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Open Letter To Senator Wyden: Your Forest Proposal For Oregon Is Flawed

Sunday, February 16, 2014 20:50

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TND Guest Contributor: Edgar A. Kupillas |

Dear Senator Wyden and interested parties,

My comments come from the perspective of a professional forester. They are different from the perspective of a politician. A forester operates from the perspective of biological and economic reality. We foresters call tending forests “the science and art of forestry”. Decisions regarding the management of a forest are grounded in science but sometimes involve “art” to achieve the desired results.

Politicians’ modus operandi is compromise. That often works if science and facts don’t get in the way. In forestry, manipulation of the forest can be done to achieve various goals. This may entail different kinds of harvesting and regeneration regimes. A forester can manage a forest to emphasize maximum wood production, wildlife habitat, beauty, old growth, recreation, etc. Any one of these goals can be achieved in an ecologically sound way. I know this because I have done it.

I managed 190,000 acres of private land in NW Oregon for maximum wood production in the 1967 to 1972 period on the one hand and conducted a forestry operation in the city of Klamath Falls Moore Park in 1995 when I was a consultant. (It’s a 170 acre park.) In addition I have managed my own forest where I live for good looks and wildlife habitat while removing timber in appropriate ways. Another property which I acquired was restored to an environmentally sound condition after having been badly treated in a logging operation.

I am recounting all this because I believe I have more and better hands-on experience than Franklin and Johnson. They are noted academics, but as far as I know they have never been responsible for managing a forest with any of the goals mentioned above.

They were among the “gang of four” that developed many aspects of the Northwest Forest Plan (NFP). Some may think the NFP is a success. I happen to think it’s a huge failure.

These are the “scientists” that Senator Wyden is relying on for the management of the O&C lands. While their perspective is based on their research and experience and has a lot of validity, it should not be the sole basis on which to manage these lands. There are plenty of forest scientists who do not agree with the type of forest management espoused by Franklin and Johnson.

The O&C Act of 2013 deals with the management of approximately 2.1 million acres of forest land. It seeks to divide the land into two categories. That fact confirms what I indicated above, that a forest can be managed for various purposes.

The original O&C Act of 1937 (two pages long) has ballooned into 188 pages in the proposed Act. The original Act said, among other things that the lands “shall be managed….. for permanent forest production, and the timber thereon shall be sold, cut, and removed in conformity with the principal of sustained yield for the purpose of providing a permanent source of timber supply, protecting watersheds, regulating stream flow, and contributing to the economic stability of local communities and industries, and providing recreational facilities.”

The language in the act that indicated an emphasis in “permanent forest production” was contested in a court case brought by Headwaters, an environmental organization, some years ago. They failed. The court affirmed that “forest production” is the primary goal of the O&C Act of 1937

This means these lands should be managed for “permanent forest production’” as well as for the other purposes stated in the Act.

The O&C lands comprise only a little under10% of the lands in the NFP and only about 10% of those lands are available for “permanent forest production”, primarily in so-called Matrix land designations. The 2013 O&C Act seeks to further reduce the productivity of the O&C lands by designating approximately half as “conservation emphasis” areas. So that portion of the lands still available for management that emphasizes timber production is a miniscule portion of the lands actually growing wood volume in the NFP area.

Senator Wyden has in various ways legitimized his bill by trotting out timber industry people who say they endorse his bill. These people are naïve and have learned little about the relentless onslaught of the “green” community. The industry people view the federal forests as sources of raw material for their facilities and are not necessarily interested under what kind of management those raw materials are produced. They are interested in “certainty of supply” and understandably so.

As far as “certainty” goes, that can be applied to the efforts of the radical environmentalists who will try very hard to stop timber harvest on the forestry emphasis areas, while the new areas of withdrawal (wilderness, etc.) will never be contested.

Foresters are interested in more than “certainty” of raw material supply. In order to properly manage forests, removals should approximate growth. Both the Wyden Bill and the bill passed in the House proposed by DeFazio, Schrader and Walden fail on that score. Either of these bills allows the forests to build biomass that will eventually be removed by fires, insects or disease, the very problem we have with our federal forests now!

In addition, the Wyden bill, apparently in an effort to placate the environmental community, proposes around 87,000 acres of wilderness and creates more Scenic and Recreational Rivers, all of which withdraws ever more forest land from management by humans and turns it over to be managed by bugs, wind, disease and wildfire. The Walden bill has a similar flaw.

