This is the third of three Public Lands Blog posts that consider the desire of the Forest Service to amend a provision of the “Eastside Screens,” standards designed to protect public forests east of the Cascade Range. Part 1 examined the history, science, and politics leading up to the adoption of the Eastside Screens and their implementation since then. Part 2 explored issues both of management and of the science behind the management. Part 3 suggests what the Forest Service could do to improve the Eastside Screens, in both the short and long term.
Figure 1. Old-growth ponderosa pines benefit from frequent wildfires to keep young trees from establishing and eventually crowding them out. If fire is frequent enough, it is of low intensity and easily rebuffed by thick bark. Source: Sandy Lonsdale. (This image appeared in the book Oregon Wild: Endangered Forest Wilderness, Timber Press, 2004.)
Sometimes the newest science is not the best science. Sometimes the oldie is still a goodie.
The 1994 report of scientists entitled “Interim Protection for Late-Successional Forests, Fisheries, and Watersheds: National Forests East of the Cascade Crest, Oregon and Washington” stands the test of time. This report was prepared by the Eastside Forests Scientific Society Panel, representing the Wildlife Society, the American Fisheries Society, the Society for Conservation Biology, the American Ornithologists’ Union, the Ecological Society of America, and the Sierra Biodiversity Institute.
It is important to note that the writers and editors of the report were not employed by the US Forest Service. This is not to say that Forest Service scientists in the Forest Service’s research branch are incapable of doing science not biased toward the extraction of wood from forests (although a large portion of the work of the agency’s research branch is dedicated to wood utilization and silvicultural practices that favor wood production), which is the bias of the management branch of the Forest Service (and also the third and last branch: state and private forestry). This is to say that the science so produced is suspect and must receive additional scrutiny. Other US Department of Agriculture scientists (the Forest Service is part of the USDA), other government scientists, scientists for Big Pharma, and scientists for the tobacco industry have produced both excellent and horrible “science.” Relying on science from a single source—especially from a source with a potential conflict of interest or ax to grind—is never a good idea.
Here we revisit the 1994 interim recommendations of the Eastside Forests Scientific Society Panel (with my commentary, of course). We also consider what the Forest Service should do with the 21-inch rule. The aim is to help the Forest Service make a slight midcourse correction rather than ignite another eastside forest war.
What the Forest Service Should Do with Eastside Forests
The Forest Service should follow each of these recommendations, which are based on impartial and sound science:
1. Do not log late-successional/old-growth forests in eastern Oregon and Washington.
Instead, the Forest Service decided to generally not log late-successional/old-growth trees rather than forests.
2. Cut no trees of any species older than 150 years or with a diameter at breast height (DBH) of 20 inches or greater.
Instead, the Forest Service rejected age and added an inch (and a lot of board feet) to the recommendation. It also narrowed its rule to only live trees.
3. Do not log or build new roads in aquatic diversity management areas (ADMAs).
The Forest Service has not adopted any such prohibition..
4. Do not construct new roads or log within current (1) roadless regions larger than 1000 acres or (2) roadless regions that are biologically significant but smaller than 1000 acres.
In 2001, the Forest Service adopted the “roadless rule” that extends some, but incomplete, protections to roadless areas generally larger than 5,000 acres . Loopholes were left large enough to drive log trucks through (it’s that discretion thing). The loopholes should be closed and the minimum roadless acreage size lowered.
5. Establish protected corridors along streams, rivers, lakes, and wetlands. Restrict timber harvest, road construction, grazing, and cutting of fuelwood within these corridors.
While such “corridors” have been somewhat established, the actual protections are few to nil.
6. Prohibit logging of dominant or codominant ponderosa pine from Eastside forests.
If the ponderosa pine is alive and larger than 21 inches DBH, then the Forest Service is generally not logging it. However, dominant or codominant ponderosa pine smaller than 21 inches DBH can be logged.
7. Prohibit timber harvest in areas prone to landslides or erosion unless it can be conclusively demonstrated by peer-reviewed scientific study that no associated soil degradation or sediment input to streams results from that harvest.
The Forest Service has not adopted any such prohibition.
8. Prevent livestock grazing in riparian areas except under strictly defined conditions that protect those riparian areas from degradation.
No such animal exists.
9. Do not log on fragile soils until it is conclusively demonstrated by peer-reviewed scientific study that soil integrity is protected and that forest regeneration after logging is assured.
The Forest Service has not adopted any such prohibition.
10. Establish a panel with the appropriate disciplinary breadth to develop long-term management guidelines that will protect Eastside forests from drought, fire, insects, and pathogens.
The Forest Service has not establish any such panel..
11. Establish a second panel to produce a coordinated strategy for restoring the regional landscape and its component ecosystems. Emphasize protecting the health and integrity of regional biotic elements as well as the processes on which they depend.
While such was tried by the Forest Service (in the form of the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project), it failed. In fact, the agency’s two-decade-plus effort to revise forest plans for its Blue Mountains national forests (Malheur, Ochoco, and Wallowa-Whitman) has (so far) failed repeatedly.
To the panel’s recommendations, I would add these (but hey, I’m no scientist):
A. Remove all national forestland from the commercial timber base.
Any logs gleaned should be the by-product of scientifically sound ecological restoration thinning.
