Reflections on Forestry when Confronted with the First Timber Harvest Plan of the Year in My Watershed

(This piece has appeared in Counterpunch, Anderson Valley Advertiser, Eureka Times-Standard, and Eco-News)

by Ellen E. Taylor, Chairperson of the Lost Coast League

Timber Harvest Plans (THPs) are like demure invitations to dance. A timber company sidles up to Cal Fire, which extends its soft hand. The music is an ancient minuet, its steps designed almost fifty years ago. The cadences repeat themselves, harmoniously, as the Agencies partner up and take their places, stately, in the still, ethereal atmosphere. Then, after a few fleurets and some courtesies exchanged, the logs start rolling out of the forest.

The minuet, made famous by Louis XIV of France, used to have meaning: it was metaphor for the serene, hierarchical architecture of society, where every character played a discrete part in time and place. In the modern world, however, timber harvest plans are a metaphor for chaos.  Outside the ballroom, chunks of Antarctica the size of New York are falling into the sea. The Gulf Stream vacillates uncertainly. Scientists grasp at fantastically expensive and risky schemes to sprinkle the stratosphere with sunlight-reflecting particles. And, as Earth warms, a quarter of its people face dying of thirst while others are swept away by floods or freezes.

The skies are emptying, one third fewer birds now than when the California Forest Practice Rules were written almost 50 years ago.  The World Wildlife Fund reports that, taken together, mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians have declined 70%. The insect apocalypse is hurtling along 8 times faster.

The agent of this chaos is the still-increasing concentration of carbon-dioxide in earth’s atmosphere, caused by human activity. We have returned the carbon, sequestered by ancient vegetation, in oil and coal, to the atmosphere. As for the contemporary, still-actively sequestering vegetation, we destroyed 80% of it before 1990.

Amidst the wreckage the minuet, choreographed by the revered California Forest Practice Rules, proceeds with inviolate composure. Biomass is conveyed to the mills: the US is by far the largest wood exporter in the world. Smaller trees are made into wood pellets, the rest for lumber. “Old growth” is now extremely rare. Trees like Douglas firs and redwoods, which can live thousands of years, are now harvested at 40 to 70 years old, leaving no generation to replace their falling elders.

Any concern about global warming is finessed with phrases such as “there is a natural variability in earth’s climate” and “considerable debate regarding its causes”. Fear of catastrophic fire, of rising temperature, wind velocity, and dehumidification in logged-over areas, is met with the entrenched dogma that fuel load reduction is critical for fire protection. Calfire asserts this despite comprehensive studies that “timber harvest, through its effects on forest structure and local microclimate, has increased fire severity more than any other human activity” (US Fish & Wildlife Service:1996).

It is paradoxical to combine commercial timber harvesting and forest management into the same agency. Logging companies are interested in fire prevention from the perspective of protecting their assets. As they have said many times, biodiversity and forest health are not their responsibilities (viz. Robert Fisher, owner of HRC: “we are a business, not a charity”) except insofar as legal compliance is concerned. Forest management is a public trust, and therefore must concern itself with public safety and its corollary, ecological stability. The commerce axiom, to extract the most profit at the least cost, is antithetical to this trust. Removing big trees, which are fire resistant and have been demonstrated to reduce forest temperatures up to 4.5 degrees compared with plantations, increases fire risk.

The fact that Calfire plans to log its own Jackson State Forest flies in the face of its public trust mission: fire safety, preventing   climate catastrophe, and defending biodiversity.

The preservation of the last stands of planetary forest is our last best hope for curbing carbon emissions in the shortest amount of time. If logging were stopped today, and the forest allowed to grow, our remaining trees could remove 1/7 of the world’s carbon-dioxide exhalations annually. Redwoods and firs sequester carbon at a rate 2.5 times the rate of tropical rainforests. The older the tree, the more efficiently it sequesters: though slower-growing, they produce more photosynthesizing surfaces.

But as forests are logged, this sequestering engine is lost, and they’re no longer sufficient to mitigate climate change.

The UN Council on Biodiversity reported last year that 1 million species are at risk of extinction, “which paints an ominous picture with serious consequences for humans as well as the rest of life on Earth”. 

Here in the Pacific Northwest, there are many species whose populations have plummeted. Making it worse, the US Fish and Wildlife just narrowed the definition of critical habitat. This opened up millions of acres for logging, including 3.4 million acres of Northern Spotted Owl habitat.  Green Diamond Timber now shoots the NSO’s competition, the less specialized Barred Owl, and is allowed to harvest the habitat the owls have vacated. The resultant “take” of NSOs “is more than offset by the value of information gained from this experiment and its potential contribution to a long-term Barred Owl strategy” (FWS).

This is deranged goal obsession, like the archetypal “Bridge Over the River Kwai”.

Despite public concerns, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife DECLINED TO PARTICIPATE IN THE PREHARVEST INSPECTIONS of the last two THPs I examined.

But they are paid by the public, by us, to be guardians of our wildlife! THE PUBLIC TRUST!

Understaffed and underpaid, they’ve handed off their responsibilities to FSC certification, a privately paid-for and administered process covering the activities of HRC, Green Diamond and SPI, who receive a premium for their certified products.

Recently the Lost Coast League challenged HRC’s certification for noncompliance with FSC principles:  they used herbicides, destroyed ecologically valuable forest, and failed to consult local communities and Tribes.

It was a long, tedious, process, involving officials in Taiwan and Bonn, which changed nothing.

In fact, recently, after offering property-wide access to the Bear River Tribe for habitat typing and lead collection for an EPA study being conducted by the Tribe, preparatory to the release of the Pacific Condor in Humboldt County, the company slammed the door in their faces.

We must end this fatal minuet, retire the senile forest practice rules, and manage our forests with “pro-forestation”: allowing them to grow. Timberlands are called “working forests”: well then, let them work, sustaining life on earth, instead of providing pellets for Swiss stoves.