OLD GROWTH: More than just owls and jobs
Understanding both the role of an old forest and the timber industry's use of it can help us make management decisions about what's left
by Ted Kerasote
This essay ran in Sports Afield in July 1991
One year ago the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the spotted owl, which lives in the disappearing old growth forests of the Northwest, as "threatened." The listing was attended by much bitter controversy. The timber industry claimed thousands of jobs would be lost if forests were closed to logging. The loggers themselves held rallies, wearing T-shirts and sporting bumper stickers that proclaimed, "If it's hooting, I'm shooting." Time magazine put an owl on its cover and ran a story titled "Owl vs. Man"; fortunately there was a qualifying blurb that read: "It isn't that simple."
Truer words were never written. In fact, describing the future of old growth forests as a conflict between the habitat needs of a single species and the economic welfare of an entire region is misleading on at least two counts. For one, old growth forests are home to far more wildlife than owls. Second, the logging industry, rather than suddenly being crippled by an implementation of the Endangered Species Act, has been in serious -- and, one might add, self-inflicted -- economic straits for years. Understanding both the enormous contributions old growth makes to our environment as well as the timber industry's use of this resource can help us make sounder management decisions about the old growth that remains.
First, consider what old growth is. It is not the biological desert many people associate with dense forests. "The desert idea," says Charles Robbins, professor of natural resource sciences at Washington State University, "comes from second-growth replantings where all the trees are the same age and height and the forest floor is essentially dead. That's not even remotely similar to old growth."
Instead, the classic ancient forest of the Northwest is dominated by large conifers between 250 and 1000 years old. Young as well as mature trees grow together, creating a multi-layered canopy. Mosses and lichens cover the trees, providing homes for insects, birds, and small mammals. Dead snags remain standing for more than 200 years, providing additional homes for insects, woodpeckers, and rodents, which attract predators such as the spotted owl, black bear, and marten. Large downed trees crisscross the forest floor, keeping soils in place on steep slopes and offering habitat for more birds and mammals. As these logs decay, over two to five centuries, they act as sponges for water while their nutrients slowly fertilize the earth. Last, the streams of a classic ancient forest hold many fallen trees. They harbor algae and microbes that feed grazing insects as well as being the woody diet of such shredder flies as caddis and stone flies. In turn, fish eat these insects and use the fallen trees as shelter from storm run-off and for thermoregulation.
Robbins and his colleagues have also done some revealing work concerning the value of clear-cuts to such species as deer. They found that the fast-growing plants that soon inhabit clear-cuts (once thought ideal food for cervids) are lower in protein than many plants that thrive in old growth and from which deer get higher-quality proteins. "The old idea that clear-cuts are great for deer and elk," says Robbins, "as compared to a forest environment is in desperate need of re-evaluation."
Another scientist helping in this re-evaluation is John Schoen, a conservation biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He and his colleagues have demonstrated that old growth is not merely preferred by Sitka black-tailed deer in southeast Alaska but also essential to their survival during periods of snow. In winter more food is available under the canopy of old growth forests than in the adjacent openings. (A similar situation exists in northern British Columbia.) Schoen has also shown that streamside old growth is crucial to the continued well-being of brown bears in two ways: as high-quality foraging habitat and as security cover for reducing the number of bear-human conflicts.
The list of animals that need old growth hardly stops here. Schoen notes that bald eagles, marbled murrelets and mountain goats all make seasonal use of old growth. He has also pointed out that both whitetails and Columbian black-tailed deer have used old growth forests in the past. Records dating back to colonial times show that deer in the Lower 48 were abundant before logging took place.
At least 118 other vertebrate species also use old growth. These include ospreys, northern goshawks, northern flying squirrels, red tree voles, fishers, five species of salamanders, and Roosevelt elk. Forty-one of these species are so closely tied to old growth that they're unable to find nesting, breeding or foraging grounds anywhere else.
Some may say, "Who cares about squirrels or voles, much less salamanders!" However, all these animals play some role -- a few of which are crucial -- in the maintenance of the old growth ecosystem. For instance, rodents eat the fruiting bodies of fungi that live between the roots of old growth trees, and within their digestive tracts they carry the fungi's spores to new sites. These fungi absorb minerals, nitrogen and water from soil and feed them to the trees, as well as producing chemicals that strengthen the trees' immune systems and give them a longer lifespan, creating the very forest that then harbors and protects the bigger animals so many humans consider valuable.
In the Northwest none may be more valuable than salmon, which are now faced with enormous challenges from drift-netting on the high seas, domestic overharvesting, urbanization and damming of rivers. The logging of old growth, which silts, warms, and floods spawning grounds, is one more stress pushing some species of salmonids toward extinction.
