It isn’t often an
academic dean gets up in public and apologizes for participating in
an effort to suppress the work of a graduate student. But
that’s exactly what Oregon State University College of
Forestry Dean Hal Salwasser recently did.
“I profoundly
regret the negative debate that recent events have generated,” he
wrote in a letter to the college. Salwasser went further and said
he should have congratulated the graduate student, Daniel Donato,
for having his research published in the journal
Science.
Donato and five Oregon State
University and U.S. Forest Service scientists concluded that
logging in the Biscuit Burn in southern Oregon damaged seedlings
growing back on their own and littered the forest floor with tinder
that could fuel future fires.
The Donato study conflicts
with an earlier study conducted by Oregon State academic
heavyweights John Sessions and Mike Newton. They concluded that
salvage logging and reforestation after the Biscuit Burn could
regenerate the forest faster than natural methods.
The
Donato study was politically inconvenient because the Bush
administration and Oregon Republican Rep. Greg Walden used the
Sessions-Newton study as the basis for Walden’s latest
amendments to the “Healthy Forests Act” of 2003.
Salwasser joined other faculty members in pressuring
Science not to publish the Donato findings. But
the editors at Science had sent the Donato paper
though their peer review process and said they had no reason not to
publish the article. It appeared in the Jan. 20, 2006 issue.
Political inconveniences aside, we laymen have walked
into the middle of an academic food fight of major importance. Over
the years, as Oregon State’s College of Forestry has grown in
size, it has added more than traditional foresters to its faculty.
It has welcomed engineers and ecologists, and both like to tinker
with the established order.
Ecologists are trained as
observers of whole natural systems and are more inclined to let
nature take its course. Foresters trained in Oregon get their
orthodoxy from the history of the Tillamook Burn. This legendary
forest fire erupted in August 1933 in the Coast Range, and it
burned about 240,000 acres.
More seriously, the Burn
caught fire again and again, every six years until 1951 — it
was called the six-year jinx — despite the best efforts of
foresters to fireproof the original burn. The problem was finally
solved, after many missteps, by aggressively logging all standing
burned timber, toppling snags, sweeping the forest floor of all
fuels and aggressively hand-planting seedlings.
This
practice became orthodoxy — the only way to treat burned-over
forests. You hear the echoes in the Sessions-Newton report.
Ecologists and younger foresters look to a different
experience. They study the Warner Creek Fire in 1991, in the
Willamette National Forest, where salvage logging was specifically
limited because of the steep slopes. Studies show a more diverse
forest regenerating without salvage logging.
So
who’s right? It’s fair to say the jury isn’t in
yet. The Donato study alone doesn’t prove the thesis that
salvage logging is worse for bringing back a forest than a decision
to leave the area unlogged. Indeed, supporters of the
Sessions-Newton study say they will write a critique for Science
magazine and try to discredit Donato’s work.
Donato
deserves more respect than that. Donato’s work is reminiscent
of another scientist who debunked the prevailing creed of forest
management — Dr. Jerry Franklin.
Franklin, who is
now finishing a distinguished career at the University of
Washington College of Natural Resources, spent more than 40 years
studying old-growth forests, primarily in the Willamette National
Forest, east of Eugene.
When Franklin began his research,
it was an article of faith with foresters that old-growth forests
had ceased to grow. Old-growth forests were “dead, dying and
decadent,” biological deserts that had to be logged to make room
for “vigorous young forests,” brimming with biological diversity.
Franklin and his many colleagues learned that reality was
just the opposite. It was newly sterilized and replanted clear-cuts
that were the biological deserts, while an old-growth forest was
the most biologically diverse. Franklin has never been forgiven by
some of his colleagues. Yet Franklin’s findings are the
foundation of today’s forest management.
Daniel
Donato and his colleagues just may be in the process of doing to
salvage logging what Jerry Franklin did to clear-cutting.
Russell Sadler is a contributor to Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He
writes in Eugene, Oregon.
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