The Final Forest: Big Trees, Forks, and the Pacific Northwest

6. The Guru

106 Standing waist high in pink fireweed on the crown of Gold Mountain, Jerry Franklin looks down a slope of Washington’s Cascade range to see an example of his ideas put into action. A score of U.S. Forest Service employees from the Darrington Ranger District northeast of Seattle have accompanied the scientist to look at one of their first attempts to produce what Franklin calls a deliberate “dirty clearcut.” It is one of many bits of verbal imagery he has coined to get his ideas across. This most recent logging pattern on Gold Mountain puts into practice Franklin’s theories about “New Forestry,” his name for an attempt to integrate ecology with wood production. The views are spectacular and troubling this late summer day. To the east, between Prairie and White Chuck peaks, a series of clear-cuts stripe a ridge that runs in front of the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area. The slope is like an unrolled scroll documenting controversial government logging practices. On several of the clear-cuts the steep slope, thin soil, and dry sun have defeated repeated replantings. Some of the vertical slashes through the forest have been nicknamed “ski runs” for their chute-like pattern. Another oddly shaped clearcut, designed in an apparently vain effort at encouraging reseeding from surrounding mature trees, is called The gUrU the Guru 107 the Playboy Bunny: its round patch has two shaven “ears” that cut uphill. From this distance, it is as if someone cut patterns on the mountainsides with a lawn mower. The Mount Baker–Snoqualmie National Forest doesn’t look very managed from this vantage point. It looks abused. Below the crest of Gold Mountain, the Forest Service is trying something new. Its latest clearcut is deliberately messy. While most of the trees have been logged, about 10 percent of the dead snags and green conifers of what was an old-growth forest stand have been left standing. The intention is to provide a refuge for surviving wildlife. Quite a bit of wood has been left on the ground as well, as if the loggers quit before they were quite finished yarding their harvest. Phyllis Reed, the district wildlife biologist who helped lay out this sale with its surviving trees, explains how the trees and rotting logs will provide shelter to animals. Like this attempt to modify clearcutting, Reed is a symbol of how fast the Forest Service is changing. When her boss, forty-nine-year-old District Ranger Fred Harnisch, joined the agency in 1963, it was almost exclusively male. The Forest Service was divided between timber-oriented “foresters” who spent much of their time planning timber sales, and engineers who spent most of their time designing logging roads. Most were from the rural West and they reflected the assumptions of their region. “The people in the organization knew we should be changing, but the direction was to get the cut out,” Harnisch recalled. “One guy [outside the agency] told me that we worked hard, but the one problem was that we didn’t listen to people. We didn’t have time. Our nose was to the grindstone.” Now the district staff is 45 percent female and has biologists and archaeologists and hydrologists who look at the forest as a place to do more than grow wood. The new mix is typical of the entire agency since Congress passed the National Forest Management Act in 1976. The change has been slow—it took fourteen years for the Mount Baker– Snoqualmie National Forest that includes the Darrington District to finish a radically revamped plan that Congress called for in that 1976 act— but it has also been significant. As a young wire service reporter in Washington, D.C., I covered the often tedious and technical hearings that produced the 1976 Act and wondered at the time if earnest lobbyists had not overblown its significance. 108 the final foreSt The law was prompted by a court ruling halting clear-cutting on federal land in West Virginia, but went beyond that issue to force the Forest Service to consider other forest values. “The days have ended when forest can be viewed only as trees, and the trees only as timber,” Senator Hubert Humphrey told his colleagues. Yet in the years after the law passed, Humphrey’s declaration seemed hollow. Little immediately changed in Forest Service practices. The reasons for the legislative tedium are more apparent now...