The dead forest and the next forest
Part 2
By George SibleyThis is the second of a two-part series on the massive changes coming over the forests of the West, from northern Canada to Mexico. In the first part of the series, author George Sibley chronicled the devastation being wrought by unprecedented infestations of natural predators, resulting in vast reaches of “dead forest,” and argued that this is an “unnatural” devastation caused by human cultural factors: a decade of drought and warming temperatures (which most scientists attribute primarily to human-induced greenhouse gases), combined with a century of wildfire suppression. This second part tries to look beyond the “dead forest” to what the “next forest” might be.
Part Two: The Next Forest
The Northern Colorado Bark Beetle Cooperative is working toward the Next Forest, with our investment focused on building resilience and reducing the risk of loss to our young trees when large-scale fires move across the landscape. The Cooperative is also generating ideas and working on a sustainable community based forest products industry for Northern Colorado. Local communities have economies that are tied to surrounding forests. All efforts are community based to insure that outcomes are aligned with local community visions. — From the “Northern Colorado Bark Beetle Cooperative” page, U.S. Forest Service Region II website (fs.fed.us/r2)
That is an interesting paragraph. The Forest Service website shovels a lot of conventional corporate coal, but that’s a diamond in the coal. Read it again. And I will begin to try to tell you why it scares me to death.
The most interesting aspect of that paragraph is the departure with the past century implied in the emphasis on “community based” ideas and economies “aligned with local community visions.” This is interesting to anyone who has been involved in any discourse with the Forest Service throughout the 20th Century, a discourse always framed by the statement, often explicitly uttered: “This is a national forest, not your local County Forest.”
Forest Service founder Gifford Pinchot, for instance, would never have penned that paragraph. He envisioned an almost priestly elite force of forest manager-scientists; Forest Service rangers historically have been forbidden to participate politically or economically in the communities they serve in, and those hoping to rise through the ranks in the Service have had to move around frequently. No “going native” and getting too interested in local problems, at the expense of the forest’s and nation’s needs.
I don’t of course imagine that the U.S. Forest Service is going to close its offices and turn the national forests over to us peasants on the basis of a visionary paragraph that probably came from closer to the bottom of the Forest Service food chain than the top. But for this paragraph to have appeared at all, on the Forest Service website, suggests that a change might be ripening that began to blossom in the 1970s: an acknowledgement (initially grudging) that many, maybe most of the communities in and around the national forests have grown up to the point of understanding their forests well enough to maybe live intelligently with them, with a little help from the experts, rather than having to stand by while decisions were being made for and about their forests from above by experts elsewhere.
I am so impressed by that paragraph, in fact, that I am not even going to go to the Forest Service and give them a chance to start hedging and harrumphing about it; it’s there and I am going to take it at face value, and run with it — and let the Forest Service play defense about it if it insists. A century of top-down management brought us to the Dead Forest; now it’s damn well time to start thinking differently about forests and people, and this is a different way of thinking for the Forest Service.
But then when I start thinking about the implications of this paragraph — as I said, it scares me to death. Despair starts to seep in around the edges when I start to think of everything we have to think of today. I begin to doubt that what god or nature might call “the consciousness project” — that’s us — has a positive future. The more conscious we get about what’s going on, the more impossible things look.
We cannot, for example, think of the Next Forest as just a discrete forest, an ecological community of plants and animals dominated by trees. We have to think of all the things that environ or surround that forest and affect its chances for success, and ours. And then we have to try to imagine a “local community vision” that somehow encompasses it all … whew. Consider these things, in thinking about the Next Forest:
First and most obviously “here” is the global climate, which may be changing temporarily or may be changing for a coming geological age, and may be changing a little or a lot. Whether or not it is our fault is probably irrelevant at this point, since the change is already underway and the best we can do from here on out is do or not do the things that will make the changes more or less extreme. This is already affecting the forests of the world beyond our ability to prevent it; it is a problem in adaptation.
As things stand now, climate change is probably going to cost us the aspens at low elevations in the Southern Rockies. They have been contesting that range with the sage and grasses for a long time, but the warming trend gives the field to the plants that like it hotter and drier. The pine forests will grow back in the montane region — and maybe extend their range a little higher on the sunny sides of the mountains. But if the winters remain warm and summer warmth continues to dry out their soils, will the beetles ever allow the pines, especially the lodgepole, to mature? Maybe they’ll be replaced, in their lower reaches, by the more drought-tolerant piñon pine and juniper. And the spruce-fir subalpine forest — will it ride the warmth a little higher into the alpine tundra? Or will the increasing violence of extreme weather events make the spruce and fir yield its exposed upper reaches — and also cause more blowdowns in it that will bring on its pests?
