Forest Scientists Discover Ancient Forests in Tree Rings - Forests Unlike Any That Exist Today!

Oregon forest scientists measuring tree rings on stumps in clearcuts have made a remarkable discovery: ancient Oregon forests were much different than the modern variety. The scientists found that old-growth trees in the Oregon Cascades and Coast Range arose in open, park-like forests quite unlike the dense, even-aged forests that occur here today.

In the late 1990’s Dr. John Tappeiner of Oregon State University led a team investigating forest development. They found that most of the large-diameter old-growth Douglas-fir stumps they sampled had wide rings near the pith (the center of the tree). This indicated rapid diameter growth when the trees were young. This in turn indicated that the old trees were open-grown in the first few decades of their lives, with relatively few trees per acre. Furthermore, they found a wide range of ages amongst the old trees. Within-stand age ranges (the spread) averaged 150 years, with a maximum range of 264 years. The ancient forests of Oregon were apparently open (sparsely stocked), and not even-aged (we have discussed this phenomenon earlier here).

[See: Tappeiner, J.C., D.W. Huffman, D. Marshall, T.A. Spies, and J.D. Bailey. 1997. Density ages and growth rates in old-growth and young-growth forests in western Oregon. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 27:638-648, and here.]

This finding conflicted with the traditional notion of the “natural” Douglas-fir forest development pathway. Soon thereafter, almost as if in response, Dr. Linda E. Winter reported her tree ring study from an old-growth Douglas-fir stand in the Washington Cascades. She found that all the old trees in her study area became established within 21 years of each other following a stand-replacement fire in the late 1400’s. After analyzing early growth rates, Dr. Winter reported that early densities were probably more than 800 trees per hectare. This is the development pathway taught in forestry schools (we discussed this here).

[See: Winter, L.E. 2000. Five centuries of structural development in an old-growth Douglas-fir stand in the Pacific Northwest: a reconstruction from tree ring records. Ph.D. thesis. Seattle, WA: University of Washington.]

Obviously, the researchers were investigating two very different forest development histories. The forest near Mt. Rainier was even-aged, dense at establishment following a big fire, and relatively undisturbed since. The Oregon forests were multicohort (many ages), open, and frequently disturbed by fires (prior to 1850).

Dr. Nathan Poage, of the USGS Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center at OSU, added to the findings about a year later. He measured tree rings on 505 stumps in 28 clearcuts in the Oregon Coast Range and Cascades. Dr. Poage also found that the Oregon old-growth trees were originally open-grown. Large tree diameters at ages 100 to 300 years were strongly correlated with rapid, sustained diameter growth rates at ages less than 50.

He also found a wide range of tree ages:

At the site level, the mean range in ages for old-growth Douglas-fir trees was 174yr … The mean range in ages in the 0.1ha plots was 73yr … [the] maximum [site] range [was] 430yr …

The wide range in establishment ages observed in the present study at both the site and plot levels further supports the hypothesis that large-diameter, old-growth Douglas-fir trees developed at low stand densities. The mean range in ages at the site level reported for this study was similar to that reported by Tappeiner et al. (1997) for old-growth Douglas-fir trees > 150 years old. Stand density at these sites must have been low initially and/or was reduced periodically to low enough level by disturbance (e.g., fire).

[See: Poage, N.J. 2001. Structure and development of old-growth Douglas-fir in central western Oregon. Ph.D. thesis. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University.]

The historical forest development pathways in Oregon forests were different than the Classical Model evidenced in the northern Cascades. Oregon forests have apparently experienced millennia of frequent, low intensity fire. The frequent fires induced multicohort, open, park-like forests here in the pre-Contact era.

That’s not what the traditional theory says was supposed to have happened. It’s the story the tree rings tell, however.

Over thirty years ago, early in my career as a forester, I was on a forest inventory team measuring stands in the Sierra Nevada. The woods were stunningly beautiful, open, park-like forests of old sugar pines, ponderosa pines, Douglas-firs, white firs and red firs. The slopes were mostly gentle (compared to forests I worked in later), and the forest floor was carpeted with pine needles and occasional short bushes and clumps of grass.

The open forest floor was mostly smooth and gently undulating, except that every 5 or 10 acres there was a pit, a depression about 10 to 15 feet across and 4 to 6 feet deep. These infrequent, shallow bowls in the carpet were old diggings, mining holes dug by anonymous and forgotten gold prospectors 120 years earlier.

At the bottom of every pit, if I scraped away the pine needles, there was a little bit of bedrock showing. Invariably, that bedrock had a quartz vein in it, with rusty looking impurities running through the quartz. In this almost uniform, undifferentiated ground surface, with pine needles covering soil 3 to 6 feet deep, somehow those forgotten prospectors had struck gold-bearing quartz veins. Every pit had one.

