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
wind protection, 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-establishment 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
non-partisan Government Accounting Office recently released an
economic analysis of salvage logging in Montana’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 contributor
to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is a biologist and
writer in Ashland, Oregon.
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