Many conservation and environmental groups initially became involved in forest collaboratives because they saw an opportunity to advance ecological restoration (including wildlife habitat restoration and resilience) with tools like small-diameter thinning or Stewardship Contracting. As time has passed, some conservation and environmental groups are considering or have opted out of forest collaboratives because they feel projects have focused on “pace and scale” or economic gain above other restoration priorities.
How do we define success for conservation and measure it – beyond just acres treated for fuels and volume produced? How can these concerns from the conservation community be better addressed, both in the collaborative process and beyond?
This session will share the lessons learned, challenges, barriers, and successes of 3 large-scale restoration pilot projects in E. Washington. The session will begin with a presentation of the results of a web survey including comparisons of tools, concepts, and processes utilized to achieve project goals of increased pace, scale, and efficiencies, and recommendations for improving successes on future restoration projects. After the presentation, there will be time for Q&A and larger group discussion.
Lessons learned have been identified through a web survey responded to by 65 key personnel and stakeholders engaged in at least one of the three pilot projects. Each project was represented by a different collaborative. The following projects and collaboratives were included in this effort:
Project 1: Mill Creek A to Z, Colville National Forest
Collaborative: Northeast Washington Forest Coalition
Project 2: Manastash-Taneum, Okanogan-Wenatchee NF (south end)
Summer is just beginning, but wildfires are already raging in the West. Large and destructive wildfires are becoming more common, with new records set almost every year. Although several factors contribute to this trend, a significant one is the declining health of our nation’s forests. The U.S. Forest Service, which manages 193 million acres of land, reports a backlog of 80 million acres in need of restoration and 63 million acres facing high or very high risk of uncharacteristic wildfire.
While improving forest health and mitigating wildfire risk will require long-term policy changes, forest restoration projects offer a way to address these issues in the short term. By promoting landscapes with healthy forests and diverse forest types, restoration projects can reduce the risk of megafires and provide other conservation benefits.
Join us as we explore how reducing regulatory barriers, encouraging private partnerships, and opening markets for wood products can help restore our nation’s forests.
The Fix America’s Forests panel discussion will be held virtually on Tuesday, June 22 at 10:00 am MST with experts from PERC, Pacific Legal Foundation, Blue Forest Conservation, and the U.S. Forest Service.
This is probably obtuse and abstruse but here goes- I think it’s an interesting window into the minds of some people who have power in federal lands policy. Again, here are links to the summary and the bill itself. If you’ll remember, the Daines-Feinstein bill (and all others that tweak current NEPA procedures) tends to provoke this kind of language among many environmental groups. And this bill is supported by them… so let’s take a look at what it says. These are the NEPA procedures for the Landscape-Scale Forest Restoration Projects we discussed yesterday, the idea being to work on areas up to 100K acres.
(I) The project shall use an efficient approach to landscape-scale analysis and decisionmaking that is consistent with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (42 U.S.C. 4321 et seq.), which may include—
1 (i) the preparation of a single environmental impact statement or environmental assessment, as applicable, for the entire project, incorporating the landscape assessment described in subparagraph (C);
(ii) the use of, as applicable—
(I) multiple records of decision to implement a single environmental impact statement; or multiple decision notices to implement a single environmental assessment;
(iii) the preparation of a programmatic environmental impact statement or environmental assessment, as applicable, for the entire project, incorporating the landscape assessment described in subparagraph (C), followed by focused, concise, and site-specific—
(I) environmental assessments; or
(II) categorical exclusions consistent with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (42 U.S.C. 24 4321 et seq.); or
(iv) the use of the landscape assessment described in subparagraph (C), through incorporation by reference and similar approaches, to support focused, concise, and site-specific—
(I) environmental assessments; or
(II) categorical exclusions consistent with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (42 U.S.C. 10 4321 et seq.).
So I am not a lawyer, but I find this confusing. If the idea of this bill is to make landscape scale projects more “efficient”, it seems to me that most efficient would be to develop a giant EIS (4FRI analyzed 1 mill acres and authorized 560K, without, as far as I know, supplemental site-specific NEPA). There are problems with this approach, though; it takes a long time to do and to litigate, and by then many of your carefully analyzed acres may have burned up, perhaps requiring re-analysis.
I think iii raises an interesting question.. what good would it do to do a programmatic if you already have an assessment and you are going to use EAs or CEs for the site-specific analysis? When I worked in DC, I noticed at the interagency NEPA meetings that CEQ seemed fond of programmatics, the agencies not so much. Double the NEPA, double the quality of the decision?
I like iv… going from some kind of assessment to EAs or CEs. But forests can do this already (even without the kind of assessment envisioned here). They can use a recent forest plan vegetation assessment if they have one, or other kinds of collaborative work like the Zones of Agreement that the Blue Mountains developed. So I’d argue that there could be a much simpler kind of assessment with which to support EAs and CE’s, and one that would be easier to update as needed.
