Alan Wittbecker
According to the booklet, Closer Look: An On-the- Ground Investigation of the Sierra Club's Book, Clearcut, published by the American Forest & Paper Association, many people were "saddened and angered" by Clearcut (published by The Sierra Club). Although the people quoted were affected by its "misrepresentation," probably everyone else who read it was angered and saddened for other reasons having more to do with destruction, ignorance, and greed. Clearcut has been reviewed favorably in American Forests, World Watch, and the Whole Earth Review, among others. Like the dueling reviews in the Journal of Forestry, however, the AFPA booklet is primarily negative. This orientation can be understood when we examine their assumptions, goals, and simple errors.
After an exhaustive search, they were able to locate 10 sites, which they present as "healthy, diverse forests." In these 10 photographs, they claim that the Sierra Club "falsified" the record or presented "misleading" information on forest conditions. For example, they state that areas described as industrial deforestation "were in fact salvage cuts following devastating wildfires and insect or disease infestation." Perhaps an even closer look at the history of those sites is needed; some of the wildfires and infestations were caused by previous cuts. Victor Menotti, of the Foundation for Deep Ecology, a sponsor of Clearcut, is preparing a detailed response for each site mentioned.
Although their primary purpose was to expose the Sierra Club's misrepresentations, they included a short piece by Thomas Bonnicksen defending modern forestry and the proper use of clearcutting. The 10 photographs are examined on 20 pages. There is not very much documentation, beyond anecdotes. Even if all 10 photographs were errors, the remaining 140+ photographs in Clearcut offer an undeniable indictment of clearcutting.
Most of those 10 photos are not errors, however. The AFPA admits that they contain clearcuts, either old clearcuts or recent relatively small clearcuts of 75 acres. Their real complaint seems to focus on the context, on the fact that not every square centimeter shown in every photograph was an intentional clearcut.
This book erroneously states that people opposed to forest management "further their agenda" by focusing on clearcutting. It never occurs to the authors that people are opposed to clearcutting and in favor of better forest management. They also state that the tragedy resides in the "many distortions, omissions, and misinformation" in Clearcut, and that the Sierra Club has chosen "fiction over fact" and "hyperbole over reason" by discouraging rational discussion (fiction books rarely have photographs when you think about it).
Closer Look admits that some photographs do depict bad practices, but claims that such practices are illegal and no longer used. Then, they defend clearcutting by using the familiar and fallacious argument that, when properly applied, clearcutting "mimics nature" but without the "lasting and wholesale destruction" of hurricanes, volcanoes, and fires.
The West Maine Mountains were clearcut in the 1930s, so inclusion of that photograph in Clearcut seems justified. Closer Look, however, after admitting the clearcut, blithely points out that half is still being clearcut (as recently as 1991), but in 75-acre patches with irregular shapes to "mimic nature." The 60-year old firs are described as "past their prime" and if they are taken for important paper products, a "new forest will appear." Of course, a new forest would appear if they were not taken. Tiny patches and narrow corridors have been left, but one wonders about their effectiveness. Too bad the money that went into this book was not spent on research on minimum effective corridor size.
The Blackfeet Indian reservation forest in Montana is another site that was cleared for salvage in the 1960s, but Closer Look claims it is fundamentally different from a clearcut because the reason was different. The text assumes that lodgepole pines live in even-aged, single-species forests, and that only by human intervention can a new forest be regenerated. George Wuerthner has written a much more detailed response to these claims regarding this site and Houghton Creek.
On the northern California coast, "nature visited" this area and burned parts of the forest. One wonders where nature is now‹visiting some other forest perhaps. After nature's visit, "rehabilitation "was completed within two years." Yet, it is unlikely that the forest is the same as it was before the fire, with old-growth redwoods. And, it is equally unlikely that nature required the roads in the photograph for her "visit."
In the Targhee National Forest, bordering Yellowstone, the Forest Service clearcut to reduce the fire hazard of beetle-killed pine. Closer Look contends that the clearcutting here is the proper management technique because it "imitates the natural life cycle of the lodgepole pine." Where in the natural life cycle does every stem get carried into an urban ecosystem? If this is a healthy forest, as the anonymous ones claim, why can we not see any trees? Closer Look compares this clearcut with Yellowstone, where the Park Service did "nothing." Yellowstone is called a "catastrophe" where the scars are terribly evident today" and recovery is "many years away."
