Forest Health and Salvage Logging (Part 1 of 2)
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This SSI information update assesses an intensely debated and much
publicized policy issue affecting biodiversity and forest ecosystems in
the United States -- forest health and salvage logging. In the past
several weeks there has been extensive media coverage of the western
forest fires, and several diametrically opposed pieces of federal
legislation intended to address the situation are currently
pending.
This update will discuss how forest health is defined and assessed, how
it is presented from both environmental and industry viewpoints, and how
national policymakers have recently proposed to deal with the issue.
This update does not, however, attempt to provide a comprehensive
proactive proposal for improving forest health, nor does it presume to
define the ultimate "sound science" perspective on the issue.
Rather, this update is intended to help SSI members improve their
understanding of this salient issue and to prepare SSI members for
upcoming policy initiatives that are likely to prompt SSI action alerts.
Over the next several months, we will track various legislative (and
other policy) proposals and will provide sound science perspectives on
these proposals, as appropriate. Because the Craig bill now before
Congress -- described below in considerable detail -- seems likely to
have strong deleterious impacts on forest ecosystems, this update focuses
particularly on salvage logging. Other policy options that have the
effect of decreasing forest health or maintaining forest ecologial
integrity may inspire additional updates.
We encourage SSI members who work on this issue to keep us informed of
scientific perspectives and/or policy developments, and to share their
expertise and opinions with us.
TROUBLE IN THE WOODS: A REVIEW OF FOREST HEALTH
Assessment, Perspectives, and Public Policy
A briefing update produced by the Union of Concerned Scientists
It is a hot year for fires in the United States: wildfires have scorched
nearly 5.9 million acres, hitting the states of California, Idaho,
Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming particularly
hard. In California, for example, 593,000 acres have burned to date; in
Oregon, the total is 315,800 acres, among them one fire that expanded
from 24,000 acres to 65,000 acres in a single day. One of the worst fire
seasons in 30 years, more than 88,500 fires have burned so far this
year, compared with a five-year annual average of 58,969 (updated as of
September 12, 1996, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in
Boise, Idaho).
No single factor is completely responsible for this burning season, but
the widespread fires have thrust the forest health issue back into
public awareness. In fact, although forest health problems are debated
at the national level and laws are passed addressing the issue that
apply across the country, the stimulus for action has traditionally come
from a particular region: the "Eastside" or "Western inland" coniferous
forests. While forest health problems do occur in other parts of the
country -- particularly introduced pests such as the gypsy moth,
chestnut blight, balsam woody adelgid, and Dutch elm disease -- forest
health would not have become the subject of intense national debate
without this year's sensational fires in the inland West.
To be sure, some policies enacted at the national level -- examples
include "Smoky the Bear"-type fire suppression and the salvage logging
rider -- have exacerbated the problems in the field and have highly
polarized the debate among environmentalists and industry. The purpose
of this update is to provide a more dispassionate examination of the
forest health issue. It will discuss how forest health is defined and
assessed from a biological perspective, how it is presented from both
environmental and industry viewpoints, and how national policymakers
have recently proposed to deal with the issue.
**Defining Forest Health
Forest health is a term used to denote the status of a forested
ecosystem, and as many observers have noted, it is not easy to define.
Most of those who have worked in the field will know that, whatever one's
definition and objectives, it's a lot easier to identify unhealthy
forests than healthy ones. The root of the problem is that the very
factors that make a forest unhealthy -- dead trees, disease, fungus,
insects, etc. -- are also present, even important, in a healthy
ecosystem. Left to its own devices, a forest will achieve a dynamic
equilibrium characterized by periods of decay, renewal, succession, and
stagnation. Anthropogenic demands on a forest ecosystem can have profound
influences on its health by disturbing, prolonging, or accelerating any
given period. Thus, any definition must take into consideration ALL the
factors that will contribute to or diminish forest health. Consider two
recent definitions:
"Forest health is defined in this context as a condition of
forest ecosystems that sustains their complexity while providing for
human needs..." (Sampson et al. 1994)
"A desired state of forest health is a condition where biotic
and abiotic influences do not threaten resource management objectives
now or in the future." (USDA-Forest Service, 1993)
As both of these definitions show, assessing forest health is largely
dependent on decisions about which "resource management objectives"
should be pursued and which "human needs" should be provided for. If, as
has been the case in the United States for much of the twentieth
century, the primary objective is timber production, then forests with
productivity well below their potential will be considered unhealthy.
If, on the other hand, biodiversity conservation is the primary
objective, the assessment may be quite different. While industry and
environmentalists disagree on many aspects of the question, they do
agree that there are substantial areas of unhealthy forests in the
United States today -- particularly in the inland West.