How had they found the right places to dig? By panning the topsoil, no doubt, tracing tiny gold flakes across an ancient eroded surface back to the source (later I learned this is called pocket mining). I am sure there was gold in the quartz veins, but probably very little. If there had been no gold, the prospectors wouldn’t have known where to dig. If the quartz vein had been significantly rich with gold, they would have dug a bigger hole. Still, I was fascinated. The early, technologically unsophisticated prospectors had found the veins. That kind of puzzle-solving has always intrigued me.

One day I was climbing out of an old prospector depression with a bowling ball-sized, mottled quartz rock in my hands, when the crew foreman spotted me and gave me a withering look. “Your job is to look up at the trees, not down at the dirt,” he yelled. I meekly complied, and threw a potential fortune back into the pit.

I never forgot the advice. A good humbling works wonders for the memory. And he was almost correct. My job, as a professional forester, is to see it all: trees, soil, bugs, bunnies, gold veins, tree rings, bushes, owls, mice and more. My job is to see the forest as a whole, not just the component parts. It is to envision, through scientific observation and analysis, the forest as it looked in the past, the forest today, and the forest as it may look in the future. It is to see what is there, and what is not there, too, and to try to figure out what all that means.

Forests are big puzzles. Fortuitously, a few clues remain on the landscape, up high and down low, waiting to be panned to the source veins. Those clues seem to indicate that something is missing today from our forests; something that used to be there is currently absent.

The whole forest picture is not complete without people. People have been an important piece of the puzzle, for ages. The signs of venerable humanity are there in our forests, like dusty flakes of gold.

Many of the Native American forestry practices highlighted in the previous post have applicability to other public lands, such as USFS, BLM, and NPS holdings.

They are not necessarily applicable to private tree farms, however. As we have emphasized again and again, private tree farms are very, very different from forests. Forests are vast tracts of native plant assemblages with an abundance of trees. Tree farms are agricultural businesses.

Traditional tree farming in the Pacific Northwest involves the growing of Douglas-fir timber. This practice is antiquated and uneconomical in the lights of a moribund, monopolized market for Douglas-fir logs, and the many, expanding markets for alternative tree farm products. Douglas-fir grows too slowly, and is worth too little at harvest, to be a profitable crop for most private landowners. We cannot compete successfully with multinational corporations and government agencies that own millions upon millions of acres of Douglas-fir. Innovative alternative crops and tree species are better at making money for most rural landowners.

The best tree farm crops and species are those that:

1. Reach harvest age quickly, in one or just a few growing seasons.
2. Are easy to grow, native plant species
3. Produce valuable crops for expanding markets
4. Provide the potential for adding value

Generally speaking, the best tree farm products are not the mass-produced kind, like structural lumber, wood chips, or firewood. Instead they are craft fibers, decorative wood, ornamental greenery, and plant extracts.

This is where anthropogenic fire and historical indigenous practices offer modern private tree farmers a good lesson. The fast growing, easy to grow, native plants with commercial potential are the very same native plant species selected for use and propagation by the local residents over the past 10,000 years. Time-tested species include western red cedar (for greenery, decorative wood, craft fibers), bigleaf maple (for decorative wood, craft fibers), shrubs like willow, hazelnut, serviceberry, and mockorange (for craft shoots), and stinging nettle (for craft fibers, medicine). These plants and many, many others have proven desirable to human beings for millennia, and they still are.

Forests and tree farms are completely different land uses, but they sometimes can inform and teach one another. Forest management has something to learn about tending heritage landscapes with human stewards. Tree farming has something to learn about innovative and profitable farm products, pre-tested and focused-grouped for thousands of years.

Over the last twenty years there has been one clear, consistent, and surprisingly infallible advocate for forests, Mr. James Petersen of the Evergreen Foundation. Jim is the founder, publisher, and editor of Evergreen Magazine, the voice of the Foundation.

Evergreen Magazine is a step above any other forestry periodical, but occasionally Jim publishes a super issue, one that is truly archival. The latest issue, Winter 2005-2006, is one such ground-breaking, deeply insightful, historic work. Entitled Forestry in Indian Country: Models of Sustainability for Our Nation’s Forests? the new issue examines forestry as practiced by Native Americans on tribal reservations and compares it to forestry practiced on our National Forests. It is a superb collection of essays, expert reports, and stunning photography (many by Larry Workman of the Quinault Nation).

