A recent comment to a prior post reminded us that the term silviculture is poorly understood. Silviculture is the tending of forests, and as such it encompasses a wide variety of treatments, practices, and activities associated with the protection, maintenance, and perpetuation of forests.

In The Practice of Silviculture by David M. Smith (8th Ed., 1986, John Wiley and Sons), that recognized world’s foremost authority [here] defined silviculture as:

… the art of producing and tending a forest; the application of knowledge of silvics in the treatment of a forest; the theory and practice of controlling forest establishment, composition, structure, and growth (Spurr, 1979). Silvicultural practice consists of various treatments that may be applied to forest stands to maintain and enhance their utility for any purpose. The duties of the forester are to analyze the natural and social factors bearing on each stand and then devise and conduct the treatments most appropriate to the objective of management.

Silviculture is a broad set of practices used to achieve the forest conditions desired. It is not merely a harvest system.

This is an important point and one where confusion is common. The following are harvest systems or treatments, NOT silviculture: clearcutting, selective cutting, group selection, thinning from below, thinning from above, prescribed fire, prepared fire, whoofoos, tree planting, precommercial thinning, etc.

Silviculture is not a single treatment but a collection of practices with specific forest goals in mind. The desired future forest condition is the target, the object of the art, and the particular artistic tool used is of minor importance at best. Just as great paintings may be watercolors, oils, or other media, so too great silviculture is not dependent on the methods used. It’s the final picture that counts.

Silviculture is often divided into two categories: even-aged management and uneven-aged management. Both these systems take into account the origin of the stands, intermediate treatments, and final harvest decisions. As such they are, broadly speaking, systems for tree farming. Traditionally, silviculture has been applied with commercial timber harvest goals in mind.

Silviculture as applied to native forests, however, is or should be much more than tree farming systems. Forests are very different from tree farms, as we have emphasized in past posts. Forests and tree farms differ structurally, biologically, ecologically, in their uses, and in their management. Forests are vast tracts of native ecosystems; tree farms are agricultural businesses. Forests have natural histories; tree farms have artificial histories. Forests are mostly publicly-owned; tree farms are mostly privately-owned.

Silviculture in true forests is concerned with restoring sustainable heritage conditions and thereby protecting forests from catastrophic fires. Restoration forestry is a silvicultural system, broadly speaking, that is neither even-aged nor uneven-aged. The objectives of restoration forestry include maintenance and enhancement of multi-aged, low density stands with a predominance of older, fire-resilient trees. Those are forest goals, not tree farming goals, but they are silvicultural.

It is common for discussions about forest management to get sidetracked and hung up on the harvest systems. This is called, “failing to see the forest for the trees.” What matters in restoration forestry-type silviculture are the trees that are left, not the trees that are removed.

In so many cases, such as the Angora Creek watershed in South Lake Tahoe and the Metolius River watershed in the Oregon Cascades, silviculture has been micro-managed with regulations limiting the trees removed. No trees may be cut larger than X, by decree of some ignorant judge acting on political imperatives, not silvicultural ones. As a consequence, those forests and so many others have burned fiercely in canopy fires that have killed all the trees, exploded into nearby towns, decimated landscapes, and left wastelands behind.

It is for that reason that we present this discussion about the true nature and proper definition of silviculture. Misunderstandings and misapplication of the term have led to some horrific megafires. Silviculture is useful in that it can save forests and nearby communities from holocaust.

It is time to raise the level of the discussion above harvest systems. The future condition of forests is the real issue, and whether our forests persist because they are tended with expert care, or are burned to the ground in raging megafires. Silviculture holds the answers, but we must understand that silviculture is broad and much more than a set of cutting practices.

[Another timely and cogent essay by the perceptive Bear Bait]

I have no idea about the Plumas, but up here in Oreygawn, we are letting our unlogged and unroaded forests be claimed for cultural purposes by default. Mexican illegal alien dope growers have infiltrated every NF, and the effort to prevent that is not vigorous. Perhaps it is fitting that the mostly Indian Mexicans have claimed the forests for their urban directed ag projects. How long will it be before you can have an organic dope grower who takes orders by pre-paid prescription? You go to the dope growers market and collect your monthly buzz. Perhaps a little more pedestrian than collecting your pinot noir, tomatos or kale, but essentially the same business plan.

