Rick Golden stands under an eroded cutbank on Little Piney Creek. The roots of the tree that he's holding can no longer hold the bank together. Photo © Mark Blaine/Forest Magazine

Wading down Little Piney Creek, Rick Golden stops at a tall cutbank. There’s a rock wall crumbling into the stream from the former pasture above. The old pasture is grown up with small trees, and the river is migrating, consuming the wall as it goes. The roots of the trees reach out into the air over the creek, and Golden, standing in the flow, reaches overhead and holds on to one of them. “They certainly didn’t build that rock wall out into the channel,” Golden says. “This little wall here is a perfect example of what happens when things go wrong.”

Little Piney Creek and the forests around it are still recovering from intensive land use of a century ago, and no one remembers what they’re supposed to look like. But people like Golden, a fish biologist on the Ozark National Forest, have an idea of what the natural state should be, and they know that the streams are in a prolonged period of recovery. That’s why Golden got upset soon after he was hired almost two years ago to build a fisheries program on the Ozark.

A model that Ozark managers were using to calculate the impact of logging on sediment that runs into the rivers seemed to contradict basic principles of hydrology. In effect, it offered an easy justification for timber management decisions. The more the forest was logged, the greater the likelihood that the model would produce an answer that allowed more logging. The model ignored the patchwork of research and historical records that showed the rivers in an already stressed state. More use, more development would likely add insult to injury.

Golden is blunt. A former construction worker who went back to school to study toxicology, he told his supervisors about his concerns and received a firm rebuke. Several district rangers demanded that he not be allowed to work on their parts of the Ozark. Golden had hit a nerve. “It’s either cave in or fight back,” he says.

So what is natural? What should the Ozark National Forest look like? Locals have a fondness for what they remember it to be or how they want it to stay, but the experts shrug: they don’t have an answer and they don’t expect one to be forthcoming. The Ozark National Forest has been so disturbed that maybe there’s no going back to some previous natural state-if anybody could figure out what that is. What’s left is the responsibility for defining the future.

The era that started the Ozark National Forest’s current problems lives on the edge of memory for people here, but its effects have become starkly apparent in the past four years. The Ozark is thick with dead and dying red oak trees-a result of an infestation of a native beetle, the red oak borer. For the moment, forest managers are doing triage, concentrating on the safety problems of the die-off-trees are falling across roads and into campgrounds-before they address what to do about the tide of bugs.

The age of the forest and two to three years of drought brought what the forest supervisor, Charles Richmond, says is the biggest epidemic of red oak borers in recorded history. He adds, however, a caveat. “I’m not so sure that we’ve ever had a forest in recorded history like the one we have,” Richmond says. “It’s nature correcting itself.”

Red oaks live only a little longer than people do. After eighty or 100 years, the trees are old and less resistant to drought, disease and insects. A substantial part of the Ozark National Forest-300,000 acres-is covered with a dying generation of red oaks. Two-thirds of some stands of trees are red oaks-trees that love sun, thrive on disturbance and grew like weeds in the abandoned fields the federal government claimed under the Weeks Act of 1911 and turned over to the Ozark National Forest.

The sprouts of red oak grew into a forest more dense than what preceded the clear-cut logging and cattle ranching of the nineteenth century in part because fire, which local tribes used to manage the forest for their needs, was excluded for most of the twentieth century. It’s been only in the past few years that managers have triedto expand fire’s role in the Ozark National Forest, burning about 55,000 acres in 2002.

It’s an infestation so out of whack with remembrance that it seems unnatural, but it isn’t. It’s just not what people who have grown up there know as normal or expect from a forest. A host of wildlife thrive on the acorns, and a strong constituent pushing forest management comes from local squirrel, turkey and deer hunters. Fewer acorns mean fewer animals to hunt, and for hunters an era is passing. “The sad thing is, we could have prevented this. If forest managers had been better communicators; if the general public had been better listeners; if hunters and other wildlife lovers had been more willing to accept man-caused disturbances instead of stubbornly sticking to their no-fire, no-cutting philosophy … if, if, if,” writes Jim Spencer, the editor of the state fish and game department’s magazine in a special issue devoted to the die-off.