So much is revealed in this issue. The first articles are by outsiders, Euro-American forest scientists with political foci. They seek to impose “helpful” red-tape bureaucratic burdens on the tribes. They do not mention the interwoven historical nature of the forest and the Indians. Their approach is quite racist and bigoted. Imagine telling people, who have managed their land successfully for thousands of years, how the white man thinks it ought to be done, complete with phony ecology and “natural” catastrophic fire.

But then the Native American voices are heard in the following articles. So many are so great, it is hard to excerpt the best. We shall make a feeble effort, however. From “A School of Red Herring” by Gary S. Morishima, Technical Advisor, Quinault Nation:

Tribes have been managing natural resource systems for thousands of years, but protecting tribal legacies for the future is no simple task. The resources that are essential to sustain tribal cultures are coming under relentless attack from a variety of economic and political forces … To a great extent, these threats stem from the introduction of an invasive species several centuries ago … Europeans.

From “Sovereignty, Stewardship, and Sustainability” by Larry Mason, Project Coordinator for the Rural Technology Initiative at the College of Natural Resources, University of Washington:

Tribes are known to have been managers of natural resources for 10,000 years or more. In many areas of the United States, ecosystems found by early European settlers were not virgin wilderness untouched by the hand of man, but were instead forests altered through time by many generations of Natives that burned, pruned, sowed, weeded, tilled, and harvested to meet their requirements for firewood, fish and game, vegetal foods, craft supplies, and building materials. Periodic underburning not only produced desirable vegetative conditions but reduced fuel accumulations that might otherwise sustain intense fire. A severe fire in a tribal territory would have meant not only loss of property, resources, and lives, but also a long-term disaster for the well-being of the community.

From “The Yakama’s Prescription for Sustainable Forestry” by Markian Petruncio, Ph.D., Administrative Forester, Yakama Nation, and Edwin Lewis, Forest Manager, BIA, Yakama Agency:

Forest restoration implies that a forest will be returned to a prior condition. Nineteenth-century forest conditions on the Yakama Reservation appeared to be more sustainable than present conditions. For example, open pine stands were maintained in a healthy condition by frequent, low-intensity fires. The forestry program [on Yakama Nation lands] is using historic species composition and stand densities as references for restoration of forest health. … The pathway to sustainable forestry requires proactive management.

From “The Forest Is In Your Hands” by Nolan Colegrove, Sr., Forest Manager, Hoopa Valley Tribal Council, Forestry Division:

We tended and managed the forest with many tools that were created from nature, but the most effective tool was controlled fire. … The tending of the forest with the use of fire produced annual crops which provided the daily necessities of the people; but what also occurred, by conducting low intensity burns annually for hundreds of years, was that the condition of the forest was healthy and in balance.

From “Ecosystem Management and Tribal Self-Governance on the Flathead Indian Reservation, Montana” by Jim Durglo, Forest Manager, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes:

The Tribes understood that both Indian-lit and lightning fires shaped the forest. Here in the Northern Rockies, fire, more than any other factor except climate, shaped the structure of our forest. It determined the kinds and ages of trees, how close together they grew, and the number and types of openings that existed. … From the stories of elders, the historical accounts of early Europeans, and the findings of modern scientific research, we know that Indians have been purposefully burning in the area for at least 7,000 years.

The best article, in our opinion, is “The Gift of Fire” by Germaine White, information and education specialist for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, Montana. She begins by quoting Dr. Stephen J. Pyne, an excellent start. Germaine White’s own words are deeply compelling, too:

As Salish and Pend d’Oreille people, our view of fire was and is quite different from the modern western view. In our tradition, fire is a gift from the Creator brought to us by the animals. We think of it as a blessing, that if used respectfully and in a manner consistent with our traditional knowledge, will enrich our world. This belief explains our long tradition (12,000 years plus) of spring and fall burning …

On my last trip into the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area with one of our tribal elders, Harriet Whitworth, we followed the trails she had followed seventy years previous with her mother and grandmother, trails her family had followed for multiple generations. When we arrived at Big Prairie on the South Fork of the Flathead River, Harriet described what it was like when she was a little girl. She said it was a big, open, park-like area where there were enormous ponderosa pine trees, an abundance of grass, and many animals … [with] many clearings, a series of prairies in one place, and Harriet talked of how beautiful it was when she was a child.

Now there is only a little bit of a camp and small prairie or meadow left, and the big pine trees are crowded with Douglas-fir trees. Being there in that place and listening to the stories of how it used to look just a single elder’s lifetime ago showed me in a vivid way what it means to exclude fire from the landscape.

There are more great articles in this issue of Evergreen magazine, including an excellent history of Indian firefighters by Bodie Shaw, Deputy Chief, National Interagency Fire Center, BIA.