Americans don’t care where their “stuff” comes from, whether it be Canadian lumber, Chinese doo-dads made from meth head pilfered scrap metals, Latin American veggies, Australian lamb, Danish pork, oranges from Israel, or beef from Argentina. We just want it. So a new coal fired power plant opens every week in China to meet our needs, and we drown ourselves in debt to secure cheap oil in a very competitive world market, all the while building homes that shining each other’s shoes will not support in the long term. Why would we think forest planning, husbandry, and use would make any more sense than how we behave internationally or on a national level?

We are a culture of spoiled instant gratification needers, and there is not time in our busy and important lives to have landscape management over time be of consequence, when all you have to do is declare it preserved, do nothing, and it will be there when you want it. It is very apparent that Southern Californians much prefer to be burned out rather than have managed vegetation. And I no longer care what happens there. Their problem is of their creation, and they can live with the results, and rebuild, and do it again, until they run out of water, which will be soon, and it all becomes a ghost region.

If Oregon becomes the same kind of place, then that is what it will be. I have seen two stand removal fires, in my lifetime, in the hills west of I-5 between Phoenix, Talent and Ashland, and the last time I drove that road, I was dumbfounded at the homes built above chimney draws where I have seen smokes from a fire twice. Dumbfounded. And then to have the whole of that end of the world locked up by serious econazi litigation and spineless public management to make sure it all becomes tinder for conflagration is mindless.

All the logging that went on before the advent of the econazis’ blitzkreig of lawsuits had reforestation efforts and many good results. So rather than being less fuel to burn, there is more. I would think that area, and some parts of the Central Oregon miasma, are going to be future disasters of magnitude, and deservedly so. Those 300 days of clear skies tend to dry things out and grow fuels during the summer. All that is needed is ignition and wind, and Katy bar the door!

The demographic that drives Oregon is not native born and raised. It is the constant influx of pilgrims coming to enjoy the public lands, bringing their money from wherever they were a part of overpopulating, and the poor chasing the high minimum wage and public give-aways in rent, food and medical care, and a chance to gain service dollars from the wealth holders. Few are aware of how things have worked in the past, or how things should work in a different environment. That is the source of the word “Californication” when used in Oregon. The person retires, sells a house in California for a small fortune, comes to Oregon and uses that money to drive up the price of strict use regulated and metered land, and then begins to tell the locals how to manage land SoCal style. Californication begins.

If you talk to long time Oregon residents, they will all tell you that when logging stopped, so did the chance for a quality education and the ability to make a living in rural Oregon. The vast array of support services for the logs and lumber economy left. It became harder for a farmer to get a hydraulic hose fixed, or buy fuel. Grocery prices went up as competition left due to an increase in poverty and and fewer family wage jobs, even in the public sector. Banking, legal, accounting, insurance, all contracted. The way we are governed, it became the responsibility of the wealth in urban areas to pay for schools in rural areas, and that loss of money to those areas has not been propertly noticed. The end result has been that amenity value property, the ranch divided into ranchettes, big gated subdivisions, have replaced industry and jobs have become low wage seasonal service employment, and Oregon no longer has a top tier public education K-12, the jobs to support kids in higher education, and the public will to even take notice. So why would you or I expect that those people who have a small lifetime experience in Oregon to make good decisions about a landscape based way of life? They make terrible decisions in California and elsewhere. Why would those same people migrating here make any decisions other than the bad ones they are escaping?

The beauty of the Quincy Library Group is that it local people dealing with local issues. Even the Judge recognizes that their empirical knowledge, their personal investment in community, holds more water than carpetbagger enviros with shotgun lawsuits cut from legal stencil paper and spray painted into the public record. I would imagine there are constraints that limit their effectiveness, but at least they are continuing to do hard work, and have their congressional representation in their corner. Add to them the long term results Collins Pine has shown, and that might be the small ray of light and hope in this whole deal. Or not. - bear bait

In the previous post we called “landmark” the recent decision issued by Judge Morrison C. England of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California, regarding forest thinnings on the Plumas National Forest. By landmark we mean the decision establishes new precedents (long overdue) in our legal system.

