The rugged slopes of the Sierra Nevada provide inspiration for wilderness preservation. Photo © George Wuerthner.
We may speak of “public land” or “private land,” but the truth is we are in the presence of an ancient mystery—life itself—and the great life-communities within which all beings thrive and die. The pines were contemporary with the dinosaurs; the sequoias were a dominant forest that swept across the north Pacific rim and into much of Asia, long ago. Oaks are in several genus found on every continent except Antarctica. Indeed, “distinguished strangers from another world.” They are all amazing. We live in a lovely and mysterious realm.
We all share a wish for the Sierra Nevada Forest, in its remarkable diversity, to survive and flourish into the far future, so that years from now people will still be able to take delight in the long views from Mount Lola or Mount Lyell, nap away an afternoon on the pine needle floor of a stand of big cinnamon-colored flaky-barked pines, shoot down a whitewater river, hear the occasional bark of a spotted owl, and also take flber, flrewood and mushrooms home from it. Such hope is really basic—it is in no way extreme. But there are details here that will be hard to hammer out—the devil is in the details.
Forest history (and prehistory) may help us get a better understanding of the pre-white contact Sierra Forest and what it was presumably like. An open parklike forest of giant pines? A mosaic of different sorts of forest, including stable old brush lands? What changes took place in the forest in the post-white contact flrst century through logging, burning, and then flre suppression?
Since the last Ice Age, California has been a Mediterranean climate, that is to say, heavy rains in winter and a long scorching dry spell all summer. This creates a speciflc array of plants that can bear both winter-wet roots and long periods of drouth. Fire is a normal presence in such a climate, and over millions of years the flres produced a range of flre-adapted plants and a forest whose health depends on periodic burning. The Sierra forest is unlike that of the Southwest and the Rockies, and totally different from the west side Cascade conifer forests of the Paciflc Northwest with its year-round rain.
So then, granted this set of determining conditions, what is the present state of affairs? What has been the effect of a century of flre suppression? Where do the previous logging practices on both public and private land leave us? How much old growth remains, and how well has it been located?
What will it take to sustain both the wild natural world out there, to keep it diverse and flourishing, and at the same time allow for a human presence in and around the woods?
Many would agree that one measure of sustainability is the maintenance of the richness of the original biodiversity. Maintenance of biodiversity may sometimes be inconvenient, but it is the law of the land, as well as the ethical requirement that comes to us as stewards of the planet.
Sustainability might be measured in terms of the ecosystem energy budget. It has been suggested that for California to rely on third-world timber imports when it has a flber-producing capacity right at home would be unethical. By the same token, an energy-intensive sort of sustainability (logging and reforestation) simply mimics agribusiness, where productivity is forced higher by inputs from outside—especially fossil fuel energy and chemicals: this is not true sustainability. If the money economy collapses, the even-age plantation created by it would collapse as well. Our wild forests have long had an elegant and self-sustaining nutrient and energy cycle, and staying within that should be a key measure of true sustainability.
A few words about time. Part of my work has been East Asian cultural history, and I have also researched and written on environmental history, especially forest history, in China and Japan. I have studied history and traveled in Southern Africa, most of East Asia, India, Nepal and the Mediterranean basin. There are some lessons in the experience of Asia and Europe that we would be very foolish to ignore. Take the forest history of the Mediterranean basin, the original “Mediterranean climate.” Using a variety of tools and means, it has been established that in the time of Plato and Aristotle, 500 B.C., there was much oak-conifer forest throughout the whole basin, and some very impressive forests in the higher elevations. They were similar to the Sierra Nevadan oak–conifer complex. Although the pine species did not grow as huge as ponderosa and sugar pines, there were giant cedars (which come down to us as the “Cedars of Lebanon”). Areas of the Mediterranean hill country that we now see as maquis or garrigue, chaparral and rocky slopes, were then covered with trees. Springs have disappeared, and soils have long since eroded away. Old seaports have been buried under alluvial silt.
The Greek or Sicilian or Albanian or Spanish people who live there today have no knowledge of what their environment looked like in earlier times; they think it was always maquis, or brush. Following the studies of J.V. Thirgood, it seems that what happened in later Greek times and then throughout the Roman era was a process of steady deforestation. The mountains at the head of the Adriatic Sea had forests dedicated to the continual rebuilding of the Roman fleet. Thirgood says that in a Mediterranean-type forest where the soil dries out in its hot dry summers, when the canopy is reduced by logging below a certain percentage and then followed by the winter rains, a considerable amount of soil will be washed away. It might not happen in one century, or even in two or three centuries, but over many centuries the forests are reduced to brush flelds, and even replanting is no longer possible.
North India, especially the Himalayan foothills, has been thoroughly deforested. North and Central China were stripped of almost all forests by the fourteenth century. Ireland was denuded of oaks by the English, who turned them into ships. Intellectuals in Barcelona, Spain, whom I asked “What was your original vegetation here?” amazed me by saying, “We think there never was any original vegetation.” In fact, that area was flrst logged by the Carthaginians. The Sierra Nevada too could eventually become a series of manzanita brush flelds. With the pressure on it from a steadily growing population, a growth-fueled economy, militant consumerism with worldwide material aspirations, and a political system whose leaders change every four or eight years, the Sierra Nevada is defended by people with limited knowledge.
These environmental histories are cautionary. They tell us that our land planning must extend ahead more than a few decades. Even a few centuries may be insufflcient. We must work on a really long time frame. We need to watch our steep slopes and our soils like hawks, leave a fair canopy when we log, and put health of the land ahead of short-term proflt. Save what’s left of the old growth for science and for the future. How flre plays into this clearly must be part of the discussion. In the local watersheds, in the universities, in public land agencies, and in the timber business, a surprisingly large number of people have come to understand and appreciate their public lands and all of nature far better than in the past. This is a big advance.
Someday there will be a Thousand-Year Forest Plan. If talking about “one thousand years” seems unimaginably long, we should remember that the Department of Energy and the whole nuclear establishment are planning for a repository of spent but thoroughly dangerous radioactive material to be placed underground at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and it will need to be overseen and guarded for at least ten thousand years. They have assured us that they will look after it for all that time.
We can be pretty sure that our descendants will be here a thousand years from now, and that they may not even know whether we did well in our planning for them, but the nuclear waste will still be a big question. The choices we make in regard to our natural environment and our society have increasingly long-range implications in this hyper-informed but historically clueless speeded-up contemporary world. We are developing (some) good information. May we be granted the wisdom and time to use it.
Copyright 2007 by Gary Snyder from Back on the Fire. Reprinted by permission of Shoemaker & Hoard, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.