Managing the Forest

I happened to be in northeastern Oregon in the early 1980s when the Spotted Owl was discovered living in the old growth forests nearby. It was an interesting time and place for a young environmentalist to be.

The local residents, basically warm, friendly, down to earth folks who knew their land and loved it, were not the original inhabitants of that glorious country. They had displaced the Nez Perce Indians, a proud and peaceful tribe who in many ways epitomize our romantic notions of Native Americans. It was, in fact, that same year that the Nez Perce, for the first time ever, returned to their home land to take part in the Joseph Days Parade.

The town of Joseph, by the way, is named for none other than the Nez Perce Chief Joseph; but Indians were not welcome there for at least a century.

There I was, young and idealistic, determined to take a stand for the preservation of this incredible wilderness that surrounded the current residents of Joseph; and there I faced such extreme animosity toward the notion of saving the Spotted Owl that I decided to hold my breath and quietly listen as people railed against the notion of closing down "their" forests.

They didn't actually hate owls, nor anything else that roamed in the woods. They despised the idea of losing their livelihoods in favor of saving an animal that few of them had ever seen. They bitterly resented being less important than a bird. And they were furious about outsiders coming in to tell them how they should live.

These were a rugged people who made their living from the land, and that included logging. In the absence of a timber industry, there weren't many alternatives for some of them. The economic reality met head-on with the environmental truth.

Striking a balance of management and preservation with our forest lands is never easy. Several recent initiatives to open vast tracts of public land to commercial logging have met with fierce opposition. This wholesale approach to forest management is rarely a good idea. Commercial logging on a grand scale has devastating effects on the forest and surrounding biomes, and rarely includes the one thing it should; the planting of young trees to replace the mature ones taken.

Selective culling is more labor intensive and less commercially attractive. It involves research, selection and careful removal of specific trees. It still necessitates the cutting of roads, in many cases, through previously undisturbed forest areas, but at least it is a much more environmentally sensitive management tool.

Old growth forests are rather rare any more, but there are plans for selective logging in some of them. If you've ever spent any time around the true giants, ancient trees five, six, even eight hundred years old, it's easy to understand why there is such opposition to any kind of tree management in these places.

They provide more than shelter to animals, aesthetic value to the landscape and roots to hold back fragile soil, and they are far more than a source of wood. They are more than giant oxygen-generating beings. Theirs is a quality that has often been described as spiritual, and to touch their essence with words is impossible.

Even so, there may be some credence to limited old-growth forest harvesting.

Trees compete with one another for nutrients and sunlight. When a stand of timber reaches maturity, very little can grow around or beneath it. Sunlight scarcely touches the ground. Younger trees that do persist are usually thin and weak, and grow close together in the only remaining space there is between the roots of their predecessors.

Selective culling of some mature trees opens the forest floor to new growth, allowing multiple generations of trees to thrive in a single place. And if you want a forest to live indefinitely, that's important, because one thing is true of life in all its forms; eventually, life ends. If all of your trees are old, what will take their place when they, at long last, perish?

Have I turned my coat on the environment? Tossed in my lot with the mindless consumers? Not by a long shot. What I have done is learned some very interesting things about managing the forest; and how it was done before there was a thing called the Forest Service.

For at least ten thousand years, and likely a whole lot longer, American forests were home to people as well as animals. Those people didn't manage the forest from without; they lived with it, and from within it.

"When the first European immigrants came to what is now the Angeles National Forest, they said it looked like a well manicured park" said Kat High, of the Hupa nation. Kat is the founder of the Haramokngna Native American Cultural Center, located in the Angeles National Forest near Mount Wilson in southern California.

The people who lived in and came to this region; the Chumash, Tongva, Kitanemuk, Tatavium and Serrano, utilized the abundant resources. They hunted and gathered here. They harvested food and medicinal plants, and made their homes from the trees and plants that thrive in the region. They collected deadfall to use for their fires, reeds for their roofs, plant fibers for their intricate basketry, and acorns and pine nuts for their meals.

"They took care of the forest, and the forest took care of them" explained Kat. "They didn't manage it from an external perspective. They lived here. They didn't deplete the resources. That wouldn't make sense. They cared for the land and it provided them their sustenance. It was a relationship. A relationship of balance."

It was not until native people found themselves confronted with the monetary-based economy brought by immigration to the Americas that they began to exploit the land's resources, as happened in the heyday of the fur trade.

The park-like quality of the landscape early immigrants found when they came to the forest was the result of a balanced approach to living with the land, as opposed to living on it or from it. It is an approach that our current population and desire for dominance over the elements is at odds with. It is, however, a realistic and balanced approach to "managing" our remaining forests and wilderness areas.

It wouldn't hurt to revisit that philosophy of living with our environment when we approach such delicate issues as how to preserve and protect our forests and their inhabitants while still being able to experience and enjoy them.