Jim Petersen has outdone himself, again. We wholeheartedly recommend you send him some money. Join his non-profit Evergreen Foundation; it is cheap and you get collector edition issues like this one. Plus, you might learn some very important things about our forests.

Forest Scientist Discovers Ancient Indian Trail System, Using Computers!

March 22 — by Mike Dubrasich, SOS Forests [reprints allowed without authorization]

An Oregon forest scientist has discovered (or rediscovered, to be precise) an ancient system of trails and campsites on the Umpqua National Forest. Dr. Ken Carloni of Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, reported his findings last July in his doctoral dissertation entitled, “The Ecological Legacy of Indian Burning Practices in Southwestern Oregon”.

Using a sophisticated computer system and software (Idrisi GIS from Clark Labs, 2002), Dr. Carloni modeled the most ergonomic (not too steep) and least cost (shortest) travel routes between ten known archaeological sites. The model was field-validated, leading to on-the-ground discovery of the ancient trails and additional sites, including an ancient summer village. The trail and campsite system in the Little River watershed is at least 2000 years old, and was used by Native Americans of the Yoncalla (Kalapuyan speaking), Upper Umpqua, (Athabascan speaking), Cow Creek (Tekelman speaking), and Molalla Tribes.

Strong indications seen in modern vegetation conditions and archaeological artifacts yield evidence of the actuality of Dr. Carloni’s computer-predicted trail and campsite system. Among the evidence is the presence of ancient meadows and remnant open, uneven-aged, park-like forests along the travel routes. Both types of vegetation are thought to have been maintained by anthropogenic fire (Indian burning).

In the same paper Dr. Carloni also reported strong evidence against climate as a controller of fire frequency prior to 1850. He compared precipitation history (derived from previous tree ring studies) and fire history (also from previous studies) with the ages of existing trees to see which factors (climate or fires) influenced tree recruitment, and whether climate history and fire history were correlated. They were not, according to his research:

Fire scar frequencies from 1590 to 1820 show no relationship to precipitation. However, from 1850 to 1950 a significant negative correlation (p = 0.005) exists between climate and scar frequency. These results suggest that in post-aboriginal times [but not earlier] high rainfall years are associated with fewer fires than low rainfall years …

Tree recruitment from 1590 to 1820 is [also] uncorrelated with yearly precipitation … [and] no correlation is evident between fire scar frequency and tree recruitment in the years from 1590 to 1820. From 1850 to 1939, however, dramatic positive correlations exist between fire scar frequencies and tree origins … This suggests that the recently observed short pulses of even-aged recruitment following wildfires (Pickett and White, 1985; Oliver and Larson, 1990; Bonnicksen, 2000) may be more of a post-aboriginal phenomenon.

Instead, Dr. Carloni reported, Native Americans were a prime factor in ancient fire ignition. The landscapes encountered by Lewis and Clark were not pristine, untrammeled wilderness. Dr. Carloni summarizes:

Intentionally or not, humans have been initiators of broadcast burning in nearly every habitat they have encountered worldwide (Pyne, 2001), and there is a long local history of burning for agro-ecological purposes in southwestern Oregon … A growing body of evidence documents the influence of Native Americans on their landscapes through the use of systematic landscape fire (Pyne, 1982; Boyd, 1986; Lewis, 1990; Robbins, 1997, LaLande and Pullen, 1999; Lewis and Fergeson, 1999; Williams, 2001; and others) …

Pacific Northwest native societies were deeply integrated into their landscapes, and used a wide variety of materials collected over extensive areas (Lewis, 1993; Boyd, 1986; Beckham and Minor, 1992; Blackburn and Anderson, 1993; LaLande, 1995; Williams, 2001). But local material cultures persist only to the extent that key species and habitats on which they depend remain abundant, productive and resilient (Perlin, 1989; Diamond, 2005). Archaeological evidence from the Umpqua indicates that material cultures remained relatively unchanged for approximately 2000 years before contact (Isaac Barner, pers. comm., 2000) suggesting that the stewardship practices of recent peoples were sustainable …

Historic Indian-set fires tended toward higher frequencies and lower intensities with regular intervals separating them relative to lightning sparked fires (Boyd, 1999; Lewis and Fergeson, 1999; Williams, 2001).

It was this recognition of the impacts on the landscape, of frequent, regular fires set by the ancient residents, that led Dr. Carloni to his discoveries.

Given the numerous historical reports of aboriginal burning in and near the Umpqua Basin, it is highly likely that the Indians of Little River were using landscape fire systematically for agro-ecological purposes as well. But if Indians were systematically burning forested landscapes, what ecological signals might we expect to observe?