** Assessing Forest Health
The forests in the intermountain West -- a region roughly encompassed by
the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Cascades and the Sierra Nevadas,
and from the Canadian border to Arizona and New Mexico -- are dominated
by pines, particularly Ponderosa, Western white, and lodgepole pines. It
has not always been thus. Since the arrival of settlers, the structure,
species composition, and land area of forests has been substantially
altered (Covington and Moore, 1994), and the changes have not been
universally beneficial.
There is general agreement on the historical origins of the forest
health problem in the inland West. Unlike the humid Pacific coast, this
is an area of relatively dry climate with frequent drought years, and
fires are a normal part of its ecological cycles. Before the beginning
of large-scale logging during the second half of the nineteenth- and the
early twentieth-century, many of the region's forests were open stands
of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), in which ground (surface) fires
occurred every 5 to 15 years (DellaSala et al. 1995).
These ground fires burned the accumulated litter, eliminated more
shade-tolerant tree species which would otherwise have established
themselves under the ponderosa pines, and prevented the buildup of
larger amounts of fuel which would have made the fires larger and more
destructive. Thus the short-cycle surface fires tended both to maintain
the dominance of ponderosa pine and to prevent fires from reaching up
into the crowns of the trees and becoming much more damaging
("stand-replacing"). Surface fires were thus frequent, but
stand-replacing forest fires were rare.
In the twentieth century, the combination of several decades of fire
suppression and timber industry preferences for ponderosa pine, western
white pine (Pinus monticola), and larches (Larix occidentalis, Larix
lyallii) led to a buildup of fire-susceptible but shade-tolerant species
in the understories of the open pine forests (Committee on Agriculture,
1992; Sampson et.al. 1994). These species, including Douglas-fir
(Pseudotsuga menziesii), true firs (Abies concolor, Abies grandis), and
lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), have reached high densities in many
areas. A study of northern Arizona forests found that the pre-settlement
tree density averaged about 23 per acre compared to the present-day
density of 851 trees per acre (Covington and Moore, 1994). Such
abnormally large concentrations of biomass are far more susceptible to
insects and diseases and are a source of fuel which can feed
catastrophic fires.
The biomass buildup has also changed the physical structure of the
forests, with more continuity of fuel and fewer and smaller breaks both
horizontally and vertically. The result is large patches of pest- and
fire-susceptible forests with "fuel ladders" from the ground to the
crowns of trees, which make it much more likely that fires will become
stand-replacing and spread over large areas (see Gorte, 1995). Pest and
fire problems are related, and can be mutually reinforcing. Burned trees
are often vulnerable to fungal diseases such as butt and stem rots. On
the other hand outbreaks of pests can lead to the deaths of many trees.
Once killed, these trees are even more susceptible to burning. This
danger is particularly great in years of drought, which as mentioned is
frequent in the region. Large-scale fires in the last decade --
particularly those in 1988, which burned major parts of Yellowstone
National park, and in 1994, when 26 firefighters were killed -- have thus
led to a widespread belief that past management has produced unhealthy
forest ecosystems and that something must be done.
Up to this point, there is a general consensus among the timber
industry, the Forest Service, and environmentalists. Most agree that
fuels have built up to levels beyond the "historic range of
variability," that the composition and structure of forests today is
quite different from those pre-1850, and that past Forest Service and
industry policies are to blame for this situation.
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Subject: SSI Update: Forest Health and Salvage Logging (Part 2 of 2)
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(continued)
**The Forest Industry Response
The timber industry sees the forest health situation as a crisis which
requires immediate emergency action. In the context of declining timber
sales on public lands in the Pacific Northwest due to court injunctions
and more recently the Clinton Administration's Forest Plan, it proposes
massive intervention to reduce the abnormal tree densities and fuel
buildup in the inland forests. In particular, it wants substantial areas
of forest on federal land (National Forests and BLM lands) to be sold for
timber harvesting, both before fires occur (to reduce wood biomass and
thus lower fire dangers) and after pest outbreaks or stand-replacing
fires (to remove as many dead or dying trees as possible). Harvests of
live, healthy trees are called "green" timber sales, while the cutting of
damaged or dead trees is called "salvage" cutting. Both have been
justified by industry on the basis of the urgent need to reduce the
dangerous accumulations of biomass which decades of fire suppression have
caused.
The timber industry also generally supports other means of reducing
forest biomass, such as constructing firebreaks, pre-commercial
thinnings (cutting of trees too small to be used), and prescribed fire.
