My Turn: Yes, there is a forest holocaust
U nable to afford the $2,000-a-plate dinner at the Chiles Center last month in Portland, I missed my golden opportunity to thank President Bush for his comments about the state of forest health in Oregon and around the nation. The following day, after flying over the Deschutes National Forest, President Bush declared it a "holocaust." And I agree 100 percent with our nation's ecologically minded leader.
Why wouldn't President Bush want to alert the citizenry of the nation to the utter devastation on our public lands? The Deschutes National Forest is crisscrossed with miles of logging roads and pitted with clearcuts that have left little more than 3 to 5 percent of the original majestic Ponderosa pine woods. The National Forest system of some 191 million acres contains over 400,000 miles of roads that channel drying winds into once intact forests. Compound that with the blistering sun baking denuded lands and literally millions of cut branches, needles and logging waste and you have a fire hazard beyond imagination.
I was hoping to walk with President Bush into a clear-cut by my home. Living by the Siuslaw National Forest, I was anxious to see the reaction of the president as he walked a moonscape that was once a living and breathing system. Hardy weeds replace the once native flora and stumps create an eerie backdrop to the mounds of limbs and unmarketable splintered logs that litter the ground. Nothing in nature mimics a clear-cut: Even forest fires leave standing trees and shade. Clear-cutting is an aberration in nature, where all the intricacies of forest ecosystems are liquidated. The timber industry's recipe for "healing" a clear-cut is a prescription for disaster. Replanting trees in sequenced rows, which compete for sunlight leading to thousands of dead branches, is a catalyst for fire disasters. What the doctor should order in this situation is kicking timber multinationals off public lands.
In reality, President Bush was here to play doctor to aid the ailing forests by intentionally razing natural systems and replace them with fire-prone monocultures. He lamented the fires that have burned in Oregon, using the powerful imagery of fire to mislead the citizens of America. His "stewardship forestry" is music to timber multinationals. For Bush's song includes the lyrics: big timber you are exempt from environmental law and have a grand time liquidating giant, fireproof trees.
His choir sings in lockstep. Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton states, "Dense, over-grown forests and range lands have grown like cancer." Yet the unmentioned malignancy here is her and her bosses' lies and cronyism toward the nation's avid clear-cutters.
The spectacle of Bush's ride over lands struck by forest fires is illuminated when one examines the facts. And facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. In 2002 similar fires burned in the Umpqua National Forest. Close to 90,000 acres burned with the press using terms like "devastated trees and darkened stumps." Yet, more than 80 percent of the forest was lightly burned, actually Mother Nature's tool to reduce undergrowth. And where did the most intense fire burn? In dense tree plantations. When the smoke clears, it is easy to see President Bush's forest plan is a hoax disguised to open native forests.
The cold hard data is sobering:
Over 50 percent of the Tongass in Alaska has been clear-cut since 1950;
Of the original 243,000 km of long leaf pine in the southeastern U.S., under 16,000 km remain;
By the early 20th century, one-third of the U.S. forests disappeared and by the 1990s the native forests standing in the Lower 48 hovered around 4 percent of their original acreage;
The national forests of the Pacific Northwest have been slashed into jigsaw puzzles.
Does President Bush think he can hide the truth in a growing sea of clearcuts or homogeneously sterile tree farms? We should end commercial logging on public lands, use fire as the natural asset it is to forests, thin forests near populated areas using federal funds and let big timber multinationals provide our wood needs from their fiber farms.
John F. Borowski is an environmental and marine science teacher who lives in Philomath, Ore., and works with the Native Forest Council.