So to get the more $ that goes with the Landscape Restoration Projects, you have to focus on returning to reference conditions (not helping suppression folks protect values at risk) and don’t seem to get any NEPA help- in fact you have to do more work (unnecessarily elaborate assessments). I’m not sure why this is part of a “Wildfire Emergency” Act.
Thanks to Chief Christiansen for all her work throughout her career!
Chief’s Retirement
Later today, USDA Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen will announce her retirement after a 40-year career as a professional forester, wildland firefighter and land manager including 11 years of service at the Forest Service.
Secretary Vilsack plans to announce the next Chief later this month as well as a timeframe for a thoughtful transition. During that transition, Chief Christiansen looks forward to demonstrating one of the Forest Service core values of interdependence in handing off leadership to a new Chief.
WASHINGTON, June 8, 2021 – USDA Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen today announced her retirement after a 40-year career as a professional forester, wildland firefighter, and land manager including 11 years of service at the Forest Service.
Chief Christiansen brought her experience and passion for connecting people to their natural resources to her tenure as head of the Forest Service, leading more than 30,000 employees working in all 50 states and Puerto Rico.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack issued this statement:
“Chief Christiansen’s contributions to the USDA Forest Service cannot be overstated. In her more than three years as Chief, she has provided steady, thoughtful leadership through multiple challenges, including increasingly challenging fire and hurricane seasons, strains on agency budgets and workforce, and the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“Through it all, she has led with empathy, integrity and professionalism, advancing the agency’s work on shared stewardship, climate change, and partnerships while supporting record visitation and improving agency culture around safety and an inclusive work environment.”
“Chief Christiansen’s leadership has been informed by her 40 years of experience in natural resources and wildland fire management, including previously serving as the Forest Service’s Deputy Chief for State and Private Forestry and Deputy Director for Fire and Aviation Management, the Arizona State Forester, the Washington State Forester, and for 26 years in the Washington State Department of Natural Resources.”
“While Chief Christiansen’s decision to retire will leave big boots to fill, I will work closely with the Chief and the Forest Service leadership team in the weeks ahead to support a thoughtful transition. I join many others in offering my heartfelt thanks to Vicki for her service and best wishes for a happy and fulfilling retirement.”
Christiansen stepped into the role of Chief of the Forest Service on March 8, 2018. During Christiansen’s leadership tenure, the agency relied on its strong science, innovation, and partnerships to overcome profound challenges and find new solutions to serve the public. From leading the development of new interagency safety protocols that enabled fire response during a global pandemic to bolstering relationships with partners, states and tribes to improve forest health and combat the effects of climate change, Christiansen led with community in mind.
Her focus on creating a safe, respectful and high-performing work environment led to a cultural transformation at the Forest Service and significant gains in employee morale.
Forest Service accomplishments under Christiansen’s leadership include year after year of historic timber production and millions of acres treated to reduce hazardous fuels and improve forest resilience to fire. The Forest Service also recently completed a suite of regulatory reforms to modernize and align itself to new legislative authorities that reduce regulatory burdens and expedite critical forest management work. And today, thanks to Christiansen’s collaborative approach, 50 states and territories are involved in Shared Stewardship agreements to ensure the right work gets done in the right place at the right time.
There are many interesting things we could discuss about this bill… here’s a link to the summary, section by section, and the bill itself. I’m interested in exploring Zones of Agreement above the collaborative forest organization level, and this legislation offers some clues to the environmental/conservation point of view. There’s plenty to discuss here, but I’ll start with the large landscape provisions (from the section by section):
Subsection (c)(1) establishes eligibility criteria for the a project, including:
o Purposes shall include 1) restoration of ecological integrity; 2) restoration of appropriate natural fire regimes; and 3) wildfire risk reduction in the wildland urban interface (WUI), to
the extent that the project includes lands in the WUI
o A collaborative group representing diverse interests must develop and support the project
2 o The project shall be based on a landscape assessment that
1) covers at least 100,000 acres (with limited exceptions for assessments of at least 50,000 acres for Eastern forests, or at least 80,000 acres if the assessments are already complete or substantially completed and the Secretary determines a larger assessment area is not necessary)
2) evaluates ecological integrity and reference conditions for the landscape;
3) identifies areas that have departed from reference conditions;
4) identifies criteria for determining appropriate restoration treatments;
5) are based on the best available scientific information, including, where applicable, high-resolution imagery and LiDAR; and
6) identifies priority restoration strategies.
o Restoration actions shall 1) emphasize the reintroduction of characteristic fire; 2) for any proposed mechanical treatments, seek to restore reference conditions and the establishment
of conditions facilitating prescribed fire; and 3) fully maintain or contribute to the restoration of reference old forest conditions, including protecting large old trees
o The project shall be consistent with all applicable environmental laws, and the roadless rule
o Multiparty monitoring is required
o No new permanent road may be built as part of the project, and any temporary roads needed to implement the project shall be decommissioned within 3 years of the project’s completion
o The project uses an efficient approach to landscape-scale analysis and decision-making that is consistent with NEPA (we’ll talk about this in post II in greater detail.)
