Downed wood, like this log from a timber sale in Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest, plays a critical role in the structure and function of old-growth forests. Photo © James Johnston
Grandeur, awe, beauty…it’s easy to get carried away when describing the intense aesthetic experience that is an ancient forest. The real fascination of a centuries–old forest, though, is found in the subtle intricacy of life and relationships between living things. Chris Maser, writing in Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest, examines one thread of the millions that make up this rich tapestry:
“Flying squirrels are associated with large amounts of rotting wood…because that is where their food, the belowground truffles, fruits most abundantly. Most of the truffles in one way or another are dependent on the rotting wood in the soil, and flying squirrels, whose main food is truffles, are the staple prey for the spotted owls. These owls are therefore indirectly dependent on the rotting wood.”
Each nook and cranny of an ancient forest’s extravagant foliage is a home or hunting ground for a different species of bird, rodent, cat, bruin, deer or bat. All these species are predators of, prey to, or even a home for thousands of other life forms, all interacting ceaselessly with each other, with the vegetation and with the soil in astonishing ways that are, for the most part, unknown to us.
Although the ancient forest appears eternal and unchanging to a visiting hiker, it is actually a dynamic system. The towering forest we see today looked very different hundreds of years ago. And tomorrow the forest may be rendered unrecognizable by fire, not to develop a cathedral overstory again for hundreds of years, if ever.
Just as ancient forests evolve and change over time, the debate about how we should manage them is expanding in unexpected ways, encompassing questions about where this forest type comes from, how it is maintained and, most importantly, how it can be perpetuated over time.
Conventional notions of protecting these forests are being turned on their head; old adversaries are becoming allies. Wildfire is a theme holding the tale together. Far from being the death of a forest, scientists are beginning to understand that fire is an essential ingredient of ancient forest complexity, creating a unique habitat and refuge in its own right.
THE ASBESTOS DISTRICT
Wildfire in the Fall Creek watershed in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest once seemed as incongruous as a baseball game at the bottom of the ocean. U.S. Forest Service rangers jokingly call the area the “asbestos district,” because the temperate lowland rainforest of dew–drenched ferns, moss–draped logs, and stately Douglas–fir, western hemlock and red cedar trees almost never burns. Thousands of visitors come to Fall Creek during the hot summer months, drawn to the emerald–green swimming holes, abundant campsites and hiking trails just thirty minutes east of the populous Willamette Valley.
In July 2003, a camper accidentally ignited brush and grass. Record high temperatures and low humidity had turned the normally lush forest into a tinderbox, and the blaze quickly became a crown fire that climbed into the forest’s dense upper canopy and leapt from tree to tree, incinerating 5,000 acres of some of the finest old–growth forest habitat in western Oregon.
Almost all of the burned forest had been designated as a late–successional reserve under the Northwest Forest Plan, a land management allocation designed to protect and restore ancient forests for spotted owls. A year after the flames were extinguished, the Willamette National Forest supervisor made what an emerging consensus of scientists are saying is the right call: Although hazard trees around campgrounds and roads would be removed, the vast majority of the dead trees would be left to deteriorate slowly over time, becoming the cauldron from which the next generation of ancient forest will be cast.
BORN FROM FIRE
“In 1902 we had a lot of fire in the Pacific Northwest,” says Jerry Franklin, a professor at the University of Washington’s College of Forest Resources. “There wasn’t anyone around to salvage–log it. As the forest grew up, instead of being a collection of uniform small trees, it had this legacy of large snags. Some of that forest became habitat for northern spotted owl by the time it was sixty or eighty years of age.” Without large snags, he says, it would have taken the forest 150 years or longer to develop the biologic diversity necessary to support spotted owls.
Franklin has been at the heart of the controversy over how to manage old–growth forests. During the 1970s and ’80s his and other scientists’ research documented the astonishing—and rapidly declining—biological richness of ancient forest. Thanks to this research, forests that had borne the brunt of decades of over–logging on federal lands changed from “cellulose cemeteries” to critical reservoirs of biodiversity in the court of public opinion—and in the courtroom.
This new perspective on ancient forest led to a number of policy shifts—including the Northwest Forest Plan—that dramatically reduced logging of these forests. As a consequence, the Forest Service today is looking to the burned landscapes of the West to meet timber quotas. Mills desperate for logs are scrambling to get their hands on burned timber, and they’re funding an aggressive public relations blitz to brand burned forests as public enemy number one. According to their spin, dead trees are devoid of wildlife, pollute drinking water supplies, set the stage for more–severe fires and, if left unlogged, obstruct forest regeneration.
And, of course, the spin contends that burned trees that could be turned into timber products go to waste, their value lost as the wood is infested with insects, rots, and falls to the ground.
But the value of dead wood, according to Franklin and others, can’t be calculated just with dollar signs. Nutrient–rich soil is created by dead wood decomposing over time, and the only dead wood that will be returned to the soil of a young forest is from the last big fire—it can be hundreds of years before the forest begins developing large dead wood supplies of its own.
