Dear HCN:
Your coverage of the push
for salvage logging in the wake of an intense fire season was both
timely and insightful (HCN, 9/19/94). Kathie Durbin’s interview
with Tom Graham, a rehabilitation worker on the Tyee Creek Fire,
exposed one of the central fallacies of public forestry. Mr. Graham
suggested that the fire had burned both “managed” and “untouched”
watersheds alike.
There are no “pristine” or
“untouched” areas left in the West. The no-holds-barred war on
wildfire that has taken place since the turn of the century has
profoundly influenced forest and range ecology in virtually every
location, no matter how remote. Fire suppression is as damaging to
forest structure and biological diversity as over-zealous logging
or overgrazing.
The challenge for activists and
managers alike now is to find a point of reference for defining
forest health in the quest for ecosystem management. Forest
management in the Intermountain West has become a closed vicious
circle. The more we manage with a singular view toward protecting
and cutting timber, the more endangered that timber and its
associated ecosystems have become.
Industry
beckons us on another mad rush around the circle with its call for
large, unstudied salvage logging operations. I suggest we stop to
catch our breath and focus on forest history and forest ecosystems
in an honest way if we want to leave any forests at all for the
next generation of
Westerners.
Tom
Ribe
Los Alamos, New
Mexico
The writer is a staff
ecologist with the Public Forestry Foundation in Eugene,
Oregon.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline No rush to log.
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