Archive for January, 2011

Earlier this month, we wrote about Hal Salwasser, the dean of the School of Forestry at Oregon State University. Salwasser described in an Oregonian article how our federal forestland is suffering from neglect and no longer offers any economic or social value.

With a new spotted owl plan still being formulated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the question of whether we should be thinning and selectively harvesting our federal forests in the West is especially pertinent.

Salwasser mentioned pilot projects in Western Oregon that are bringing timber companies, environmental groups and the federal government together to selectively harvest federal forestland, thin the forests to protect from wildfire and also create better habitat for the spotted owl.

The Medford Mail Tribune wrote last week about one of the projects in the Applegate Valley near Medford. The paper quoted local residents and government officials who were excited about a more collaborative approach to federal forestland.

“This is the kind of stuff we’ve been talking about for 20 years,” (said Jack Shipley, head of a community partnership that helped get the project off the ground.) “Instead of fighting about jobs versus owls, we all come to the table and have both. This will be ecologically driven but will include jobs.”

“…We have moved beyond the ‘cut or no-cut’ argument,” (Shipley) said. “We are saying there needs to be active management on the landscape. We want to move forward and do something proactive.

But Doug Robertson had a different take on the pilot projects in an insightful op-ed in the Capital Press. Robertson is the head of the Association of O&C Counties, a group of Oregon counties with a large amount of federal forestland.

In regard to the pilot projects, he said “while I am hopeful for success, my expectations are low.” Robertson added that the proposed new spotted owl plan — and current federal rules — make it almost impossible to smartly manage federal forestland.

He said he did not hear promising answers in a recent meeting with federal officials.

The spotted owl expert from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made no mention of the barred owl, in spite of a growing consensus that a major threat to spotted owl survival is the larger, more aggressive and invasive barred owl.

When asked how the agency would deal with this threat, the expert said the barred owl could be trapped, but he admitted that he had contacted many agencies on the East Coast, where the barred owl originated, but none of the states contacted wanted any of their native barred owls returned to them. The spotted owl expert mentioned shooting the barred owl, but doubted the public would support it.

The concern voiced by many is that we are building management policy for federal forest around the recovery of a species that can’t be recovered.

There is no doubt that the pilot projects in Oregon are promising, but much deeper reform of our federal policies needs to be done.

It’s frustrating – especially with a new and flawed spotted owl plan under consideration — to think about the failed dreams and wasted potential of our forestland. So many lives and communities have been ruined by onerous harvest limitations that don’t have any connection to science or reality.

Hal Salwasser, the dean of the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, understands this. In an extensive piece in the Oregonian, he describes how federal forest policy has created forests that are failing on all levels: suspectible to forest fires and beetles and also of no economic or social value.

Instead, he says, it’s time to reclaim the federal forests as a source of community wealth and health by making more timber available for logging. We can do it, he says, by returning to areas where trees were logged in the 1960s to 1980s, were replanted and have grown to suitable size. That can be done without screwing up the environment, without cutting old growth and without grinding intrusive new roads into roadless areas, he says.

Salwasser cites a U.S. Bureau of Land Management harvest project in southwestern Oregon as “a good experiment” in balancing harvesting with environmental stewardship.

Using federal forests for responsible harvest again will make the forests and their surrounding communities healthier.

In Salwasser’s view, Oregon has hundreds of thousands of federal acres that can be part of a sustainable timber supply. Another harvest of replanted trees would avoid cutting old growth, building new logging roads or violating stream setbacks and habitat protection rules added in the intervening years.

Forest productivity and mill efficiency have increased so it takes fewer trees to meet the international demand for wood products, says Salwasser, who has been dean for a decade at OSU.

“That frees up the rest of the forest to do something else,” such as provide wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration and water filtration.