Cook

The recent news about a logging proposal on the Ottawa National Forest is non-news. MSU forester David Carter put it well when he’s quoted as saying that the project “didn’t really raise any red flags.” However, organizations that depend upon sensationalism to forward their agenda and to raise funding have jumped all over this mundane, everyday forest management effort.

The project is not particularly huge, contrary to the contrarians. And, its implementation would occur over a 30-year period. The management proposal covers roughly 83,000 acres. That’s about 0.4 percent of Michigan’s forestland, and less than one percent of the U.P. forest.

The proposed harvest, again over 30 years, reportedly calls for 1,500 acres of clearcuts, 24,000 acres of seed tree cuts, and 57,000 acres of shelterwood and selection harvesting. This is not a diversion from business as usual, which is good business, not the end of life as we know it.

The Environmental Law and Policy Center paints a false picture of devastation from Ironwood to St. Ignace. A few more of the erroneous or grossly skewed claims are below.

Mature forests, especially those proposed for regeneration in this particular Ottawa project, do not sequester much carbon, mitigating climate change, as the Center claims. The Center is using fear-mongering and weary poor information. The aspen and declining conifer forests in question may very well be net carbon emitters. It’s better for the atmosphere to put that carbon into long-term forest products and rejuvenate those forests to conditions where they actively sequester more carbon from the atmosphere.

Carbon release from soils in post-harvest stands is a red herring. Yes, there is a “bump” in carbon emissions from the soil after some harvests, but forest research in the Lake States shows this to be a temporary event of only a few years before that carbon is restored through regenerated forests.

Logging might introduce invasive plant species. True. However, this risk can be easily mitigated. More “risk” is derived from recreational use of the forest, not harvesting.

Water runoff may cause damage to surface water. False. That accusation is a tired mantra from old research examples in mountainous regions of Appalachia and the western states, more often from non-forestry operations. Here in the Lake States, forest research clearly shows such claims are patently false.

Logging might harm the endangered long-eared bat. Populations of this bat, along with its colonial cousins, have been devastated by an exotic fungus, not the removal of “roost trees”. Within the Ottawa project boundaries, there is no shortage of potential roost trees. Additionally, those that are known, and they change from year to year, are retained. Logging is not going to harm the bats.

Then there are concerns about gray wolves, another sensationalist falsehood. Wolves do just fine with timber harvests. In fact, the proposed management activities are more likely to favor wolf populations. And that creates different set of controversies.

Another poster child of misrepresentation is the Kirtland’s warbler, once endangered, and brought back from extinction through strategic forest management, clearcutting in particular. This wee bird’s breeding habitat is dependent upon the young jack pine forests created through clearcutting. Historically, it was wildfire that created the proper habitat conditions, but wildfire and humans don’t mix well, especially in jack pine.

As far as wildlife impacts are concerned, harvesting results in winners and losers. Doing nothing also results in winners and losers. A mix of forest habitat conditions, promulgated through strategic forest planning, or sometimes just serendipity, is the key to robust wildlife populations. That’s been the case for the past century and a half, despite the wanton logging of a hundred years ago.

The Lake States, and probably all of North America, hasn’t a single instance of a wildlife species extinction due to logging. If anyone has an example, I would like to know about it. This said, one can make a case for extinctions due to habitat loss and deforestation. However, logging and natural forest regeneration is neither habitat loss nor deforestation. Logging and forest loss associated with agriculture and urban sprawl is not forest management. It’s agriculture and urban sprawl.

More than anything else, forest management, including clearcutting, has served to maintain and restore wildlife populations, as well as healthy forests. Incidentally, when referring to the forestry practice, “clearcutting” does not have a hyphen. Clearly the spelling of clearcutting is not clear-cut.

The Center is reported to claim that planting will not replicate current conditions. Well, of course. The forest is regenerated from a mature condition to a new forest. The “kind of benefits that the public receives now” will not be lost, but shifted to the future. Until then, a suite of other “public benefits” will result from the management, including clearcutting.

What the Center fails to acknowledge is that the current conditions are going change anyway, and not likely for the good. But, given time, the young forest will move through its various stages of natural succession to a mature point when, once again, it will hopefully be regenerated by future foresters.

Most of the time, forest regeneration is secured without planting, through forest management, which is ecologically based, unlike the tenets of groups such as the Environmental Law and Policy Center. Natural regeneration through revenue-generating forest management is far more common than planting, which is quite expensive, hundreds of dollars per acre.

The Center cites increased wildfire risk with harvesting, which is only partly accurate. The “rest of the story” is that wildfire risk will be considerably higher by not harvesting and regenerating. As some forest stands decline, especially those conifer stands with high mortality due to spruce budworm and other insect pests, fire risk sharply rises with the tons and tons of dead material. Fire risk is drastically reduced by harvest.

At the end of the day, groups such as the “Center” fail to serve the maintenance of healthy and robust forests through distortion and fabrication of wildlife and forest ecological principles. These groups prey upon the innate public tendency for the concern and care of forests. These groups use “hot button” issues which are really not issues at all, but play well in the media. All the while, on-the-ground foresters, loggers, and wildlife biologists work to do the real work of caring for our forest resources, on both public and private forestlands. It’s these quiet, persevering people that are the forest heroes.