At the landscape level, we should find historic meadows, savannas and parklands located near archaeological sites and near the historic trails connecting them. It is reasonable to surmise that Indians would burn more extensively and more often around the areas where they spent the most time …

The pattern of the modeled pathways fits the corridor, yard and mosaic pattern common to indigenous landscapes in many parts of the world (Lewis and Ferguson, 1999). It is also reflected in early sketches (see 2.16) and in the following quote from S.C. Bartrum, first Umpqua National Forest Supervisor, writing about conditions in 1899 on what is now the Umpqua National Forest: “There were no trails into the interior of the Reserve, only a very few short cattle trails close to the Reserve boundary line. There were of course the old Indian trails, indistinct and impassable in many places, routed to reach the apex of all high points, presumably for observation purposes regardless of location and grade, with grades varying from level to 35 or 40 percent, and some too steep for horse travel.”

Some modern ecologists propose theories of forest dynamics that are altogether natural. However, the historical forest development pathways (what really happened) were mitigated by human beings, and evidence of this can still be found in the field. Dr. Carloni noted that other researchers besides himself have also found strong evidence of human influence over forest development:

Early descriptions of much of the forest as being in an open, park-like state (LaLande and Pullen, 1999) are consistent with the recent findings for stands in the Oregon Cascades and Coast Range (Tappeiner et al. 1997; Poage, 2000; Sensenig, 2002). Tappeiner et al. (1997) found early growth rates of old-growth trees to be more typical of trees grown at low stocking densities (100-120 trees/ha) than of trees currently growing in young, un-thinned stands (often >500 trees/ha). They suggest that periodic, low intensity fire was likely responsible for reducing stocking levels rather than self-thinning.

Vestiges of these open stands and their connections to native management are often found near sites with documented aboriginal activity and are evidenced by (a) very large, old “relic” trees with highly branched “open grown” architecture imbedded in a matrix of substantially younger, even-aged cohorts (Fig 2.12), (b) annual rings from relic trees showing suppressed growth only as far back as the origin of the young even-aged cohort in which they are imbedded (pers. obs.), and (c) origin dates of the even-aged in-growth cohort that commonly post-date the period of Indian occupancy.

Dr. Carloni also noted that in the absence of anthropogenic fire, the vegetation has changed:

A shift in the proportions of tree species across the landscape also suggests a change in fire intensity … and reveals a trend toward recruitment of more fire intolerant “avoider” species (Agee, 1993) (e.g. hemlock, true firs) in the 1820-1990 time span compared to the 996-1820 period. This analysis suggests a change from a high frequency, low intensity fire regime that favored “resistor” species (e.g. Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine) to one that now favors fire avoiders …

While post-clearcut plantations are even-aged (and often single species), native stands in southwestern Oregon typically have a range of sizes and ages distributions … When an even-aged stand is defined as one in which 80% of the trees germinate within 3 decades, only 11 of the 180 stands in these two datasets are even-aged (6.1%) …

While the age and spatial structure (and therefore fuel structure) of young stands in southwestern Oregon increases their risk of high severity fire, mature stands are also at increasing risk. Because of their open understories and lack of contiguous crowns, historic old-growth forests would have been highly resistant to high mortality crown fires. But during the last century and a half, many late seral stands have become thickly in-grown with a younger, shade intolerant conifer seedling cohort dating from the late 1800s through the present.

Finally, Dr. Carloni provided some sage advice to land managers:

Evidence that the indigenous people had an active hand in influencing the fire regimes that shaped their landscapes has important implications for current managers. Rather than a conversion of unmanaged land to managed lands, the changes witnessed in the last 150 years are more indicative of a change from one management regime to another, with a brief period of passive management in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The message to land stewards is clear: taking no action will not tend to return the landscape to aboriginal conditions …

Landscape fires in southwestern Oregon have gone from (1) being regular, frequent, and of low intensity, to (2) being irregular, infrequent, and of high intensity … Increases in the time between fires and the intensity of the blaze have apparently also been accompanied by an increase in the size of fires …

While it is no longer possible to “restore” the forest to aboriginal conditions, it is possible to emulate indigenous ecosystem dynamics. A return to a “corridor, yard and mosaic” pattern is still possible in a warming climate. While a return to native dynamics for its own sake is not a compelling reason to change current management, there are some important ecological and social reasons for doing so …

Since material cultures often reflect their landscapes (e.g. bedrock mortars in acorn country; woven nets, weirs, and traps where salmon run), stable human cultures infer stable landscape resources. And since local material culture was stable for at least 2000 years in southwestern Oregon (Beckham and Minor, 1992), then the pre-Euro-American socioecological system represents the last known stable state …

If we desire a predictable suite of ecosystem goods and services that are comparable (but not necessarily equivalent) to those available to native managers, then historic ranges of ecosystem conditions represent reasonable management sideboards. Given that the historic landscape of the Little River watershed is to a great degree the product of active aboriginal management, it will take active management on the part of land stewards to recreate and maintain analogous conditions.