I’ve some concerns with this part.
As we’ve seen with the Blue Mountains, the extra funds are great and allow them to do great work. Still, it does tend to separate forests into haves and have-nots. It’s discouraging for busy forest workers and the public to work hard on a proposal and not be funded. Those places may actually “need” the extra support the most.
Of course, I’m not a fan of spending megabucks determining “reference conditions” when we have no clue about whether it’s a good investment to try to “restore” them for (which?) “ecological reasons”. I still think we should have stuck with managing for individual wildlife species and trying to keep them on the landscape. I know that coarse-filter fine filter is supposed to work better, but has it? It’s always seemed like a full employment program for historic vegetation ecologists to me.
People who want strategic fuel treatments to help suppression folks protect their communities seem to have no place in all this; in fact, it seems very wet (Coastal) in its focus. It seems like instead of saying.. here is a landscape where threats from wildfires are serious as evidenced by these (x) criteria, we will fund communities and the Forest Service to plan and implement strategic fuel treatments and ongoing prescribed fire, considering factors as in the Stewardship and Fireshed Assessments.
You could have numerous considerations and restrictions proposed by the environmental community, but what’s fundamentally flawed about this section for me is that its’ not about protecting communities, infrastructure, plants, animals and watersheds from destructive wildfires at all, but about restoring to reference conditions with possible wildfire utility.
Not only do I think a Wildfire bill with landscape scale projects should focus on wildfire projects (but perhaps large landscapes are not the appropriate mechanism?), I also think it should have a preference for underserved and low-income communities at risk of disastrous wildfires and their druthers.
I’ve heard this proposal characterized as CFLRP 2.0, so it would be interesting to hear from CFLRP participants on what you all think about this.
Gila Wilderness turns 97: Still the wildest, even after all these years
Guardians announces upcoming publication of a collection of writing from Torrey House Press titled “First and Wildest: The Gila Wilderness at 100”
SANTE FE, NM—Today, in celebration of the Gila Wilderness’ 97th Birthday and in anticipation of its centennial in 2024, WildEarth Guardians is excited to announce the upcoming publication of a collection of writing from Torrey House Press, edited by Elizabeth Hightower Allen, titled First and Wildest: The Gila Wilderness at 100. The anthology, to be published in the spring of 2022, showcases an exceptional assemblage of work from locally, nationally, and internationally renowned authors, ecologists, politicians, conservationists, and wildlife enthusiasts, including a foreword by Tom Udall and essays by Pam Houston, Beto O’Rourke, Martin Heinrich, and others.
As Hightower Allen says, “It’s a celebration of the first hundred years of not only the Gila Wilderness, but also of American wilderness itself. And it’s an opportunity to start a conversation about the next hundred years, beginning with (fingers crossed!) Congressional designation of the Gila River as Wild and Scenic. First and Wildest includes a huge range of diverse voices, from an Apache horsepacker to U.S. senators. I can’t wait to share it.”
The Gila Wilderness is the heart of the Greater Gila bioregion, an improbably biodiverse, impossibly immense section of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona. The traditional homelands of the Apache, Acoma, Zuni and Hopi Tribes, the Gila has been the home to Indigenous peoples of the Southwest since time immemorial. The Gila region is sacred land. It’s a living cultural landscape, a hunting ground, a refuge, a wildlife sanctuary, a place of refuge for wild nature, and an important part of both tribal and non-tribal community values.
“This compilation of work, praising the Gila in so many different voices from so many different perspectives, feels like a perfect preface to what we hope will be a grand celebration of this landscape and an even grander reimagining of who and what Wilderness is for, and how and why we protect public lands,” said Leia Barnett, Greater Gila Campaigner for WildEarth Guardians.
It is the landscape that stoked the imagination of the father of wildlife ecology, Aldo Leopold. As a young Forest Service ranger working in the Gila, Leopold learned why some degree of wildness was imperative for the ecological health and integrity of any biological system. Leopold advocated fiercely for the protection of the Gila and all its wildness, often in eloquent prose, some of which is included in the anthology.
Today, 97 years later, we’re celebrating America’s first wilderness, the Gila Wilderness, for its persistent wildness, the place it holds in the hearts of so many, and the inspiration it gives us to imagine our next 100 years.
Possibly Covid has been an event that has accelerated increased use, and perhaps will fundamentally alter both the way federal lands are managed, and the way that we recreationists plan and go about our activities. This will require more management by land managers than ever before. Even National Parks like Rocky Mountain are going to reservations to drive through, or timed entry, so the managed is getting more managed, and the relatively unmanaged is going toward managed. Please add any links to your local recreation news on dealing with crowds in the comments below.