Judge England’s logic is impeccable. He found that catastrophic fires destroy endangered species habitat and endanger human habitat, too. He also found that thinning forests in the right way helps make forests resilient to fire and fires easier to control. Judge England wrote in his decision:

DFPZs [Defensible Fuel Profile Zones, i.e. properly thinned areas] have hence been proven effective in reducing fire intensity, controlling fire spread, and protecting ecological resources like habitat…

Fire protection through vegetation management in these areas is therefore important both from the standpoint of wildlife and humans. For wildlife, unchecked wildfire may completely destroy habitat. For humans, both lives and property are at stake…

On the evidence of the evidence before it, the Court believes that a greater danger of irreparable harm exists in not vigorously addressing the over-forested conditions that are present within the Plumas National Forest. This danger is not speculative but very real, as evidenced by the large wildfires that ravaged the Plumas this very summer…

The long-term benefit of preventing stand replacing fires which completely destroy habitat is preferable over any short term benefits derived from retaining dense forest structure preferred by old growth species…

The England Decision establishes the legal doctrine that saving a forest from catastrophic destruction is better for wildlife (and people) than incinerating said forest, even if actual, human, forest stewardship is required to save it.

To the average lay person this sounds like ordinary common sense, and so it is. Our legal system, however and sad to say, does not normally run on common sense, at least in regards to forests. Hence the England Decision is a major breakthrough.

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On Oct. 16,  Judge Morrison C. England of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California issued a written judgment denying the injunctions demanded by the Plaintiffs, a coalition of environmental groups led by Sierra Forest Legacy, formerly known as Sierra Nevada Forest Protection Campaign. Others in the (losing) coalition are the Center For Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society.

The victorious defendants were Mark Rey, in his official capacity as Under Secretary of Agriculture, Dale Bosworth, in his official capacity as Chief of the United States Forest Service on the date of filing, Jack Blackwell, in his official capacity as Regional Forester, Region 5, US Forest Service, and James M. Pena, in his official capacity as Forest Supervisor, Plumas National Forest. For a report from the Plumas County News, see (here).

The Plaintiffs sought to have the court enjoin three forest thinning projects initiated through the efforts of the Quincy Library Group. The QLG (website here) is a local citizen group with a steering group of about 30 members, formed in Quincy, CA in 1994. The QLG has been the most successful of any local group in the Nation at influencing the stewardship of the federal land in their landscape, about 2.5 million acres that encompasses most of the watershed of the Feather River. For a partial history (through 1998) of the Quincy Library Group, see (here).

In 2004, Regional Forester Jack Blackwell signed a new Record of Decision (ROD) for the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment providing authority to USFS managers to implement pilot thinning projects called for in the 1998 Herger-Feinstein Quincy Library Group Forest Recovery Act.

Since then the construction of over thirty lineal miles of DFPZ’s (Defensible Fuel Profile Zones: areas approximately ¼ to ½ mile wide where fuel loadings are reduced, usually along roads) have saved hundreds of thousands of acres of Sierra forest from catastrophic fire.

The Plaintiffs sought a preliminary injunction on grounds that the Slapjack, Basin and Empire Projects risked irreparable harm to old forest habitat and imperiled wildlife including California spotted owls, Pacific fishers and American martens. However, no fishers or martens have been seen within 200 miles of any of the project areas during the last 40 years.

The Projects are forest thinnings in the Wildland-Urban Interface, that most dangerous of fire zones. The Empire Project will treat 2,500 acres immediately adjacent to five communities at risk: Quincy, Massack, Greenhorn, Keddie and Butterfly Valley. The 35,00 acre Slapjack Project is near the communities of Brownsville, Challenge, Clipper Mills, Dobbins, Feather Fall, Forbestown, and Strawberry Valley, which collectively are home to between 5,000 and 7,0000 people. The Basin Project is 1,300 acres of similar selective thinning.

