Redwood Reader

Redwood Reader salutes the efforts of Pacific Lumber to limit sedimentation, and their willingness to talk about their operation. We have been critical of them but for specific reasons and to illustrate my other concerns. It is no surprise there is so much contention, because the whole premise is based on a false concept. PL is not to blame for this. IN the last year I have contacted everyone involved in the Freshwater dispute concerning the role of the fungal product glomalin in the forest as regards sedimentation. No one presented anything of the sort and the Water Board decision was apparently made as a compromise with economic interests due to the lack of factual information as to the causes of sedimentation.
Pl has been fighting a non-stop battle to operate competitively in the marketplace. We will not argue about the mitigations for NSO or marbled murrelts. Destructive practices are not ameliorated by feel good stories from agency workers. Everything looks good because they are within the letter of the law, which was based on current science when it was written. Obviously residents are being mpacted and are upset. There is real loss, and the threat of massive damage in extreme weather events. As pointed out by Denver in the Times-Standard, the reason PL is in this new fight is because it refused to accept clearcutting in the first place. They have survived because the founders were familiar with destructive logging in the Lake state region and Maine. Now under the California business climate, economies of scale, technology and needing to prove PL was as undervalued as advertised, they are forced to operate in a manner that appears sustainable but is in fact allowing far more damage than is suspected. We can prove that but is not helpful without recommendations. In light of the no new surprises clause we hope that legislationn concerning BMPs and all other land use issues will take this amazing new discovery in hand and implement sustainable practices and regulations based on the role of fungi in maintaining watershed health. We point out that roads are an egregious example of cutting sediment loose without cutting trees. Skidding, loading, clearing yards and landing sites all have detrimental effects on watersheds. The damage may continue for decades as at my place, after the last big tree is gone, potentially because the undisturbed portion has been cut off from its food supply and is slowly decaying in the soil.
50 percent of its timberlands and 60 percent of its volume to be off-limits to harvesting until more detailed science was completed.
A "science-will-drive-policy" approach provided two processes for making changes to the HCP when science dictates (watershed analysis and adaptive management).This science does not include health of the root zone water storage functions of fungal residue, the critical missing element in the discussion, nor of the impacts of ground disturbance on the forest system which creates sediment in the first place by dissolving the aggregating property of the fungi..
No harvesting in areas prone to landslides.
Geology does not cause landslides, peak climatic events cause failure in areas where the precipitation interface has been compromised. Heavy cuuting on top of a stable ridge will cause runoff and land failure between the sight and the drainage stream at the bottom . Look at Haiti last year, Mitch, Stafford and other massive recent slides in the Phillipines, Venezuela and Colombia and LA. It can happen here.
Either "no harvest" and/or "limited harvest" only would be allowed in wide buffers along all watercourses.
This is a clear example of not knowing what is happening. If the forest floor is protected then some vegetation management will be possible, indeed necessary to reduce fuel loading, especially in damper areas. Sediment once cut loose is very hard to reweave back into the landscape, and this is why spoils fail to become part of the landscape. Once the sediment is separated from the glomalin and the aggregated particles dissolve, they will move downhill carried by water or as dust. So impacting the land near a watercourse is actually less destructive than further up in the watershed, as everything cut loose will eventually find its way into our watercourses.
Harvest restrictions in both Elk River and Freshwater watersheds of 600 and 500 acres annually were imposed.
Acreage is unimportant when select cutting. Economies of scale however make concentration of effort seem more imperative than working a larger piece but with less impacts. New technology like the walking machines, self contained feller-bunchers with minimal impacts on the forest floor, will prove their value once glomalin and the system that produce it are recognized as the key to forest and watershed health. Could be a key purchase, maybe more important than the new mill.
"Leave trees" are to be scattered throughout the harvest area for wildlife habitat.
"Leave" trees and the old seed trees were often pointed out as good management in the past, but inevitably someone else would come in and get the rest. Wildlife habitat will come naturally in a less devastated environment, and there will be less need for full protection as more acreage comes under sustainable operations. Like teaching a kid how to clean, we see what is left, not what was done.
