The U.S. Forest Service could write a book filled with myths of forest management. Photo © George Filgate
Foresters have long believed that burned forests must be logged to reduce future fire risk and clear the land for replanting. But, until this year, no controlled studies had taken a hard look at a forest’s condition following salvage logging.
Researchers at Oregon State University’s School of Forestry did so at the Biscuit Fire. They compared burned forests that had been salvage-logged with burned forests that had undergone no post-fire logging. The contrast was startling. The burned and unlogged forests were naturally reforested with more than 700 seedlings per acre. The burned and logged forests had 70 percent fewer seedlings; apparently logging had destroyed most of the native stock. The logged forest also had substantially more flammable debris left on the ground than did the unlogged forest, increasing the risk of hotter forest fires in the future.
Forestry stalwarts immediately issued rebuttals to the research, including a call to the journal Science to stop the study’s publication, which was refused by the editors.
The “salvage logging is good” myth is only the latest in a plethora of sacred cows that have not withstood the test of science. Until the 1970s, foresters claimed that old-growth forests were “dead, dying, diseased and decadent” biological deserts, unfit as habitat for any wildlife. This convenient characterization justified the “conversion” of old-growth forests to tree farms throughout the West. Researchers at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest found otherwise; old-growth forests are among the most ecologically diverse of any forest type.
In defense of clear-cut logging, foresters sought to appear ecologically literate by claiming that “clear-cutting mimics fire.” Fire scientists have debunked that fiction, noting that forest fires leave most of the wood in the forest while clear-cut logging removes most of the wood from the forest. (Not to mention that fires don’t build logging roads.)
For decades foresters decried the damage to fish habitat every time they found big trees in streams, claiming that fallen logs would block salmon from migrating upstream to spawn. Foresters led a campaign to cleanse rivers and streams of these “destructive” log jams, remarkably removing only the commercially valuable logs. By the early 1980s, researchers had shown that fallen trees, especially the large logs foresters had been removing, are a natural and essential part of healthy fish habitat.
The granddaddy of all forestry myths is that forest fires are bad for nature. “We’ve got to cut the forests to save them from fire” has become yet another justification for logging. The fire-is-bad myth gains credence because, like the three little pigs, we too often refuse to build our homes sensibly, with fire-resistant roofs and landscaping.
Anthropogenic climate change may further strip bare foresters’ long-held myths. For example, the Tillamook Forest, long championed as a crowning achievement of industrial-style forestry, is dying across hundreds of thousands of acres due to an epidemic of Swiss needle cast. This naturally occurring fungus notoriously infects Douglas-fir trees that are not evolutionarily adapted to their surroundings. Now global warming may be accelerating the demise of this forest that was planted by the hand of man in the 1940s with nonnative stock.
The unstated thesis of all foresters’ myths is that tree farming is environmentally benign, or even beneficial. The ecological reality is that tree farms are to forests what corn fields are to tall-grass prairies. Tree farms have their place on corporate and other private timberlands. But our national forests should remain natural forests.