Judge England rejected the arguments of the Plantiffs, refused to grant an injunction, and wrote an excellent, landmark decision (for the entire document see here, 160KB): Some excerpts:

The USFWS study opined that the vegetation management treatments envisioned by the HFQLG Act (which include the three projects presently at issue) would not adversely affect the owl, and stated unequivocally 1) that catastrophic wildfire appears to be the greatest potential threat to the owl, with fuel-reduction treatments being necessary to reduce that threat; and 2) that the contemplated treatments will not threaten the continued existence of the owl…

Any impact on either the Pacific Fisher or the American Marten by the site specific plans is even more attenuated than potential effects regarding the owl. While Plaintiffs appear to argue that logging would increase fragmentation and create barriers to the movement of these forest carnivores, the simple fact is that neither species appears to be present within the project areas. No marten sightings have ever been reported 10 within any of the three project locations; in fact, marten generally prefer habitat at higher elevations than the lands at issue here. In addition, no scientifically validated sightings of fisher within 200 miles of any of the projects has occurred within the last 40 years…

In sum, then, available data shows that habitat effects upon owls are minimal, with the vast majority of habitat being unaffected by the projects in question and with the owl comprising a stable population in any event. Protections affecting potential forest carnivore habitat are also largely unaffected by the projects even though virtually no individual carnivore specimens have been detected…

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In the case of the recent Southern California fires, and the Idaho fires, and the Montana fires, and all the megafires of this fire season, and every recent fire season, the firestorms that threatened and burned private property arose on unkempt, untended, fuel-laden Federal Government property.

Whether the fires were started by lightning, accident, or arson, the excess biomass on Federal property gave rise to fires that spread over millions of acres.

The culprit? Despite arguments to the contrary, it was the fuels.

Some folks blame decades of fire suppression for creating hazardous conditions. Yet eliminating fire suppression, or cutting fire budgets, will not put out a single fire. Not fighting fires will not make fires go away.

Some folks blame homes in the “wildlands.” Yet no one is allowed to build homes on government property. You can’t buy a lot on US Forest Service land and build your dream house. Government land is not for sale or lease to developers or homebuyers. If you believe you can buy a house lot in the wilderness, then I have a bridge to sell you, too!

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[ The following essay by Dr. Stephen J. Pyne of Arizona State University and the author of “Tending Fire: Coping With America’s Wildland Fires” appeared in the Washington Post Sunday (here). We repost it in full: ]

Blazes On The New Frontier

By Steve Pyne
Sunday, October 28, 2007; Page B01

It takes only a whiff of smoke for it all to return. Sensations deeper than memory. The streaks of flame. The throb of heat. The gusts of smoke, twisting white and black like exhausted whirlwinds. A rush of adrenaline that can blow your head off. A fatigue so profound that it can rearrange your chromosomes. The sense of a world in such commotion that it seems to slow.

The big fire.

Most fires aren’t big, and most wildland firefighting is a world of routine jobs and small blazes. It’s a life of coming to know a place through its fires as a naturalist might know it through its flowers or mammals. In the deep backcountry, away from lodges and roads, the chief skill is just finding the fire — a smoking snag, a smoldering stump. Only if that first attack fails does the firefight scale up into a campaign that resembles nothing so much as the moral equivalent of war. It’s an intoxicating life, full of flame and fortune.

It was the life I knew for 15 summers as a North Rim Longshot, fighting fires in the Grand Canyon. It was a way of life that defined fire protection from its origins on the frontier of the Old West until very recent times. It was one of the founding narratives of wildland fire, the saga of smoke-chasing, the firefighter as a kind of woodsman. It was a seasonal life for seasonal workers: Fire season was a time in your life before you grew up and went on to family and career. I traded my shovel for a pencil and began a career as a smoke-chaser scholar, tracking down the long history of humanity and fire around the world.

