What Is a Healthy Forest?

From the Environmental Review Newsletter Volume Two Number Two, February 1995

Introduction:

The Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains divide the United States West Coast into a wet, westside forest system with an annual rainfall of about seventy-five inches; and a drier eastside forest system with an annual average of twenty-five inches of rain. In 1992, most logging on public forests on the westside was stopped by court order to protect the remaining 8,000 northern spotted owls. Logging activity outside the owls' range, in the slower growing, less productive east side and inland forests subsequently increased. The timber industry, denied westside timber, is attempting to increase the rate and amount of timber harvest by proposing massive salvage operations in the "unhealthy" east side forests.

Parts of the eastside forests are considered unhealthy because of outbreaks of tree killing insects such as spruce bud worm and bark beetles. Historically, low intensity fires would periodically sweep through the eastside forests, reducing fuel build up and populations of pest insects; and encouraging reproduction of dominant tree species like Ponderosa pine. If these forests are now unhealthy, it is because of historic logging and grazing practices coupled with forest fire suppression. As a result of fire suppression, unnatural levels of fuel build up have increased the potential for catastrophic wild fires. The 1994 fire season in eastern Washington was the worst on record for this reason.

Environmental watchdog groups suspect that many in industry are using the forest "health crisis" as an excuse to continue unhealthy salvage logging practices, including the continued removal of healthy, high value trees. We spoke with Roy Keene, executive director of the Public Forestry Foundation, about forest health, salvage logging and restoration forestry. Roy Keene founded the Public Forestry Foundation to improve logging and forestry practices in the Pacific Northwest. PFF is a not for profit organization and can be reached at PO Box 371, Eugene, Oregon 97440 Phone: 503-687-1993

ER: Roy, what is purpose of the Public Forestry Foundation? What is its point of view?

RK: The Public Forestry Foundation is a loose coalition of resource professionals and citizens interested in socially and ecologically responsible public forestry, not just on federal forests, but also on state forests. We believe large private forest owners have a responsibility to the public because they are also stewards of public water and wildlife, because they rely to some extent on publicly subsidized fire protection and, often, publicly subsidized roads to get their timber out. PFF is perhaps more of a conservation coalition than an environmental group.

ER: What does the foundation do?

RK: One of our major programs has been strategic forest monitoring. Although we do not retain a lawyer and we do not directly sue over issues, we often provide vital information to groups who feel it necessary to file suit. We also provide technical assistance to many diverse environmental and conservation groups, including some that use the appeal method as a tool to achieve better forest management.

ER: What are your qualifications to do this monitoring?

RK: All of our staff associates are trained forestry professionals coming from what I call the "ivory tower" schools. The forestry schools crank students out managing to convince the public they have the only suitable body of forestry knowledge. I would argue that many other people; particularly, first nation people [American Indians. ed.] have equally important forestry knowledge - people who have worked in the forest and who have seen the land change over a long period of time; people from other science pursuits who have added to the body of forest knowledge. It is important to realize that the forestry institutes have pretty much justified the so-called science that brought us to the present situation. Fifty years of clearcutting in the public forests of the Northwest has been promoted by well funded academics.

Over the years I have worked as a forest resource consultant for a number of different entities and companies. I still do a little consulting work for large outfits from time to time. My particular focus was in large forest area reconnaissance, evaluation and appraisal, the design of logging operations and the marketing of forest products. I have worked for companies like Travelers Insurance, predicting for them what an acquisition might produce in future values. I have spent twenty-five years nosing around throughout the western forests, oftentimes evaluating what their future productivity might be. Through the years I have acquired a dirt level understanding of western forest ecosystems and how they function.

ER: My training is in biology and I think of the forest as a living system, but when I talk to foresters, they usually call the forest inventory.

RK: Exactly. Many students are encouraged in forestry school to quantify and reduce the forest to liquid monetary capital. They are encouraged to deal with the forest as a crop and as a temporary asset and not as an ancient, self perpetuating, living entity; not as the lungs of the earth.

