SAWS or Woodpeckers?, Bakersfield Californian

Stalled timber sale highlights date on forest restoration

By Matt Weiser
September 20, 2004

[Forwarded by Sequoia ForestKeeper]

At the top of Sherman Pass, at 8,000 feet in the Sequoia National Forest, two kinds of forest restoration can be heard.

One is the hammering of woodpeckers drilling into burned bark. The other is the shriek of chain saws cutting out the largest charred trees. Both are making way for new trees to replace those burned in the 2002 McNally Fire.

The chain saws are buzzing on the east side of the pass, But on the west side, woodpeckers are all you'll hear, because the Forest Service can't find buyer for the burned trees it wants to cut there. The lumber market is glutted with salvage trees from last years huge wildfires in Southern California and continuing attack by bark beetles. This means thousands of valuable trees will rot, forest officials say, potentially fueling another McNally size fire decades hence.

"It concerns us, because if the market's at capacity, we can't get resource work done," said Dave Freeland, Forest Service District Ranger. "There's going to be another big fire bed out there."

Environmental advocates disagree.

Logging does not reduce fire danger, they say, it increases it by leaving behind piles of flammable brush and limbs, called slash.

They favor the woodpecker way: natural decay and regeneration. Woodpeckers eat harmful insects, and their pecking speeds up the decay of dead trees, which remain to provide nutrients for the soil.

"Post-fire logging is the worst thing you can do in terms of forest recovery. 'It will actually set back recovery dramatically," said Chad Hanson, director of the John Muir Project, which monitors forest practices in the Sierra Nevada.

"Anyone who has ever built a campfire knows it's the kindling-like material that burns. That's the one thing they're not removing from the site. In fact they're creating a lot more of it."

The dispute boils down to the reality that nature moves slower than human desires. Just as it took 100 years of fire suppression to create tinderbox conditions in national forests, it will take another 100 years or more to recreate a fire-resistant forest.

Forest Service officials believe logging improves conditions for growing new trees in burned areas. They want to clear out the dead trees, then plant seedlings.

"The public would like to see a forest established a lot quicker than natural processes allow." said Freeland.

East of Sherman Pass, logging crews are removing dead trees more than 20 inches in diameter -- large trees that the Forest Service's own scientists have said pose little fire danger. Tractors churn up clouds of soil and crush new undergrowth as they drag log sections to loading areas.

Some of the slash left behind will be burned later by the Forest Service, but some will remain.

Sierra Forest Products is removing 50 to 60 truckloads of scorched logs every day from about 1,500 acres in the area. At its mill in Terra Bells, south of Porterville, the logs will produce about 10 million board-feet of lumber, enough to build 800 homes.

The company was the only bidder on the $125,000 sale, and then only after the Forest Service dropped the price from $200,000. The project is small, covering only about 1 percent of the 150,000-acre McNally burn area. No bids came in on the companion logging project west of Sherman Pass, even though the Forest Service repackaged it twice at less than half the original price. Not even Sequoia Forest Products bid on the job.

"We don't have enough room for the logs," said Jeff Gletne, the forester for Sierra Forest Products who is supervising the harvest.

Back in 2000, Sierra Forest Products officials said the company's days were numbered after President Clinton created Sequoia National Monument putting 327,000 acres off-limits to logging.

Now the company runs the last lumber mill in Southern California, and it is prospering on salvage trees. It has even hired nearly 30 new workers in the past year, Gletne said, to process Southern California's burned and pestilent forests.

"Over the last 10 years, these catastrophic events have helped us stay in business," said Kent Duysen, the company's general manager. "But there's no guarantees in our business. We're hopeful the public is also starting to understand forests need to be managed to some degree. If not, Mother Nature will do her forms of management."

Officials fear a shortage of mill capacity in California means there is nowhere to take all the trees that need to be cut to reduce fire danger on national forests. The industry favors a sustained increase in timber harvesting on public land, as proposed in President Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative, to reduce fire danger and encourage more mills to open.

"We really don't want another big fire or large die-off until the Southern California situation settles down, because the market can't handle it", said Tom Simonson, ecosystem management officer for the Sequoia National Forest. "They're just about giving it away, and so are we, really, in the final analysis. It's a very bad situation."

Critics say more logging is not the answer to the fire threat. The Bush plan will not limit fire danger, they say, because it focuses on logging the most fire-resistant trees miles from residential areas. It would also limit environmental analysis and public participation in many logging proposals.

Environmental groups favor reintroduction of low intensity fire, through controlled burns, to remove small trees and underbrush that serve as kindling for major fires. They also support limited logging to create "defensible space" near rural communities that border forests.

Ara Marderosian, Executive Director of Sequoia ForestKeeper, said Mother Nature is already at work on the McNally Fire. He said logging is just slowing her down.

He has been monitoring a single acre west of Sherman Pass that burned in the fire, and says there are now 57 new seedling trees growing back in that acre by themselves. Shade from standing dead trees is helping, he said, and new shrubs and ground cover have restored nutrients to the soil and helped hold it in place.

"It's the Forest Service that's impatient to see the forest restored. They're the ones that think it can't happen unless they manipulate it,' said Marderosian. "It's already naturally recovering. It doesn't need the help' of the Forest Service. It's doing it more quickly than they are."