Forest-ism

On the meaning of forest.  

Part I of II.

According to official government figures, forests comprised 66 million acres of the West Coast of the United States (excluding Alaska) at the time of the first mandated survey in 1933 and 63 million acres years later, in 1992, after the timber extraction industry had become a timber farming industry.  That’s only a 4.5% loss after decades of peak extraction.  So what’s the problem?

Defenders of the timber industry cite the fact that more wood is grown in a year than is removed from forests, a statistic that is supposed to shut environmentalists up.  But those lamenting the loss of the West Coast’s forests aren’t wrong.  The methodology is.

Statistics are arrived at through the use of methodological choice, a choice made by humans.  Any methodology looking for answers on deforestation starts with a value-laden philosophical question: “How should we define the word forest?”  It seems like an easy question with an obvious answer, but it isn’t and the answer is far from obvious. 

WILDFIRE!

Wildfires of the size and severity the Pacific Northwest faced in 2015 are downright horrifying.  I can say I actually know, through personal experience.  My occupational relationship to the National Forest Service wasn’t through logging, like my forebears; it was through wildfire-fighting.    

In 2003, I was seventeen years old and working for “camp crew,” the group of federal employees or private contractors that builds and maintains the base camp that forest firefighters are deployed from on large wildfires. The year prior, Oregon had its biggest fire in 130 years. 

The Biscuit Fire, as it was named, burned nearly 500,000 acres of forestland in southern Oregon.  Firefighters spent most of the summer of 2002 fighting the Biscuit Fire and most of the summer of 2003 talking about it.  In my first camp crew deployment near the B&B Complex fire in 2003, I listened to their war stories and imagined fighting the biggest forest fire in Oregon since the 1865 Silverton Fire, which is the fifth largest in U.S. history.

Tiny Bugs

In terms of acres affected, wildfires have caused the most damage to U.S. Western forests this century.  In close second, having ravaged 46 million acres from 2000 to 2012 is a beetle the size of a grain of rice. 

Logging the Forests to Save them from Fire

The debate between save it and log it is longstanding in timber country.  Oregon’s largest city, Portland, is nicknamed “stumptown” and the rest of the state is full of old-time logging memorabilia on the walls of small-town diners, cafes and bars.  Portland is also a hub for environmentalists and progressive residents that pride themselves on being more eco-conscious than the rest of America, while simultaneously cheering for a local professional soccer team called the Timbers and dressing in now fashionable lumberjack chic. 

In Portland, the logging debate seemed to have boiled over in the 1990s before being left to simmer until the Bush presidency pushed through national logging legislation in 2003, but the entire conversation had run out of steam by the time I left timberland in 2011.

Now logging is back on the issue hotplate.  Why? Because the summer of 2015 was one of the four worst wildfire years on record for the Pacific Northwest.  Portland residents experienced this viscerally in July and August when the smoke from burning national forests blew into the city from hundreds of miles away making the air hazardous to breathe and leading city officials to issue an air quality alert.

While that was happening and a lot of national forestland was burning, Congress passed new logging legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives.  The Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2015 has a preamble that reads in part, “[An Act] to address the growing economic and environmental threats of catastrophic wildfire.”  So, once again, legislators have renewed the timber issue, proposing to save the forests by logging them. 

Saving the Forests by Logging Them

In 2015, Oregon legislators renewed the debate on logging by coming out in favor of new legislation that would open more tracts of public land to timber outfits.  Lawmakers say that the bill they have written, the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2015 (H.R. 2467), will “return resilience to overgrown, fire-prone land.” Ostensibly, the bill is intended to preserve national forestland; to save it from the “disastrous consequences of catastrophic wildfire, insect and disease infestations, and other threats to our nation’s forests.”  Environmental organizations criticize the bill, saying that it is basically a piece of pro-logging legislation masquerading as conservationism (for example).  

Discovering Oregon's HF: The Worlds Largest Living Organism

The largest single organism in the world, as far as we know, is an individual armillaria ostoyae living in a forest at the base of the Blue Mountains in Eastern Oregon.  The biggest known individual of the species lives near the town of Prairie City, covers an area of 2,384 acres, and is sometimes called the Humongous Fungus (HF).  The discovery of HF is a recent one.  Until 1992, scientists never expected that the world’s biggest living thing could be a mushroom.  Once the possibility became known, scientists discovered the individual named HF in about five years.   

Armillaria, or the common honey mushroom, has been well-known to foresters and arborists for many decades, as the shoestring fungus or shoestring root rot.  “Shoestring” because the fungi’s black rhizomorphs look something like a boot’s laces and “root rot” because its rhizomorphs surround a tree’s roots and colonize them before sending sheets of potentially deadly white mycelial mats beneath the tree’s bark.  The inside of the bark is then consumed, developing a layer of the fungi’s mycelium, a white substance often described by humans as dried latex paint. 

The consumption of a tree’s cambium by the fungus will eventually kill it.  In the forested areas that armillaria calls home, its victims are generally seedlings, young trees, or otherwise weakened trees that are unable to mount an effective counteroffensive.  Older, larger, and more resistant types of trees are capable of containing or isolating the fungus and learning to live with the parasitic relationship. 

Armillaria, then, only becomes an ecological problem when it is combined with the standard forestry practice of clearcutting and re-planting.  If all the trees in a given area are seedlings, chances are that none of them will survive the onslaught from the previously benign fungus.  Afterall, HF has been living for maybe over 8,000 years in the forests of Eastern Oregon without altogether decimating the forest ecosystem it preys on. 

The Malheur National Forest: Home to the World’s Largest Living Organism

Bigger than the Giant Sequoias and Coastal Redwoods of the coastal range is a quaking Aspen tree named Pando in Utah.  Pando looks like approximately forty thousand individual trees, but it is one “clonal” organism . . .

Malheur National Forest has something that is both alive and bigger, in terms of sheer biomass, than Pando.