There is no such thing as biological waste in a forest. But, the economic concept of waste, which excludes nonmonetary social values and all intrinsic ecological values, has spawned the industrial concept of salvage logging, usually in the form of clearcutting. Clearcutting, in turn, is an economic expediency in which I find no biological justification--it mimics nothing in Nature, such as biological investment.
We must learn to reinvest part of Nature's biological capital, including some large merchantable trees, to maintain soil health, which in large measure equates to forest health. Forest health, in turn, equates to the long- term economic health of the timber industry. (To "reinvest" means to leave, to forego some potential short-term profits in the forest in the form of merchantable trees--both live and dead--to assure, for future generations, long-term soil fertility and thus the long-term productivity of the forest.)
Planting and fertilizing trees are investments in the next commercial stand, not reinvestments in the forest. They are investments in a potential product. We do not reinvest in maintaining the health of biological processes because we do not see the forest, only the commercial product. We do not reinvest because we insist that ecological variables are really constant values that we need not consider.
"What," you may ask, "will we really lose if we convert forests into economic plantations (tree farms) through such practices as clearcutting and salvage logging?" Before I can answer this question, you must understand that all things in Nature's forest are neutral when it comes to any kind of human valuation. Nature has only intrinsic value. Thus, each component of the forest, whether a microscopic bacterium or a towering 800-year-old tree, is therefore allowed to develop its prescribed structure, carry out its prescribed function, and interact with other components of the forest through their prescribed interrelated, interactive, interdependent processes. No component is more or less valuable than another; each may differ from the other in form, but all are complementary in function.
Consider, for example, the coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest in which Douglas fir and western hemlock predominate in the old- growth canopy. Herein lives the spotted owl, which preys on the flying squirrel as its stable diet. The flying squirrel, in turn, depends on truffles, the below-ground fruiting bodies of mycorrhizal fungi. (The term mycorrhiza, meaning "fungus-root," denotes the obligatory symbiotic relationship between certain fungi and plant roots.) Flying squirrels, having eaten truffles, defecate live fungal spores onto the forest floor, which, upon being washed into the soil by rain, inoculate the roots of the forest trees. These fungi depend for survival on the live trees, whose roots they inoculate, to feed them sugars, which the trees produce in their green crowns. In turn, the fungi form extensions of the trees' root systems by collecting minerals, other nutrients, and water that are vital to the trees' survival. Mycorrhizal fungi also depend on large rotting trees lying on and buried in the forest floor for water and the formation of humus in the soil. Further, nitrogen-fixing bacteria occur inside the mycorrhiza, where they convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form that is usable by both the fungus and the tree. Mycorrhizal/small mammal/tree relationships have been documented throughout the coniferous forests of the United States (including Alaska) and Canada. They are also known to exist in Argentina, Europe, and Australia.
This may seem complex, but the forest is even more so. To add to the overall complexity, a live old-growth tree eventually becomes injured or sickened with disease and begins to die. How a tree dies determines how it decomposes and reinvests its biological capital (organic material, chemical elements, and functional processes) back into the soil, and eventually into another forest.
A tree may die standing as a snag, then crumble and fall piecemeal to the forest floor over decades. Or, it may fall directly to the forest floor as a whole tree. Regardless of how it dies, the snag and fallen tree are only altered states of the live tree--the live old-growth tree must exist before there can be a large snag or fallen tree.
How a tree dies is important to the health of the forest because its manner of death determines the structural dynamics of its body as habitat. Structural dynamics, in turn, determine the biological/chemical diversity hidden within the tree's decomposing body as ecological processes incorporate the old tree into the soil from which the next forest must grow. What goes on inside the decomposing body of a dying or dead tree is the hidden biological and functional diversity that is totally ignored by economic valuation. That trees become injured and diseased and die is therefore critical to the long- term structural and functional health of the forest.
The forest is thus an interconnected, interactive, organic whole defined not by the pieces of its body but rather by the interdependent functional relationships of those pieces in creating the whole--the intrinsic value of each piece and its complementary function. These functional relationships are totally ignored in salvage logging.
