If any resource is endlessly renewable, it is the tree. Ecology-oriented policy ought to encourage consumers to substitute wood for materials derived from nonrenewable ores and chemicals. Instead, per capita wood use has been declining, partly because wood prices have risen with the spread of environment-friendly logging practices, such as planting more trees than are cut. For all the re cent blather about “sustainable development,” anti-logging sentiment is forcing workers and customers out of one of the few industries that is in every sense sustainable.
The tall-tree forests of the Pacific Northwest have been hurt in recent decades, though many millions of acres remain. By every other measure American forests are thriving. According to forestry expert Roger Sedjo of the nonpartisan Resources for the Future, U.S. forest cover reached its nadir about 1920. “Sometime around the early 1940s,” Sedjo has written, “forest growth nationally came into balance with harvests, and since that time growth has exceeded harvest.” Vermont, for example, was about 35 percent forested a century ago; today it is about 76 percent forest. Through the postwar era the forested portion of the United States has steadily risen, not gone down.
Most of what environmentalists call “ancient” Northwest forests are around 200 years old. Age per se is not what makes them right for owls; it’s the tallness of the trees, which comes with time. Two hundred years is a long span by human standards but the wink of an eye to nature. As long as forests are allowed to recover, they can be “ancient” again relatively quickly.
If global warming is coming, government policy ought to encourage logging. Young trees withdraw carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, from the air much more rapidly than do mature trees.
Within greenhouse science there’s something called the “missing carbon” problem: human activity puts about 7 billion tons of carbon into the air each year, but tests find only about half of it there. Where does the other half go? Increasingly researchers suspect it is pulled from the atmosphere by young trees growing quickly under modern forestry practices. So an environmentalist who says the greenhouse effect is an emergency and also that logging is a disaster isn’t shooting straight.
The “second growth” forests run by big lumber companies don’t have the haunting, Middle Earth esthetic quality of tall-tree forests, mainly because trees are cut before reaching full height. And industrial foresters are given to comments like, “It took us a lot of R&D to find a tree that will perform in the wild,” as James Rochelle, Weyerhaeuser’s manager of environmental forestry research, says.
But it’s a fallacy that managed forests are dead zones. They brim with life. Climax species like spotted owls cannot thrive in second-growth forests, but browsing species such as elk love them. Some studies show that young “industrial” forests have greater biological diversity than oldgrowth stands.
An ideal solution may be to encourage more intense, managed forestry on private lands. This would protect lumber jobs and permit higher production of sustainable timber, while reducing the need to log Forest Service lands, which could then increasingly be set aside as areas for strict preservation. In this sort of compromise, high-tech forestry and pure preservation would both be boosted. They are not incompatible; they can be allies.
