Redwood Reader

This week’s economic news for Humboldt County reminded me of a news article on TV about a decade ago. A bunch of PL workers were losing jobs because THP’s were being denied, the Headwaters deal and/or the Northwest Forest Plans moratorium on National Forest logs. The mill workers said half of us are going to grow marijuana and the other half will get jobs as cops to chase them. At the time much was made of returning the men to work in the woods as restoration workers, and some good work came out of these programs. But river conditions continued to deteriorate and no new model for forest land use put forth. And the mills have been fighting the predictable rearguard actions caused by centralization and economies of scale, as well as the reality that they are only a bottom line to investors now, rather than owner/operators of their operations.
As the Times-Standard points out there are real community losses here besides jobs. Lack of competition will allow log buyers to offer less to landowners. Opportunities for “off species” are dwindling or disappearing as well. In either case it results in less economic return on timber improvement activities, which in large measure include thinning and reducing fire risk. This together with the pre-paid expense of the timber harvest plan process makes it almost imperative to remove a lot trees just to balance the books. Just growing trees is a recipe for catastrophic wildfires. We need to manage the forest and earn a sustainable living in the process.
Meanwhile restoration money was vetoed in the latest budget. We have said previously government restoration funding was likely an unsustainable source of income and jobs and a peace time dividend. Repair jobs are not expected to provide job security, and can’t in today’s business environment. While it remains to be seen what the local effects will be, the overall effort to return anadramous fisheries to health will roll along. The correction of drainages and tree planting are the principal activities. Laws technically tell us that there should be no need for restoration on lands managed under today’s guidelines, but we know that is a false presumption because the law admits it is malleable in the face of new science.
An article in yesterdays LA Times was entitled Kool Aid Fish. It was about how heavy rains this year scoured streambeds, some long devoid of fish, creating spawning conditions ripe for steel head, and the fish have appeared as if by magic. The Sacramento is having a bumper year for salmon.
But from the Klamath north, were the drought has migrated to, the picture is much uglier. A report the other day from Lake Washington in the Seattle area said two thirds of the schooling fish simply disappeared before venturing upstream, and the hundred thousand remaining are the smallest run on record. Bonneville fish station was counting dozens when it usually counts thousands. Studies are underway, especially in Lake Washington, an estuary with heavy siltation problems from upstream land use patterns.
All of the trouble centers around the unexpected results of massive removal of forest cover, particularly on streams and rivers, which began suffering from epidemics of mass wasting in steep, wet country. Scientists of all stripes have studied and engineered but can not fully explain why slopes are failing in many areas, not just timbered areas. They discovered a lot about weathering and erosion and soil building and pore space and saturation and so on. But in the end they said too much rainfall triggers these events.
Today I watched a PBS series on KEET 8 about geology including episodes on Weathering and Soils, and Mass Wasting. An excellent series, if a little old and simplistic and no recognition of the moderating influence of vegetative cover or belowground conditions was mentioned. Glomalin dots the I’s and crosses the T’s by explaining added soil structure to weathered soils, the precipitation interface as well as the biological conditioning of the soil to hold more water, all of which reduces the amount of excess water in peak events and reduces the likelihood of earth movements and catastrophic flooding downstream. It won’t prevent them all but as pointed out, human activity is often a triggering event in a natural process.
None of these studies has looked at the effects of vegetation on the likelihood of moderating mass wasting, which to some extent is simply gravity having its way in the world. Almost all of the examples were from landscapes devoid of trees, including the California coast. All types of mass wasting from creep to slump to landslide and debris torrents were shown and I believe I have seen all of them. There was no explanation that the hillside in Colombia had been clear cut before it buried 22,000 people in an hour. Nature has a way of selecting the appropriate species for conditions that allow it to live there. By not recognizing the role of vegetation as a community we fail to recognize impacts on other parts of those communities. So while in relatively flat land the major erosive forces are wind and running water, a quick fix of grasses and forbs can create topsoil, bind it together and host fungi and bacteria to do those operations. In low rainfall areas this all you get. In higher moisture environments woody plants become dominant. Rather than several inches deep, roots extend feet out and below the trees, creating larger conditioned soil reservoirs that hold water. Trees that grow for decades or centuries have massive reservoirs and these contribute to summer flows that keep rivers cool and flowing. Clear cutting removes these deposits from further nutrition, and they atrophy, eventually leading to unaggregated material in a steep wet place.
A recent report from the Oak Mortality Task Force tells us the pathogen has been found in diseases wood itself. Previously it was believed bark removal would prevent the spread of the disease. This is troublesome because it will be hard to use even as firewood anywhere but at the site without risking spreading the disease.
So we need to create a method of putting the forests back together while reducing the fuel load. This means pretty much every acre of timber and wildlands. We need to keep a certain amount of large trees on each acre but we can take a few from almost every acre. Large capacity markets should be developed to take small wood, chips and green matter from large and small operators, to assure cash flow and value added for fuel reduction. Restoration projects should stay the course because we are harnessing the healing power by taking time and allowing vegetative processes to work their wonders. Timber is king here because it is nature’s way of dealing with heavy rain on loose soils. Once that lesson is learned we can sustain ourselves on the benefits of a fully functioning forest ecosystem.