They make the mistake of regarding the 1988 Yellowstone fire as a terrible disaster caused by the absence of forest management‹even though fire suppression and fragmentation are the results of forest management. Furthermore, they seems unaware that these fires are natural events on 200-300-year cycles in Lodgepole pine forests, and that management made very little difference to the extent of burning. It was not a disaster ecologically; 45% was burned, and its remarkable "recovery" has been documented in the Journal of Forestry (11/94), as well as in National Geographic and Current Health 2. They do not seem to understand the important roles of fire: regulating oxygen on a planetary level (according to James Lovelock), reducing the acidity of and increasing the organic matter in forest soils, and increasing species diversity (especially nitrogen-fixing legumes under the canopy).
They ascribe fragmentation of Oregon's Blue Mountains to "unproductive soil conditions" and southern exposures, and not as a result of harvesting. Soil conditions do not cause fragmentation, which is a human artifact, but they do shape natural mosaics. Too often, harvesting on fragile sites ensures that the forest cannot come back. They condemn the Clearcut editors for implying that practices, such as salvage harvests following insect infestations or restocking poor sites, represent bad forestry. In fact, many salvage harvests of insect infestations and bad plantings are unnecessary and do represent bad forestry practices.
On Weyerhaeuser land south of Mt. St. Helens, the harvest rate in one drainage was increased to compensate for timber destroyed in the eruption. (Was clearcutting the harvest technique used?) Thus, "nature" placed "extra burden" on lands not destroyed directly. What is wrong with this sentence? Weyerhaeuser replanting is said to contrast sharply with part of the blast zone not rehabilitated. Although some areas still seem devastated, the recovery of much of the land around Mt. St. Helens has been documented in scientific journals, such as the Journal of Ecology.
The criticisms in Closer Look are based on the many unconscious myths, logical fallacies, kinds of ignorance, and professional agendas that underlie their activities.
Two other myths, progress and nationalism, arose with the industrial revolution. Aldous Huxley described progress as the theory that one can get something for nothing; progress assumes that all consequences could be foreseen, and that the ends justify the means, even theft, destruction and murder. Nationalism is the theory that the state was the only true god; all others, especially other states, were false. Other old myths, such as " man is lord over the earth," have proven to be dangerous. They should all be retired to the scrolls of dead myths.
The myths of the mutant modern economics have tremendous impacts on how forests are treated. The old analogy of the economy as a machine leads to unhealthy and dangerous myths about forests:
The fallacy of complexity occurs throughout‹where arguments have multiple assumptions, and attacking one has the appearance of attacking others, which may be adequate. When Clearcut attacks clearcuts, Popovich claims that forest management is being attacked. When Clearcut points out problems with the inbreeding of education and industry, the anonymous ones claim that forestry schools and the profession are being "denounced."
There is a fallacy of the false dilemma, where only two alternatives are claimed and one is considered unacceptable, as in: Either A or B; not A; therefore B. Obviously, there are more than two possibilities. Preservation is not the only alternative to clearcutting; the Ecoforestry Institute has been promoting other alternatives, such as individual tree selection.
Begging the question (petitio principii) is a popular fallacy. In this fallacy the premises are insufficient to establish the conclusion. For instance: ŒWhen a forest has an insect infestation, it is unhealthy; Spruce bud worm is killing Umatilla National Forest, therefore the forest must be clearcut.'
The anonymous ones all use a logical fallacy of the appeal to authority (argumentum ad vericundiam) by constantly referring to foresters as having all the facts. For example, one forester exclaimed that he would be "proud" to hang a picture of the excellent management of the Rangeley Lakes harvest on his wall.
Joseph Meeker judges that a burned forest is ugly because it is truncated; but it is as beautiful as a baby, and for the same reasons: potential, development, and being in the process of renewal. Our sense of beauty, of what is intrinsically meaningful, dominates our grasp of what is real. Until we understand that all phases of the forest have beauty, we will not appreciate the meaning of the process. Understanding beauty could even allow a deeper understanding of the utilitarian. For example, what is the use‹or the beauty‹of a burned forest, as related to the function of lightning or the planetary carbon cycle? Lightning is essential to life by breaking down amino acids into ammonia, methane, hydrogen, and water. Burned forests are necessary to maintain diversity, among other things.