Scott Fitzwilliams, Forest Supervisor on the White River:
Surging visitation is putting pressure on recreation resources at a time when there are fewer people to protect them. Fitzwilliams said he wishes he had more staff for public engagement, patrols and enforcement, but his budget is half of what it was 10 years ago.
Areas near the trailhead to climb Quandary Peak (shown), a fourteener just south of Breckenridge, routinely attract large crowds and overflow parking issues. Officials of the White River National Forest see Quandary as a place where they hope to manage crowds better in the future. Quandary is the sixth-closest fourteener to Denver. Its east ridge is visible upper left. (Provided by White River National Forest)
“More and more of the national budget has been going toward fire suppression,” Fitzwilliams said. “The big pot stays relatively the same, but every year we’re spending more on fire, and that means less for the other resources. We would like to have more boots on the ground, more people to monitor, enforce, educate. It’s just not what we have. We’re going to do our best, given the resources we have.”..
“It’s a little intimidating as we head toward the busy season,” Fitzwilliams said of the staff shortage. “Combining less staff with more and more visitors to the forest, it’s tough. I don’t think we’re meeting the public’s expectations. When you have people breaking the rules or leaving trash or leaving fires unattended, they call us (and say), ‘You’ve got to catch these people.’ There are only so many of us.”
The Arapaho Roosevelt National Forests closed dispersed camping sites on Guanella Pass near Mount Bierstadt in 2018, shifting the area to day-use only and the transition has reduced impacts in the alpine region, said Clear Creek County Commissioner Randy Wheelock.
Wheelock, who moved to the county 50 years ago, said he’s been seeing “radical increases” in crowds over the last several years, with thousands of hikers on Mount Bierstadt and Grays and Torreys peaks every summer and fall weekend.
Last summer Wheelock saw cars parked for three miles on the Forest Service road leading to the Grays and Torreys trailhead.
“I think COVID wasn’t just giving us a glimpse of the future,” he said. “It was ushering the future in even sooner.”
. This article in WyoFile talks about Wyoming recreation.
Long-term solutions
To alleviate impacts, Wyoming land managers are relying heavily on educating visitors to plan ahead, keep expectations realistic, be better stewards of the land and wildlife and be more considerate of one another.
In 2020, “we learned that communicating around Responsible Recreation may help to address those impacts and widespread messaging with and through our partners is extremely helpful in this respect,” BTNF spokesperson Cernicek wrote.
Her agency is using #recreateresponsibly and www.recreateresponsibly.org to share information with the public, she wrote. That message is being touted across the state; The Wyoming Office of Tourism will launch its second summer of the WY Responsibly campaign June 1.
In other areas of the U.S. dealing with overuse, land managers have implemented new permit systems or even closed trails. Shoshone National Forest Public Affairs Officer Kristie Salzmann hopes that the situation in Wyoming does not warrant those types of measures.
“Right now, we are hoping that the need for any of that doesn’t come to fruition,” Salzmann wrote in an email. “We are focusing on education right now to ensure we do the best we can to get out information about things that make the Shoshone National Forest unique …” such as food storage and fragile vegetation.
Wyoming Office of Tourism will on June 1 launch its second summer of the WY Responsibly campaign, which encourages visitors to be respectful of the state’s resources. (Wyoming Office of Tourism)
O’Connor, however, hasn’t ruled out limits.
“I would say, you know, in a nutshell, clearly there are places for limits, and I don’t want to say that limits aren’t something we should be thinking about,” she said during the virtual conference. “But we really do need to focus on some of those other factors first.”
With the BTNF’s current inventory, she said, “there’s much more demand for camping than we can provide. I go back to … we’re not serving people, if we encourage them to come but there’s really no place to stay.”
Modelled changes in fuels following thinning on the Malheur. Dr. James Johnston of OSU. speaking.
Thanks to Sustainable Northwest for hosting this webinar as part of the PNW Collaboratives Workshop. I particularly like the way the partners have generated and answered science questions; what the science and technology studies folks call “co-design and co-production of knowledge.” We’ve had several posts about the effort before about this effort from news stories, and Susan Jane Brown is one of the partners. This webinar goes into more detail about the monitoring, funding and so on (they are part of a CFLRP project so have more funding for monitoring, hiring scientists and so on).
Here’s the description of the webinar:
The southern Blue Mountains are one of 23 high-priority CFLRP areas that receive augmented funding from Congress to accelerate the pace and scale of forest restoration. Between 2012 and 2020, over $17 million has been invested to mechanically thin 230,000 acres across the 550,000-acre CFLRP area. An integral part of this exemplary landscape-scale restoration effort is a collaboration between the U.S. Forest Service and the Harney County Restoration Collaborative (HCRC) and the Blue Mountains Forest Partners (BMFP). Both groups prepare detailed Zones of Agreement documents that help guide Forest Service restoration work. Zones of Agreement documents are informed by large multi-party monitoring currently in its 7th year. This panel will describe the results of multi-monitoring and the continued evolution of adaptive management in the southern Blue Mountains.
