Salvage is a word that is much in the air these days,
not just in the woods, but also in the lecture halls of
universities and in the marble corridors of Washington, D.C. It is
a word of power, a soothing word implying many virtues: prudence
and profit, rescue and redemption, both exploitation and, somehow,
protection. No wonder politicians love it so.
Among the
definitions of “salvage” in the American Heritage
Dictionary of the English Language are these: “the act of
saving imperiled property from loss” and “something saved from
destruction or waste and put to further use.” It couldn’t be
clearer: Salvage is salvation. But definitions, like history, are
written by the winners. In this case, the winners are those who
decide on the meaning of the words property, loss, destruction,
waste and use.
For boosters of salvage logging, the
property in question is timber damaged or killed by fire, insects
or other “catastrophes.” Loss, destruction and waste? They mean by
that the decay of snags and fallen trees. “Use” refers to the
harvested logs and the money to be made from them. Under this
definition, what is saved by the act of salvage is timber for the
mill.
But what about the forest? If our goal, after a
fire, a windstorm or an insect outbreak, is to salvage the forest
— to save it from destruction or waste — how would we
do that?
This is not a rhetorical question. Research
scientists have been hard at work examining this very issue. And it
turns out that if your goal is to salvage a forest, then salvage
logging is the last thing you want to do. From the perspective of
the forest, the terms “waste” and “loss” apply to the logged trees
that are taken out of the system: Their removal is a dead loss to
the forest.
What good are dead trees? They are essential
for forest recovery, from the very first days after a fire to the
very end of the process. In the days and weeks after a fire, both
standing snags and downed logs help to stabilize the newly exposed
soil and prevent erosion. Snags provide shade and protection from
wind, creating buffered microhabitats favorable to the germination
and survival of colonizing herbaceous plants and tree seedlings.
Dead trees are essential habitat for many species of wildlife, from
woodpeckers to cavity-roosting birds and bats, to salamanders that
live beneath decaying logs. And the gradual decay of dead trees
releases nutrients into the soil that are the basis for renewed
fertility and the re-stablishment of the complex, essential
community of soil fungi and invertebrates.
Despite the
value of dead trees for forest recovery, many people still support
salvage logging for a perfectly understandable reason: The burned
timber is just too valuable to leave to rot. It’s a simple
matter of dollars and cents.
But in fact the economics of
salvage logging are anything but simple. The nonpartisan Government
Accountability Office recently released an economic analysis of
salvage logging in Oregon’s Biscuit Fire through 2005. The
results may shock you. Logging produced $8.8 million in revenues
but cost $10.7 million. What’s more, most of the income
— more than $5 million — came from hazard-tree removal,
not salvage logging. Far from being too good a deal to pass up, the
salvage- logging program cost American taxpayers millions of
dollars. Both the forest and our pocketbooks would have been much
better off if it had never happened.
So what would it
look like if we took the powerful idea of salvage and applied it to
living systems, not commercial commodities? Using prescribed fire
to thin overstocked forests and save them from wildfire becomes
“salvage burning” — what a concept. How about “river
salvage,” an appropriate term for removing dams to restore
free-flowing rivers and save threatened salmon populations? And
“species salvage” perfectly describes habitat protection in the
name of saving endangered species such as spotted owls and grizzly
bears.
If we can train ourselves to define “salvage” in
this holistic, ecological way, perhaps we will be able to save
something that sometimes seems beyond salvation: our relationship
with the earth.
Pepper Trail is a biologist and
writer in Ashland, Oregon.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Of salvage logging and salvation.
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