And some sage advice to researchers, too.

The history of a landscape is intertwined with the history of its peoples; one needs to know both before one can really understand either.

Dr. Ken Carloni spent 13 years on this research, earning his doctorate from Oregon State University part-time while teaching full-time at UCC.

Superfluous notes:

1. Here is another news article about Dr. Carloni’s research.

2. SOS Forests is proud and privileged to bestow these kudos upon Dr. Carloni. To be completely fair about it, however, Ken is a personal friend, a great guy, smart as a whip and sharp as a tack, so we might be biased.

3. UCC now has the status and distinction of having the best forest science faculty of any institution the state of Oregon.

4. Accredited institution, that is. SOS Forests is not accredited, or is self-accredited, which is pretty much the same thing. We don’t need no stinking badges.

To: The Honorable Brian Baird, Ph.D., Member of Congress

Re: your statistical review, “Flaws in Salvage Logging Study”

Dear Congressman Baird,

Thank you very much for your statistical review of Donato et al. Speaking as a professional forester of thirty years, with a Masters in Statistics as well, your analysis was a huge blast of fresh air. Thank you again. And again.

I also reviewed Donato et al. (see here). I did not have the data, as you did, but only the article itself. With the actual data in hand, you raise some very important questions.

One aspect I noted was confusion between tree density (trees/hectare) and tree stocking (percentage of stocked quadrats). The authors called their statistic “stocking density”, which does not exist in forestry (actually they reported density, not stocking). Stocking is the more appropriate and useful statistic in most forest regeneration cases, including this one. Professional forest biometricians, such as myself, would probably normalize discrete tree counts by taking the log (Poisson => Gaussian), and would normalize stocking percentages with the square root transformation. In any case, we would know the difference between density and stocking, and how to analyze each separately.

The concerns you raise, and especially your point about the use of a non-parametric test in an obvious ANOVA situation, go to the root of a very serious problem. Who is teaching Mr. Donato how to do science, or forestry for that matter?

Mr. Donato has only a Bachelors degree. This was his Masters project. He has a major professor, Dr. Beverly Law, whose name appears on the article. The BLM did not give $300,000 to a Masters candidate. Dr. Law, however, was named in the grant. She was and is directly responsible for Mr. Donato during the entire study from design to data collection to analysis to report. Whatever academic mistakes and improprieties occurred, the responsibility lies with the faculty, not the graduate student.

Yet neither Dr. Law nor Dr. Boone Kauffman appeared at your Medford hearing to defend what was essentially their work. They let the grad student take all the heat. Poor Mr. Donato’s academic career may be over before it really got going. Meanwhile, Drs. Law and Kauffman go merrily on their way, cashing in on the largess of the taxpayers, practicing junk science, and acting irresponsibly in their offices.

As a teacher you understand and adhere to written and unwritten codes of ethics. It is unethical to teach bad experimental design, inappropriate field methodology, incorrect terminology, and inappropriate statistical methods. It is unethical to set up your student by publishing junk science under the student’s name, with overt political intentions in the mix.

The problem, Dr. Baird, is institutional. Oregon State University’s College of Forestry has become a fouled nest of non-forester junk-scientist political activists. The taint goes all the way to the Dean, Hal Salwasser, who is not a forester but is a professional politician. The taint goes beyond OSU to UW, too.

There is a growing body of real forest scientists who reject over-politicized, Franklin-esque forest ecology. They instead propose that our forests arose via anthropogenic fire, human-initiated landscape burning practiced purposefully by the original inhabitants for millennia. Noted scientists researching this new paradigm include Drs. Bob Zybach, Ken Carloni, Nathan Poage, M. Kat Anderson, Henry T. Lewis, Thomas Bonnicksen, Stephen Pyne, and many, many others. The Anthropogenic Fire Theory (AFT) holds that historical forest development pathways were human-mediated. The AFT is supported with hard evidence, such as forensic stand reconstructions and tree age distributions. The Franklinites have not a shred of evidence to support their bogus theories.