6,000 acres, including a large portion of old growth, was set aside for 50 years to protect marbled murrelet habitat.
It will be found that all of our rotations are too short to restore the fungal systems in impacted forest areas because fungi follow each other in succession, the "redevelop" areas byrepeatedly infecting the same soils, each individual and species doing its bit by paying glomalin tax to the forest as a whole, just like people.
Detailed scientific watershed analysis is to be conducted in all PALCO watersheds to determine appropriate protections. The problem has been studied to death but there is no satisfaction. There is real, scientific, hard evidence from USDA-SAR that really applies to this problem. It will end the need for scientifc quest the way day ends night and let us move onto a more harmonious stage. There is a vast amount of work to be done quantifying the impacts of fungal residue in the soil and how it impacts watersheds and sediment, even simplifying glomalin detection and accounting methods for handy field use will be extremely important. PL can then gather their data remotely or with technicians and allow their scientists to analyze the data and move forward with research. One example: A story was posted on agroforestry several years ago regarding innoculation of trees with mycorhizzial fungi. THe results are fairly well known when applied to one or two species of fungi. When the writer gathered fifty species of mycorhizzial fungi and ground them into an innoculent, he reported six foot leaders on Douglas fir. Another field of study will be the difference chemically of slow grown redwood compared to the rapid growing second growth. Of course the broad array of operational fungi in the forest, mycorhizzial, sprophytic and parasitic and the functions of their hyyphae, mycelium and supporting molecules is a huge field. To this point, mycologists have missed glomalin because it is not a component of the living, friuiting body. Plenty to learn, plenty to do.
The rest of part one is a bunch of gobbledygookabout legislation and court hearings. Their will be no settling these issues until everyone gets on the same page about glomalin, at which point we can move forward again without imperiling, people, property or natural systems. We note the shift from CDF approval to Water Quality Control Board is a response to sediment moving from hillsides to streambed. It is preventable as well as the heart of sustainability.
In Part 2 Mr. Manne explains his companies stand on many issues. It is clear new science can help him out and make the company more profitable, without going into some of my more esoteric earlier suggestions on this blog about business options. In the relatively sterile environment of farm fields it was easy to see the impacts of single species of fungi. Inn the forest this hasn't been applied yet and is a whole world of science awaiting our interest.
In all the above discussion the most important issue is the retention of water and sediment on the hillsides in the biologically conditioned soil. This is what must be preserved, and restored where necessary. Glomalin is easily destroyed by human impact and will need time to return to health. There will have to be longer rotations and larger trees to replace the lost glomalin. It will do it, it is the healing power of nature. THis makes carbon sequestration quantifiable and doable, and may provide revenue streams for PL lands protected by law. They would have to argue and prove old trees restore watershed health far more quickly than seedlings just because of the number of molecules formed in a given period of time. Ok, now you need scientists.
But glomalin is also an amazingly easy concept to grasp so we need to educate everybody about it. I mean the entire world. It is associated with the vast majority of greenery anywhere yet is invisible and difficult to extract, which is a whole story for the discoverer to tell. It affects water issues directly and shows we grow the water holding capacity of any landscape. Retention also means less flooding and we see why development is so harmful, and why green belts and parks are essential in urban development. As for rising emissions, aerial fertilization has been shown to stimulate growth of above ground root and fungi repeatedly, and that the more you have in the air the faster you can collect it and the richer you can become for it.
Being aware lets you make some small differences right away, especially in operations, like in roads and so on. It may come to be you go to all walking machines so you don't need any roads at all, bringing a higher percentage of land into use. To make a big difference,call for a glomalin task force of state federal including PArks and BLM, CDF, USFS, DFG, tribes, restoration groups like MRC and HWC, other timbermen, ranchers, HSU, UCCE, USFW and see if this is truly amazing as it seems, and how to take advantage of it as the basis for sustainablity into the future.
A bigger difference then would yield land use benefits for development and agriculture throughout the state and would be extremely helpful in developiing nations struggling with many of these issues.