But over the past 15 years or so, this culture of fire has encountered a dramatically different environment. The names for the new fire frontier vary — the wildland-urban interface, the I-zone, the intermix. They all describe the mingling of exurban developments with lands that are uncultivated or wild, a kind of ecological omelet. America is recolonizing its once-rural countryside. In the East, this means houses sprouting on former fields and woodlands; in the West, on ranches and landscapes abutting the public domain. The city and the wild mix in metastable compound.

These circumstances aren’t unique to the West, or even to the United States. Variants have spawned throughout the industrial world: Fires erupt outside Sydney and Melbourne, Barcelona and Athens, the outer fringes of Vancouver. In the United States, exurban developments are interbreeding with whatever local hazards exist, whether floods, coastal surges, tornados or earthquakes. Fire is far from the most damaging: One Category 4 hurricane is worth a a century of wildfires (except perhaps in California). But fire is the most telegenic threat, and it offers the best political theater. You can’t fight — or appear to fight — hurricanes, floods or F6 twisters. You can fight fire.

The pressures behind America’s recolonization are many, as seemingly irresistible as a rising sea. The U.S. population has doubled over the past half-century. Historically it has balked at codes that might restrict where and how something is built. Americans have come to savor settings that blend natural features with urban services. And it is not merely blinkered exurbanites who seek out such places. A few years ago, I was at a national fire training class when attendees were asked who among them lived in the I-zone. About 80 percent raised their hands (including me), and though some protested that they lived there because of their job, they admitted that they chose that job because it got them into such places.

This recolonization has kindled a new fire frontier that eerily inverts the old. Instead of agricultural encroachments, we have urban ones. Instead of a landscape laden with combustibles as a result of logging and land clearing, the scene bloats with inflammable structures amid an overgrown biota. Instead of fires rushing into forest reserves, fires roar out of reserves and into the exurbs.

The population expansion of the 19th century sparked a wave of horrific conflagrations. The old frontier was a frontier aflame, as ax and torch met logging slash and clapboard village. The new frontier is recapitulating that sorry scenario, as arson, accident, lightning and machinery collide with houses and a revanchist flora. In the wildest settings, modern homesteading is verging into an extreme sport.

So far fire protection has more or less kept the bubble from bursting, if at great cost. Fire services have tried, with mixed success, to shift the burden to homeowners and developers. But the latest outbreak of subsidized and speculative development may prove to be the environmental equivalent of the subprime mortgage mess, promoting environments — liar landscapes, as it were — beyond the pale of control. Now nature is calling in its markers.

Fire protection in the I-zone demands a different culture of firefighting. Because the fires emerged from the wildlands, the problem has evolved as a variant of wildland fire. But it makes more sense to consider it as a subspecies of urban fire — of shielding structures, of protecting lives, of massing engines against flames. This is a long way from smoke-chasing. Urban fire happens in a profoundly social setting. The culture of urban firefighting is one of saving victims. It has its own traditions, its own sensations, its own fraternity. Ultimately the new frontier consists of urban enclaves, and this argues for solutions akin to urban fire services. California has gone further in this metamorphosis than anyplace else, and Southern California beyond the rest of the state. But they’ve had a long time to learn.

Still, the United States remains decades behind Australia. After the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, Australians studied precisely why houses in the urban bush burned. The most obvious hazard was a combustible roof. They learned that most structures burned from ember attacks — showers of sparks, often thrown by winds after the flaming front had passed. They tracked how vegetation near a house could permit direct flame contact. And they learned that people died not huddled in their houses but in flight from them, that most fatalities occurred in last-minute evacuations.

What has emerged is a program of sheltering in place. The choice to fight or flee belongs with the homeowner. If you leave, you leave early. If you stay, you take measures to protect yourself and your home. The protocol is taught like standard first aid. The lessons are coded into a saying: Houses protect people, people protect houses. Residents can stay inside and emerge after the front to swat out threatening embers.

