Redwood Reader

Gentlemen,
Thanks for your excellant work in this most important field. I, like you have been preivately investigating issues that led me to your Center. In a sense I ffel I have arrived at a summit and can reach back to give you a hand up. In science we all count on others work, and I have been amazed at how well much of your material supports and enlightens my field even though I am a layman. But you have overlooked one aspect that has incredible implications for natural resource and restoration workers-the role of glomalin in stabilizing land and storing water in the root zone while removing CO2 from the atmoshere.. I came to tjis investigating landslides in Douglas fir regions, so it is ironic that after waiting a year and having you go commercial and spending money I don't have to sign up that I still can't access the plant growth data for it this month. Be that as it may, your work is an essential compilation of evidence, when coupled with several other streams of information, that pave the way for new and realistic forest practice rules, vegetation and stream management and land use in general, since it is the heart of sustainability.
My brother bought steep creek bottom land devastated by logging and flooding in 1977. We average over 100 inches of rain a year but have dry summers. After the great local flood of 1964 large areas were still unvegetated, especially the creek bottom. In 1981 the place experienced wildfire, killing off the few remaining seed trees from the previous Douglas fir vegetation. I moved there in 1982 and we began to try to restore the place which had been a major salmon spawning creek until the flood wracked the entire ecosystem. We planted over 100,000 trees on 120 acres but had a lot of losses. The land revegetated itself anyway in less desirable species. Big storms would wipe away years worth of efforts on the ground.
After moving back into town ( the family had a death and a lifelong injury to a child due to a log truck accident) I began investigating the likihood of eventual restoration by speeding up the natural healing process. Meanwhile massive sliding from properties above ours was destroying our pools and stream habitat. I started attending salmon restoration meetings that were beginning to focus on roads in unstable forest soils, and activists were giving timber companies a hard time with permits for commercial logging. Drainage disruption of natural systems was directly leading to land failure between the disturbance and the creek, every time, every swale. (An eventual sediment inventory was performed confirming this for the entire three and a half miles of stream.) Only canyonn live oak trees resisted this sliding, all other species were simply swallowed up. One that had its root system exposed on one side revealed mases of roots dozens of feet gelow the surface. Reading and observation suggested they may seek bedrock. In any event the volume of soil is massive. They seem to pin the landscape down.
Reading on rooting sytems led to mycorhizzia and things really took off. Regular posts by Dan Wheeler of Oregon White Truffle to newsgroups showed the complexity, variety and abundance of fungi and their necessity for sustainability in Douglas fir forest. His posting of news stories with commentary was very enlightening and inspiring.So somehow the fungi were doing something in the soil, perhaps with mycelia, that held the soil better when trees were growing there, and they were deep in the soil with the oak trees. He and I are both fans of J.R. Smith s Tree Crops, seekng annual return fron trees creating a stable and profitable landscape, and Dr. Alex Shigo, a tree scientist who has some interesting views on forests as systems and an enlightening style, in a chapter of the New Tree Biology called Trouble In The Rhizosphere.
Meanwhile, back in the field, the creek was not running brown all winter anymore. It cleared up quickly after average rains but began drying up in the summer in places that had pools previously. It became clear we didn't want any more disturbance in areas we were trying to protect which wound up with a large purchase of timberland by Save the Redwoods League and BLM with a no commercial timber clause attached to the Title. It lies between Humboldt Redwoods State Park and King Range National WIlderness and Conservation areas. All of these public land managers are hurriedly regrowing their forest while managing fuel load risk without being able to sell the proceeds, in spite of new small sawmill configurations and the need for chips for fuel and pulp. We formed a stewardship group in the neighborhood and carried out tree planting, fuel load reductions, sediment inventory, stream surveys for eight parameters, and commented extensively on all of those plans. But our previously sustainable neighbor PL has been on a n unsustainble cut level since its purchase by Maxxam Corp in 1985. People are becoming very aware of the problems logging and roads cause.
Morer reading led to the next level of awareness: Waterforum newsgroup had some very expert water people discussing watersheds and public centaralization among other exceellant topics. CO2 Science magazine was referenced in one post. Global warming and rising waters were discussed. A random Google search for carbon turned up the first glomalin article and my hair stood up, especially reading its function and what destroyed it. I read all the other articles I could find and e-mailed the discoverer.