However, it sees these techniques as inadequate to deal with the crisis
unless accompanied by commercial timber harvesting. For example,
industry argues that prescribed fires cannot be used in many areas
because fuel levels are so high that these intentional burns could not
be controlled; even though intended as surface fires, they would quickly
spread into the canopy and become just as destructive as the "natural"
fires they are intended to prevent.
Thus, in a reversal of the normal situation, it is industry which most
strongly emphasizes the errors of past Forest Service policies and is
most alarmed at the potential for a catastrophe. Although industry
representatives acknowledge they will derive economic benefits from
their proposed solution, supporters of logging claim that the basic
reasons for large-scale green timber and salvage sales are ecological.
**The Environmentalist Response
The environmental community, while in agreement that past mismanagement
has caused a serious problem, parts company from the timber industry's
proposed "solution." Its critiques are twofold -- that the crisis is
being exaggerated, and that commercial logging would do little to solve
it.
Environmentalists point out that while stand-replacing fires were
uncommon in pre-European times, they did occur, and would impact the
forest landscape for many centuries. The result was a patchwork of
forest types and ages, leading to a diverse set of ecosystems able to
recover from perturbations. Pest outbreaks, in particular, are a normal
cyclical feature of this region, and the major tree species are able to
recover from them.
Dead and dying trees, environmentalists contend, are not in and of
themselves a sign of ecosystem ill health, even if sometimes found in
large numbers. They are critical to many ecosystem processes, including
nutrient cycling, seed germination, maintenance of the populations of
natural biological control agents and beneficial fungi, and reproduction
of many species of animals (DellaSala et al. 1995). The mere presence of
pest insects and diseases in a forest area, therefore, cannot be used as
a measure of ill health; indeed their absence is what would be abnormal.
In relation to pest problems, in fact, there is relatively little evidence
that we are in a crisis situation. Consider, for example, the summaries of
the status of the major pests of Western forests, published by the Forest
Service in its report on The Scientific Basis for Silvicultural and
Management Decisions in the National Forest System (Mason et al. 1989).
These summaries, done before the recent polarizing debate on forest health,
found that only two of the eight major types of pest problem in Western
inland conifers were increasing, while six were decreasing. For Pacific
coast conifers, only one of five was increasing while four were decreasing.
Thus the Forest Service's own summaries indicate that, from the point of
view of pest problems, the overall trend is not a growing crisis, but
rather a decline.
Even granting that fire dangers have reached abnormal levels, it is
doubtful whether commercial timber harvesting provides an ecologically
sound solution. Commercial timber sales, whether green or salvage,
emphasize those trees which are large enough to use, while the basic
problem is the abnormal density of small trees. Timber companies
continue to prefer ponderosa and western white pine, which have already
been overexploited, to the low-value true firs which are overly
abundant. Furthermore, the very act of carrying out a commercial timber
harvest involves road construction, soil compaction, sedimentation of
streams, and the arrival of equipment and personnel which are sources of
new fires. Logging can thus be even more damaging than the
stand-replacing fires it is supposed to prevent.
Non-commercial alternatives such as prescribed fire, pre-commercial
thinnings and firebreaks, as well as protection of large areas in
reserves, are environmentalists' preferred solution (DellaSala et al.
1995; Committee on Agriculture, 1992). They agree that actions should be
taken to improve forest health, but these should be driven by ecological
considerations and accurate scientific data rather than by the desire to
justify more timber sales. They warn that "emergency" actions based on
the need to respond quickly to a supposed forest health crisis can
ignore both scientific knowledge and the established legal framework for
management of our national forests.
**The Policy Response
This warning has proven to be justified by the results of the timber
salvage rider, passed by the 104th Congress in July, 1995. While forest
health bills had been introduced with bipartisan support in previous
Congresses (e.g. Rep. Larry LaRocco's (D-ID) HR 4980 in the 102nd
Congress and HR 229 in the 103rd Congress), they had never gotten to the
floor, let alone been passed. But in 1995, the newly
Republican-controlled 104th Congress attached an amendment to the
Rescissions Bill to open up many public lands to salvage logging. This
"Timber Salvage Rider" required the Forest Service to produce between
3.375 billion to 5.625 billion board feet by Dec. 31 and allowed timber
companies to log areas that had been or might be affected by insects,
disease or forest fires. To expedite logging in these areas, Congress
wrote the legislation so that all environmental laws, including the
Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National
Environmental Policy Act would not apply, and restricted the right of
citizens to sue to stop salvage sales.
