Sometimes not doing something has bad effects. If you don’t plant or irrigate, you don’t get much of a crop, and if you don’t maintain equipment, you end up with big repairs. There can be negative effects if you don’t harvest trees too, although all we seem to hear about is the negative effects if we do cut trees. Logging hurts wildlife, impacts water quality, releases carbon dioxide (CO2) and contributes to climate change—maybe.
Consider these rough estimates (you should contact a consulting forester for the volumes and values of timber in your location). Let’s say you have 100 acres of Douglas fir timber, which are about 90 years old and have greater than a 7-inch diameter at breast height (4.5 feet). Using U.S. Forest Service timber volume tables for western Washington and Oregon in the Pacific Northwest, on a site with moderately good soils, you might have about 90,000 board feet (BF) per acre, or 90 thousand board feet (MBF) per acre, which is equal to 9 million board feet (MMBF) per 100 acres, or 9 MMBF/100 acres.
In the less productive, drier and fire-prone Northern Rockies (Idaho and western Montana), you might have 20 MBF/acre or 2 MMBF/100 acres of Douglas fir.
Let’s say you harvest half of the trees across the 100-acre stand in the Northern Rockies, resulting in a more open forest with grass production, reduced fire hazard, carbon sequestered in wood products and income. At a value of $500/MBF, 1 MMBF (half of the 2 MMBF in the stand) would be worth about $500,000 minus logging and trucking costs (about 35 percent). Or you could choose to not harvest it and risk a fire that destroys the timber, increases soil erosion and water runoff, and releases CO2 from the trees, ground vegetation and dead wood on the ground and in the soil.
There is a lot of research showing that forest trees and soils are important for storing CO2 and preventing its release. That makes sense, as long as it doesn’t burn. I need to study this more, and it may be simple reasoning, but from a CO2 climate change perspective, it seems to me that in any forest, harvesting trees, locking up the carbon in wood products and regenerating new trees that absorb and sequester CO2 would be about the same or better than not harvesting the timber over forest stand rotation time frames (for example, 50-100 years). Regardless, it seems like common sense that harvesting timber is better than risking destructive fires in fire-prone forests.
The economics and biology of timber harvest are complex and vary among areas, but as my forestry professor John “Jack” Berglund taught me in the 1970s, a landowner’s management objective is the most important factor to consider. Berglund was a professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (yes, New York state has a lot of forests).
On public lands, like Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands, landowners include everybody, so management objectives become political. But private landowner objectives should be respected. Some landowners might want to leave timber untouched as wildlife security areas, while others may want to generate income and reduce fire hazards with timber harvest. There is no single right answer to forest management; it’s up to the landowner. It becomes political when different groups have different objectives and lobby the government for theirs.
On public lands, the best we can do is insist on following the law, use unbiased science and impact assessments, and make our objectives heard. As many of you know, timber harvest and other resource uses—such as grazing—on public lands have been greatly reduced over the last 50 years because of environmental regulations such as the Endangered Species Act (recall the northern spotted owl). These regulations are used to regulate timber harvest on public and private lands and are often based on one-sided science and are politically driven.
Destructive forest fires are occurring frequently. The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire and the Black fire in New Mexico have burned a combined 600,000 acres, cost about $220 million and were still burning as of June 9. In my opinion, increasing timber harvest on public lands to prevent large forest fires and provide employment to rural communities is obviously a good idea. Not doing something is having—and will continue to have—bad effects on our public forests. — Dr. Matt Cronin
(Matthew Cronin was a research professor at the University of Alaska and is now at Northwest Biology Company LLC [www.northwestbiology.com] in Bozeman, MT. He can be reached at croninm@aol.com.)
Reference
Wildlife, Endangered Species, and Science, Liberty Hill Press, 2021.
