By Patricia H. Kushlis
In early April 2010, I drove from Phoenix to Albuquerque via Route 60 through the area where Arizona’s now largest fire on record blazes. I remember Springerville as a small green oasis with a river running through it in the middle of high arid desert - mile after mile of dry lands dotted only with sage bush. I don’t remember much forest after leaving Show Lo 42 miles to the west – at least until I got to the New Mexico side - but clearly the Apache Forest with its stands of thick Ponderosa were there. (Photo left: Route 60 signs east of Springerville by PHKushlis, April 2010)
Once the smoke and flames are extinguished – and hopefully the human culprits who apparently started the inferno by leaving a camp fire unattended are found and brought to justice – we’ll hear the all too familiar litany from forest industry organizations – claiming that the fire could have been prevented – or at least its damage lessened – had the forests been opened to the axes and saws of the timber companies.
We’ll be told yet again that “virgin” forests burn hotter and are more damaging to the environment than if lumber companies had been given free rein to remove the “offending” combustible materials – aka the best quality timber available on the land. In fact, the hues and cries of their acolytes have already begun. If only, we’re told, that these companies had been allowed to cut everything worth selling in sight, thereby helping the economy by putting lumber jacks and saw mill operators back to work and letting pigs, cows and horses graze in the former forest land. Then all would be right with the world. (Photo left McCloud Lumberjack Fiesta, Ponderosa on logging truck in parade, JE Hogin).
The Forest Products Commissions – the lumber companies’ representatives - have been tremendously successful at packaging and promulgating this questionable tale. Just look at their websites if you’re the least bit skeptical. They may claim they support managed and controlled logging of our forests but at the same time they rail against any and all regulation in favor of letting the lumber companies do whatever they want. I’ve seen that happen – it’s simply code for clear cutting – thereby denuding the land of all harvestable trees.
This came to the fore with “The Healthy Forests Initiative,” implemented on behalf of industry lobbyists by the George W. Bush Administration in 2002. That was nearly eight years ago. In reality, the Healthy Forests Initiative is an oxymoron designed to “change the dial” to convince the gullible that the “increase in forest fires in recent years is due to “a century of well-intentioned but misguided land management.”
Eight years on where are those “healthier” forests? Where’s the proof? Have you seen it? I haven't. What's this about accountability? Sadly this self-serving initiative which used the “change the dial” technique to reframe a message that foremost promotes the interests of the forest products industry to others' detriment has not delivered on its promise - at least as far as I can see.
Prohibiting industry from "saving" nature from itself
Those opposed to the lumber industry's mantra are tarred with the somehow negative monikers of “tree-hugging spotted owl lovers” and less colorfully as environmentalists standing in the way of progress. These retrogrades among us are charged with entangling American forests in massive bureaucratic red-tape through law suits and such that, well the companies can’t do what should be done to save nature apparently from itself. California’s environmentalists have been somewhat more successful than their northern neighbors in containing the rapacious demands of the industry. But that’s not really saying much.
I saw what happened to the Ponderosa forests west of McCloud, California after big timber came in and bought out the family owned lumber mill which had provided the town its livelihood and sustenance since the early 1900s. First, International Paper sold off the company town, then it started clear cutting the Ponderosa that had lived and grown there for hundreds of years, then it closed the mill and trucked the logs to a huge saw mill 120 miles away because that was more profitable for the company. (Photo right: McCloud River Lumber Company General Office Building, by JE Hogin, winter 1975; photo left, McCloud Main Street, by JE Hogin winter 1976).
A fire would have been far less destructive because, well, if you know anything about the Ponderosa, the bark of the older, healthier and bigger trees can withstand the high heat of fire. Furthermore, the trees’ canopies are so high that they don’t burn all that well either. The bark beetle, human carelessness, lumber companies and ranchers who graze their animals in the forests and disturb the flora and fauna on the forest floor are far greater foe than the flames in their different ways.
