The Problem with Forests

The bio-mass is enormous! Even in tiny ones like ours—ENORMOUS!! I can’t imagine what might be more humbling to an environmentalist than to come into direct labor-based stewardship of a mis-managed forest. (Ok, perhaps encountering federal bureaucracy about it is worse...) .. It has this David and Goliath feeling, except that Goliath is just Nature saying “um, hey, I have sunlight and I have earth, I’m going to cover this ravaged ground with whatever sprouts, and you pitiable human can just deal with it…”

So what is mis-management, then, if Nature charges along making perfectly reasonable and dispassionate decisions? In my view, mis-management is when we European humans came in to harvest timbers not in the way Native people did, slowly vertically chiseling rips of timber out of a living cedar without killing it, but leveling entire swaths with our machines, arrogantly ignorant to what might happen after our action. There is a plankhouse in the Ridgefield Wildlife Preserve, if you are in my area. Also a shout to Onda.org, bringing the eastern deserts back into something more sensible with how the river or the antelope wants to run.

Mis-management in our case is near history: a federal protective measure was put in place about 50 years ago to make sure creek-sides had a forest buffer of 100’ to protect salmon and other fish that needed year-round cool waters. But our land was logged prior to that protection, way down to the creek, so there was a vast open area and Nature said ok, I guess I’ll just seed what I can- doug firs and nitrogen-fixing alders. So she did, and they grew up, all at the same time, about 60 years ago. So now we have a band of forest along Dee Creek, 600’ long by 100’ wide, protected after the federal measures, that theoretically can’t be thinned because of the federal measures, so it is slowly thinning itself, 50% of the trees slowly dying because they are even-aged, showing less than 30% of their canopy growth up top.

You farmers and gardeners growing from seed- it’s the same process- you thin brutally early on to prevent poor growth in the long term. We have a tree-sized version of a problem caused by lack of thinning. A “forest” of 50% dead trees has the very real risk of being knocked down completely by a large winter storm. You know those photos of blasts from St. Helens, all the trees looking like evenly scattered toothpicks, like fur on the curves of the wild animal of the land? That in minuscule is our worst case scenario, as described by a forester we hired from the NNRG.org when we purchased the property. He said “look, what you do is you thin 50% as soon as you are able and let the forest adjust to new winds as you wait 5 years or so, then you thin about 30% again. and in this specific situation, plant red cedar.” That sets us back on the path towards a truly mixed-age old-growth forest with variable species.

Moreover, the people who made the mill and had a bull-dozer decided to build a dam and a pond. Originally I thought this was a mill pond (keeping the logs wet until they were ready for milling), but people have been correcting me- it’s a pond, probably stocked with fish for consumption by the workers of the mill. Either way, we have on the property a narrow dam on which nature in her infinite wisdom (as my mother would say) sprouted a gaggle of red alder trees. They were picturesque, leaning out at 45* angles everywhere, threatening to fall but not quite yet. The only problem is that they are big, and short-lived, and like all big trees, have a comparable root ball. So when they die and fall, they carry their root ball as they go, which undermines the integrity of the dam on which they’re growing, causing a breach.

So we constantly experience this double-edged sword at our Woods: fecundity, and the need for some directorial decision-making about it. Fortunately, I am a potter who will eventually make a kiln that fires with wood as its fuel. Fortunately, Joel is an environmentalist with skills and the seemingly endless energy adequate to the task of harvesting Nature’s slowly-dying bounty, moving and splitting and stacking it for the purpose of a bunch of potters making wares to serve us humans…. …having done these wood prep tasks myself for two decades in various locations, I have a deep appreciation of his work. At the moment, it is mostly him. I helped a ton with the cleanup of the branches from the re-boot of the dam area (everything leveled and re-planted). I also got valuable hardwood chips out of it, for my orchard and to grow mushrooms. In the future when we have amenities like parking space, I have every intention of conscripting my firing crew to make this happen as a team.