Before we go much further, we have to differentiate between a company's right to call their privately owned forest an "inventory" or a "unit" and Americans' concept of their publicly owned forest. A big problem has been the inability of politicians and bureaucrats to make this distinction and acknowledge that the public forest is America's forest heritage. It is not cheap, private art that can be bought and sold at will. It is eternal art that hangs in the Smithsonian. It is a living heritage, a house of deep grottos and cold water and abundant life. It is not a commodity. It is not a capital asset and certainly not an inventory.

It has always bothered me that some forest managers could not make the distinction between private forests and public forests and what the divergent goals of the two are. What is the purpose of the federal forest reserve, the public reserve? Originally it was to protect watersheds and guard forests from liquidation. We are returning at least in concept, to that, which I think is wonderful.

ER: Does your foundation concentrate on publicly owned forests?

RK: Yes, but we are also actively engaged with a number of large, private forests owners, including the first nation people, to help change how they manage their private forests. And we have also worked with Louisiana Pacific on their northeast Oregon lands and helped to make tremendous changes in their harvesting techniques. There seems to be an inherent need however, for accountants to liquidate assets, and there is always pressure to cut more trees. The foresters are holding on to as many of those trees as they can, doing what we call "retention" cuts instead of clearcuts. I feel there is an opportunity to work with private owners, particularly in drier, eastside forests, but we need to recognize that it cannot be approached the same way we work on public lands.

ER: How would you manage public lands differently from private lands?

RK: The most important thing with public forest lands is to reaffirm our purpose and goals for those lands. The environmental community has developed tremendous skills in slowing down the deforestation ship, but they have not developed much skill in redirecting and navigating it. What kind of future forest condition do Americans want and how will we get there? How close to the so-called "historic range of variation" do we want public forest conditions to be kept? How will this condition be reconciled with on-going fire suppression? What were these forests reserved for? Again, they were reserved for watersheds, and in the eastside, as in no other place in the westside, the forests are even more critical to maintain a supply of clean, cold water.

ER: Why is that? Because the climate is drier?

RK: Partly because there is less forest cover in proportion to watershed areas. If you take every square mile of watershed east of the Cascades and add up the percentage of forest cover, you find that because of its dryness, there is much less forest cover than there is on the westside. Thin soils and a long history of compaction and disturbance due to tractor logging and heavy grazing exacerbate the problem.

ER: There are fewer people on the eastside, for the same reason: not much water.

RK: Right. But there is a tremendous demand for irrigation water and most of that water in the eastside comes from the forest. The first nations have clearly taught me that. I have been privileged to work on the Umatilla reservation, and again and again I see that water in the plains comes from the forest. Some of the most critical water supplies come from what I call the "finger" or transition forests, which are the forests that run down through the gullies and the draws in the foothills and down out into the plains. That forest has been degraded by cutting all of the trees out of the drainages and plowing or discing those drainages into grazing or cropland.

When you fly over northeast Oregon, you see thousands of desolate acres that the 1937 Forest Service mapping showed as forest now converted to bare land. So there has been a great deal of degradation of the intermediate watersheds that are critically important in late summer. Intensive agriculture in the eastside is probably one of the largest causes of watershed degradation and probably going to be one of the most difficult offenders to slow down or change.

ER: The metaphor of health is commonly applied to ecosystems. What constitutes a healthy forest?

RK: PFF feels that forest health has to be measured across a wide range of indicator species, more than just merchantable trees or big game. When we measure forest health, we have to talk about soil, watershed and wildlife conditions. We must consider seemingly unimportant life forms like fungi. We cannot measure forest health merely by how dense a forest is or how many dead trees there are; we have to look much deeper. We also need to realize that historically, healthy native forests have always included fire, insects, pathogens and tree mortality. All of these parts of a healthy forest are vital agents of disturbance and succession. [Forest succession is the progression from disturbance adapted plants like grasses and fireweed through intermediate brushy plants like vine maple, to climax forest with species like Douglas fir or Ponderosa pine. ed.]

It has not been proven yet that logging, especially after a burn, promotes forest health. I am working in places with some logging that I believe may be improving the forest health, but it is not done for the same reasons that historic logging has been done. It is logging to restore appropriate tree densities and appropriate ecosystem functions. And even though it is done in a careful manner, it is not without its impacts. It is going to take us some years of "restorative" style logging before we can say what kind of operation helps and what kind of operation hinders forest health. Up to now, instead of paying any attention to what helps, we have just extracted trees.