Nature's way of restoring equilibrium
In fact, there’s good reason to think that forest fires are nature’s way of thinning the undergrowth – the brush and the scrub – to keep the forest healthy. No way this happens as a result of logging. Quite the opposite – loggers remove the healthy trees and leave the forest to contend with the detritus that grows more rapidly in their absence. Remove too many and the faster growing "second growth" trees – suitable for plywood and paper products - take the place of the mighty Ponderosa. (Photo left: Mt. Shasta from the southwest, by JE Hogin)
Baby Ponderosa don't mature overnight
What the lumber companies, err forest products commissions, officials also don’t tell us is that it takes a Ponderosa between 30 and 60 years to grow to maturity. The Ponderosa, or yellow pine, are huge, western trees that populate the Sierra Nevadas and the Rockies. They produce superior soft wood - but Ponderosa seedlings don’t just sprout up again in a few days, or even reach maturity for decades. (Photo right: Ponderosa log on McCloud River Railroad logging train by JE Hogin).
Furthermore, it must take far more skilled lumberjacks – and likely higher paid ones too - to fell the big trees selectively - which if done properly doesn’t play havoc with our forests - than simply to clear cut, the lumber companies preferred approach akin to slash-and-burn.
I saw lumberjacks fell giant trees and went to school with their kids. It is dangerous and bad accidents happen. A lumberjack’s skill is honed over years so as to preserve the tree’s wood while causing minimal damage to the surrounding forest - all the while avoiding injury or worse from a calimatous encounter with the enormous trunk as it crashes to the ground. (Photo left: Ponderosa being felled in Pondosa, a lumberjack town 29 miles east of McCloud off Highway 89, by James E. Hogin, May 1952)
I’ve also witnessed the results of clear cutting from the 1920s and 30s, when people did not realize the long term consequences of their actions and thought the forests would last forever. Hills with stumps and scrub that thirty, forty even fifty years later had not regenerated into forests; other hills covered with second and faster growth timber – but with wood far inferior to the majestic Ponderosa that had grown there since well before the Europeans arrived.
So tell me please. How do we know that fires in today’s environmentally “protected” forests are more devastating than those that happened years before. Higher temperatures? Oh, come on. Doubtful, but so what? Weren’t all western forests virgin before the middle, if not the end of the 19th century when the loggers came in? Weren't there always years of drought and those of summer rains? Fires have broken out in “them thar' hills” for centuries - caused by lightening at the very least.
So what’s the difference between then and now?
What’s different is the greed of the lumber interests combined with encroaching civilization - developers building houses and other buildings deep in the forests themselves – houses far too close to the Ponderosa, cedar, lodge-pole, sugar pine and other evergreens not to mention the brush, needles and smaller plants that compose the forest floor and turn to kindling in dry years at the touch of a match – or a lightening bolt.
It’s understandable, therefore, why a town in a cleared area like Springerville has been spared whereas a newer, tiny isolated forest retreat like Greer, 17 miles south and west wasn’t so lucky. Building in the middle of the woods, my friends, is like playing with lighted matches while sitting in a tinder box.
But so too are the long term health hazards of the forest industry companies – among this country’s worst polluters – hell bent on short term profit.
Despite their protestations, the financial clout of these industries used to their political advantage, regurgitated and broadcast by too much of the media to the unsuspecting whose knowledge of forests and their fires is deficient is also a hazard to this country’s long term health – and not just to the trees coming under the ax and the buzz-saw.
But then, why should we expect differently in this day and age when the super-rich ultra-conservative Koch Brothers who – by the way - own Georgia-Pacific, a forest products conglomerate that operates 31 paper and plywood mills concentrated in the South and is a leading producer of formaldehyde, were able to keep this noxious product off the US government’s list of known carcinogens through intensive lobbying until just last week. Who knows what else their billions and their minions have also been able to keep under wraps for years.
Related WV posts by Patricia Kushlis:
Route 60 and the Salt Water Canyon, (May 15, 2010)
Wintoon William Randolph Hearst's Secret Hideaway (October 11, 2oo9).