Definitely worth a watch. In the questions, I remember one of the partners saying how important sitting down together and seeing each other as human beings over a beer helped in developing relationships and ultimately agreement. I watched the movie “Oslo” last night and was reminded of what she said, except in the film it appeared to be wine and whiskey. It’s suggestive, though I don’t know how accurate the film is.
As we discussed before, I’m working on exploring different avenues for figuring out the views of various members of the environmental community on how to gain their support for managing fire-prone landscapes. We can call it “increase the pace and scale of restoration” “managing dry forest landscapes by returning prescribed fire” or “living with fire” for those of us in dry forests.
So far I’ve discovered that trust in the Forest Service is one obstacle. One way to deal with that would be to make sure that any woody material is removed solely for fuel treatment/restoration/resilience purposes, without considering the need to meet timber targets, that the agreed-to procedures are carried out in practice, and are checked by independent auditors.. which might go back to something like forest certification, only from a restoration/wood waste perspective.
Remember that current sustainable forest certification schemes were developed for forest lands with the assumption that removing trees for forest products was a legitimate use. Well, I am on Andy Kerr’s mailing list, and while I don’t know how typical his thinking is, he is apparently very against FSC certification for national forests (the title of his piece is “Certified Wood from Federal Forests? Hell No. Make That NFW! Let’s look at his arguments and see if they would be relevant for say a “bonafide waste wood” kind of certification. Note: there is a sustainable biomass certification program, but that is focused on biomass for energy. I was against it in the 2000s (? anyway, a long time ago) for different reasons, but it is familiar territory to me.
Kerr points out the practices allowed by FSC that he doesn’t think are appropriate for FS land.
Fundamental Issues: Older Forests and Plantations
While the proposed certification standards cover many subjects, let’s focus on two close to the heart of any card-carrying conservationist:
• The conservation of older (mature and old-growth) forests.
The proposed standard calls for the protection of “Type 1” (never touched) and “Type 2” (remnant) “old growth” (not mature) forest. Type 1 protections only apply to stands > 3 acres, and Type 2 to stands > 20 acres. Individual old-growth trees could still be protected as “legacy trees,” but that would be totally subject to the discretion of the federal forest agency. To make matters worse, the draft federal lands indicators would insert a new requirement, saying that Type 1 and 2 are protected where considered “likely” to occur. Leaving the determination of what is “likely” to the federal forest agencies is an open invitation to abuse their discretion.
In addition, this consultation draft removed language that had been recommended to protect “late successional (mature and old-growth forest) stands on federal lands, and grow new ones to their historical levels. It has been replaced by language just requiring a slight net increase in late-successional stands.
• The prevention of new and the ecological restoration of existing plantations.
A Douglas-fir monoculture planation with trees all of the same species, heights, and diameters is ecologically more akin to a cornfield than a forest. There are millions of acres of these ecological abominations on federal public forestlands. Rather than require that plantations be put on a track toward ecological and hydrological restoration, he proposed FSC-US standard would generally bless the existing abominations and allow even more.
Now I can’t imagine the FS throwing out forest plans, ESA requirements, and all that because FSC might be less restrictive. When we were working on it (I reviewed the Pinchot Institute study) we assumed we would pick the most restrictive, be it forest plan plus other requirements or FSC.
Kerr recommends reaching out to board members of FSC and gives their emails. This might be a good general practice for boards of other NGO’s who take actions with whom individuals or groups disagree.
I haven’t kept up with this with all the states, but Minnesota and Wisconsin both certify state lands to FSC, so the idea that publicly owned land can be certified is not new (Minnesota 1997) nor apparently controversial for states.
Finally, Kerr says
– The only logs coming out of federal forests should be by-products of scientifically sound ecological restoration, especially projects that reintroduce structural, species, and functional diversity to millions of acres of monoculture plantations.
• The highest and best uses of US federal public forestlands are the conservation and restoration of biological diversity, carbon storage and sequestration, watershed protection and restoration, and compatible recreation.
• Giving equal consideration to economic, environmental, and social values for federal public forestlands is not appropriate. Economics should not be a factor guiding the proper management of federal forests. Making it so would be like requiring the Smithsonian Institution, the National Park System, or the Department of Defense to turn a profit.
So perhaps we all might agree, if we could agree on what ecological restoration/resilience might look like. The idea that woody material removed should be a byproduct of restoration was one I think I first heard in the 90’s, and it might have been part of New Perspectives. Does anyone else remember this? It might be an interesting discussion as to what is “economics” and what are “social values” vis a vis timber production, or wind turbines, or ski areas or ???
