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TODAY Thursday 4 September 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Logging

Most people who live west of Denver and east of Sacramento subscribe to the public doctrine that US National Forests should remain -- in the felicitous phrase -- "land of many uses." They can and do disagree on which uses are appropriate to which degree in which places, but there's a solid majority of westerners who approve of some mix of logging, ranching, mining, recreation, and wilderness on the vast acreage of federal lands.

In this they are faithful to precedent. When Gifford Pinchot argued for the establishment of the National Forests, he explicitly cited the need to maintain a replenishable supply of timber. In the east, private owners had razed the once-great forests, and Pinchot and his generation believed that the state had a crucial role in protecting resource-extractors from their own worst practices. It is no accident that the US Forest Service is a part of the Department of Agriculture.

The near-century-old system is under great strain these days as the Forest Service tries to accommodate the passionate advocacy of competing uses. Yesterday's news is symptomatic: the General Accounting Office released an audit which criticized the excruciating length of time (six to ten years) it takes the Forest Service to write rules for logging and other commercial uses; there is a legislative fight brewing over rights-of-way across National Forest land; environmentalists compelled the disclosure of a scientific report which said that the Forest Service had allowed the cutting of healthy trees under the guise of "salvage;" and a nine-organization coalition of conservationists challenged the management plan for the Targhee National Forest in Idaho, a plan described by loggers as already disastrously anti-commercial.

Both the enviros and the loggers have some good arguments. The loggers can say that reforestation efforts have seen to it that the net consequence of their activities is more, not less timber. They can point to jobs, export opportunities and an insatiable domestic market for home-construction wood (this morning's New York Times has a long feature on the demand for bigger houses; a new home enclosed 1500 square feet in 1947, 1900 square feet in 1977, and 2500 square feet in 1997). The enviros can say that what's called reforestation is really the conversion of a biologically-rich forest into a biologically-impoverished tree farm, with calamitous consequences for thousands of species. They can point out that logging jobs have been in decline for years, that timbering on public lands is subsidized by taxpayers, and that preservation of the forests is in the long-term economic interests of local citizens.

What has happened, among other things, is that humans have realized that they overestimated their abilities to "manage" complex ecosystems. Pinchot and his colleagues didn't have the insights of ecology, didn't think in terms of biodiversity, and consequently were seduced into thinking that board feet were all that mattered (Americans weren't unique in this; Germans and Scandinavians are only now counting the losses incurred by their attachment to "scientific" sylviculture). Enviros, in their turn, have been too glib about the economic viability of wood-harvesting systems that can be honestly described as "sustainable." A few niche markets aside, it's extremely hard for a landowner to turn a profit and preserve biodiversity at the same time.

All of which makes me think that the radical minority out West has it right. Tim Hermach, for example. Hermach runs the National Forest Council in Oregon. For years he has advocated a straight-ahead policy of no new cuts on National Forest land. He tends to upset some people, including many environmentalists who have to operate in the here-and-now. He doesn't spend much time on band-aid gestures like job re-training for displaced bulldozer men. But at a remove of 3,000 miles, his logic seems impeccable: there is no known way for commercial logging to co-exist with ecological forest preservation, so stop the logging. The truth, he implies, is that we really don't have a clue yet on what sustainable forestry really means.

I wonder if we don't need a few Nixon-goes-to-China moves right now. I wonder if we don't need a kind of Grand Accommodation. Some conspicuous defender of private property and economic development (Newt Gingrich?) should advocate a modified Hermach position: that National Forests be set aside in perpetuity for wilderness, research, and recreation. And some conspicuous green (Al Gore?) should propose that, after a comprehensive biological inventory, significant fractions of the National Forests should be sold to private owners, who would conduct operations on those newly-privatized lands under the same regulations as would obtain for any farmer or rancher. There would be a huge brouhaha, of course, and people would argue heatedly about the appropriate fractions of strict-conservation federal land versus economically-available denationalized land. But the process would be educational, and certainly engaging. And we could relieve the Forest Service of its agony of trying to apportion uses that, in the end, simply may not be compatible.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Don't forget that Liberty Tree features a clear and thorough summary of all the big Forests issues in our In The Trenches section. Brad Auer does the honors.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

9/03: Fishing
9/02: Our Biodiversity Problems
8/29: Babies
8/28: MegaSheep and SuperCow
8/27: East Asia / Southeast Asia
8/26: No Drama on the Rhine
8/25: The End of Nature Again
8/22: Our Friend Escerichia 0157:H7
8/21: Free the Greenpeace One Million!
8/20: Cattle and Jet Skis

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