Re: TownHall.com – 5/1/2008 – “Treehuggers Against Trees” – Iain Murray

Compelling fiction, but nothing to do with the history of American forests.

Native American did practice burning to clear patches for crops and create forest edges for game animals but Native Americans had relatively little concern for forest health per se.

Murray says “The pioneers, however, used much more wood in their civilization than the Native Americans. They needed it for housing, for boats and river ships, for railroad sleepers, for carriages, and for town infrastructure. To them, fire was an enemy”. While the pioneers did use much more lumber than the Native Americans, what the pioneers used was what the local forests provided. Transportation difficulties made moving wood long distances impractical, and while small areas of forests surrounding growing population centers were cleared for their wood content, the vast majority of the pioneer forests that were cleared were cleared by burning for farmland, not for wood products. 

Early forestry practice involved clear cutting and leaving. Neither fast nor slow growing trees were planted --- logged forests were left with slash on the ground, resulting in huge fires that decimated uncut neighboring forest land, towns, and farms as well. This was a particular problem in the upper mid west. Consider the 1871 fire at Peshtigo WI where 1.3 million acres were burned and 1,500 people were killed. The founders of our national forest reserves were not the kind of “environmentalists” that Murray sees lurking behind every bush but practical people who recognized that our forests were being destroyed and the consequential losses therein wore intolerable. The predecessors of our National Forests were created in 1891 to stop the pillage of our forest resources and protect our watersheds; it wasn’t until 6 years later that the cutting of any timber at all was allowed on government controlled forest lands.

State attempts to encourage replanting by offering tax breaks to foresters for managing their post logged forests were to no avail --- early foresters were only interested in cutting and running and preferred to loose their land to tax foreclosure rather than stay and manage their land for future generations (at any reasonable discount rate, the cost of maintaining a stand for years without income was not worth the opportunity cost of moving on to the next stand of virtually free timber). Lots of state lands were acquired by such tax foreclosures.

Virtually all the original attempts to bring European style sustained yield forestry to the United States were efforts of the federal governments over the strong objections of the cut and run loggers, a notable exception being the Pinchot managed Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina before Pinchot became the chief national forester.

In time, industry came around to growing as well as logging timber only because land prices rose and standing timber supply declined to a point where it was no longer possible to cut and run and meet market demand with private holdings at the same time. But that didn’t stop them from complaining that the government was “locking up” the forests by requiring them to do on public land what they were no longer economically able to do on their own private land.

It’s a myth that private forests are better managed than national forests. To the extent that national forests are poorly managed, it is mainly due to budgetary and political policies mainly imposed by the timber industry interests on our government that slant budgetary allocations toward timber extraction and away from any constructive ecological management. 

Murray forgets that ecological processes are not necessarily favorable to what man wants out of forests, and fire prevention is not a high priority for ecological processes.

In the Pacific Northwest wet coastal Douglas Fir forests, infrequent “catastrophic” fires are natural and have occurred for thousands of years without man’s interference. In these forests, the climax species is primarily Western Hemlock with a few large species, especially Western Redcedar, Grand Fir, and in limited areas Sitka Spruce, mixed in. Huge, wide ranging fires burn those fire susceptible trees and the burned areas are reseeded by a few old, legacy Douglas Fir trees. Douglas Fir seedlings grow much faster than the other species and thus almost completely form the forest canopy. But Douglas Fir cannot reproduce in its own shade while the climax species can can, so the climax species form an understory of young trees that persist and slowly grow in the shade of the forest cover. Barring fire, the Douglas Fir begin to decline, and on the timeframe of perhaps 500 years begins to be reduced in the forest population, and the forest eventually reverts to its climax form, at least until the next “catastrophic” fire. In these forests you can keep Douglas Fir growing forever by thinning and clear cut rotations, but if you think that has anything to do with natural processes or forest health, you just don’t really understand anything about either natural processes or forest health.

In the western dry high elevation mountain forests dominated by lodgepole pine, the situation is even more extreme. Lodgepole pine is a fast growing, short lived, insect prone tree requiring full sun to germinate and grow and hot fire to release its seeds. Stands of lodgepole pine grow quickly and burn to the ground more quickly only to rise again, like the phoenix, out of their ashes. There is really no other way for lodgepole in these forests. If you think a pre-fire stand of dense, thin, over-aged forests is unhealthy, so be it, but understand, this is a necessary precondition to a new stand. If you could thin a lodgepole stand without burning it to the ground, lodgepole pine wouldn’t be able to naturally regenerate. And in the end, when the last lodgepole died of old age without getting a chance to release its seed in fire, the stand would be gone forever unless hand replanted or reseeded by man.

Murray thinks that the environmental movement was born in the 1970’s. That’s an error that Murray could correct by actually studying the subject he’s writing about.

Murray thinks the environmental movement has made American forestry policies worse. Again he exposes great ignorance. Forest policies prior to the environmental movement couldn’t have gotten worse --- anything worse is unimaginable.

Murray thinks “Environmentalists are dogmatically opposed to man's interference with nature”. He’s again wrong. Environmentalists believe that many of man’s interference with nature have consequences detrimental to man, and believe that all things considered, the less interference with nature, the better for man. But they support many “interferences” with nature that are necessary for mankind’s survival and/or wellbeing.

Murray said “in 1988, a million acres of Yellowstone National Park burned to the ground as the combination of overgrown forests and natural burn led to catastrophe”. The Yellowstone burn did not level a million acres of forest, but took many significant bites out of it. And although it might be accurate to describe the fire as a catastrophic fire, it hardly can be said to be a catastrophe, and the catastrophic lodgepole pine forest fires is what you get when nature takes its own course.

Murray says “Before the 1990s, commercial logging companies had been allowed access to the national forests for a fee that was placed in a trust fund, something that helped keep the forest service within budget and provided extra funds for fire control when needed. Moreover, logging represents a way to thin forests without the risk of managed burns. Loggers benefit, the forest benefits and the public and taxpayers benefit”. Actually, with the exception of the Pacific Northwest, the Forest Service not only sells its timber below market value but looses money on the sale. Actually, logging (at least in the west) consists of clear cutting, not thinning. Actually it would be completely uneconomical to harvest the understory to preserve the mature trees (which is what frequent ground fires accomplish) --- loggers instead remove mature trees and leave the fire-prone understory components behind unreduced or as slash.

I could go on, but I’m fed up. Murry just doesn’t know or understand anything about the subject he has written about. He knows nothing of forestry, forest history, environmentalism, or anything else he has written about here --- my guess is he just made it up as he went along.