What constitutes salvage? The word salvage is from a Latin word, salvare, which means to save. Let's remember that the focus of salvage activity, including logging, should be to heal or to save the forest. So,whether we are salvaging a burn or salvaging a pine stand that has been logged until it no longer has any pine in it, we need to bring salvage operations back to an honest, respectable activity where its focus is on healing and restoring the site.

ER: When Gifford Pinchot was setting up the Forest Service at the turn of the century, its mission was to act as a steward of the land. I don't know if the forests can stand ninety more years of this kind of stewardship.

RK: Yes, the Forest Service motto is "To care for the land and serve the people," at least that is what it says on their trucks. I think we have seen the gradual disintegration of the Forest Service's original mission through the influx of money and political influence from the special interest groups, particularly the timber industry. Industry has successfully raided timber from the public forests for over fifty years to the disadvantage of all the other resources. What was intended to be "multiple use" has become dominant use, and I do not think anybody who has studied the issue would debate that. Now we need to make a return. We need to ask ourselves what the public forest was established for. What was the original plan for the national forest reserves? It was to set aside reserves that would be inviolate. Although Gifford Pinchot said, "We can have these reserves and use them too!", his intention was to manage the forest carefully and prudently, certainly not simply to exploit them. This is reflected in the Organic Act of 1897 that permitted mortality risk logging for the purpose of preserving the living and growing timber and promoting the younger growth. Pinchot's vision is that this conservation forestry would "pay its way."

ER: Taking out the dead and dying trees.

RK: Right. To make way for the new. It was not perfect forestry but it was certainly better than merely exploiting the woods with clearcuts and subsidized roads. And Pinchot's forestry manual further called for "conservative lumbering to maintain and increase the productivity and the capital value of the forest land."

Let's just take that one test, of increasing the capital value of the land, and apply it to modern forestry. Let's talk about what it takes to realistically increase the capital value of the forest land. And as a person who has appraised and valued timber, I can assure you this can be measured. You can go out and do a cut on your forest and I can come along and tell you whether or not you increased the capital value over some period of years, say thirty years.

Industry would argue that by taking out the old, decadent forest and planting brave new seedlings that we increase the capital value, but that increase is out there in over one hundred years. Speculative silviculture was not what Pinchot intended by increasing value. He did not intend that we convert the forest from old to young because, for one thing, we have no proof that a young forest can function over time like an old forest. So as we are busy converting old public forest to young forest - "vigorous forest" - we have no proof that those forests will stand the test of time let alone support biological diversity.

To me, as a forester, so-called new forestry is the last fifty years of clearcutting, foolishly called regeneration harvesting; it is unproven. The old selection style forestry is what came before it, and I have a library full of old but timeless forestry books that discuss forestry instead of promoting deforestation. Clearcutting may be, as Jack Ward Thomas says, a "tool", but it should have never become the paradigm of public forestry, and it has certainly not promoted forest health.

I think a healthy forest - this is one of Aldo Leopold's criteria - is resilient enough to recover from natural disturbances; a healthy forest is resistant to catastrophic change. It is also a forest with relatively stable streams and soils. Healthy forests are diverse enough to support a variety of species. They are forests that have achieved a state of dynamic equilibrium, and the key concept is "dynamic." We are also finding that a healthy forest is one in an ecological condition generally within the range of historic variation. A healthy forest is capable of producing some sustainable level of resources for human use. In other words, I think a healthy forest like a cow, has got enough cream in it to where it can give you a glassful, but wanting to skim some cream does not warrant you killing the cow. We want our forest reserves to be healthy because we want them to last perpetually as a heritage. And in order to have endurance, in order for those reserves to maintain themselves over time, the points I gave to you are some of the criteria forests should be judged by.

ER: Scientists are debating about what an ecosystem is; where do you draw the boundaries? But you gave an eloquent description just now.