In this short space it's impossible to describe all the intricate contributions old growth forests make. Two more, though, deserve mention. Some researchers believe that the conversion of old growth forests to younger forests adds carbon to the atmosphere; thus, maintaining old growth may help to mitigate the greenhouse effect. In addition, old growth forests collect moisture from passing clouds and fog banks. When the trees are cut, this moisture is lost, lowering the levels of reservoirs. For example, in the Bull Run watershed of Portland, Oregon, the moisture captured by old growth amounted to 30 inches of additional precipitation.
Once there were about 25 million acres of this sort of rich, complex forest -- nature's cathedrals -- covering the lowlands and mountains of the Pacific Northwest: Washington, Oregon and northern California. Today perhaps 5 million acres remain. One million of them have permanent protection in national parks or wilderness areas. The Forest Service owns between 3.8 and 4.3 million acres (depending on whose study one reads), less than one quarter of which is protected. The Forest Service believes that most of this acreage consists of old growth. On the other hand, the Wilderness Society, which has also mapped the region during the past year, believes that only 2 million acres are left of the classic, ancient forest.
British Columbia has cut about 60 percent of its old growth and may have 7 million acres left, most of it unprotected and open to a rapacious logging industry under few regulations. In Alaska's Tongass National Forest, long the site of below-cost timber sales that returned about a penny on every dollar the Forest Service spent preparing the sales, a million acres of old growth were recently protected under the Tongass Reform Act. However, Alaskan wildlife biologists are still worried that the legislation may not offer enough protection for the Tongass's ancient forest, which is particularly critical habitat for bears, deer, and salmon.
It is in the Pacific Northwest that the logging industry claims it must have continued access to the remaining, unprotected federal acres of old growth to stay in business. One might ask what happened to the old growth on the industry's private lands?
In short, it has been clear-cut. As Jeff DeBonis, a former Forest Service timber sale planner and now president of the Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (AFSEEE), says, "The big industries are liquidating their forest land as fast as possible through clear-cutting, converting it into capital and reinvesting in other sectors of the economy at a much higher rate of return."
As for the industry managing its second growth in a sustainable way, this too, hasn't been done well. Some research shows that during the first half of the 1980s, the industry overharvested its own lands in the Pacific Northwest by as much as 256 percent and in the national forests of the region by as much as 61 percent.
During this same time the timber companies have also been automating, which has laid off some of the industry's work force. For example, in Oregon, the biggest timber-producing state in the country, production increased 4.3 percent from 1977 to 1987 while the number of timber-related jobs declined 14.3 percent. Cutting old growth remains attractive not only because of the quality of the wood but also because an old growth mill employs 10 jobs per million-board-feet cut, whereas an automated second-growth mill employs only four jobs per million-board-feet.
When those in the timber industry say that locking up old growth will take away jobs, they're correct. But should the nation pay the price of that industry's automation and past overharvesting on its own and federal lands? To also say these jobs will be lost as a sole result of protecting trees is misleading. These jobs will inevitably be lost if and when the old growth is felled. Considering what old growth provides in terms of wildlife and recreation, storage of carbon and water, and pure biological and aesthetic irreplaceability, might there not be a better way to deal with it than turning it into plywood, toilet paper and diapers?
Saying, as the timber industry does, that we need to reconceptualize the idea of biological diversity to a "regional landscape dimension" and that we need to look at the Pacific Northwest from a satellite is definitely a good idea. We then find a landscape of which 50 percent is clear-cut. The industry claims that this is a "diverse" ecosystem. On the other hand, John Schoen of Alaska Fish and Game believes that "much of the forest that's been set aside isn't productive old growth. It's at higher elevations and scattered. We're left with small blocks of classic old growth surrounded by seas of clear-cut and second growth."
Nor is planting new trees when old growth has been cut down an adequate solution to preserving this ecosystem. A tree farm consisting of rows of trees, all the same age, is not old growth. Old growth takes centuries, even millennia, to accumulate.
What can be done?
Currently, Congressman Jim Jontz (D-IN) has introduced a bill, the Ancient Forest Protection Act (HR-842), that would preserve the remaining ancient forests of Washington, Oregon, and northern California. It deserves support. As of this writing, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has also been ordered by the courts to designate critical habitat for the spotted owl, a move that may provide de facto protection for certain areas of these forests.
In the long run, the timber industry could stop selling raw logs abroad, which would increase the number of milling jobs here in the U.S. We could also begin the sort of wood savings some of the Scandinavian countries and Japan have instituted. Increased manufacturing efficiency in sawmills and plywood mills, the elimination of construction waste, the reduction of disposable products, and paper conservation could save 232 million cubic meters of wood -- half the total U.S. consumption -- and relieve some of the pressure to cut old growth.
Initially such changes will be hard, both economically and emotionally, on logging communities. A total forest plan must include retraining for these workers. However, to maintain the status quo out of sympathy for these communities is simply a short-sighted compassion that will lead to misery for all. The logging industry doesn't own these trees; it is only, along with the rest of us, their custodians and their beneficiaries. Too much data has been accumulated to deny that cutting the last old growth is hardly custodial and is certainly not passing on the benefits of these ancient forest to future generations.