All we can say for sure is that climate change is going to cause changes in our relationship with the Next Forest — in ways we can’t know till we see what is actually happening in the forests.
But there is another “environmental change” imminent that is probably going to have an even greater impact on our relationship with the Next Forest — and with everything else, too — and we are still in serious denial about this one. This change is going to happen in the economic and political environment surrounding our forests and communities: the coming “drought” in cheap fossil energy.
This is not the straw man that’s put out there: “We’re running out of oil.” We know there is a lot of fossil energy left, in the form of oil, natural gas, coal, tar sands, oil shale, et cetera, and a lot of “renewable” energy, too. But none of it is cheap, in the sense that petroleum and natural gas have been easy and cheap this past century, with hundreds of energy units produced for each unit of energy invested in production. For the future, we are going to be depending on energy resources that, at best, yield fewer than ten units of energy for every unit invested. Much of it, like oil shale, will yield less than five units, and some of the renewables like ethanol and hydrogen are just “energy carriers,” converting a unit of one kind of energy (biomass) into a unit of a more usable kind of energy (liquid fuel) with no energy gain at all. The prices of energy will rise accordingly.
This “changing energy climate” is going to change everything, including the way we relate to forests. Virtually every aspect of modern life is rooted somehow in cheap fossil energy, mostly in cheap petroleum. The food we eat, from the fertilizers and pumped water that grow it to the fleets of trucks and trains and planes that deliver it, is basically a petroleum product. More and more of the building products in our homes — again all brought in by truck and train from somewhere else — are wood composites glued together with petroleum products or petroleum-based plastics. Transportation costs alone — once they climb into the $10-20 per gallon range — will force the “local community” to become a lot more local in terms of food production, building materials and energy resources.
But that brings up a third “environmental challenge” the local community of the Next Forest faces today: that is the extent to which the political and economic climate of the 20th Century essentially did away with the local community as a functioning political economy capable of producing and distributing anything useful to its own residents. We chuckled about the centralized planning of the Soviet Union and its “Five Year Plans,” but we essentially engaged in the same degree, if not quite the same kind, of centralization of all economic and political activity around the great-state ideology of corporate capitalism and its urban industrialism. With “economy of scale” and “standardization” as our marching cries, we essentially turned over all production of everything to increasingly centralized entities. Local communities that were once semi-self-sufficient in the production of food, building materials and energy resources are today just terminals for the shipping out of raw resources (cattle, coal, petroleum, ores, et cetera) and the shipping in of processed and manufactured goods and services (beef, electricity, gasoline, manufactured products, et cetera). Or in the case of the resort town — the shipping in of people with money in their pockets to consume our scenic and recreational resources in situ.
What we call the “local economy” today in most communities outside of the metropolitan areas consists mostly of retailers who display and sell the goods produced elsewhere; the local knowledge for food and energy production is barely still alive and is not generally known. Aside from the one big sawmill in Montrose, Colorado, a few remnant “ranch mills” here and there, and some local suppliers of firewood and fence poles, there is no “community based forest products industry” sustainable or otherwise, and there aren’t many people left who would know how to put one together.
The education facilities — what we used to call “rural schools” before the term became pejorative — where an intelligent society might have kept such knowledge alive, have, for the past century been turned over to preparing the local kids to leave their community, for more lucrative careers in the centralized political economy of corporate capitalism. The rural people of America taxed themselves to prepare their own children for export, along with their cows, coal, et cetera.
So — put all that environmental context together, and it looks like the Next Forest as described on the Forest Service website — all that local community based stuff — will be emerging in an environment that is politically and economically unfriendly as well as physically unknowable, with the likelihood of bad weather on all fronts. Conditions could hardly be worse. Welcome to the 21st Century. And now it’s time to form a “local community vision” for our 21st century relationship with that New Forest.
Is this is a test? Is the Forest Service saying — “Okay! You didn’t like the way we were doing it? You think you guys can do it better? Go for it!”
Having probably pissed off most of my friends in the Forest Service by now, I’m going to go ahead and piss off most of my environmentalist friends by suggesting that we ecofreaks have become part of the Dead Forest problem too, and will probably have to change our thinking for the Next Forest.
Thanks to a cultural environment and education indoctrination that taught us nothing practical about how to survive in the world since benevolent corporations would be supplying our every need or desire, we thought that what we mostly wanted from the national forests was for them to stand around forever looking pretty.
