Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West

Introduction

Introduction W hen whites first came to the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon and Washington in the early nineteenth century, they found a land of lovely open forests full of yellow-bellied ponderosa pines five feet across. These were stately giants the settlers could trot their ponies between, forests so promising that people thought they had stumbled into paradise. But they were nothing like the humid forests to which easterners were accustomed. Most of the forest communities across the inland West were semi-arid and fireadapted , and whites had no idea what to make of the fires. After a century of trying to manage the forests, what had seemed like paradise was irrevocably lost. The great ponderosa pines vanished, and in their place were thickets of fir trees. Although the ponderosas had resisted most insect attacks, the firs that replaced them were the favored food for numerous pests. As firs invaded the old pine forests, insect epidemics spread throughout the dry western forests. By 1991, on the five and a half million acres of Forest Service lands in the Blue Mountains, insects had attacked half the forest stands, and in some stands nearly 70 percent of the trees were infested. Even worse, in the view of foresters and many locals, was the threat of catastrophic fires. Although light fires had burned through the open pine-; every ten years or so, few had exploded into infernos that killed entire stands of trees. But as firs grew underneath the pines and succumbed to insect damage, far more,fuel became available to sustain major fires. By the beginning of the 1990s, one major fire after another was sweeping the inland West, until it seemed as if the forests might all go up in smoke. The Forest Service understandably saw the situation as a major 3 4 INTRODUCTION crisis in forest health. A few years earlier, loggers had harvested over 860 million board feet a year of timber from the Blues-nearly 600 million of this from the three national forests in the area, the Wallowa Whitman, the Malheur, and the Umatilla. To get some sense of the magnitude of these harvests, consider that a board foot-the standard measure for timber-is a piece of wood twelve inches square and one inch thick. The total harvests of Forest Service timber in President Clinton's 1994 forest plan for the entire Northwest were set at about one billion board feet a year-only 15 percent more than the Blues alone were producing a few years earlier . The Blues once had the largest stand of commercial forest between the Cascades and the Rockies, but by 1993 the harvests had slowed to a trickle. Alot of money, a lot of timber, and a lot of jobs were at stake. In an unusual admission of guilt and confusion, the Forest Service stated that this crisis was caused by its own forest management practices. Yet no one could agree exactly which practices had caused the problems, or why foresters followed those practices in the first place. On one level, the landscape alterations were the result of a series of ecological changes. When the federal foresters suppressed fires in the open forests dominated by ponderosa pine, firs grew faster than pines in the resultant shade, and they soon came to dominate the forests. When droughts hit, the firs succumbed to insect epidemics . What these changes mean, however, is not a simple question . Declaring a crisis in forest health assumes a shared cultural ideal of what a healthy forest should be. The succession of ponderosa pine stands to fir-dominated stands, and the resultant insect infestations and catastrophic fires, do not mean that the forest itself is threatened: they only mean it is changing. If we were to stop trying to fix the forests today and step back and watch the results, spruce budworm and Douglas-fir tussock moth epidemics would kill numerous trees, and fires would kill many more. But such an outcome would not necessarily be a disaster; it might indeed be better than the results of intensive attempts to "fix" the forests. The result would be ideal conditions for the establishment of new ponderosa and larch stands interspersed with older mixed-conifer stands in areas where the fires had been less intense. What would INTRODUCTION 5 be threatened by insect epidemics and catastrophic fires is not the forest, but our ability to extract certain resources...