Image courtesy of Laurie Gwen Shapiro by way of The Forward. Top of the World: Morrison circa 1943. He received a Bronze Star for his service in World War II.
I’ve visited Camp Hale on field trips with the Forest Service. Right now, I believe something about preserving/interpreting Camp Hale is in the CORE Act. I ran across this piece this morning telling the history of one soldier in the 10th Mountain Division, Sam Meiselman (Morrison), in the Forward.
I first went back with other veterans in 1988 to the battlefields, and that helped bring inner peace, too. I’ve gone many times since, but that first trip brought back memories, good and scary. To this day there are foxholes covered over by grass; you have to be careful. I took 35 rolls of film, many pictures of the villagers who remembered us. So many of those people are dead now.
We fellows closed up the war. The 10th is a great outfit, and we showed the way. Bob Dole, and all the rest of us, we didn’t want this country to get caught short again without special forces. And because of what the Germans had mountainwise, we smartened up America.
I enjoyed reliving the past, but I looked to the future. I was not just active in the 10th Mountain. I’ve also been connected to the International Federation of Mountain Soldiers, where people in mountain divisions of all countries reunite. We remember those lost, and we tell our stories and the stories of those who did not make it back. We have our own pin, and we’ve created peace trails. Ours is in Colorado. I’ve walked that with former Nazis. A German soldier is a member — we are all close-knit brothers now for the love of the mountains — and the love of peace. I know we were called the “Greatest Generation,” but I am well aware we are among the disappearing generation. The old story is, it takes three to take a mountain: one to get killed, one to get wounded and one to tell the story. I got two out of three. So I didn’t do bad.
The whole story is interesting and I believe the Forward allows a number of free articles.
This is a great interview and explains much more than a recent HCN piece, so I’m posting it in its entirety for those without an NS subscription. If you want to learn about the current state of plant cooperation from a more materialistic approach, try this review paper by Dudley in 2015.
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Suzanne Simard was raised in the Monashee mountains in British Columbia, Canada. Her research, beginning with the discovery of the wood wide web, has transformed our understanding of forests. She is now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia.
FEW scientists make much impact with their PhD thesis, but, in 1997, Suzanne Simard did just that. She had discovered that forest trees share and trade food via fungal networks that connect their roots. Her research on “the wood wide web” made the cover of Nature. What was then a challenge to orthodox ideas is today widely accepted.
But Simard and her colleagues continue to challenge our preconceptions of how plants interact. Among other things, their research shows that the wood wide web is like a brain and can communicate information throughout the entire forest, that trees recognise their offspring and nurture them and that lessons learned from past experiences can be transmitted from old trees to young ones.
Simard calls herself a “forest detective”. Her childhood was spent in the woods of British Columbia, Canada, where her family had made a living as foresters for generations. As a young woman, she joined the family profession, but soon realised that modern forestry practices were threatening the survival of the ecosystem she loved. She knew that, when logged with a lighter touch, forests can heal themselves, and she set out to discover how they are so naturally resilient. Along the way, her concern for the future of forests sparked an intense curiosity about what makes them tick.
Rowan Hooper: How did your discovery of the wood wide web change the received wisdom about forests?
Suzanne Simard: The key finding is that trees are in a connected society, and that it’s a physical network and that they trade and collaborate and interact in really sophisticated ways as a cohesive, holistic society. From my training, and from the way we viewed forests or any plant community prior to that – at least in Western thinking – we didn’t see plants as collaborative and linking. We thought that plants are solitary and compete to acquire as many resources as they can to increase their fitness. That idea isn’t necessarily wrong. It’s just that the way plants grow isn’t simply by competition. They also collaborate, and there are synergies.
The wood wide web consists of fungi as well as tree roots. What are fungi in thesemycorrhizal networkslike?
There are many different species of fungi, and they have niches and different physical and physiological structures. Some are really big pipelines. Some are little – tiny, fine threads. They all have different roles in extracting resources and moving things around. If you change the composition of that fungal community, you actually change how nutrients and carbon and water are moved around.
At first, some biologists were sceptical about the wood wide web. How did you convince them?
It was so tiring. I had to keep showing that these networks exist, and that plants are obligate mutualists with fungi; this means they need them to gather nutrients and water from the soil, especially in a stressful environment. That is what all seeds encounter when they are trying to germinate. The environment is a stressful place because seeds are small, there are predators, competitors – there’s all sorts going on. And this little boost, the boost provided by the fungi, even though it’s hard to measure, can make the difference between survival or death.
Mature trees, such as this oak, hold information accrued over centuries
Adam Burton/naturepl.com
This doesn’t challenge natural selection at all. Darwin wrote about the importance of collaboration in communities. It’s just that it didn’t gain traction like the idea of competition did. Natural selection results from more than competition. It involves a lot of different interactions and relationships between species and with the environment.