Congress is rightfully concerned with the fate of our priceless, heritage forests. I second that concern. It is imperative that Congress receive up-to-date, reliable, scientific information upon which to base critical decisions regarding our forests. However, as far as I can tell, Congress has been listening solely to proponents of junk science and ignoring (or been oblivious to) the real forest experts.

I respectfully request that Congress, through your Resources Committee, make a concerted effort to hear all sides in the current forest science debate. I call upon Congress to investigate via public hearings the Anthropogenic Fire Theory to discern its importance and applicability to modern public forest management. I would be more than happy to assist your staff in organizing AFT meetings, and to suggest the best scientists, the most expert in the field, for your witness lists.

Thank you again for your time and efforts to inject logical inference and analytical expertise into public forestry issues. I stand ready and more than willing to assist you, to encourage excellence in forest science, and to protect, maintain, and perpetuate America’s priceless, heritage forests.

Sincerely,

Mike Dubrasich, Professional Forester

Dear Steve,

Sorry. We tried, but we failed. We may have overestimated the Power of the Blog. Instead of bending to our popular will, as so expressively expressed here, the Prez appointed a career politician to Sec DOI.

Hope flies out the window, again.

It’s a tough row to hoe. The current mindset does not grasp the problem. The light does not go on. The clue roams free.

The human race has become estranged from the natural (ie. real) world. Catastrophic, hugely tragic, totally preventable events result. Catastrophic forest fires, the largest in Euro-American history, destroy priceless, heritage forests. Catastrophic floods destroy cities built below sea level. Poverty, disease, suffering of all kinds, and millions of senseless deaths can be directly attributed to estrangement, disconnection, misperception, superstition, blindness, and a fundamental rejection of the real world.

People are natural. We have a place and function in Nature. This is not the problem; it is the solution. We know you know. That’s the why behind our failed campaign.

Oh well, maybe next time. The new political dude won’t be there forever. There will be a next time. And let us not write him off completely yet. There’s always a ray of hope shining somewhere. It springs eternal, of that we can be sure.

Sincerely,

All of us here at SOS Forests

Welcome to SOS Forests, the most revolutionary forest blog in the Blogosphere. We are very glad you dropped by. We have some important facts about forests to relate to you, to teach you, to help you to understand.

We seek your understanding because our forests are being destroyed at an alarming rate. Priceless, heritage forests cannot be replaced. Unless and until a greater number of responsible citizens grasp the problems, we will not be able to protect, maintain, or perpetuate our magnificent forests.

We began, six months ago, by defining forests. Then we discussed some important features of forests. Then we launched into our as-yet-unfinished history of our forests. Along the way we pointed out some important changes in the scientific view of forests, changes we call paradigm shifts (here, here, here).

A paradigm is a scientific worldview, an all-encompassing theory in a scientific discipline to which everyone in that discipline ascribes. The all-encompassing theory then frames and guides all normal research, normal research being the investigation of minutia within the paradigm. A paradigm weakens when anomalies develop. Anomalies are phenomena that cannot be explained using the old scientific worldview. An occasional anomaly can be brushed aside as a bad measurement. But if enough anomalies are discovered, then the accepted paradigm must change (called a shift), or a completely new paradigm developed to replace it.

The most important paradigm shift in forest science is the growing realization that human beings have been altering our landscapes with fire for 10,000 years or more. The old forest developmental ecology paradigm holds that human beings were either absent from, or inconsequential to, our historical forests. Although this old paradigm is arguably both ignorant and bigoted, questionable taste is not scientific grounds for theory rejection. The true test of a scientific theory is whether or not it explains real world phenomena. The old forest ecology paradigm fails the science test; it is lousy with anomalies that it cannot explain.

For example, early Euro-American explorers and pioneers encountered and described open, park-like forests (OPLF’s) across millions of acres of western North America (here, here, here, here). Remnant trees that once grew in OPLF’s may still be seen in the older cohorts of multicohort stands (here, here). The openness of pre-Contact forests cannot be explained by the old forest ecology paradigm. None of the natural ecological pathways predicted by the old paradigm lead to OPLF’s. Indeed, nowhere in the modern landscape are OPLF’s arising spontaneously, and the old paradigm cannot explain this, either. Millions of acres of inexplicable forest structure are more than an anomaly; the vast tracts of historical OPLF’s utterly discombobulate the old forest ecology paradigm.

Old paradigms sometimes die hard. In the case of the old forest ecology paradigm, modern proponents aggressively seek political endorsement of their bogus theories. Political endorsement is necessary because scientific confirmation is lacking. Confirmation is not merely lacking; the growing body of scientific evidence indicates that the old paradigm is badly flawed and must be rejected.

