Redwood Reader

Last night C-SPAN ran a show celebrating 100 years of the U.S.D.A. Forest Service. I saw only part of it but it is clear the Service is looking in new directions including fee-demo programs to pay for operating costs, their enterprise team system should be retained, the costs of road building are still not included when Congressmen decry the loss if “extra” income compared to the good old days, recreation values are skyrocketing, and that air quality, water and carbon sequestration were the most critical products forests provide to humans. Timber was mentioned but it was made clear basic materials change with opportunity and economics.
Among the panel were Sally Fairfax of Cal Berkely, a forest policy professor, Gifford Pinchot III, grandson of the Forest Services founder and president of his own company, a Republican Congressman fron Idaho and a leader from a group from the Adirondack Park area. They were saluting the Forest Service and pointing out problems and future scenarios.
The truly incredible part was that if you understand glomalin, the perspective changes and prescriptions become obvious and doable. For example, one person brought up climate change in regard to ecosystems moving, and needing to prepare places for the ecosystem to move to. A general dissolution of ownership across landscapes was seen as a way to deal with this. Glomalin management will show up in ownership blocks over time, and glomalin depletion will remain one of the biggest unknown factors in a wide variety of symptomatic forest problems, including low flows, fire risk, tree diseases, insects, floods and landslides. Glomalin management allows working forests to provide some timber while maintaining the water storage properties of the landscape, which is now a thin slice of what was a water management system over 500 foot from root hair to crown. Previous models of watersheds in two dimensions do not accurately reflect the damage done to this system. Harvested lands will show an increasing resistance to slides and creeks run longer as the trees grow. Development will show a very thin layer of capacity in yards, while row crops under no-till methods are actually being paid to sequester carbon. Unharvested lands show the magic of old growth because its glomalin was never disturbed.
But if your primary object is water for a locality, you want to remain in the precipitation zone and maintain soil structure that can maximize local precipitation. Trees with deep root systems and thorough canopies and local mycorhizzia are the surest way to capture precipitation. Time slows down in the forest for water, and it takes months to perk through the system and completely dry out, resulting in year round rivers. Without forest rain bounces off the ground into the river and out to sea in a few hours. Running water cuts sediment free from its fungal restraints and heads downhill into the river.
The ironic part is that glomalin is an unknown here while it is USDA’s Sustainable Agriculture Research Lab that discovered glomalin in the first place. Talk about connecting the dots, it kinda says forestry as is is not sustainable, doesn’t it? But now we can fix that. The vegetation management risk reduction measures everyone is yelling for create the exact conditions for glomalin production zones. Shaded fuel breaks with undisturbed floor are called for on a huge scale. Small wood mills and chip products can be made from the slash for paper or composite or biofuel. IF the canopy stays intact many less desirable species are prevented from gaining a foothold, also minimizing the need for spraying herbicide. It is important to remember we are also tying up huge amounts of carbon by not disrupting the ground as well as increasing the water holding capacity of the soil. Now CO2 emissions are atmospheric fertilization, and the increased CO2 is causing accelerated growth above and belowground at high levels of efficiency. We can study it to death or run with the obvious and wait for more science to shed more light. There was a question of whether the Forest Service should move to the Department of the Interior. Glomalin and its discovery make the answer to that a resounding No.