RK: There is a problem in the academic community, when it comes to putting the bell on the cat. Scientists tend to wander off into questions like "What is the cat really?" rather than going out and putting the bell on the cat. We do not need to endlessly study ecosystem boundaries, we just need to take good care of every acre. If we look at that acre and ask, what has this acre been historically? What is this acre of forest trying to become? What are the processes that are working on this acre? What are the linkages that connect this acre with the acres around it?, if we do what is right for each acre of forest - which may just be leaving that acre alone, or it may be running a light burn through it, or it may be gently chipping some surplus wood out of it - on an acre by acre basis, eventually we treat the whole forest well.

This is part of the problem with the eastside assessment team: they have got caught up in way too large a planning area. I am afraid they are never going to get any realistic resolution on how we should treat each important acre. And in practical forestry, that is where you need the resolution, that is where you pound the soil and the trees. We come in with heavy equipment and saws and perhaps even fire, and we work acre by acre. So there is no sense in getting off into too deep a theory about how to put the bell on the cat. The test is to do what is right for that acre, and in logging, that is going to mean a big shift in the kind of tree we take and also a big increase in the effort and financial energy that we put into logging. Previously, most of the logging on the eastside has been characterized by very cheap logging: tractor logging; get the biggest bulldozer you can get, hook on a big gang line, and drag as many big pines to the landing as possible; to hell with everything else including stream protection and soil compaction. The historic focus has always been on the larger trees in public logging. Most of the mills on the eastside are random length mills that still need bigger trees. There are very few stud mills or fiber board plants operating that can use smaller logs.

So the eastside timber industry has not yet geared up to use the type of material that proper acre by acre care is going to provide. Because if we do what we talk about doing - if we mimic fire - we are going to be in forest stands taking out the small wood, taking out the understory that has grown in because of fire suppression. This means we are going to be logging much smaller wood than what anybody has ever used in the eastside industry. We could with proper operations, be working with lots of it, because over the last eighty or ninety years it has come up all over. In places it has completely replaced the dominant species like Ponderosa pine. In many places smaller firs threaten to replace surviving dominant tree species. There are whole drainages of larch in eastside and inland forests that are being crowded out by true fir. Without saw or fire, we are losing the larch; there are whole plateaus where we are losing the pine. The combination of historic high-grading of pine and letting fir encroach in the pine habitat has almost eradicated the formerly dominant species in places. [High-grading is removal of only the highest value trees. ed.]

So when we talk about eastside forest health, we ought to be looking first at restoring larch and pine. That may produce some wood product because restoring pine will involve thinning out or removing a lot of encroaching fir, which is what the bud worm feeds on. The bud worm has done a nice job of thinning in places; I have seen thousands of acres that have been exquisitely thinned by the bud worm. The only problem is that the same stands have got so much standing fuel, that if we get a fire in these stands, we can lose both soils and remnant pines.

So we have accumulated a lot of dysfunctional conditions in the drier forests. Somebody fans the flame into a crisis mode and suddenly the Forest Service wants to hurry up and do something. I don't think a little inactivity will hurt while we study the system and reform logging methods. I think we have many practice lessons to learn. I think there are also many acres we could begin immediately treating to restore to forest health. I think we need priorities.

Priorities of operation are what we established in planning a forest health salvage operation with the confederated tribes. We went all the way back to the last big bud worm invasion and said, "OK, how many dead stands do we have out there?" Not dead trees - dead stands - clusters of trees five acres or larger where more than fifty percent of the stand is dead? We tallied up all the dead stands. The bud worm had, in effect, planned the landscape for us. Tribal elders said, "We would like you to remove most of the wood from those dead stands so we can get a little economic recovery while returning forest stands to a functional state." You would be amazed at how nicely the bud worm delineated those dead stands for us. My, what a nice landscape design it was, as natural as you can get! The dead stands turned out to be as one would suspect, largely fir stands. We went into the stands that the bud worm had wiped out and, very carefully - paying the logger the top dollar - removed the dead and dying material, or at least part of it. We left lots of snags and downed woody material.

