Seeing Both the Forest and the Trees
By Dennis Drabelle
Sunday, January 7, 1996; Page X05
IN KEEPING with their lugubrious titles, these books are about the
parlous state of American forests -- and of the people whose livelihoods
depend on them. Over the last two decades, loggers and environmentalists
have squared off over the cutting of old growth, courts have blocked
timber sales, mills have closed, jobs have been lost, once-prosperous
towns have declined, and conscience-stricken forest rangers have
rebelled against their supervisors. In a break with tradition, the new
chief of the U.S Forest Service is neither a forester nor an engineer
but a biologist who made a name for himself in the spotted-owl fracas of
the Pacific Northwest. Whether these upheavals are doing the forests
much good, though, is doubtful: Nationwide, trees are dying at an
alarming rate.
Alston Chase knows what's wrong with American forestry policy: bad
philosophy. Americans have lost their faith in reason and natural law,
thus becoming prey to biocentrism, an insidious doctrine preached by
radical environmentalists, which holds that all creatures -- humans
included -- are equal (except that any endangered species is a trump
card); and that preserving ecosystems is the chief earthly good. The
courts and ultimately the Forest Service have hearkened to this message,
Chase believes, partly because the other side -- logging companies and
so-called "timber beasts" within the Forest Service -- has insisted on
treating forests as mere tree plantations. Neither side, he adds, has
adduced much science in support of its passions.
Chase is an engaging storyteller. His lengthy account of Redwood
Summer -- the 1990 guerrilla campaign to save tall trees in Northern
California which climaxed with the critical injury of activist Judi Bari
by a car-bomb -- reads like a thriller. He took pains to listen to
loggers and company owners as well as environmentalists, and his book is
the better for considering multiple viewpoints. Two of his overarching
points are well-taken (if already familiar from his previous book,
Playing God in Yellowstone): "Ecosystem" can be a slippery concept, and
the oft-expressed goal of leaving wild areas alone so they can revert to
pre-Columbian lushness ignores the fact that Native Americans regularly
altered the landscape by setting fires. In his closing pages, Chase
offers some intriguing examples of business and environmentalists
cooperating to let forests be used without being ravaged.
But Chase tends to impute to all environmental groups the excesses
of the radical fringe: Most environmentalists of my acquaintance regard
ecosystem protection not as an end in itself but as a sine qua non for
preserving biodiversity and perhaps ensuring human survival. In a Dark
Wood is awash in exaggeration, caricature, and verbal legerdemain.
Here's an example of Chase's trickiness. He is quoting from the
Environmental Protection Agency's reaction to Vice President Gore's
effort to reinvent government. (The ellipses are Chase's, and be warned:
The following passage contains bureaucratese.) " Agency regulations have
not been developed with full regard to ecosystem protection . . .
Historically EPA has primarily focused on the protection of human health
with less consideration of the impacts on ecosystem issues . . . EPA
must make ecosystem protection a primary goal of the Agency.' This would
be accomplished by protecting ecosystem stability' from man-made
stressors' that upset it, such as over-grazing, unbridled commercial and
residential development, over-population, pollution and a host of
others.' "
To my eye this looks like a pretty innocuous agreement to add one
more item to EPA's mix of mandates. But watch what Chase does with it.
"Gore had reinvented government," he glosses, "but in ways few expected:
government had shifted its goal from protecting people to that of
safeguarding ecosystems from them." Nice rhetoric, but the hedged EPA
text doesn't bear it out. It's not easy to write entertainingly about
forestry; Chase has done so -- but at the cost of objectivity and
subtlety. (For a less biased, more elegant consideration of some of the
same issues, see Charles C. Mann's and Mark L. Plummer's recent Noah's
Choice: The Future of Endangered Species.)
In The Dying of the Trees, Charles E. Little takes the reader on a
disheartening tour of America's sickly forests, which are being ganged
up on by gypsy moths, Dutch elm disease, hemlock wooly adelgids,
befouled air and myriad other pests and blights. A former executive for
conservation organizations, Little attributes the "pandemic" to "the
accumulated consequences of some 150 years of headlong economic
development and industrial expansion, with the most impressive of the
impacts coming into play since the 1950s -- the age of pollution."
This is a pretty familiar indictment by now. Which doesn't make it
wrong -- just likely to fall on inured ears. Little has traveled widely
in gathering his data and forming his impressions, and his theorizing as
to how unrelated minor setbacks can combine to devastate a forest is
valuable. But for all its skilled interweaving of seemingly disparate
trends, I'm afraid that the book will be pigeonholed as a genre piece --
one more environmental jeremiad, subcategory arboreal.
ON THE OTHER hand, Nancy Langston, an academic at the University of
Wisconsin, has done something arresting. Forest Dreams, Forest
Nightmares is an in-depth look at forest policy as applied over the
decades to a specific region: the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon and
Washington, where the Forest Service manages some 5.5 million acres.
Langston is particularly good at unraveling the motives that have
inspired foresters to sneer at 800-year-old trees. A climax forest, in
their view, was not just bogged down in poky growth-rates; it was
chaotic. Cut it, though, and you snatched its timber away from disease
and decay while at the same time making room for a new, regulated,
virtuous, fast-growing replacement forest. Borrowing a notorious remark
from the Vietnam War, Langston accuses the Forest Service of having
believed that "we must cut the forests in order to save them." Only
recently have scientists persuaded foresters that old growth's "defects"
may actually be assets -- that, for example, decaying logs enrich the
soil for seedlings.
If Langston has a hobby horse, it is science -- or, rather, the
lack thereof. Her most damning passages portray managers fiddling with
numbers to justify harvests that outpace the forests' capacities to
replenish themselves. In the Blue Mountains, at least, it wasn't
misanthropic environmentalists who kayoed the logging industry but the
Forest Service. "In their haste during the 1920s to regulate the Blues
forests," she writes, "planners authorized extremely rapid harvests,
well knowing that those harvests would ensure the collapse of the local
timber industry by the 1990s."
Langston's main recommendation for change may be perfunctory --
foresters still know so little about how forests work that they should
immediately undertake a learning program based on small-scale
experiments. But her analysis is original and shrewd, and her book will
do wonders for the reputation of dead wood.
Dennis Drabelle is a Washington lawyer who has worked on
national-park and endangered-species issues at the U.S. Interior
Department.
© 1996 The Washington Post Co.
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