This explained what was actually happening in those overloaded swales- the fabric and glue were being destroyed and the landscape unraveling. But in addition it implied that smaller trees had smallercapacity to process CO2, and a lot had to go into growth. So the water storage capacity, enhanced by glomalins properties and functioning on a scale of centuries had absorbed enough water to tide the forest through annual dry seasons with enough excess for rivers to run all year. that is to say, watersheds (root zone surface water) are shrinking in depth across vast stretches of the industrialized world. A lot of glomalin has been destroyed and returned to the atmosphere as CO2 due to development, agriculture, forestry and mining. I can find no reference to this source of CO2 as a cause for rising CO2 levels. Trees and fungi immediately recolonize an area, succession in mycorhizzia as forests mature indicate the same piece of ground is recolonized by many fungis, each depositing its share of glomalin and conditioning a bit of soil to store water. So you may want to overplant an area to kick start the soil conditioning, especially if you plan pole or chip harvesting to thin the forest to a functioning reduced risk area. Glomalin is why revegetation is essential in wildland restoration and forest management. Glomalin makes us see the forest as a natural precipitation interception and retention strategy. Any doubts about ectomycorhizzia being different from vaso-arbuscular forms dissappears when glomalin is recognized as a structural material in formation, then cast off as garbage when the hyphae it supported die, aggregating soil particles and increasing pore space and water storage.
Glomalin management is a key to carbon treaties but more importantly can be seen as the healing power if nature, and the provider of abundance and sustainability. we are ready to move into a new century of research and management practices. This new knowledge cuts across many fields like soils, hydrology, climatology, dendrology, mycology, forstry and many regulatory boundaries and threatens the way a lot of business is done today. It alleviates the need or desirability to preserve large blocks of forest land.It allows us to quantify carbon sequestration while using it to restore and embellish our natural world.
The US has stated the science wasn't in yet to sign Kyoto. They were right but for the wrong reasons. I have offered you a hand p and now we are at the summit. Looking from the height we can see why massive landslides in high rainfall areas cause devastating landslides in the Phillipines, Haiti and Nicaragua. We see perennial native ecosystems overgrazed and replaced by non-mycorhizzial annuals, thus removing the entire water storage system in the Great Basin causing more flooding, drought, water and fire problems. We see glomalin has reformed US crop growing, saving farmers in many ways while allowing them to collect carbon credit money and harvesting. In forestry it has yet to appear. Yet management techniques for BLM, parks and for timber companies with nothing but cutover lands all encourage rapid restoration of watersheds with a measure of risk reduction. We can see how Mediterranean tree farmers were able to stabilize their lands and provide annual incomes from chestnuts, olives and pork for thousands of years. We see the prairie communities and sod as a an other community based on the same ideas. We see clear cutting as completely and unnecessarily destructive, select cutting mandatory and with minimal impacts, the roadless rule should stay in place until a new generation of Best Management Practices in forestry can be implemented, and recreational destruction of the forest floor wasteful.
There are incredible amounts of work to be done by scientists and regulators but we can proceed in a quantifiable manner with hard questions. Dan Wheelers reports on Douglas fir inoculation are extremely encouraging and certainly suggest there is plenty of room to believe timber growing and management will benefit in the long run although there may be resistance to change initially. Glomalin surveys on a grand scale as you have done with the FACE experiments are called for. Quantification of glomalin from many landscapes in various states of development need to be analyzed and compared. Matthias Rillig at U of Montana has published some articles on aggregate s and stability in forest soils in conjunction with Sara Wright, discoverer. New information from universities in the crop growing region is basically repeating each other but there is a lot going on in that area. The grape growers are measuring ground water storage with ground radar. How about checking the old growth? It is ironic that USDA Sustaiable Agriculture Labs discovered glomalin but the Forest Service has no information on it. I asked Redwood Sciences Lab in Arcata to look into forest practices and glomalin.
So Salute! Nothing you ever published disagrees with these points unless you disagreed with it in an editorial yourselves. Your information has solidified my thinking and I am anxious to see the world enlightened to a newly revealed natural law, a gift for the new generations. But you generally quit short of the massive rethinking and realization that can put us on a truly sustainable footing far into the future, and you need to broaden the scope of the carbon storage occurring with long term experiments. To that end I began a blog n April to share what I have learned and to educate people. I have printed some articles verbatim, others are comments on newspaper articles, local and worldwide. I started a website but could not afford the hosting, so I am at www.redwoodreader.blogspot.com, and this letter will be article 102. I have cited you as a reference repeatedly but I only have 500 hits altogether, most for zero minutes. Nevertheless, my aim is to put most of this information available for others to read themselves, the first step in education. Then I write letters inviting people to read. All of the new information is on the web, and alot of it is from people outside the mainstream. As you know, a tree planter from Africa won the Nobel Peace Prize this year, a truly encouraging trend. And once we take care of the hillsides, the fish will return.
I humbly thank you for all you have done, and hope I have contributed to your vision.