B. Reintroduce fire after every thinning project.
If the agency gets behind on the burning it pledges to do as part of every so-called restoration project (as it has), the Forest Service should stop any new thinning until the prescribed fire catches up.
C. Dial back livestock grazing to protect and restore both riparian and upland areas.
Bovine bulldozers are harmful to uplands as well as riparian areas. Any forage that goes through a domestic bovine or ovine (or equine [feral horses are not “wild]) is not available for native species (e.g. elk, deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, sage grouse, or butterflies).
D. Let all fires burn.
Use money and people now being spent pretending to put out wildfires (weather decides the outcome of most fires) instead to make human structures fire resistant, if not fireproof.
E. Reintroduce fire to these fire-dependent forests.
Reallocate the same money, staff, and other resources from the wildfire season to the prescribed-fire season.
Figure 2. The Forest Service should take a walk. Source: Ric Bailey (This image appeared in the book Oregon Wild: Endangered Forest Wilderness, Timber Press, 2004.)
What the Forest Service Should Do with the Eastside 21-Inch Rule
The Forest Service is both unwilling and unable to comprehensively manage eastside forests for the conservation and restoration of biological diversity, watershed integrity, and long-term carbon storage. The agency has put this question on the table: What should the Forest Service do with its 21-inch rule?
It should do three things:
1. Do nothing until we have another president.
Not since the presidencies of Reagan and Bush I has the Forest Service felt such pressure to get out the cut. This pressure pushes (and permits, as it is the agency’s proclivity) the agency to view the solution to every problem to be ever more logging.
The current president issued an executive order in late 2018 telling the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to increase their cuts by 31 percent. If, as the Forest Service insists, the proposed rule change is not about getting more logs to the mills, the agency should delay a decision. From the standpoint of public trust, any decision issued while the executive order is in place is fatally suspect—especially in a time when the secretary of agriculture himself (not the chief of the Forest Service herself) has regular conference calls with regional foresters to see how the cut is coming.
2. Change the central minimum metric from trees 21 inches DBH to trees 150 years old.
However, since age cannot be precisely determined, there must be a built-in margin of safety. This can be achieved by setting the age at 100 years—or better yet, at the culmination of mean annual increment (CMAI) for the particular tree species on the particular site.
What the hell is CMAI? I hear you asking.
As every forester knows, it is the age of a tree (or stand) at which the maximum annual growth of biomass peaks. The CMAI is a good approximation of when a tree (or stand) transitions from a young tree (or stand) to a mature tree (or stand). Even after this peak, a tree or stand continues to take on biomass (about half of which is carbon), often quite a lot. A later transition is when a mature tree (or stand) becomes an old(-growth) tree (or stand).
Once the particular CMAI for a tree (or stand) is known, field observation of bark plate width and other factors can determine if the tree is older or younger than the CMAI.
What about those cases where it is ecologically desirable to remove mature trees older than their CMAI age? Just as it does now, the agency can do a site-specific forest plan amendment. The removal of mature trees from eastside forests should be justified and transparent and not done willy-nilly.
3. Apply whatever metric to only half of the eligible stands and leave the other half alone.
The eastside forests have been hammered by fire exclusion, high-grade logging, livestock grazing, and roads. They are now, and increasingly will be, hammered by climate disruption. As both the past and the future for these forests is unprecedented, both humility and hedging are in order.
Permit me to close by quoting myself from testimony given to the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in 2010. I believe it also has aged well.
While today’s best available science says that careful and constrained—but widespread—thinning of dry forest types on the eastside of the Pacific Northwest is the best course of action, such may not be the case in the future. The existing scientific consensus may either grow stronger or turn out to be wrong. To mitigate this risk of wrong prediction it is prudent for society to hedge against the risks of both ignorance and arrogance.
Today, the best available science says careful and constrained restoration thinning of much of these degraded dry forests is necessary to return them to ecological health. However, we should no more thin every acre than not thin any acre of eastside dry forest types. Perhaps one-half should be thinned, while perhaps one-half should not be thinned. In this way, if the best available science of today turns out to be correct, we will have done well for the forest on a landscape scale. If the best available science of today turns out to be wrong, at least we won’t have made the entire landscape worse.
Figure 3. The late, great Tim Lillebo of Oregon Wild. He, more than anyone else, taught me that becoming an eastside forest restorationist as well as an eastside forest preservationist makes for a well-rounded conservationist. This forest needs no restoration, save perhaps removing the livestock and letting it burn when it wants to. Source: Elizabeth Feryl, Environmental Images. (This image appeared in the book Oregon Wild: Endangered Forest Wilderness, Timber Press, 2004.)
Stay Tuned
The Forest Service will reveal its plan for “management direction for large diameter trees in Eastern Oregon” in two webinars:
Session 1: Wednesday, August 19, 6–7:30 p.m. PDT (technology orientation at 5:45 p.m. PDT)
Session 2: Thursday, August 20, 1:30–3 p.m. PDT (technology orientation at 1:15 p.m. PDT)
The Adobe Connect connection information will likely be on the agency’s Eastside Screens Plan Amendment webpage.