forestry

KUOW 94.9 FM recently aired a story -- reported by yours truly -- about a controversial land exchange in Port Ludlow on the Olympic Peninsula. 

The Washington state Department of Natural Resources wants to trade thick forests  around Port Ludlow for Pope Resources clearcuts in the Olympic foothills. 

The story spotlights the Port Ludlow exchange, which is one small part of a larger DNR strategy under fire from conservationists and citizens, as detailed by a longer Web version of the KUOW story.

The Washington state DNR manages 5.6 million acres of public property, including forests, grasslands, croplands, aquatic and commercial land.   But the agency also gets rid of public forests via land exchanges with private companies. 

The DNR's state-wide strategy pulls public ownership -- and protection --from scattered lowland forests at risk of redevelopment due to nearby urban or highway sprawl.  In return, the DNR accepts swathes of timberland higher up in the mountains;  the buffers between the land and development pressures make it easy for the DNR to create big parcels of land for future timber harvests.

While the trades reduce the DNR's management costs, they also allow older growth public forests to be rezoned and redeveloped for private profit -- at a time when school, state and county budgets are hurting.  The state's Constitution mandates that the DNR revenues produced by selling the public's natural resources -- such as timber or shellfish -- support public schools, state institutions, and county services. 

Though the DNR's land has belonged to the public since sta

Fubar is the name of a stream on Alaska's Prince of Wales Island, and apparently it's appropriately named. FUBAR, of course, is an acronym meaning "Fouled up beyond all recognition," or something pretty close to that, anyway.

It's the central scene in a news story by Mary Pemberton of the Associated Press outlining how restoration efforts in the national forests are helping restore jobs in places let down by the timber industry across the West:

Forest restoration is occurring all over the West, said Mary Mitsos with the National Forest Foundation, a Montana-based group. Efforts in Montana, Alaska, Washington and Oregon involve repairing watersheds to encourage healthier fish runs. In Arizona and New Mexico, restoration is more about forest thinning to lessen the danger of wildfires.

At Fubar Creek, soil washed into the waterway from clearcuts upslope, filling it in and causing the water to go all over the place, including a nearby road.  The restoration there in the Tongass National Forest and elsewhere in southeastern Alaska added $8.4 million and 150 jobs to the economy in 2007, according to a study by The Nature Conservancy.

Pemberton quotes Marnie Criley, coordinator of the Montana Forest Restoration Committee:

People are getting to know each other and not automatically hating each other because this person is a timber person and this person is a conservationist. A lot of trust-building has been going on.

We should point out that this is not a new trend. In fact, we wrote about enviros making peace with loggers and agreeing to some logging in Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest back in 2004.

Nor does this mean peace is breaking out in the War In the Woods.

Thank goodness for non-profit journalism again. On the web page of The Tyee is an opinion piece by a Canadian environmentalist with some astounding news about how Canada severely undercounts its contribution to global warming.

The column by Sierra Club campaigner Jens Wieting finds that a huge chunk of the Great White North's greenhouse gas production is not counted and is acknowledged in what amounts to a footnote: the carbon dioxide coming out of Canadian forests because of logging and slash burning.

Wieting closely examines a report catalouging British Columbia's greenhouse gas emissions, although he says the same approach is used at the national level:

According to the report, total greenhouse gas emissions in British Columbia in 2007 were 67 megatonnes. These mainly originate from the use of fossil fuels (80 per cent) as well as waste (six per cent), agriculture (four per cent) and deforestation (five per cent). So far, all correct. But it's the innocuous-sounding item "emissions from forest land remaining forest land" that hides the real bomb: a whopping 51 megatonnes of CO2. This figure appears only as a "memo item" in the report and is not counted as part of B.C.'s total emissions. B.C.'s carbon emissions would be 77 per cent higher if emissions from forests were included.

Normally forests are carbon sinks, places that suck up carbon dioxide. It turns out that emissions from forests are outpacing the uptake because the pine beetle infestation left the forests in such tatters.

Tyee, btw, is a localism for the king salmon.

A first nations group says B.C. forest fires could have been prevented if the federal government had removed wood killed by pine beetles, reports Richard J. Dalton Jr. in the Vancouver Sun. Hundreds of millions of dollars normally reserved for the pine beetle program were used instead to improve infrastructure and help those who lost jobs in forestry, and the government did not set a dollar amount for dealing with the pine beetle infestation. Trees killed by pine beetles burn more readily and quickly. The B.C. First Nations Forestry Council says had the government used the funding to clear dead wood, fire breaks would have been created that kept the fires from coming so close to communities, minimizing the overall damage.

– Emily Linroth

Quietly, the logging of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest has all but ground to a halt, Matthew Preuschwrites for The Oregonian. Only about two-tenths of 1 percent of the old-growth at the heart of the spotted owl battles of the 1990s was actually cut between 1994 and 2003, Preusch reports. The Obama administration seems poised to, if anything, restrict such logging further. So maybe the tree-sitters actually won?

Perhaps. One unanswered question: What happened during the final years of the Bush administration, from 2003 to 2008? The most recent figures aren't in yet. During that time the Bush administration made a number of concessions to the timber industry,  which took legal action to boost harvest rates.

Foresters in Western Canada and the United States have begun taking climate control matters into their own hands by relocating certain tree species threatened by global warming to new geographic locations.

Alicia Chang, Science Writer with the Associated Press, takes a thoughtful look at this controversial practice. Critics worry no one should play God with nature and that such re-introduction efforts, however well intended, may upset the natural balance in the new location. But proponents of proactive tree conservation say it would be irresponsible to let whole species die off because of deteriorating ecosystems. So far the approach is being tried with the Western larch, which grows in areas of British Columbia's southern interior, and is now being seeded just below the Arctic Circle. And in a similar effort, scientists are planting seedlings of Sitka spruce and Western red cedar from B.C. coastal rainforests into the dry ponderosa pine forests of Idaho.