And after the Forest Service had, in its unconscious technocratic arrogance, corrupted its own forest science after the 1950s in order to get out the Congressionally mandated cut so every American could afford a sub-urban house, the environmental reaction set in and the preservationists finally got their say, and to a remarkable extent, their way. The advent of the Environmental Impact Statement process made it possible for just about any public lands timber cut to be held up or stopped, and a lot of trees were kept from untimely deaths for utilitarian purposes in order to stand around looking pretty until they died a natural death, or suffered death by fire, which is probably the same thing.
But it is as possible to allow a type of uncritical ideological arrogance to run amok in stopping forest management activities, as it is to have uncritical ideological arrogance running amok on the management side. And a few decades of mismanagement is not cured by a few decades of no management; put the two together, and you get the Dead Forest. Dan Kemmis, founder of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West and one of the more aware Western leaders in moving toward the Next Forest, analyzed this situation at length in his book, “This Sovereign Land: A New Vision for Governing the West.”
What’s going to be hard for environmentalists to face up to is the intensity of management we are going to have to bring to the Next Forest if the next generations of humans and the Next Forest are going to survive together, because of two things. One is the nature and magnitude of the environmental changes, already discussed, that we’ve brought on the forests and ourselves. We’ve been able to stop a lot of “harvesting” in the national forests in the Rockies — to the extent that the forest products industries in the Southern Rockies have virtually disappeared — because cheap fuel has enabled us to ship lumber in from the Northwest, the Southeast and Canada. Transportation costs in the not-distant future will make that, first, prohibitive, and probably eventually impossible. If we are going to have building materials at all, we are going to have to go back to producing them relatively locally.
And the other reason why we are going to have to manage the forests intensively is because we refuse to “manage ourselves.” If upwards of 90 percent of us would simply disappear, then we could return to the presumed golden age of “letting nature take its course,” with us as part of it. But there aren’t many volunteers for disappearing; we’ve got some good wars and famines going that are knocking our swarm down a little, but we keep trying to end or prevent those; and every time we get a good disease going, we declare war on it and keep it from helping nature take its course. We refuse to manage ourselves.
So basically, if we let nature take its slow adaptive course in the forests, but continue to refuse to let nature take its course with us, then we will begin to devastate the forests again when we can no longer get cheap goods from Canada. If we are going to truly try to realize the goal of “having (most of) our forest and eating (some of) it too,” then we are going to have a practice a new kind of really intensive management.
But it doesn’t have to be “intensive management” in the sense of the “devastation by management” some of the national forests experienced through the industrial “timber beast” era; it could be, should be more comparable to the kind of “intensive management” a gardener brings to a garden. A relatively new term that’s often used in such instances is “adaptive management.” This is a new way of saying things like “trial and error” and “seat of the pants”: acknowledging the complexity of ecosystems, we try something, see how it works, then change what we’re doing as soon as we start to see all the unforeseen consequences and implications of what we tried. This requires all of us ideologues to evolve a little, transcend our own ideologies and enlarge our souls accordingly.
Become gardeners, in short, gardeners of all growing things within our ken, knowing what’s there, what’s ready, and how to get it out without harming what’s there but not ready. It is the only alternative to full-out locustlike, first-come-first-served, neoindustrial corporate devastation. And if we choose it, not all of it will be new; some of it has been happening on the margins of the industrial corporate culture forever, recessive genes in the social body.
For example — I spent several seasons running the saw for a little sawmill in the valley of the North Fork of the Gunnison River, surrounded by the Gunnison National Forest. Our mill depended on what the Forest Service called “clean-up sales” — small cuts in blowdown areas, or places where bugs were becoming a presence, or places starting to look nastily fire-prone, with just enough surrounding healthy trees to make it a passable deal for a mill. Arguably — and I would so argue — the forests were better off for the timber cuts that supplied our mill. There were two other small mills in the valley doing the same thing.
But to find the areas where small cuts would improve the health of the forest required Forest Service people to spend a lot of time out getting to know their forest, which wasn’t always the case, given budget issues, loss of timber funds from stalled sales, the cuts of the Reagan Revolution, and other factors. As a result, there weren’t always enough small sales to keep the three small mills operating — although economics and political pressure decreed that there were always large sales, clearcuts or “seed cuts” in the healthy timber, for the big mills then operating in the Montrose-to-Delta strip.
