, Anchor Books, New York, NY; Word #1, Waldport OR 1998