Most of the time, logging and healthy forests can’t coexist happily

A Eugene-based forestry consultant describes how federal forests are better managed for conservation and preservation.

In his guest viewpoint of March 30, Dave Montgomery, a private forest owner, invites me to his “planet” to show me that logging and healthy forest can coexist. I appreciate the invitation, but I’ve already been to Montgomery’s forest — many years ago, when it had more timber. I cruised parts for his family’s estate settlement and once helped Montgomery get a better price for his timber than local mills offered.

There are other forest “planets” folks should visit before thinking that logging and healthy forests can coexist. Over the hill from Montgomery’s tree farm is Georgia-Pacific’s Siletz wasteland, deserted after thousands of acres of 35-year-old trees were slicked off hastily. An entire watershed was left slash-filled and muddied.

Across the road are barren, half-square-mile cuts where Roseburg Forest Products is rapidly stripping and poisoning lands the company acquired from International Paper Company, another out-of-state despoiler.

Visit Oregon’s North Coast to see tens of thousand of acres of dying, needle-cast-infected fir plantations left by Times-Mirror, along with bankrupted human communities. Travel through Southern Oregon’s warmest slopes to witness several hundred thousand acres of Bureau of Land Management land yet to be successfully reforested from decades old clear-cuts.

My earlier criticism that Montgomery referred to was about the Bureau of Land Management, not woodlots — specifically, the BLM’s proposal to move forest science backwards by clear-cutting more old growth.

After spending millions on planning and hiring foreign consultants to create irrelevant computer models that can’t pass scientific muster, the agency forges blindly ahead. Without a current physical forest inventory, BLM forest managers propose to sell our oldest and best trees at fiber prices in today’s flat log market, create more debris-loaded flammable plantations, and leave taxpayers to pick up the tab.

No sane private forest owners would tolerate such a careless and wasteful proposal for their own land. Why should the public tolerate it for ours? The irony of woodlot owners defending the BLM’s proposal is that, if carried out, it will flood markets with cheap stumpage, further decreasing the value of their timber.

In this debate, where so many “professional” foresters stump for more logging, who says forestry always has to be about logging?

America’s father of modern forestry, Gifford Pinchot, was more about conserving and, yes, even preserving forests — forests that are today, even after industry’s assault, far healthier and more valuable than any private forest. For his vision and integrity, Pinchot was demonized by the timber industry of his day.

I suggest that industrial foresters inquire into forestry’s historical roots before making so many “professional” judgments. Perhaps they should even visit the wild corners of our public forests: Planets without roads or eroded streams, where whistles and jake breaks don’t break the silence. Where there are still groves of old trees that have withstood the test of fire and climate change. Places where elk calve and winter undisturbed and salmon find cold, clean stream gravels to spawn in. Places that remain “unimproved” by their management.

For many years, while directing a crew of foresters with pedigrees from the best forestry schools, I took them into wild forests to humble and instruct them — to help them get in touch with their roots and contemplate the very reasons they went into this profession.

In order to maintain healthy forests in today’s climate, management is needed more than ever from foresters who side in favor of keeping trees, not log decks or spreadsheets — foresters who can regain the public’s trust by designing projects that are economically efficient and ecologically benign, perhaps even beneficial.

Forestry consultant Roy Keene of Eugene helped design the first sustainable forestry certification system for the 100,000-acre Collins Almanor Forest in Northern California and the first federal forest ecosystem management plan for the 60,000-acre Fort Lewis Forest in Washington state.