In comparison, the American resort to ever-vaster mandatory mass evacuations looks both pathetic and paranoid. Apparently we can defend our houses with an M16 and a bazooka if we choose, but not with a garden hose and a rake. There can never be enough firefighters to shield all structures during a conflagration. They shouldn’t have to. Let homeowners take responsibility, not only for preparing their property but for protecting it. Knowing that you might be called on to defend against the next outbreak of a Santa Ana fire avalanche ought to concentrate the mind wonderfully.

The likely outcome is that today’s intermix fire, which first appeared like an alien specter, will continue to be naturalized, and then gradually domesticated. Urban fire services will claim the task. Authorities will enact fire codes for buildings and landscape development. Fighting these new fires has to become institutionalized, as it eventually was in America’s frontier cities, which burned with even greater frequency and ferocity than the I-zone today. The crisis will linger while fires consume the slacker communities and early developments that resist retrofitting.

When this passes, however, wildland fire may revert to something akin to its origins. This will probably mean finding better ways to reinstate those vital wildland fires, whether set by nature or by people, that decades of fire protection have tried to suppress.

This won’t abolish firefighting in the woods, or eliminate the occasional big fire, or revive the craft of smoke-chasing. But it might reinvent firefighters in a greener form, perhaps as fire foragers, seeking out sites to kindle the way their predecessors tracked down smoke. That would at least put future practitioners into the woods. And if they — if we — are fortunate, the smell of smoke may trigger something more benign than the incense, at once cloying and frightening, that characterizes the wildfires of an industrial order and its megacities.

The following pithy analysis by SOS Forests Fellow Dr. Mr. Forrest Grump says it all:

Yes, gents,

There is a landscape-scale problem here that needs landscape-scale solutions. If you put together a drainage-wide package at a minimum, then you have salable timber over here to pay for the nit-and-pick over there to block the blowtorch from the irreplaceable over here, without hosing taxpayers everywhere.

The worst fire catastrophe in California history was the Cedar Fire of 2003. Yet no actions were taken to address the fuels hazard or the sorry state of the public, unbuilt, semi-abandoned land that surrounds long-established communities.

The landscape-scale problem was not dealt with, and within four short years megafire returned to wreak havoc and disaster upon the same region.

As Mr. Dr. Grump points out, landscape-scale problems require landscape-scale solutions.

As he also noted, the same catastrophic fire problem plagues landscapes across the West. We all could use some landscape-scale solutions. Up north here in Big Tree Country, forest restoration yields a positive cash flow to the Treasury. If we geared up and cared for our forests with sensitivity and stewardship, then the receipts overflow could help finance landscape stewardship down south there in Puny Tree Country.

More the brushy Sage of Montana:

News in Montana is that the state has put together a legislative Fire Suppression committee to look at the future. The bill was $107 million, $43mil of that state money.

The Feds have stated unequivocally that money for Fed forest management and Fed firefighting is to decline. If so, the Feds better be willing to allow actions to be taken by the States and Counties on Fed ground to prevent fire escapement. Gonna be a fun debate.

If the Feds are going to abandon their lands to catastrophic holocausts that they encourage rather than fight, the States and Counties are going to have to supplant Fed managers and firefighters in order to protect State, County, and private interests.

It is no longer satisfactory to permit the Federal Government to engender firestorms that sweep off Fed land and cause billions of dollars worth of damage, suffering, and death amongst the US Citizenry in their homes. The US Citizenry must take over all fires and forest management on Fed land, or we will be lost.

The Federal Government was chartered to secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness among the people. Instead it promotes death, destruction, and catstrophic holocausts, and then blames the victims of said holocausts for living in homes on their own private property.

That corruption of our founding principles cannot continue. Our Federal Government must reaffirm that its foundation is laid upon such principles and its organizing powers in such form, as to the people shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness (T. Jefferson, Dec. of Ind.).

Catastrophic firestorms that destroy public forests and ecosystems and then rage off unkempt Federal property onto non-Fed rural and urban lands are not conducive to the Safety and Happiness of the People.

Unless the Feds suddenly become responsible landowners again, their irresponsibility must be set right by local fiat. The ersatz “partnership” idea is down the tubes. The Feds must back off and allow the affected citizenry to commandeer Federal land for beneficial purposes.