But one has to think — if there were still three small mills in every valley in the Southern Rockies, and enough foresters to find and map clean-up sales for all of them — would the Forest Service have been able to get enough infected timber out of the forests to have kept ahead of the beetles? Maybe, maybe not — global warming is really big, and is going to change the forests, bugs or not, and that’s what we’ve got to learn to adapt to. It’s environment. Nonetheless, there is an intensity of management at a small scale that could have made a better transition to the Next Forest with less of the traumatic Dead Forest.
I’m also remembering that elsewhere on the Gunnison National Forest, an old forester on the Taylor River District, Tom Rutherford, was designing small random-looking, fuzzy-edged cuts in lodgepole pine that mimicked what he perceived to be the “mosaic” pattern in some healthy lodgepole stands prone to lightning strikes — what would occur when lightning caused fires from year to year that would run up a hillside, then get rained out on the downside of the hill: The result was a lot of small stands of different ages, so the bugs might find one stand that suited their taste but wouldn’t get a whole mountainside. Working the same district was another Gunnison National Forest forester, Jerry Chonka, who has become one of the Forest Service’s most experienced controlled-burn experts nationally; he also works on “mechanical thinning” methods for the urban interface that imitate the healthier actions of fire. Is it entirely coincidence that the beetles have not yet come over the Divide into the Gunnison watershed yet? Well, maybe next year they will be there, too. But it will be interesting to see how Rutherford’s and Chonka’s efforts work out.
That’s what I’m thinking of when I suggest we need management at the intensity of “gardening” for our national forests — forest workers who spend a long time getting to know their place, and working on ways to take care of it. Wilderness lovers and naturomantics won’t like that idea. And it’s not part of the technocratic heritage of the Forest Service either. Gifford Pinchot was proud of his European training in forestry, but failed to import one of the cornerstones of the European system: the local community forester, who grew up with the forest and the community, and spent his life there, and gave a replacement (often his son) a long on-the-job training so he would know it as well. Pinchot opted for the scientist-manager, and didn’t want his boys getting too intimate with their places. It needs to be different for the Next Forest.
But how will we run a local community-based forest products industry without petroleum? No diesel for the mills, the dozers, the skidders and trucks? Well, think back — America was built, through the 17th and 18th centuries, entirely with water-powered sawmills; aren’t we smart enough to recover that technology? That’s a serious question, when you look at the extent to which we moderns have lost all the grandfather-and-grandmother knowledge of how to do anything truly useful. Assuredly we wouldn’t be able to crank out the same volume of lumber with non-fossil energy — which means some of us will have to have settle for smaller houses — but some of us won’t want to be paying to heat a midlife manor anyway.
Once I start thinking of this stuff, all kinds of things come to mind — I remember a late-20th Century sawmill I saw in Washington that used computers to maximize the lumber output from small logs. So imagine a water-powered sawmill with a solar-powered computer analyzing and setting up the logs, partially compensating from the loss in volume with maximum efficiency. It won’t cut any million board feet a year, but it will be sustainable, and maybe we’ll have think more about straw or adobe walls and leave the wood for the roof.
And out in the woods, getting the timber? We don’t want big roads there anyway, right? So I’m remembering a Montana study, thirty or forty years ago, that compared a rubber-tire skidder, a farm tractor and a horse team for selective logging in lodgepole pine (bringing out the buggy trees). Guess which method won, in the board-foot-output for energy-input comparison. Of course, it’s easier to operate a tractor or skidder than a horse — you have to show respect for the horse and treat it right. It’s also slower — but that might be okay since the sawyers will be using the old crosscut saw rather than a chainsaw. Can we go back to that kind of thing?
Everything will have to slow down a little. Well, hot damn.
I don’t know, finally, what to say. To look at the challenges presented by the visejaws of global climate change on the one hand, a huge energy transition on the other, in the unfriendly environment of a great-state political economy created by, for and of the corporate capitalists, it looks overwhelming. But go wander in the woods, look at the young green of the Next Forest starting up among the remains of the Dead Forest, and little things do look possible … out there, the age of science, technology and rationalized economy is over as a top-down centralized megastrategy — but when those priorities are mixed with some common sense and traditional knowledge, down on the ground where we and the trees live, they might work better. Some of it might even be fun. So welcome to the Next Forest, one of those terrifying futures you might actually come to love.
Thanks to Roy Mask and his colleagues at the Forest Service Region II Forest Science Center in Gunnison, and to forester Carey Green on the White River National Forest in Minturn, for specific help with this analysis.
