Discussion
By ROB CHANEY of the Missoulian | Posted: Friday, February 3, 2012 6:15 am |
[NOTE: The Big Lie of Stewardship Contracting - One large forestland owner and logging company, Collins Pine, is getting a $3.5 million grant to log already overcut national forests in south central Oregon near Lakeview. Of course they call it "green alternative biomass energy production", "thinning" and "restoration logging" even if it is calling for 85% removal or "heavy commercial thinning". TGH]
The U.S. Forest Service wants to speed up work on national forests, for both timber production and forest health.
“Collaboration is most effective in getting forests managed in a proper way,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said during a conference call on Thursday. “We want to move beyond the conflicts in the past that slowed progress down. We’re going to look to encourage environmentalists, folks in the forest industry, people who live in forest communities and other stakeholders to work for healthy forests.”
Vilsack pledged the Forest Service would boost its lumber production from 2.4 billion board feet in 2011 to 3 billion board feet by 2014. That would come through a 20 percent increase in forest acres treated over the next three years.
Those treatments also include fuels reduction, reforestation, stream restoration, road decommissioning, culvert work and prescribed fire, as well as timber harvesting.
Much of it will be paid for with $40 million in new congressional funding for local forest projects this year. That’s up from $25 million last year, the first time Congress authorized money for the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program.
Montana’s Southwest Crown of the Continent forest project was one of the first 10 selected for the program, receiving $4 million in 2011. It should receive that amount again in 2012, according to Forest Service director of forest management Cal Joyner.
“By increasing the scale of areas we look at, we’re planning and considering larger parts of the landscape,” Joyner said. “That leads to a greater pace of activity.”
Idaho had one project approved last year in the Selway-Middle Fork Clearwater region. This year, the state has two more: the Weiser-Little Salmon Headwaters Project for $2.4 million and the Kootenai Valley Resource Initiative for $324,000.
The board feet expansion could have a significant effect in the Forest Service’s Region 1, which includes Montana, according to Montana Wood Products Association director Julia Altemus.
“That would be about 360 million board feet coming off Region 1,” Altemus said. “That’s a lot. The target is usually 270 million to 300 million, so they’re looking at doubling that. I’m not sure they’re going to have the personnel capacity (in the Forest Service) to do that.”
The acceleration should not cause problems with local state initiatives like Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester’s proposed Forest Jobs and Restoration Act or a similar measure proposed in Oregon, Vilsack said. Those measures would also require the Forest Service to increase the pace of forest work, such as Tester’s mandate for treating at least 10,000 acres of Montana national forests a year.
“I don’t see we’re going to be working in conflict,” Vilsack said. “We’re going to be working cooperatively and collaboratively to make sure that we get the best use of the forest opportunities we have.”
The Forest Service work would also include bark beetle treatment, projects to improve watershed health and wildlife habitat, improving markets for wood products like biomass-based fuels and efforts to boost recreation opportunities, Vilsack said.
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Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com.
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Amy S. Karpati
Forest bill is about commerce, not science
Posted: Tuesday, January 31, 2012 12:00 am
The arguments presented in support of a bill that would allow commercial timber harvest on state lands are illogical. They are based on the unfounded assumption that the bill (S1085)- which stalled in the last legislative session but has been reintroduced – will always result in positive forest restoration projects.
Recent opinion pieces in New Jersey media cite how our collective “passive management” of the state’s forests is leading to declines in forest “health.” One article says, “Centuries ago, wildfire, storms, and periodic flooding by beavers created the large forest openings these species required. Today, restoring this balance is left to us.” Another states that “efficient disturbance” created by such natural forces as “fire, wind, disease, and insects” is good for the forest, but that “…when humans prevent Mother Nature from managing forests by suppressing her natural forces, we act to compromise her immune system.” This commentary goes on to say that, “Passive management creates severe imbalances in the ecosystem, which allows insects, disease and deer to intensify beyond the ability of nature to manage these forces efficiently.” In addition to deer, insect outbreaks, and diseases, crown fires and increased vulnerability to wind are also given as symptoms of an unhealthy forest.
There are several fallacies in this argument. Yes, patchy and periodic natural disturbance is good for the forest community as a whole – it creates a heterogeneous landscape and promotes biodiversity. But the above statements imply that beneficial processes like wildfires, storms, insect outbreaks, floods, and diseases do not happen naturally anymore, so we need to mimic them through current forestry practice. In the bill, this practice means cutting down large trees that generate revenue to stimulate a wood products market with public trust resources.
First, our suppression of these natural disturbances is hardly passive and is much more aptly described as misguided active management. Implying that these natural processes can no longer occur is absurd. These disturbances would occur naturally, and on smaller, non-catastrophic scales if we did not actively suppress them. We do not need to inadequately “replicate” these events ourselves.
Second, the argument that we need to mimic the natural disturbances of fires, storms, insects, and diseases so as to prevent the “severe imbalances” of fires, storms, insects, and diseases is wholly illogical. We need to replicate insect outbreaks so that we don’t have insect outbreaks? How does this make sense? One proponent’s article specifies that without our active management, these disturbances “intensify beyond the ability of nature to manage these forces efficiently.” Does this mean that when large, mature, potentially profitable trees die by way of fires, storms, insects or diseases, that this is considered inefficient or wasteful? From Mother Nature’s viewpoint, allowing these trees to be habitat for woodpeckers, insects, the rest of the food web, and simply letting them decompose and return their nutrients to the soil is energetically nearly 100% efficient, especially for the rare species that depend upon these natural events.
Perhaps the biggest fallacy in the arguments supporting the forestry bill is the belief that the bill will actually accomplish what proponents say it will. It has been praised as promoting woodland restoration built around positive ecological goals. The reality is that several environmental organizations tried to have ecological restoration provisions — such as rare plant and animal species surveys, deer fencing or reduction, invasive species control, and baseline and follow-up monitoring to ensure restoration success – built into the bill, but these provisions were either not included or were stripped from the bill as it is currently drafted. We cannot let this bill masquerade as ecological restoration legislation when, at its core, it is a bill to allow revenue generation via logging of public trust resources.
The bill necessitates that projects be built around the goal of harvesting and selling large trees – not that the projects be carried out with true restoration goals as the primary scientific objective. Scientifically defensible restoration projects, such as the often-cited project to create golden winged warbler habitat along a power line cut, are driven by specific ecological goals, not by the fact that big trees happen to be on a site. True restoration projects must be accompanied by the collection of baseline data, identification of clear ecological goals, management for ongoing threats such as deer herbivory and invasive species, and long-term monitoring to quantify the success of our efforts.
Without these provisions, these projects are scientifically unfounded.
Forty Ph.D. scientists who are actively engaged in forest restoration and ecological research have signed on to a letter in direct opposition to this bill. This is not to say that the scientific and conservation community is against every form of timber harvesting. But the current draft of this bill is a bad idea for the ecological integrity of our public forests. We hope that our state legislators will strongly consider current science and make the environmentally – and socially – responsible decision to oppose this bill.
Amy S. Karpati is the director for conservation science at the Pinelands Preservation Alliance. This column was also signed by 12 other New Jersey scientists.
