Restore some forests to their precolonial condition
Note: yours truly in the Main Stream Media. Special thanks to Jack Wilson, Editorial Page Editor, Eugene Register Guard.
By Mike Dubrasich, Opinion, Eugene Register Guard, Jan 19, 2009 [here]
Restore some [public] forests to their precolonial [precontact] condition
Recent guest viewpoints in The Register-Guard have blamed forest fires on global warming (George Wuerthner, Dec. 26) and logging (Roy Keene, Jan. 11). However, forest scientists agree by overwhelming consensus that fuels cause fires. Further, without forest restoration treatments, wildfires will destroy Oregon’s heritage forests.
Foresters [Forest scientists Drs.] Jerry Franklin and Norm Johnson testified to the U.S. Senate in December 2007:
We will lose these forests to catastrophic disturbance events unless we undertake aggressive active management programs. … Without action, we are at high risk of losing these stands — and the residual old-growth trees that they contain — to fire and insects. …
Inaction is a much more risky option for a variety of ecological values, including preservation of northern spotted owls and other old-growth related species. We need to learn as we go, but we need to take action now. Furthermore, it is critical for stakeholders to understand that active management is necessary in stands with existing old-growth trees in order to reduce the risk that those trees will be lost.
Indeed, over the last few years catastrophic, stand-replacing fires have destroyed vast tracts of Oregon old-growth forests. Examples include the Biscuit Fire (2002), the B&B Fire (2003), and last summer’s Rattle and Middle Fork fires. Heavy fuels led to severe burns that killed old-growth and converted those forests to permanent fire-type brush.
The damage was not limited to vegetation. Habitat for endangered species was destroyed; soils were baked and stripped; air was filled with smoke and carbon; streams were polluted with soot, ash and eroded sediments; recreational opportunities were lost; scenery was degraded; public health and safety were threatened, and the economic costs have been enormous.
Restoration forestry is the art and science of returning forests to heritage conditions of fire resiliency, with open and park-like structures. Our forests today often are crowded thickets, overladen with fuels and prone to catastrophic fires.
Restoration forestry removes the excess fuels and puts forests back into their historic condition, as they existed before Euro-American contact.
Restoration forestry is different than [from] rehabilitation of burns. Restoration is the treatment of stands before they burn to protect, maintain and perpetuate old-growth forests.
Restoring historical conditions sustains forests by protecting them from total mortality canopy fires, by maintaining fire-resilient old-growth trees, and by enhancing the capacity of forests to grow trees to old ages.
Our old-growth trees arose under much different conditions than today. The forest development pathways of precontact eras were not punctuated by infrequent catastrophic stand-replacing fires, but instead were the result of frequent, seasonal, light-burning fires in open, park-like forests.
Those fires largely were anthropogenic (set by indigenous people). Because the fires of historic eras were frequent and seasonal, they gently removed fuels without killing all the trees. The widely spaced trees thus survived repeated burning and grew to very old ages.
Modern fires in dense thickets not tempered by frequent, seasonal, anthropogenic fires cause total tree mortality. No trees survive the infrequent holocausts, and so no trees attain old-growth status.
In fact, modern fires routinely kill old-growth trees that withstood multiple fires in bygone eras. Modern fires burning in dense, built-up fuel conditions often convert heritage forests to more or less permanent brush fields.
By restoring thicket forests to their historical norm of open, park-like conditions, and in addition restoring historical anthropogenic fire regimes, forests can be saved from catastrophic incineration and conversion to brush.
Restoration forestry, applied at landscape scales, will make our forests safer and less prone to catastrophic, forest-replacing fires. Restoration forestry protects, maintains and perpetuates habitat, heritage, wildlife, aesthetics, recreational uses, watershed values, economics, public health and safety, and every other forest characteristic valued by human beings.
The Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, passed by the Senate on Jan. 11, includes Title I, Forest Landscape Restoration. It encourages “the collaborative, science-based ecosystem restoration of priority forest landscapes.”
Public forest tracts of at least 50,000 acres are to be identified and treated with active ecological restoration. Projects must include collaboration with state and local governments, tribes and local private, nonprofit or cooperative entities. Projects must contribute “toward the restoration of the structure and composition of old-growth stands according to the pre-fire suppression old-growth conditions characteristic of the forest type.”
We all need to understand that restoration forestry is vital to preserving, protecting and sustaining Oregon’s treasured heritage old-growth forests. We should support active restoration projects as proposed under the new Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009.
Mike Dubrasich has worked as a [professional] forester in Oregon for 34 years. He is the executive director of the Western Institute for Study of the Environment in Lebanon.
