As Washington prepares to officially adopt “The Evergreen State” as its nickname, it’s impossible to ignore the irony of this commonly used description for our corner of the Pacific Northwest while gazing out over mile after mile of muddy brown clearcut wasteland. While the timber industry will claim “it will just grow back” and boast of how many trees they plant, such arguments fly in the face of the fundamental nature of tree growth and how ecosystems function. What grows back after a clearcut is an even-age low-diversity plantation, which will never be allowed to grow to maturity.
Beyond the obvious aesthetic blight, such antiquated forest practices come with serious consequences to our communities, and indeed to the timber industry itself. Clearcut areas and young, low-diversity plantations do not provide the ecosystem services which are inherent to mature, natural forests. Plantations and clearcuts result in exacerbated heat and drought conditions, as well as increased wind. Such impacts apply to both the forest itself and the surrounding region, making every heatwave or heat dome hotter, every drought drier, and every wind storm more damaging. What’s more, heat, wind, and drought are the primary factors behind extreme fire danger, and such fires spread through plantations far more quickly and with more devastating results than a mature, natural forest.
The exacerbation of heat, drought, wind, and fire danger is enough on its own to condemn clearcutting and plantation forestry, but that’s only scratching the tip of the iceberg in terms of the far reaching consequences of the ongoing poor management of our forests. Clearcutting results in severe pollution of streams and rivers, while also permanently altering the hydrology of entire watersheds. It results in increased water temperatures and reduced stream flows, which along with the pollution, has serious consequences for aquatic species, including salmon. The meager stream buffers required by law do little to counteract this.
Other ecological consequences of low-diversity forest management are disease and infestation. When only a few species of tree are allowed to grow, and are almost universally overplanted at a greater density than is natural, the resulting plantation becomes a ticking time bomb for disease and infestation. Such a plague could sweep through a plantation at a terrifying speed, with the resulting tree mortality transforming them into even more hazardous tinderboxes than they already are. Natural, diverse forests help to slow the spread and overall impact of disease and infestation.
A little known fact about trees is that they actually grow exponentially faster as they age, sequestering CO2 and increasing the quantity of wood they produce at an ever increasing rate. It must also be acknowledged that forests actually become net emitters of CO2 for as long as 20 years after they’ve been cut. With commercial tree plantations typically being allowed only 30 to 40 years between harvests, these forests are only actually sequestering CO2 for a fraction of their lifespan when they are managed as short-rotation plantations. Further fraying the concept of timber products as being climate friendly is the fact that only about 15% of CO2 remains sequestered in timber products after they’ve been cut, hauled, and processed.
The necessary reforms to forest practices can be broken down into three basic components:
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Selective cutting instead of clearcutting and even-age forestry.
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Promoting species diversity in forests.
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Mandating long harvest cycles of at least 100 years.
First and foremost, clearcutting needs to be outright banned. Even-age forestry should be replaced with mixed-age forestry, where trees are selectively harvested at a rate of no more than 25% of trees per acre every 25 years.
Secondly, it is necessary that we promote healthy, diverse ecosystems within forests, as opposed to the sterile plantations which currently dominate millions of acres of the Pacific Northwest. That means when trees are replanted they need to represent a wide range of native species (both coniferous and deciduous), and the use of herbicides to suppress species diversity must be banned.
Thirdly, we must allow trees not just to grow to maturity, but also to have the opportunity to live and continue growing for a time as mature trees. Remember that trees grow exponentially as they age, and they typically reach maturity at around 70 or 80 years old. With this in mind, the bare minimum harvest cycle should be set at 100 years. This would both allow us to enjoy the many ecosystem benefits of mature forests, and greatly increase the amount of wood produced by each tree.
Beyond this, we also need to ensure that a number of trees are designated to remain permanently on each acre to one day become old growth, serving to increase the health of surrounding forests. These designated habitat trees would be allowed to live, die, and decompose, whereupon a replacement habitat tree would be chosen. Standing and fallen dead trees are an important part of forest ecosystems, and it is vital that we restore this cycle of life, death, and decomposition which is almost entirely lacking from our commercially harvested forests today.
It’s also clear that current stream buffer zones are of inadequate size to protect watersheds from the adverse impacts of logging. Even with the aforementioned reforms and the positive impact they will have on watersheds, it is necessary to increase the width of stream buffers to further protect and enhance aquatic ecosystems for the sake of salmon, among other species. Pollutants from runoff, increased stream temperatures, and permanent disruption of the hydrology watersheds are all consequences of current forest practices.
Forest practices reforms are also key to resolving recent conflicts over certain legacy forests which do not meet DNR’s Maturation 2 definition. This conflict came to a head with the Sizzler and Highlander sales, which were presented and approved at the April meeting of the Board of Natural Resources. These meet the commonly accepted definition of legacy forests as older, naturally regenerated forests, but not the narrow definition which DNR has decided to assign to them. By implementing forest practices as have been described here, DNR could strike an acceptable middle ground with these edge-case forests and bring such sales forward as selective harvest operations rather than clearcut logging (often referred to as Variable Retention Harvest (VRH)). This would greatly reduce the increasing tension between environmental advocates and DNR. To be clear, all sales included in Commissioner Upthegrove’s pause should be permanently excluded from logging, as should those currently being fought in court by the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition. Many of the sales approved by former Commissioner Franz were among those forests most worthy of protection, and the decision to log these 2328 acres needs to be reversed.
Sweeping forest practices reforms can be implemented without interrupting the supply of timber products, while maintaining jobs in the timber industry. Better yet, these reforms will bring long term stability to what has historically been a volatile sector. Reforms will dramatically reduce the risk of natural disasters to the prosperity of this industry, and create a path towards mending the divide between loggers and environmental advocates. It is a path towards genuine, lasting healing for both the land and our communities.
Our window to effectively implement forest practices reforms is shrinking. Every clearcut is a blow which sets that patch of land back by decades, and the cumulative degradation of repeated clearings and continued monoculture forestry will have long lasting repercussions which will echo for centuries to come. The best time to act was two hundred years ago, the second best time to act was 100 years ago, the third best 50 years ago, and today might well be our last chance to right the course.
The Washington State Forest Practices Board next meets on May 14th, and written comments may be emailed to forest.practicesboard@dnr.wa.gov. To give spoken testimony in-person or remotely at the meeting, it is necessary to register in advance here (the registration form was not yet available as of time of writing).
It is also helpful to speak up at the monthly Board of Natural Resources meetings. Registration instructions may be found here, and you may also email comments to bnr@dnr.wa.gov.
The Legacy Forest Defense Coalition is also raising funds to fight the DNR in court to protect endangered legacy forests which were previously approved by the Franz administration. You can help them out via their GoFundMe campaign.
Click here to see a beautiful video of current forest practices and why we need to reform them
Andy Zahn is a writer, photographer, and environmental advocate dwelling in the shadow of Mt. St. Helens. A lifelong interest in science and land management has inspired him to employ his skills to aid the efforts of conservation focused nonprofits.
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