The old paradigm is killing our forests and harming our communities. Historically and inevitably, the lives of the human residents and the living landscape are thoroughly intertwined. People and forests go together. Separation is bad for both. Please forgive our clumsy efforts, but this is what we have been trying so hard to pound into the group consciousness.

And please stay tuned for more of SOS Forests’ healthful, erudite, and blogistic forest consciousness raising.

Patch dynamics and mixed severity fire regimes are eco-babble. If the Chetco Nation landscape was subject to such since the Pleistocene, where did the 500 year-old trees come from? The Biscuit Fire killed thousands of acres of old growth trees. Entire Late Successional Reserves were destroyed. The former forest contained Douglas-firs, sugar pines, and incense cedars, and ponderosa pines. How did these old trees get there in the first place?

There have been human beings living in Southwest Oregon since the Pleistocene. These people set fires every year for millennia. They did not fight fires, or prevent fires, instead they set them. Human beings torched most of the West every year, year after year, for at least 10,000 years, according to pollen records from bog cores. This human mediation and human impact was not “natural” in any sense of that word. Thousands of years of annual fires induced a savanna/woodland, essentially a prairie with scattered trees. It was the elimination of aboriginal fires, not modern fire suppression, that allowed an incendiary thicket of young conifers to arise under the older cohort.

This multi-cohort stand structure is not limited to SW Oregon. From Flagstaff to Wenatchee, from the Oregon coast to Montana, multi-cohort stands are the norm in un-logged forests. Such forests have complex canopy structures, as well. Complex multi-cohort canopies are preferred habitat for many rare species, such as spotted owls.

To abandon such forests to catastrophic fires is to destroy the complex structure and replace it with fire-type chaparral. Even without fire the older cohort is dying from moisture stress caused by the dense competition from the younger cohort. It may seem counter-intuitive, but our forests are getting younger every year as the older cohort, heritage trees succumb to insects and diseases. Even without timber harvest spotted owl habitat is declining, as is the population. In the ten years since inception of the Northwest Forest Plan spotted owls populations have fallen by one-third.

We have to understand that doing nothing is not going to protect or perpetuate old growth forests. Nor will catastrophic fires in fuel-laden forests save the old trees. Wilderness is a political designation, not an ecological condition. We have to come to grips with the reality of the “natural” history of our forests (the historical landscape development pathways). We need to examine the forest dynamics that are occurring now, and decide what kind of forests we want our grandchildren to experience. If old growth, multi-cohort, spotted owl habitat forests are the desired future condition, then we have to manage stocking and fuels, and reintroduce frequent, non-catastrophic fire to achieve that condition. Otherwise we will continue to convert ancient forests to chaparral.

Yesterday Gail Norton announced her resignation as Secretary of the Interior. We salute her, thank her for her service, and wish her well in all her future endeavors.

At the risk of appearing hasty, SOS Forests strongly recommends to the Administration, Congress, and the American public the nomination of Dr. Stephen J. Pyne, Ph.D. to replace Secretary Norton. We believe Dr. Pyne is the most qualified, capable, and suitably excellent individual in the country for Secretary of the Interior.

Stephen Pyne is currently Regents’ Professor in the School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University. He is the author of 17 books and dozens of monographs, and is widely recognized as the World’s Foremost Authority on Fire. He is also a former wildland firefighter, and worked 15 seasons as Fire Crew Chief at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. As a National Park Service employee, and later as a scholar and consultant, Dr. Pyne has provided innumerable suggestions and ideas for improvements to the NPS, BLM, and the USDA Forest Service on micro and macro levels. He has also provided expert consultation and advice to resource agencies around the world, and his insights are highly valued in Australia and Canada, in particular. Dr. Pyne is well-known, well-liked, and highly respected within the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture.

Wildland fire is the single, overriding issue facing public land managers today. All other concerns, such as endangered species protection, forest and range management, recreation, and resource use in general all take a backseat to wildland fire. This is because wildfire has enormous impacts on all other resource values. Stephen Pyne is the top expert on wildland fire, and his leadership is desperately needed by the Dept. of the Interior today.

Moreover, Stephen Pyne has a clear vision for a better future in all aspects of public land management. He knows the system from the ground up, the beauty and the flaws, and he knows what changes are required today. He is an historian, an educator, and a natural and proven leader who inspires excellence in others.

We have no idea what political party Dr. Pyne is a member of, if any. We don’t care. He is the best man (or woman) for the job. SOS Forests recommends, endorses, and wholeheartedly supports Dr. Stephen J. Pyne for the next Secretary of the Interior.

[Short note to Steve: put on a tie. If this blogging stuff works like they say, then the National Press Corps should be showing up in your yard any minute now.]