President Clinton signed the Rescissions Bill, including the rider, on
July 27, 1995. Once it was passed, the timber industry sued the Forest
Service in federal court, arguing that the rider forced the reactivation
of old timber sale proposals that had been held up because they did not
conform to environmental laws. This interpretation was upheld in court,
and forced the Forest Service to prepare additional areas for logging.
These areas included some green timber and in many instances even stands
which the Administration's Forest Plan had placed off limits. It also
forced the Forest Service to sell timber in National Forests all over the
country, even though its justification had been the forest health crisis
in the inland West.
The Administration, which had gone along with the rider saying that it
would only cover a small area of already-dead timber, initially asserted
that the timber industry's interpretation was unlikely to prevail in
court. Having lost the case, however, the President has realized and
acknowledged the mistake of signing the rescissions bill with the rider
attached.
**Current Forest Health Legislation
Two major pieces of legislation relating to forest health have been
considered by Congress in the last year. On the environmentalist side,
Rep. Elizabeth Furse (D-OR) introduced the "Restoration of Natural
Resources Laws on the Public Lands Act of 1995, " H.R. 2745, a bill to
repeal the Timber Salvage Rider. This bill would have stopped all
logging operations begun under the timber rider; subjected all National
Forest logging to environmental laws again; restored to citizens the
right to go to court to object to environmentally disastrous logging;
and re-established the Forest Plan as the basis for logging in national
forests in the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, the amendment was
defeated by a 209-211 in a House vote on June 20. (Another effort, a
similar bill pushed by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) in the Senate, was
earlier defeated by a 54-42 vote in March.)
On the industry side, Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), who chairs the Forests and
Public Lands subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Committee, introduced S.391, the Federal Lands Forest Health Protection
and Restoration Act, last February. This bill would make provisions of
the timber salvage rider a permanent part of the law. The bill would
permanently curtail environmental review, endangered species assessments
and citizen participation in timber sales designed to restore forest
health. Sen. Craig's subcommittee held hearings on his bill this past
April, and the Committee passed the Forest Health bill with a voice vote
on June 19. On the same day, a letter signed by 111 scientists was
delivered to President Clinton (and members of Sen. Craig's Committee)
urging him to reject the bill as "legislation that benefits the logging
industry rather than protecting the ecological integrity of forest
landscapes." The bill was referred to the Committees on Agriculture;
Environment and Public Works on July 16.
Although the Republicans continue to have a majority in both houses, the
environmental community and many scientists have strongly and vocally
opposed Sen. Craig's bill. With the environment being a priority issue
of concern with voters, it is unlikely that the Craig bill will be
passed before November. However the forest health debate may well be an
important feature of this year's election campaign and is likely to
continue in the next Congress.
** This briefing update on forest health was prepared as a special
project of UCS's Global Resources Department. Staff scientist Darren
Goetze and UCS consultant Dr. Doug Boucher were major contributors.
**References
Committee on Agriculture, US House of Representatives (1992) Forest
Health and Clearcutting (Hearings before the Subcommittee on Forests,
Family Farms and Energy). Serial No. 102-97, US Congress, Washington,
DC.
Covington WW and MM Moore (1994) Postsettlement Changes in Natural Fire
Regimes and Forest Structure: Ecological Restoration of Old-Growth
Ponderosa Pine Forests. In: Assessing Forest Ecosystem Health in the
Inland West (RN Sampson and DL Adams, eds). Food Products Press, New
York, NY.
DellaSalla, Dominick A., David M. Olson and Saundra L. Crane (1995)
Ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation: applications to
inland Pacific Northwest forests. In: Proceedings of a Workshop on
Ecosystem Management in Western Interior Forests (D Baumgartner and R
Everett, eds.). Washington State University Cooperative Extension Unit,
Pullman, WA.
Gorte RW (1995) Forest Fires and Forest Health. Congressional Research
Service RepoEErt No. 95-511 ENR. Washington, DC.
Mason, Garland N., Kurt W. Gottschalk and James S. Hadfield (1989)
Effects of timber management practices on insects and diseases. In: The
Scientific Basis for Silvicultural and Management Decisions in the
National Forest System (RM Burns, tech. compiler). USDA-Forest Service
General Technical Report WO-55, Washington, DC.
Sampson, R. Neil, David L. Adams, Stanley Hamilton, Stephen P. Mealey,
Robert Steele and Dave Van De Graaff (1994) Assessing Forest Ecosystem
Health in the Inland West. Forest Policy Center, American Forests,
Washington, DC.
USDA-Forest Service (1993) Healthy Forests for America's Future. U.S.
Forest Service Publication MP-1513, Washington D.C.
September 1996
ssiupdates@ucsusa.org
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