In addition to their role in energy and nutrient cycling, the dead snags left after a fire create habitat for more than two–thirds of ancient forest species. The fallen wood holds in soil that might otherwise wash into streams, choking salmon spawning grounds. And healthy aquatic systems depend on the pools and riffles created by the same large logs as they are slowly deposited into the stream decades after a fire.
“Salvage logging isn’t done for ecological reasons,” warns Franklin. “It’s a tax on recovery.”
BISCUIT DEBATE
Although it seems land managers made the right call at Fall Creek, the Forest Service’s decisions about the Biscuit Fire have been savagely criticized by all sides in the debate.
In 2002, Biscuit burned at various intensities within a 500,000–acre fire perimeter on the Siskiyou National Forest in southwest Oregon. Initially, the Forest Service proposed a modest plan that would have salvaged between 5 and 105 million board feet of timber, most of it near roads or in “matrix” lands where intensive timber management is allowed by the Northwest Forest Plan.
Under intense pressure from county commissioners and the Bush administration, the Siskiyou National Forest withdrew the original plan and came out with two alternatives that would cut more than a half–billion and a billion board feet respectively, most of it in old forest reserves and roadless areas. In 2004, the administration also threw out Clinton’s roadless rule, which prohibited logging and development in roadless areas.
Four years after the fire burned, local mills are outraged. The delay caused by preparing the new plan, and wild overestimates of timber volume from salvage logging, have led to far less volume being logged than the industry expected. Conservationists and the states of California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington are challenging the administration’s new roadless policy. This past June, despite protests across the country, the Forest Service awarded the nation’s first post–fire salvage sale in a roadless area—the 640–acre Mike’s Gulch timber sale—to an Oregon logging company. A federal judge refused to suspend the sale until the petitions challenging the new rule have been heard. Logging at the sale began in August.
Rich Fairbanks, a twenty–five–year Forest Service veteran who coordinated planning for the Biscuit salvage operation, says we need to respect fire’s role in creating and maintaining forests.
“Biscuit was a 500,000–acre fire that reburned another fire that burned fifteen years ago. They have a fire issue in southern Oregon, but the Forest Service completely ignored it. It was like pulling teeth to get them to talk about anything except boards. That’s all they cared about.”
Fairbanks, who now works for the Wilderness Society as a fire policy analyst, sees the controversy about salvage logging as a natural extension of the debate about protecting old growth.
“The environmental movement has done a good job of preserving old–growth structure. The challenge now isn’t necessarily roping off areas,” he says. “The challenge is maintaining processes and functions. What’s killing forests is that we don’t have the same type of fires we used to. How do we keep insects and fire operating in a forest to give us the forest conditions that we expect? What processes give us the structure? We have a very complex, subtle job to do.”
LOGGING FOR OLD GROWTH?
Twenty years ago, Franklin and other scientists were pointing the finger at widespread clearcutting as the most pressing threat to the persistence of ancient forest and the species that depend on it. Today, most logging of 200–year–old trees has ceased on federal forests in the West. But how durable is the fraction of ancient forest that’s left?
The fire that burned the forest at Fall Creek was rare, but not remarkable. Catastrophic fire typically kills most of the trees in this type of forest every 200 to 500 years; Fall Creek’s number had simply come up. In the future, if sufficient ancient forest is maintained over a large region, infrequent severe fire will merely add diversity to the landscape, providing habitat for species that need areas containing copious snags or dense young forest.
Forests throughout much of the Columbia Basin and intermountain West, however, have quite different fire histories that are being overwritten by a hundred years of logging, road–building and fire suppression. The driest of these forests typically burned every two to seven years. These frequent, low–intensity fires hugged the ground, removing shrubs and young trees, creating ideal conditions for a widely spaced forest of fire–tolerant species like ponderosa pine, larch and Douglas–fir.
Today, after years of fire suppression, large volumes of younger trees that would have been killed by frequent fire have grown into the canopy of large legacy trees, carrying fire with them. The traditional approach to protecting ancient forests—drawing lines on the map around older stands and making them off–limits to logging—may not work everywhere. Chainsaws are becoming a tool for protecting old growth in dry forests.
“In North America we’re going to have to have a lot of interaction between people and the forests, for the good of both,” says Franklin. “Preservation is not going to be an adequate philosophy every time.”
The biggest challenge for forest managers this century will be seeing the forest through the years, designing management strategies that make room for the disturbance agents that birth, shape and nurture the ancient forest.
“Back when I was always being hauled into court as an expert witness for the feds or the environmentalists, the challenge was always the same,” says Maser, author of Forest Primeval. “People don’t see relationships, they see commodities. We struggle to create predictability, but the entire universe is based on novelty, which is unpredictable. The change which we try and hold in snapshots is a constant process,” he says.
“The only real constant in the universe is change.”