From our experience, it is evident we could have some very logical priority and design in what we are doing in the eastside right now. And instead we are getting this vague assessment combined with political pressure. And my fear is that we will end up defaulting to hammering big trees out of stands for the same old reasons, all political. As a community of conservationists, we should make up our mind to go for design and not to lose by default. We should be proactively engaging to direct the cut instead of reactively engaging to resist it, because the cut will come. But will it come by good design or will it come by default?

We have moved parts of that eastside forest so far from their natural state that many scientists doubt if we will be able to return them. This is particularly true with some of the forest savannah-grassland communities. Because we are already in a semi-dysfunctional state with much of the eastside forest, I feel we should have practical priorities such as the treatment of dead and dysfunctional stands. Because many of those stands will be largely true fir and not of much value to industry, they will resist this approach. Industry would rather wait to have a politically defaulted plan which allows them to go into a substantial amount of the same old kind of timber. In other words, they want to get on with cutting pine.

I do not think we should cut any pine on the eastside for at least the next ten years and then work with it a bit before we cut it. Agencies and industry should be made to deal with the forest they have created where the pine has been largely removed and the understories have grown up and covered the sites. We should say, "Now you have to live on thinnings from these understories." When they say, "No, we need pine." We should tell them, "No, you need to help us restore this forest." Back over on the westside, lots of thinning has been left unattended; we have millions of acres of stands that are too crowded. Industry knows they are little trees and they know that all you are going to be able to do is peel a little veneer or cut a few studs out of them, so again they will try to default into more big, high-value trees.

The Public Forestry Foundation wanted a simple moratorium on cutting any more large pine, larch or old trees in the eastside. The only pine that would be taken out is what we call "bull" pine - black pine - and it would be taken out to thin growing pine stands. Because a lot of the young pine stands have not been treated in thirty years and are overcrowded, another big bark beetle infestation, and we could lose many of them.

We would like to see industry work with the kinds of products that come out of forest stand restoration. But it seems that we will allow ourselves to be led down the road of default. With foolish timber sale screens and a large volume of uncut timber sales, we are, to some extent, already there.

ER: Industry is spending heavily on advertising and PR and campaign contributions and lobbying. Who in politics these days is going to have the spine to stand up to that?

RK: There is nothing wrong with the environmental community today that we could not patch up by taking a few lessons from industry.

ER: How so?

RK: Just the way industry fights the war, the way they wage the campaign. They are very focused, very cohesive, very up on the issues. They have a clear understanding of the rules of engagement and they know how to direct their energy and their people. They know how to fund the right people in the right places to do the right work. And until we reach that point, the environmental community is going to be fairly ineffective whether we have lots of money or not.

We need to take a proactive role; we need to jump on into ecological science and get ourselves up to speed with appropriate forestry activities. We should tell industry, "We don't mind you taking some trees but we want you to take little trees; not the big fir and pine." Maybe in thirty years, we will get some balance on the system; we will get caught up on the backlog of thinning and stand improvement and maybe be at a point where we will have some surplus of larger trees, then we can have some discussion about what we might do with the surplus. But now, with eighty-five percent of the great trees gone that covered our forest and no plan for renewing them, we should hold back across the entire western forests. There is a need to do restorative forestry, not more extractive forestry, not even a small "legal" level of extractive forestry. Everything should be focused at restoration, that is, establishing healthy forests.

We have some major priorities to take care of and we should not get ourselves locked into a position where we default to a smaller level of extractive forestry. We need to change business, not reduce business as usual. We need to figure out practical problems like, how we are going to go from logging with tractors to logging with suspension cable systems - or something else besides a tractor - so that while we are removing small wood from the eastside forests, we do not further beat down the already compacted soils.

Another question we should resolve is how Congress will give the Forest Service a budget to match practice with policy? We need to get policy wonks out on the forest and make it clear to them that their forest policies do not result in appropriate forestry practices. Our foundation has had encouraging results with policy makers by getting them out on the ground to show them what it's going to take to bring practice into compliance with policy.

ER: That means reduced timber revenues for the Forest Service.

RK: Exactly. It also means that we need to redirect the Forest Service timber budget from extraction to restoration. We need to find practical ways to redirect budgets toward ecosystem restoration and not toward a lower level of ecosystem exploitation.