Richard Powers fictionalised your struggle in his arboreal novelThe Overstory. Did his account ring true?
Powers did such a great job. He was able to construct this character, and I thought that he really captured it well. Even though Patricia Westerford studied above-ground communication and I was studying below ground, that didn’t really matter. All the personal things about the difficulties in advancing her ideas and getting her work out there, I encountered something in parallel.
The pushback against your work reminds me of the reactionJames Lovelock’sGaia hypothesis received. Do you agree?
I think it comes back to the fact that there had been this separation of humanity from nature, mind from body, spirit from intellect, and that we had moved away from this more holistic, spiritual way of seeing the world. Lovelock’s idea of the biosphere as a self-regulating system was antithetical to the view that we could dissect the world and understand all the parts in a deterministic way. It was similar with Lynn Margulis and her endosymbiotic theory, showing how eukaryotic cells evolved from the engulfment and collaboration between different prokaryotic cells. She was ridiculed and her papers were rejected – but now her ideas are mainstream.
You have continued to make remarkable discoveries. How did you find out that trees recognise their family members?
I was working on mycorrhizal networks, seeing if the networks were improving regeneration of seedlings around trees. And it seemed like the next logical question was: well, would the networks be able to favour seedlings that were coming from the mother trees, the parent trees? I worked with Susan Dudley at McMaster University [in Canada] and we have found that kin recognition occurs in conifers. It’s happening through mycorrhizal networks, and it’s an important phenomenon in structuring these forest communities.
We were able to trace the carbon transferred between trees. We would label a mother or a sibling plant [by feeding it with carbon dioxide that contained a radioactive form of carbon] and then we would see that the carbon would transmit to a kin seedling, but not to a stranger planted nearby. I don’t know how they recognise their kin, but I assume it’s by chemicals because when we allow seedlings to connect with the mother trees or with their siblings, through these mycorrhizal networks, we get responses much more dramatically than if they connect with non-kin. It changes the rooting behaviour. It changes their chemistry, the nutrition of the plants and the response to disease.
All this reminds me of the “mother tree” in Avatar, a film featuring an alien species that can tap into something like a forest-wide natural network. Were you involved with that?
It’s funny, when the movie came out, I got a call from someone who said that [director] James Cameron based his idea of the film’s “hometree” and the Na’vi people connecting to the network on my work. I was like: “Oh, really? That’s cool. I’m glad somebody picked it up.” And then when I went to see the movie, I’m just like: “Oh my god, of course he read my papers.” Interestingly enough, James Cameron is making sequels to Avatar right now, and they’re making a documentary on the science behind Avatar. And now they’ve contacted me.
Your latest findings are even more mind-blowing. Tell us what you discovered when you mapped the nodes and connections in mycorrhizal networks.
The architecture of those networks follows a biological neural network. In your brain, neurotransmitters have got to move from different lobes in order for your thought patterns to emerge. So they have evolved to do that efficiently.
It turns out, the underground network in the forest is designed the same way. I think it’s for efficient transfer of information and resources for the health of the full community. Not only that, but the chemicals that are moving in those networks include glutamate, which is one of the dominant neurotransmitters in brains.
Is it too much to suggest that, like in a brain, there is intelligence in this network, even wisdom?
From a purely biological, physical analysis, it looked like it had the hallmarks of intelligence. Not just the communication of information and changes in behaviour as a result, but just the pure, evolved, biological chemistry and the shape of the networks themselves spoke to the idea that they were wired and designed for wisdom.
If you look at the sophisticated interactions between plants – and some of that happens through the networks – their ability to respond and change their behaviours according to this information all speaks of wisdom to me.
What about awareness? Are trees aware of us?
Plants are attuned to any kind of disturbance or injury, and we can measure their biochemical responses to that. We know that certain biochemical pathways are triggered to develop these cascades of chemicals that are responses to stresses and disturbances, like chewing by herbivores. And if they are so attuned to small injuries like that, why wouldn’t they be attuned to us? We’re the dominant disturbance agent in forests. We cut down trees. We girdle them. We tap them.
Science points to ways in which we can improve forestry management
Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images
If I injure trees so much that they start to die, they start sending their carbon through their roots to their neighbours. They are responsive to us. We’ve proven it by doing our experiments. People go: “Oh, that’s kind of scary”. But why wouldn’t plants be aware of people? They are aware of everything else.
That might surprise some people in the West, but not the Indigenous communities in North America with which you collaborate. How do they see the forest?
The work I do about trees being connected and nurturing each other represents a world view that has been known for thousands of years by the Aboriginal people of North America. But there’s been this long history of ignoring them and ridiculing them and destroying them. Maybe we won’t listen to Aboriginal people because we think it’s mystical and airy-fairy and spiritual, and that we really only want science, but I’ve been able to demonstrate some of these holistic connections with science. We’re doing the same things. We have the same findings and world views. So let’s work as a team.