Other euphemisms clog our arteries of communication. Industrial forestry itself is sometimes a euphemism for killing forests (silvicide) for profit.
What the reviewers are trying to say is that clearcutting is the same as, that is, has the same function as, natural processes. This is not true either. Clearcutting is the large-scale removal of a significant part of the biomass, destroying the structure of the forest. Fire does not "sweep" away old trees. We cannot duplicate the structure of the forest in a tree plantation because we are uncertain about all of the parts of the structure. Far more than natural events such as fires and hurricanes, we are cutting, clearing, and wasting at a scale that threatens the stability and existence of forests. At the same time we degrade habitats, rapidly add novel elements to the forest cycles, compact soils, cause transient perturbations in energy relations (from burning), manipulate species, and interfere with wild species. None of these things by itself is exclusive to humans as a species, but they are excessive, rapid, compounded, and very large-scale.
The reviewers state that the Clearcut editors attribute natural catastrophes‹wildfire, storms, insect infestations, etc.‹to the perfidy of forest management. Many catastrophes only seem natural because of our ignorance of our effects on forests; 90 percent of fires are human-caused, according to Charles Stoddard, and various percentages of blowdown and insect infestations result directly from poor management techniques.
Catastrophic disturbances are not nature's clearcuts, as Bonnicksen and the others emphasize. Wildfires, which are presented as "nature's clearcuts" in the discussion of Houghton Creek, are haphazard and partial‹ rarely burning more than 10 percent of a forest, unlike a clearcut, which is a complete with removal of stems on a short cycle. Even catastrophic disturbances like hurricanes rarely damage more than 5 percent of a forest. Furthermore, damages from hurricanes and fires are not "wholesale" and "lasting" as the anonymous ones claim.
More than being agents of mortality, insects, diseases, and animals are native components of complex food webs in ecosystems that contribute to the selection of certain kinds and ages of trees (determining the composition of the forest, which changes over time). Insects pollinate some trees and overwhelm others‹rarely more than 1 percent of a forest. Diseases remove stressed trees, also probably a low percentage on the order of 1 percent. The effect of these disturbances on the long-term health of a forest can only be regarded as positive, unlike a clearcut, which destroys the forest.
In general, industrial forestry denies forest processes in an attempt to control and regulate production for economic reasons. By trying to prevent one kind of mortality, industrial forestry merely sets up another kind. Ecoforestry, by contrast, accepts a typical percentage of death as the normal condition, necessary for the renewal of the forest. The rate of death per year in an old forest is remarkably consistent at about 1-2 percent, even with wind storms, fires, disease outbreaks, and animal damage. In spite of Boise Cascade's recent television advertisement about our public forests ("Let our public forests rot or burn again? What a waste!"), rotting and burning do not produce waste (certainly nothing like pressed-wood furniture in landfills) and are an integral part of the cycle of life and death in the forest.
There is little historical understanding of a site. Previous forestry practices are never connected to drought and infestation. In many cases, it is those new forests that are under attack from the ghosts of previous practices. Rocky slopes, meadows, and agricultural land are presented as if they were all that had ever occupied a site. In fact, many agricultural lands, as well as grazing lands, meadows, and rocky outcroppings were once forested, have been clearcut, and cannot get reestablished. The reviewers are deceiving themselves, not by the objectivity of their facts, but by their triviality and unrelatedness. Parts of problems are identified and analyzed, but the conclusions are trivial, weak, and irrelevant.
Everyone calls for a balanced presentation of forestry, although forestry has been polarized since Pinchot and Muir. The Ecoforestry Institute is working to integrate ideas and perspectives into a comprehensive approach. Part of the problem is that we have not found any convincing scientific arguments for clearcutting, so it is hard to give balanced arguments. The anonymous ones mention the overwhelming record of successful regeneration, but US and Canadian government statistics do not show any such thing.
Without meaning to, Closer Look ends up supporting Clearcut by reproducing pictures of clearcuts and admitting that they have been clearcut and are ugly. While explanations for some of the photographs were helpful in understanding the contexts and reasons, none of them seems adequate to justify the clearcutting.
The peevishness of the reviewers seems to be a general response to their perceptions that they are being attacked and misrepresented by anti-forestry forces and not a response to valid criticism. The debate on clearcutting needs to be framed as a dialog so that the people who make the decisions will think of other alternatives. Closer Look starts in the right direction, but derails itself with self-interest and its own misinformation.