The red oak borer is a symptom of nature’s response to intense manipulation: if there weren’t so many old red oaks growing up from the cut and grazed slopes of the mountains of northern Arkansas, there wouldn’t be a plague of borers.

“Is that natural? Is that healthy?” Richmond asks. “I don’t know.”

Downstream from the rock wall on Little Piney Creek, Golden points out two substantial trees that are stranded on a gravel bar. It’s an odd effect-the trees are buried by a foot or more of gravel, making them look as if they grew up through the bar. In reality the stream has moved away from them. “Those two trees were probably part of the bank,” Golden says.

Stable stream banks tend to have vegetation growing to the edge of the water. The bank may be undercut, but the knot of tree roots and brush inhibit the river’s powerful scouring action and the river’s course changes slowly. On Little Piney Creek, however, the banks on the outside of the river’s bends are much higher and steeper and the trees and brush that would hold the bank together can be six feet or more above the water’s surface. Because their roots don’t reach deep enough to hold the cobble and sediment together, the current cuts into the bank, calving large chunks of sediment into the river channel. The more the river cuts into the bank, the farther the channel is displaced, a cycle that ends only when the river has migrated across the valley and into the bedrock of the opposing hill.

Ozark streams have a lot of gravel, but no one knows how much accumulation is natural.

Meanwhile, the scouring action adds tons of sediment and cobble to the streambed, filling formerly deep holes and making the river warmer and wider. During the summer when many reaches dry up, the holes are the only refuge for fish and other aquatic wildlife. As the holes fill and temperatures rise, habitat shrinks.

Ozark streams probably have a lot of gravel naturally, but how much is a big question. Fine sediment is in short supply-landslides and the chocolate-milk runoff effect is not as common as in other places in the United States. There’s just not much topsoil in the Ozarks and there’s little evidence of upland gullying from erosion caused by past logging and other land uses. But conventional wisdom holds that the streams have too much gravel. When Robert Jacobson, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist who researches stream geomorphology of the Ozarks, systematically asked old people about Ozark streams and how they remember them to be, they consistently said they’re filling with gravel. Some local entrepreneurs mine gravel from the streambeds, a controversial practice.

Jacobson’s research indicates that streams are wider and shallower than before European settlement. How much and how universal the effects of development, however, aren’t known, and there’s not a lot of money available to do the research to find out. So from Jacobson’s perspective, it’s hard to point fingers.

“Can we really identify what is natural versus what is caused by man?” Jacobson asks. He’s skeptical: there are too many variables to tease out what nature should look like here.

These streams have always had a lot of gravel, Jacobson says, and the problems with streams may not be as bad as many perceive them to be. But there are long-term effects to the streams that haven’t sorted themselves out yet-it’s a system that’s already “ringing like a bell” from historical land-use practices.

Jacobson postulates that the way European settlers used the land started a chain of events that led to wider, shallower streams. The cause wasn’t direct runoff from one practice-logging, for example-but a succession of land uses that resulted in the current stressed condition.

A timber boom in the nineteenth century denuded most of the slopes of the Ozark Mountains. Settlers followed by burning the clear-cuts to promote better growth of grasses for grazing cattle. Intensive cattle grazing eliminated much of the riparian growth around streams, which unmoored stream channels from the relative stability provided by the bankside vegetation. As streams carved new paths through the valley floors, they eroded banks, adding a new load of gravel to the system, which was swept downstream and filled deep holes, eliminating cool summer refuges for fish and other aquatic species.

Meanwhile, as ranchers who couldn’t make a living abandoned their farms to be reclaimed by the federal government, weedy red oaks found a perfect niche to take hold in the logged-burned-grazed former forests.

“Looking at the historical view doesn’t give you a lot of predictive power,” Jacobson says. “We’re often coming up against the brick wall of lack of information.”

