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The Northwest Forest Plan, the landmark policy put in place in 1994 with the intent of saving the northern spotted owl and other old growth-dependent species, is up for revision in the coming year.
As someone who has watched the plan unfold, I will say that on the east side of the Cascade Range, the NWFP has delivered unfortunate results. Not only has the northern spotted owl continued to decline, but for 30 years measures that could help our forests to become more sustainable have been curtailed. While the more aggressive barred owl is largely responsible for the downward spiral in the northern spotted owl population, so is habitat loss due to increasingly hotter and more destructive wildfire, insects and tree diseases.
Before the arrival of Europeans, there was a robust Native American population. Fire was used to maximize travel and hunting and gathering opportunities on both sides of the Cascades. Historically, many fires were low-severity, where flames stayed on the ground, or fires left a mixture of live and dead trees by skipping from the crowns of the trees to the ground. When high-severity crown fires occurred, new habitats emerged, contributing to the whole spectrum of wildlife. Recent research of fire history in the southern part of Oregon’s Willamette National Forest has detected more fires than can be explained by lightning ignitions alone. On the east side of the Washington Cascades, Native Americans historically accounted for 70% to 80% of ignitions, according to remarks by Cody Desautel, executive director of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville, at a Yale University webinar.
My work replicating and comparing historical panoramic photographs taken in the 1930s with the same landscapes today only illustrates the last 80 to 90 years of change in forests of the Pacific Northwest. The first changes were precipitated by multiple waves of smallpox, malaria, and tuberculosis, which decimated Native peoples. The unjust removal of survivors to reservations, followed by forced enrollment of their descendants in boarding schools, took more people from the land. Compounding the loss of Indigenous-created fire was the deliberate suppression of all fires, a policy established after a series of forest fires burned millions of acres in three states in 1910.
Without any fire, the tree species mix shifted away from fire-tolerant species like ponderosa pine and Western larch to a greater abundance of less fire- and drought-tolerant species. On the whole, our forests have become dense while dead materials have accumulated on the forest floor.
The NWFP, which holds sway over 24 million acres, follows the model in which humans do not interfere with nature. This “preserve” model does not take into account that nature is dynamic, and disturbance is essential to ecology. The popular credo “take only pictures, leave only footprints” fails as land management policy. In particular, the NWFP did not take into account that forests on both sides of the Cascades, but especially the east side, had long been separated from their historic condition and lost much of their resilience and biodiversity. This is the very condition identified as important to spotted owls — dense, multistoried canopies with high vulnerability to crown fire.
Back in the day, the U.S. Forest Service marked the largest and most fire-tolerant trees for cutting. The agency also did a lot of clear-cutting, and while that shares some commonality with burns, it is very different. In all fairness, timber targets were mandated by Congress, and fire suppression was and is hugely popular.
Now the Forest Service is trying to unravel the unintended consequences of more than a century of fire suppression and to grow back some of those large trees. While supported to some extent by several environmental organizations including The Nature Conservancy and the Wilderness Society, the Forest Service is stymied by others who use legal procedures to undermine projects that would otherwise be helpful in restoring forest resilience and ecological function.
Legal leverage using the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act often forces policy contrary to what is best for the environment. The ESA invites policy that manages for a few species instead of the overall ecology, and NEPA requires that agencies prove that a project will not be harmful, even when doing nothing ensures disaster. A recent example is the appeal by North Cascades Conservation Council of a 20,000-acre forest restoration project on the east side of the Cascades near Twisp. The Forest Service proposes to reduce the number of trees, leaving the largest of appropriate species, and to follow up with prescribed fire. The conservation council objects on grounds that the Forest Service analysis is not detailed enough. Federal judge Stanley Bastian ruled against NCCC, but we can expect an appeal.
I am as horrified by climate change as anyone, but I see folly in using Pacific Northwest forests as carbon sinks. Forests have always sequestered carbon and then returned carbon to the atmosphere through a combination of fire and decay. Crowded trees are stressed trees, and susceptible to fire, disease and insect attack. Patches in forests where there are no trees are actually important to survival of forests, as they are places where fire and insect epidemics might stop. Efforts to use forests to sequester carbon would be best placed where deforestation has occurred.
While assisted migration of species like redwood northward to fit with climate change might have some efficacy, we need first to manage our forests in such a way that the tree species we already have can thrive. It will take a combination of thinning, prescribed fire and a managed approach to wildfires instead of all-out suppression. Along the way we can supply logs to mills and employ people, but ecological needs, not economic needs, should be put first — at least on public lands. A single focus on endangered species will not only not prevent extinction, it will sink our forests as well. Having too many trees on the landscape is the pathway to having few or none.
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