Returning for a moment to the Pacific Northwest, let's consider that the spotted owl preys on the flying squirrel, which depends on truffles for its diet. The fungus, of which the truffle is a part, is closely associated with large wood on and in the forest floor. The squirrel, the owl, and the fungus all depend on the same wood!
Salvage logging disrupts this interconnected, interactive, interdependent relationship by removing all merchantable dying and dead trees. The danger of such logging lies primarily its philosophical underpinnings that justify immediate economic considerations to the exclusion of all else. Those members of Congress who favor such economic tactics, recently attached authority for salvage logging as a rider to an unrelated bill. The purpose of this maneuver was to insulate short-term monetary profit from environmental law and any legal challenge to lawbreakers.
Salvage logging, as currently practiced, has these immediate consequences:
I do not question cutting some dying and dead trees. It is neither morally wrong nor necessarily ecologically harmful. But I do question the practice of salvage logging per se. The consequences of such ecological folly, in the name of short-term profitability, are inevitably passed on to the children for generations to come.
Salvage logging, one of the most ecologically dangerous practices in modern forestry, employs an overriding short-term economic rational as an excuse to summarily ignore all current ecological knowledge about the long- term biological sustainability of forests. The sole objective of salvage logging is to convert trees into money, thus replacing the art of forestry with the technology and economics of cutting trees.
Salvage logging epitomizes traditional, outmoded forestry, which is the myopic economic exploitation of trees at the supreme cost of the biological health of the forest as a living system. Outmoded forestry focuses on growing, then cutting, trees as rapidly as possible to maximize short-term profits.
Traditional forestry practice, now outmoded because we have improved information, began with the idea that forests (considered only as collections of trees) were perpetual economic producers of wood. With such thinking, it was necessary to convert a tree into some kind of potential economic commodity before it could be assigned a value.
The rationale for converting trees into money came from a classic, liberal, economic theory, the "soil-rent theory." "Soil rent" was devised in the early 19th century to maximize industrial profits. It is still the overriding model for industrial forestry worldwide.
This economic theory, however, is based on six, greatly flawed assumptions, that: (1) the depth and fertility of the soil in which the forest grows is nondegradable, (2) the quality and quantity of precipitation reaching the forest is unchanging, (3) unpolluted air infuses the forest, (4) diversity (biological, genetic, and functional) is unimportant, (5) the amount and quality of solar energy available to the forest are constants, and (6) climate is unchanging.
Erroneously assuming that ecological variables can be considered economic constants leads to the further false assumption that Nature recognizes the economic notion of an "independent variable." The concept of an independent variable means that soil, water, air, biodiversity, etc. can be considered constant while manipulating a single desired economic entity--the tree. If there were in fact such a thing as an independent variable, biological sustainability for any tree species could be calculated using only two considerations--growth rate and age at which the tree must be cut in order to gain the highest rate of economic return in the shortest time for the least investment--but there is no such thing as an independent variable in Nature.
The potential for converting trees and other resources into money counts so heavily because the economically effective horizon in most economic planning is only about five years away. Thus, in traditional linear economic thinking, any merchantable tree that falls to the ground and reinvests its nutrient capital into the soil is considered an economic waste, i.e., it has not been converted into money.
Forests are being decimated the world over because "conversion potential" dignifies, with a name, the erroneous notion that unharvested resources have no intrinsic value and must be converted into money before any value can be assigned. An article in the 1940 Journal of Forestry exemplifies this: "Without more complete and profitable utilization we cannot have intensive forest management.... When thinnings can be sold at a profit and every limb and twig of the tree has value, forest management will come as a matter of course."
These notions predominate in forest management, that anything without monetary value has no value and anything with immediate monetary value is wasted if left unused by humans. Short-term economic profitability is thus always the goal and is politically justified by such maneuvers as attaching salvage logging as a rider to an unrelated Congressional bill. Unfortunately, the long-term ecological/economic price will be paid by the generations of the future.
Chris Maser is a forest ecologist who is working to persuade forest practitioners to go in new directions (and ":go slow"). He is a popular lecturer and the author of numerous books including Sustainable Forestry and Global Imperative: Harmonizing Culture and Nature