How has your upbringing shaped your own views?
I grew up in the forest, seeing how it was this diverse, entwined, very complex place where all these creatures live together. The trees, the roots overlapping, the many species growing together, the lush, structured forest – that was what I knew. My family are foresters, and when I started getting involved as a forester, there was a big shift going on in industrial practices, with clear-cutting [felling all the trees in an area]. Intuitively, it didn’t make sense to me.
Have things got better now that we know about the connections in forests?
We know a ton about how to make it better, and there are definitely people who want to make it better. There’s a lot of pressure to improve practices, and we even have certification of our forests to show that we do sustainable forestry practices. But look at the big picture in British Columbia. We’ve turned, in my short lifetime, from a province of old-growth forest to a province full of clear cuts. Even the iconic old-growth forests with the big cedars and hemlocks and spruces on the west coast, those towering forests, only about 3 per cent are left. We’ve cut everything down, and it’s not stopping.
So, no, it hasn’t improved. In some ways, it’s got a lot worse. And I think that this is manifested in these big indicators, which are climate change and loss of biodiversity. A lot of that comes from forestry practices.
Should there be some sort of charter for trees, akin to animal rights or human rights?
That’s a great idea, yes. We have the United Nations Convention on Conservation of Biodiversity and we’ve got the Paris Agreement on climate change. Conservation of forests is crucial to both of those things. So we have treaties and yet we don’t honour them. The iconic old-growth forests are hugely diverse and store megatons of carbon. Those forests aren’t very well protected and they aren’t protected far into the future. When we push the system to collapse – which is what we’re doing if we lose those old-growth forests – what are we going to do? They are the places where that genetic diversity lives, that we are going to depend on in order to get us through climate change.
What would you like people to do after hearing about your work or reading your book?
I want them to want to go to the forest. That’s the most simple, basic thing. Just go and be with it and love it and care for it and talk to it and show your respect for it. I think that is the foundation of changing our behaviours. Ultimately, this will translate into action. Not everybody will act, of course, and not everybody has to act. But we need that change to happen, and it starts with connecting back with nature.
The Mother Tree Project
The roots of trees like this red cedar form an underground network with fungi to create a kind of forestwide brain
Cheryl-Samantha Owen/naturepl.com
Every forest has its share of mature, majestic trees. Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia, Canada, calls these “mother trees”. She and her colleagues have found that they are crucial to the well-being of the entire forest community. They are the hubs of communication, protection and sentience, they nurture their own offspring and they provide information to help generations of trees survive. This has crucial implications for the way we manage forests, which is why, in 2016, Simard launched The Mother Tree Project to explore the role that mother trees play in forest regeneration.
“It’s the biggest project I’ve ever done,” says Simard. It involves 24 Douglas fir forests stretching across nine climate regions in British Columbia. Each forest is logged using five different harvesting treatments, ranging from felling all the trees in an area to keeping large patches of trees with mother trees present. The team monitors and measures how the forest responds and regenerates by collecting information before and after logging about things like carbon storage, biodiversity and productivity.
Research is ongoing, but there have already been some compelling results. “We’ve found that the more mother trees we leave, the more diverse and abundant the natural regeneration is,” says Simard. Her team also has good evidence that mother trees protect seedlings, especially when conditions get tough, such as when there is a frost or a particularly hot, dry day. By comparing results in different climate regions, the researchers aim to identify more sustainable ways to manage forests in the face of climate change.
“I wanted to create a project that would show people that you can do things in a different way and design forest practices around the idea that the forest is a connected, nurturing, healing place,” says Simard.
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I’ve spend most of my time looking at regeneration in ponderosa pine forests. It seems to me that the more large trees, the more seed there is because large trees produce large amounts of seed (but there also needs to be openings). And in dry areas, large trees can produce shade that keeps the seedlings and soil from drying up. So my own experience with pine is about the same as in the Mother Tree above. In fact, I remember the Keen classification system which was popular in certain ponderosa pine areas when I started working (in the early 1980’s) when even-aged management was catching hold.
The size of crown and abundance of foliage are probably the best outward indicators of the relative vigor of different trees of a given age.
Therefore, each age class was further subdivided into four sub-groups based upon relative crown vigor. These are designated by letters .d to D.
The position of the tree in the stand in the following descriptions is for uncut stands. The positions may be entirely changed in a cutover stand; however, the other criteria of vigor are readily recognized.
.d. Full vigorous crowns with a length of 55 percent or more of the total height and of average width or wider; foliage usually dense; needles long and dark green; position of tree isolated or dominant (rarely codominant).
This paper by Hornibrook about trees in the Black Hills is from 1939 in the Journal of Forestry. It seems perhaps we have come full cycle. OTOH, I don’t think I’ve seen this in lodgepole.