Another flaw in the bill, a fundamental one, is what I call prescriptive legislation. Instead of stating the goals as the O&C Act of 1937 does, this proposed legislation prescribes particular forest practices in considerable detail. This law is proposing requirements over site specific situations that supersede the experience of professional foresters who are educated and obtain experience from working on the ground. This is fundamentally wrong.

Yet with 188 pages of prescriptive forestry, I could find nothing about salvage. Is it there and I missed it? Without a way to deal with the results of catastrophic events like wildfire, wind throw and others, a tool is taken away from forest managers to deal with these problems. Why not pass legislation that limits the instruments surgeons use to only those that are politically correct? Sounds absurd, and it is.

Examples of successful recovery from catastrophic events by salvaging the damaged timber and reforesting are legion, yet ignored by the Senator and his staff. Instead they are fixated on the Salvage Rider, a bill that was passed in 1995 and was due to expire December 1996, a 17 month period to clean up 4 million acres of burned forest through salvage. To hear the extreme greens of the day talk about this legislation, one would suppose that the world was about come to an end. Please, can someone point out to me any long term damage to the forests in question from the implementation of the Salvage Rider? If there is any, I am sure it pales in comparison to the long term negative effects of the implementation of the NFP.

Here are the facts for some of the successful results of salvaging timber from catastrophe events:

1. Tillamook Burn. This catastrophe was actually 5 fires over a period of time, the first one occurring in 1933, the last one in 1951. I can remember seeing the edges of the burn and seeing snags in 1962 that were still being logged. Old growth with a lot of heartwood takes a long time to decay. It is well known that the area has recovered and is again a vibrant forest after being replanted.

2. Columbus Day Storm of 1962. “In less than 12 hours, more than 11,000,000,000 (that’s eleven billion with a B) board feet (26,000,000 m3) of timber was blown down in northern California, Oregon and Washington combined. This is from Wikipedia. Most all of that was salvaged. Would society be better off if this timber had not been salvaged?

3. Oxbow Fire. This fire started on August 20, 1966 and resulted in a burn area of 42,000 acres. It burned both BLM and private land timber. Both the BLM and the private landowners salvaged and reforested, and now 48 years later the burn is a thriving forest again. The BLM was able to conduct its salvage because this was before so many impediments were in place that would prevent it from being done.

4. Mount St. Helens Volcanic Eruption. Almost 150,000 acres were flattened from the force of the blast May 18, 1980. According to Jim Petersen, founder and executive director of the Evergreen Foundation, reporting in the spring issue of Range Magazine, said the blast affected 68,000 acres of Weyerhaeuser Co. forestland and 64,000 of Gifford Pinchot forest land. Weyerhaeuser salvaged 850 million board feet of timber and replanted. The 64,000 acres of Gifford Pinchot forest was included in the 110,000 acre Mount St. Helens National Monument from which no salvage was done and no trees were planted. The difference between these two areas today is astounding. The monument is still struggling through the early seral stages of recovery with tree growth a distant possibility. The Weyerhaeuser lands support a vigorous new forest.

5. Timbered Rock. This fire, around 10 airline miles from where I live, started on July 13, 2003 and grew to 27,000 acres. About half of the area was BLM land, the other half mostly industrial private land. The private land was quickly salvaged and replanted. The BLM proposed similar treatment on its lands, but after a lawsuit brought by green groups none of the BLM’s salvage plans ever occurred. One can look at that burn today and see thriving young trees on the private land and a sea of snags on the BLM land with a heavy brush understory through which the planted trees are struggling to survive.

I could go on, but you get the picture. The bottom line for me is that without a way to deal with catastrophic events, this proposed legislation is a non-starter. (In some cases salvage and replanting is not appropriate but whether to let “nature takes its course” or not should be determined by an experience forest manager). Other aspects of the bill that I mentioned and have not mentioned are not fatal, but still undesirable.

Okay, you say, “You have done nothing but denigrate the proposed bill. Can you, smarty pants, offer something positive?” Yes I can but I am not going to do it here. It is beyond the scope of this piece. My comment/critique has gone on long enough anyway, and my position is that I have checked in with the Senator with my facts and opinions. He is free to consider them or not. But I have done my civic duty.

Edgar A. Kupillas, Forester/Rancher

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Mr. Kuillas can be contacted via email at: EdKupliass [ @ ] Live.com (remove the spaces and brackets added to help curtail spam)