Collecting that information depends on where the funding is. “I haven’t seen very much push for more research in Ozark streams,” Jacobson says. There aren’t strong funding sources to do that. Ozark streams are a low priority-the fishing is good and people don’t perceive a problem. “We don’t have salmon and we’re not killing people,” he says.

Golden’s objection to the sediment model has held up the current timber projects on the Ozark. In early March, a team of U.S. Forest Service researchers reviewed the model and echoed Golden’s concerns. The model has since been scrapped, stopping for a time much of the logging on the Ozark.

“This isn’t about whether or not they can have a timber program,” Golden says. “It’s about refining their tools.”

Grant and Jody Nally, members of a local canoe club who just finished a house on the edge of a bluff over Little Mill Creek downstream from the Ridge Pine Sale, are coming to grips with the notion that the densely wooded uplands north of their new home may be logged. Walking into a creek bed, a place called Fern Gully, within the project, Grant Nally points at surveyor’s tape that runs to the rim of the little gorge. It’s a place recently popular with rock climbers-the cliffs aren’t tall but they’re filled with cracks and narrow passages. A seasonal stream runs through the bottom of the gorge, over waterfalls, slides and jumbled boulders. The water runs clear.

“It’s in pretty good shape right now,” Grant Nally says. The surveyor’s tape marks the timber sale’s buffer around Fern Gully, and the Nallys had argued to push the buffer back to protect this spot.

“I’d never paid attention to any of this,” he says about timber sales on the Ozark. “Now I see what it is.”

It was the Ridge Pine Sale that laid bare Golden’s problems with the sediment model and the animosity within the Ozark about his speaking out. He’s been accused of being an obstructionist to Ozark timber sales, and he bristles at that accusation. From Golden’s perspective, the model is a liability: by using a model with such obvious flaws, any timber sales or other management activity on the Ozark could be challenged and held up in court. Golden advocates for better science on the national forest so managers can clearly document what impacts a project might have. It would ensure that management decisions are legal, he says.

“I’m sympathetic to the fact that managers need a model to use,” Jacobson says. He’d been asked to review the Ozark National Forest’s sediment model. “Better a blunt tool than no tool at all.” If managers understand the uncertainty of the model-that it’s a blunt tool-it can be useful for making decisions. The keys are calibration and validation, Jacobson says, and it’s uncommon for managers to validate.

“I can see that there would be concerns with this model,” he says, “but I can also understand the challenges to do better.”

Richmond says that there are flaws with the model and that the Ozark is working to create a new one. “We probably didn’t look at [the model] as closely, with as trained an eye, as we could have,” Richmond says. “Any model is just that: it’s a model, it’s an estimate. No model is correct.”

“I just don’t want to see brown water for the next ten years,” says Jody Nally.

Richmond says the Ozark National Forest logs about 25 percent of what grows every year. It comes out to about 40 million board feet on average, and the Ozark has stayed at that cut for many years. About 40 percent of what’s cut is pine. The rest is hardwood, mostly red oak. He says that recent projects have moved away from outright timber sales and are intended more for forest health.

For current projects, Richmond asked the districts to go back and better document impacts and use the new model. It could be a couple of days of work or a couple of months, depending on the size and complexity of the project. It may have some effect on the forest health work with the red oak but most of those are safety projects, intended to remove trees that threaten heavily traveled or occupied areas. As the Ozark works to manage the spread of the red oak borer, Richmond cautions that there could be an effect on future projects with new attention to stream monitoring.

The red oak borer has taken on a new life in a congressional bill sponsored by Representative Scott McInnis of Colorado that may make stream monitoring on timber sales a moot point. The bill lets forest managers designate up to 1,000-acre “assessments” that are exempt from environmental review in the name of combating insect infestation.

The reality is that the bill-an outgrowth of President Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative-would eliminate the Rick Goldens of the world from the process of evaluating the ecological effects of timber sales and road building on the national forests. Years spent walking streams, measuring accumulation of gravel, poring over old maps and data that may be 150 years old and comparing it to current GPS readings would be lost. Nature would be redefined as the de facto current condition.

It would be license to forget.