Such a program will be vastly preferable to the current program, in which the Feds abandon their land to catastrophic fire and commandeer private land for the malicious purposes of dehumanization and destruction.

Modern medicine saves lives. This is a fact widely acknowledged by our society. Sometimes it happens that parents of an ailing child refuse medical treatments which would save the child’s life, a “moral” decision based on cultish religious reasons. It also happens that authorities often step in to remove the parents’ custody rights and treat the child in defiance of the parents’ wishes. Such cases may be rare but are often given prominence in the Media when they do occur.

So too, modern forest stewardship, and in particular restoration forestry, can save ailing forests. By restoring thicket forests to their historical norm of open, park-like conditions, and in addition restoring historical anthropomorphic fire regimes, forests can be saved from catastrophic incineration and conversion to brush.

When dense forests burn, the fires kill every tree, old and young alike, by intense heat of combustion or by subsequent bark beetle infestation. Restoring historical conditions sustains forests by protecting them from total mortality canopy fires, by maintaining fire-resilient old-growth trees, and by enhancing the capacity of forests to grow trees to old ages.

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[This compelling guest essay was written by Mary Macnab of New Mexico, as a comment to a post. But we thought was too good to be hidden in the comments and so place it here with prominence. Thank you, Mary.]

In the Gila Forest, New Mexico, “wilderness” designation and the Mexican Wolf have been superimposed right on top of pre-designated agricultural land. Real healthy-forest-making thinning was practiced by the locals which fed small mills. The local generational forest harvester families were the one’s that went to the Forest Service and told them that the industrial forest use plans they were adapting would be bad for the forest.

People came (and still do) from Idaho and Wyoming to hunt the huge elk. Wolves seem to be devastating the herds by sport killing elk calves. The meadows, which mean food for elk, and therefore wolves, are rapidly disappearing due to pine encroachment. Riparian areas on the Glen Allotment, retired from grazing decades ago, have lost most of the riparian cottonwoods, which seem to be the dam building material of choice for beavers here, and other deciduous trees, while pines encroach. Pines are also rapidly filling up the historic forage meadows and the native grasses are going senescent, patchy, dying out.

The Blue River in Arizona seems to be on its way to becoming a dry gulch via uncontrolled willow and cottonwood growth, ever since cattle access to water at the river was restricted. It now goes dry in some areas and can be seen to rise somewhat in the evening when the un-natural overgrowth stops sucking. The ridges and mountains above are severely unhealthy and overgrown. The results of watershed restoration projects in Arizona in the 1950’s (another similar drought here) showed that flow through the watershed to the rivers and streams could be greatly enhanced by thoughtful restoration of open forests above, and hence we know it is not all because of the current drought. There are now 40+ foot hedges of willow with dense stands of 12 year-old (and growing) cottonwoods right along the rivers edge. It is becoming impossible in many areas to even get to the waters edge. The future of this river most likely will go the way of the spring up the creek from us. USFWS was sued by the “protect nature to death” bunch to build “protective” fence at least 10 feet high around the whole spring area. Historically a small meandering rivulet wandered through rich grass and open forest. Now, about 5 years later, one could barely tell a spring ever existed there except for the especially dense thicket of shrub and small trees. Can’t even find a damp spot on the ground.

I suppose the Southwest is much more sensitive to this kind of “protection” because what we call a river might be considered a “creek” or “stream” up there.

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In the previous post the issue of riparian zone protection was raised. The un-measureable metric of site potential tree height has been applied (awkwardly) to riparian zone buffers.

Riparian zones are the areas alongside creeks and streams. It is thought that such areas are particularly fragile, and that disturbances to riparian zones affect downstream habitats in a variety of ways. Riparian zone buffers are no-touch areas where disturbances must be minimized to avoid negative impacts to aquatic and streamside ecosystems.

The question then arises, how wide should the no-touch zones be to protect those fragile systems? Site potential tree heights are one way (a poor one) to determine riparian buffer widths.

All the above assumes that riparian zones are very fragile and sensitive. But are they?

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